Yesterday I went to another in a series of Product Management related breakfast discussions, the last one was on The Philosophy of Product, this one was about creating a value proposition.  Once again Ellen Grace was an excellent host and facilitator of a great conversation.

Here are some of the key take-aways I had from this discussion:

A value proposition is a multi-layered and multi-faceted thing.  Depending on what level you are at and what view you take the answer to “what is the value proposition?” may be very different.

• Multi-layered in that there are different levels of detail you use.
  • Market
  • Brand
  • Company
  • Product
  • Feature
• Multi-faceted in that there are different views or portals through which you need to look at a value proposition depending on the context and audience.
  • Business owner
  • Technical owner
  • Consumer / end-user
  • Purchasing department
  • Channel
  • Integrator

There are some things that a new value propisition will not change, and knowing ahead of time what those are is key to creating a value proposition that will work.

• Corporate culture
• Core compitency

A value proposition is like a press relationship message.  You can’t have too many, 3 or less is a good rule of thumb.  So whatever context, level and audience you have the value proposition has to be concise.  In my own experience simply eliminating value proposition statements and angles that were less effective added to the effectivity of the other remaining statements.

Tips and tricks

• Interview the company team members to understand what facets of the value proposition are resonating and working with customers, the market, analysts and press.  There may be some common themes that rise to the top.
• Perform win-loss analysis to learn what messages and propositions were effective and which weren’t
• Host a cross-functional brainstorms to get different groups thinking about the business / product from the perspective of the other groups within the company.  Having a meeting facilitator that can hold 1 on 1 pre-meetings to preflight any potentially sticky issues between groups can make things go even better.

Here’s my idea for the day, “Distributed Open Social Networking” free for anyone to take and implement.

Take wordpress or similar self publishing platform and add a few features to it to make it into a distributed social networking platform.

• Make it easy to “add Bill as friend” from the DOSN enabled homepage so that when someone’s viewing your site they can add you as a friend to their DOSN enabled site.
• Create a common “app framework” similar to facebook’s app framework.
• Make arranging the site a simple drag and drop interface like iGoogle or Facebook.
• Provide a common template for “About me” (school, gender, pic, favorite lists etc…)
• Create a status update concept that is propogated to all friends (potentially ping each friend when the status updates and provide a status RSS feed)
• Through the app framework you could monetize your popularity yourself by placing ad “apps” on your page.
• Use the existing blog post and comment mechanism as the blog / wall

That’s it.  Maybe it exists, I dunno I haven’t gone looking for it yet.

One of the advantages would be that you own your own data, and you get to choose what platform to use so long as it complies with the open specification.  No more choosing what platform to use.