Designing Value

The Job to be Done

People buy products to get a job done. This simple idea was the basis of an important framework established by a legendary Harvard Business School professor named Clayton Christensen. Christensen believed that instead of asking what features we should build, we need to ask, “what job is the customer hiring this product to do?” It’s known as the Jobs to be Done (JTBD) framework, and it’s a critical perspective that can help us design and build profitable products.

A value proposition is the simplest framework you can use to develop products that align with the JTBD framework. A business is essentially a value delivery system. Products (or offerings) are the output of this system. Successful companies begin by choosing the value to be delivered (or the job the customer hires the product to help with). The next step is delivering the value, meaning the specific and distinctive benefits that get the job done better than alternatives, according to our preferences. Finally, companies communicate the value. This is the part of marketing most folks naturally think of because it is linked to advertising and promotion. But marketing is really about all three. You purposefully choose what value to deliver and then you figure out how to communicate it.

Wanted: Stylish Thirst Trap

Definitions are forgettable, so let’s focus on a product you probably know better than you’d like to admit: the Stanley Quencher. This 40-ounce tumbler with handle and built-in straw has become ubiquitous—the source of endless TikTok shorts and a slew of competitive knock-offs.

Here’s something you maybe didn’t know: Stanley almost threw the Quencher in the trash.

For over a century, Stanley sold rugged steel vacuum bottles to construction workers, hunters, and campers. The Quencher was an experiment and was far from the company’s business priorities. In fact, in 2017 Stanley planned to discontinue it. The cup that would soon make hundreds of millions of dollars was discovered while sitting on a clearance rack in Utah. That’s where Ashlee LeSueur, a mom and author of a shopping blog called The Buy Guide, found it. She loved it, told her followers. They went nuts. The rest is history.

What happened that suddenly made a vacuum-insulated steel cup get hired for millions of jobs? To answer this question, let’s frame it as a value proposition.

Value Propositions

Value propositions help managers identify and deliver the value that will get a product hired by a customer. They have four components.

Target audience

All customers are not created equal. A construction worker in Detroit might have very different needs and preferences from those of a college student in Los Angeles. Good value propositions have a clear audience in mind. They don’t try to be everything to everyone. They try to get hired by a specific employer.

Stanley’s old target was outdoor enthusiasts and tradespeople. The new target—the one that printed all the new-found profit—shifted to active young consumers (skewing female) who are concerned about hydration but not at the expense of personal style. Stanley fondly calls them Quencher Women. Demographically, the audience shifted from male to female, and old to young. Psychographically, it shifted from utilitarian to lifestyle. The new crowd includes mom influencers, Bachelor Nation, and the #WaterTok faithful. (Yes, there is a corner of the internet devoted to romanticizing hydration, and it has hundreds of millions of views. What a time to be alive!)

Need

A need is the unmet or under-served part of the job the customer is trying to get done. The emphasis is on unmet. Successful offerings address needs that alternative options serve badly or ignore completely.

A Stanley Quencher addresses several needs for Quencher Women:

The need to stay hydrated all day without constantly stopping to refill a small water bottle
The need for an on-the-go travel mug that actually fits into a standard car cup holder (she’s busy)
The need for refreshingly cool beverage temperatures throughout the day
The need for the durability that can withstand an active lifestyle without being heavy to lug around all day
The need to seamlessly switch between a straw for sipping ease and spill protection
The need for a modern accessory that matches personal style
The need to make sustainable, eco-friendly choices that are good for the planet

The last need is an interesting one. Stanley describes the eco-friendly dimension as “Built for Life.” While Quencher Women would probably tell you that this influences their purchase behavior, the reality might not align perfectly. In the same way, there is a need that is not defined above but may be part of their choice: belonging. The viral success of Stanley has led many of these consumers to have a need to avoid FOMO (fear of missing out).

If we ladder up, we can simplify into this statement—the need for a cool hydration device that is both convenient and stylish.

Benefit

If the need is the job to be done, the benefit is the job getting done. A benefit is the specific, distinctive value the customer actually receives—the reason the product gets hired instead of fired.

It is sometimes helpful to think of benefits in relation to price. In economics, we know that an optimal price is a function of the perceived benefit delivered. When consumers perceive more benefit, they are willing to pay more. Conversely, if benefits are reduced, they expect to pay less.

