I’ve read the same document under different names more times than I care to remember. Sometimes the doc says positioning, sometimes it says value proposition but almost always it’s just a product description.
Nobody does this to make your job more difficult. Product built the thing because they were genuinely excited about it, and the document is what happens when that excitement is documented together with the words “powerful,” “seamless,” and “built for scale,” or as I call it, the corporate holy trinity.
This isn’t a knock on product teams, by the way, because they’re genuinely trying to help. They just don’t understand marketing the way marketing does, in the same way nobody should be asking me how to build the actual product because it would not end well.
A product description is supposed to be about the product. That is genuinely useful, but not as a value proposition. Because a value proposition has exactly one job, which is to help someone decide why they should pick you over the alternatives.
Break that one job into its four parts and you can see exactly where the document above fails.
The first part is what you’re selling (category and use case), and the enthusiastic product description already sort of answers it, but not really. Fifteen features is not the same as one category. A buyer doesn’t file you by feature count but by the shelf they already have in their head (product management, CRM, etc), and that shelf comes from the job you get hired to do.
The second part is who it’s for, which means the specific segment, the decision they’re facing right now, and the thing keeping them stuck on it. A product description skips this one almost by design because whoever wrote it was thinking about the product in front of them, not about one particular buyer stuck on one particular decision.
The third part is what it replaces, and that isn’t always a competitor. It’s often the extremely popular option of doing nothing, or a workaround (an Excel written by Martin, who left the company in 2025 and is now believed to be living somewhere peaceful without Microsoft Teams).
The last part is why it’s better and it is where “powerful,” “seamless” and “built for scale” go to retire without ever having done an honest day’s work. Better has to be something the alternative genuinely cannot say, not just something true about you. A lot of what product teams reach for here is true but also claimable by the competitor, or even by the workaround. “We’re fast” is not a value proposition if the spreadsheet is also fast. I’ve written versions of this document myself where every word was true and it convinced nobody.
So the next time a document like this lands in your inbox, don’t rewrite it so it reads better. Go looking for the boxes it skipped.