We have used the Value Proposition Canvas for years. It still works. But we think it is time for it to grow up.
For years, we taught the Value Proposition Canvas. We facilitated workshops with it. We covered walls with it. We relied on it to help teams understand their customers and shape value.
And it still works.
But we feel it needs to evolve.
The conversation that started in November
Since November last year, together with a group of co-creators, we have been reviewing the innovation tools organisations use today. Not because the tools are broken, but because the world they were built in is not the world we are working in now. Teams move faster. AI sits inside the workflow. Customers behave differently. Strategy cycles have collapsed. The way we build and validate value propositions has changed, even if the canvases we use to capture them have not.
One question keeps coming back in those conversations. What is missing?
When we turned that question on the Value Proposition Canvas, three observations surfaced almost immediately.
First, the order feels off
The Value Proposition Canvas inherited its structure from the Business Model Canvas, where the customer sits on the right hand side. That made sense at the time. It was an extension of an existing tool, and the layout followed the parent. Logically, the choice was sound.
But when we work with teams now, we keep wanting to start somewhere else. Not with the product, not even with the jobs-to-be-done, but with the customer problem itself. The right side of the canvas is where the value sits, but the work begins on the left. Every workshop we run, we watch teams scan the canvas left to right and start in the wrong place. A tool designed to put the customer first ends up being read in the opposite direction.
The order is not just a layout question. It shapes the order in which teams think. And the order in which teams think shapes what they end up building.
Second, there is no place for the customer problem
The Value Proposition Canvas focuses on jobs, pains, and gains. Three useful fields. But none of them is the customer problem.
Jobs-to-be-Done is related. So are pains and gains. They circle the territory. But they are not the same as a sharp, well-articulated customer problem statement. A job is something the customer is trying to get done. A problem is broader, more strategic, more fundamental. A problem is the reason the job exists in the first place.
When teams skip the problem and go straight to jobs, they end up optimising for the wrong thing. They build features that solve a job but miss the deeper need. They polish a solution that addresses a pain but does not move the customer's situation forward in any meaningful way. The customer problem deserves its own space on the canvas, and right now it does not have one.
Third, the value proposition itself is missing
This is the observation that surprises people the most.
The Value Proposition Canvas helps you define products and services, pain relievers, and gain creators. Useful boxes, all of them. But the value proposition itself? The one clear sentence that explains why a customer should choose you over the alternatives? There is no box for it.
Most teams leave the workshop with a filled-in canvas and no value proposition written down anywhere. They have ingredients. They do not have the dish. They created the recipe but never plated the meal.
The canvas is named for the thing it does not ask you to articulate. Which raises a question worth sitting with. Shouldn't the value proposition have its own place on the canvas that carries its name?
What an evolved canvas could include
In our conversations with co-creators, we have been sketching what a next-generation Value Proposition Canvas might look like. The shape is still moving, but a few elements keep showing up. A clearly defined customer problem at the start. The customer context and trigger for action, the moment that pushes someone from accepting their situation to actively looking for a change. Jobs, pains, and gains, kept but tightened. A dedicated value proposition statement that lives on the canvas itself. Evidence and validation of the assumptions underneath each field. And a way to prioritise the most important problems, instead of treating every job, pain, and gain as equally weighted.
None of this is a critique of the original. The Value Proposition Canvas is one of the most influential innovation tools ever created. We owe it a lot. But it was built for a different decade, a different way of working, and a different relationship between humans and AI. Maybe it is time for a next generation, one that reflects how we actually build, validate, and scale value propositions today.
Why this matters now
Tools shape behaviour. The canvases we use are not neutral templates. They influence which questions teams ask, what they treat as obvious, and what they leave out by default. A canvas without a customer problem statement produces teams that skip the problem. A canvas without a value proposition box produces teams that never write the value proposition down. A canvas read in the wrong order produces teams that start with the product and only meet the customer at the end.
Improving the tool changes the work. That is why this conversation matters, and why we have been so deliberate about it with our co-creators over the past year.
Over to you
If you could add one element to the Value Proposition Canvas, what would it be?
We share the redesign we have been working on in Augmented Collaboration. The book is the next step in the conversation that started with our co-creators in November, and it includes the updated canvas in full.
Grab your copy of the #badversion of Augmented Collaboration, available now as a softcover and as a digital edition. The final version, with QR codes linking each tool to a live Miro template, arrives on 1 September 2026 and can be pre-ordered today.
Every tool we use shapes how we think. The canvas that helped us understand customers for the last decade can still do that work, but only if we are willing to keep evolving it.
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