One of the most useful things my Executive MBA at the Institute of Product Leadership has made me do is leave the building and actually talk to people.
For a Value Proposition Design project, my classmate Shilpa Ashok Kulkarni and I picked a community we wanted to understand: AI builders. We went to an AI × SaaS Founders Meetup in Bengaluru and interviewed the room — founders, hosts, and the people in the audience furiously taking notes.
We asked four questions, and they map almost perfectly onto a value proposition canvas:
- The "Why" — what made you decide to come, and what were you hoping to walk away with?
- The "Hard Part" — how are you actually trying to use AI in your product, and where does it hurt?
- The "Gap" — what was missing from the room that would have made it more useful?
- The "Friction" — what stops you from implementing the insights you leave with?
The core finding
The same answer kept surfacing in different words: there is a wide, painful gap between inspiration and implementation. People leave events lit up with ideas and then collide with the boring reality of shipping. The talks sell the destination; nobody sells the road.
That gap is the value proposition. The most valuable thing you could build for this community isn't more inspiration — it's less friction between the idea and the working thing.
Why this lands for me
After eighteen years in QA, I already distrust the confident claim and ask for the evidence. Customer discovery is the same instinct, pointed earlier in the process: don't assume what people value — go and find out. The canvas just gives the instinct a shape.
I'm only a few months into thinking like a product person. But this exercise taught me the most important habit early: the answer is almost never at your desk.