The classic rookie mistake is to confuse a feature with a benefit. A feature is what the offering is: “double-walled steel, 40 ounces, fits a car cup holder.” A benefit is what the customer gets out of that feature. Nobody ever loved a cup for its wall count; they love what the wall count does for them—a drink that’s still cold at 4 p.m. Features are the how; benefits are the why it matters.

Benefits come in three types, and the strongest value propositions deliver more than one.

Functional benefits are the practical, tangible payoffs—the offering doing its literal job. For the Quencher, these answer the bulk of the need list: it holds enough water to get her through the day (need 1), fits the cup holder (need 2), keeps the drink cold (need 3), survives an active life without weighing her down (need 4), and switches between sip and spill-proof (need 5). This is real value, but notice it’s also the most copyable value. Any competent competitor can build an insulated cup that does these things—and plenty did.

Emotional benefits are about how the offering makes the customer feel. Here’s where the Quencher pulls away from a generic bottle. Carrying the cup everyone’s talking about feels good. It scratches the belonging itch from the need section—you’re part of the moment, not the lone holdout watching everyone else’s #WaterTok. The emotional benefit is the feeling of being part of a movement.

Self-expressive benefits are about how the offering signals identity to others—what owning it says about you. This is the payoff for the “modern accessory that matches personal style” need (need 6). The specific color, the limited-edition collab, the bow charm clipped to the handle: these let the cup broadcast taste and personality. Two women can own the identical product and still use it to say completely different things about themselves. That’s a self-expressive benefit doing its work.

Stack them up and the pattern is hard to miss. The functional benefits got the Quencher into the consideration set—they’re the price of entry. But the emotional and self-expressive benefits are what got it hired over every other cup that keeps water cold. They’re harder to copy, harder to commoditize, and they map straight onto the needs ordinary water bottles left on the table.

Differentiator

The differentiator answers the question: what makes your product better than alternatives? An alternative might not be a competitor in the category. It could be a substitute product. For example, years ago, the management of Gumout, an automotive engine cleaning brand, wanted to understand which competitive products mechanics were using when they didn’t use Gumout. They were surprised to learn that the product that was stealing their business was none other than a 2-liter bottle of Coca-Cola. Mechanics would soak dirty parts in Coke overnight, then rinse them off with water in the morning. The phosphoric acid in Coke did the job perfectly, and it was much cheaper than a bottle of Gumout–a textbook example of a substitute product.

The differentiator in a value proposition can at times seem weak or arbitrary. In blind taste tests, many consumers could not differentiate between Coke and Pepsi. But both brands found ways of making themselves distinctive. Coke built its brand around refreshment and the world of Coca-Cola that often manifested in many of the world’s beloved pastimes (Baseball, theme parks, movies, etc.). Pepsi leaned on trends and popular culture, focusing its brand on the now, which resulted in historic partnerships and collaborations with Michael Jackson, Britney Spears, and MTV. While the product itself was hard to differentiate, the way in which the product was branded and served to the consumer was distinctive.

Stanley pulled off the same trick—building distinctiveness into a product that, mechanically, anyone could copy. Stanley’s edge was partly manufactured scarcity. A former president put it bluntly: the frenzy wasn’t an accident, they used scarcity “to create the fun and frenzy and the demand.” Limited drops, store collaborations, fights breaking out over special editions. An Olivia Rodrigo collab Quencher sold out in minutes and now resells for around $10,000. For a cup. The resale market is the receipt that proves the brand is desirable.

Putting It All Together

A value proposition isn’t a slogan or a tagline—those come later, when you communicate the value. It’s an internal statement that captures, in one place, the value you’ve chosen to deliver. McKinsey’s original definition (they coined the term) called it exactly that: a clear, simple statement of the benefits—tangible and intangible—that the company will deliver, and the price the customer pays for them.

Assembled from the four components, Stanley’s looks something like this:

For active young consumers who won’t trade style for hydration, the Stanley Quencher delivers all-day cold, everyday convenience, and a cup that signals taste and belonging—benefits ordinary bottles can’t match, at a premium price.

Notice what this is and isn’t. It names the target, the benefits (functional, emotional, self-expressive), and the differentiator, with price as the trade-off. It’s written for you—the builder—as the ruler you hold every future decision against. It is not yet the line you’d put on a billboard. Turning this internal clarity into something that lives in the customer’s mind is a separate job called positioning—the subject of another note.