The “value proposition” is a concept that’s crucial to a company’s marketing success. For the most part, people get it: explain your value succinctly. The hard part is always whittling down all your features into what solution your product represents; it’s cutting the “marketese” so everyone else can get to the point.
The core of the concept is shedding the subjectivity of your opinion to let the more objective truth shine through. It helps others understand what you’re saying more clearly.
Beyond being a marketing tactic, this simplicity of message does the world a favor: everyone spends less time sifting through your presentation of an idea, and, instead, engages with that idea more directly. Further, the shared understanding of this solution-oriented message helps inform the growth and changes of the product itself.
The pursuit of and focus on simple, core truths doesn’t cease being useful outside copywriting and product roadmapping. What if I asked you—designer, developer, entrepreneur, salesperson, or barista—what’s the good in what you do for a living?
Honestly, I think we balk at this question far too often. I think we often say we’re working towards being able to do good for a living, so we’re doing the hard work for money now.
I think, in many cases, our outlook on our work is a travesty in this regard. The same technique we use to find the value proposition of a product can help us find our own good—right here and now.
What’s “good” and where is it?
I said earlier that the core idea of a value proposition is shedding subjectivity in favor of a more objective truth. So, for now, leave behind even what you believe about the meaning of life (and what happens afterwards), and meet everyone at a place most folks can agree on: doing good is leaving the world better than you found it.
So, how is the company you work for leaving the world better than it was? And, how are you, specifically, helping them accomplish that?
Personally Speaking
(I’ll leave out company names just so you know I’m not selling you something.)
When I interviewed for my current job, I remember my, now, boss asking me if I felt comfortable moving from the non-profit sector into the definitely-for-profit sector. I’d already thought about this quite a bit, as I was moving from a position in which I was able to participate in and even organize community service efforts directly as part of my actual job; that certainly wouldn’t be a part of my new position, so far as I knew.
I remember telling him that I was absolutely comfortable because I believed what the new company was doing benefitted mankind in its own way.
Truly, I work for a company whose product enables marketers and salespeople to get the right solution to the right people at the right time. This increases efficiency, reduces waste, and mitigates the frustration in solving problems. Further, I, specifically, catalyze the utility and usability of that product through my skill set and collaboration with others.
Even in my consulting and contracting, I strive to empower my clients, and I strive to work with integrity.
“Do all the good you can.”
As I mention in a couple of the talks I give, if you can’t honestly say the way you make money makes the world better in some sense, do your soul a favor and find something else to put your effort into. For the majority of us, though, I think our good is simply buried in a mountain of the day-to-day worries of life. I refuse to accept that most of us are simply waiting until some time in the future when we can be of service to the world.
If you died tomorrow, would you be proud of the work you’ve done? Make it so. Your focus on it will not only make you better, it will make the world, objectively, better.