Define

As soon as you have something, the natural impulse is to start drawing. Drawing is pleasant, it looks good immediately and, above all, it lets you postpone the decision. Writing a sentence that explains the product lets you postpone nothing.

So before opening any tool, I write down what somebody has to understand in the first seconds. And I write down who I am leaving out, which is the hard part.

Why one sentence is so difficult

Closing doors is vertiginous when the project is yours, because every closed door looks like an opportunity you are giving away. Say this is for small product teams and it sounds like you are renouncing the large ones, the freelancers and everything else.

But until you leave somebody out you do not have a product, you have an entire category still unspecified. That is where the sentences that say nothing come from: the platform that connects teams with their data could describe two hundred different companies, and that is exactly its function, to commit nobody to any decision.

A sentence that works for everybody convinces nobody. The person reading it never gets as far as this is for me, which is the only thing that makes anybody keep reading.

What has to be inside it

Three things, and none of them is an adjective. Who it is for. What specific problem it solves. And what that person does today instead of using it, which is what actually measures the change you are proposing.

That third part is the one most often forgotten. If you cannot name what you are competing against, a spreadsheet, a notebook, doing nothing, you will not be able to explain why anybody should switch. And you are almost never competing against another product: you are competing against habit.

How I test it

The test I use is simple. I explain the product to somebody in one sentence and ask them to give it back in their own words. If what comes back is right, the sentence works. If they have to ask me something before they can repeat it, it is not there yet.

There is a second signal, less comfortable: if saying it a second time tires you, it is not the right one. You are going to repeat that sentence far more often than you imagine, to the people you want using it, to whoever works with you, and to whoever asks at dinner what you are up to.

And a third, useful for discarding quickly: if reading it aloud makes you want to add well, actually it also does, then the sentence is describing two products.

Interface text is the interface

There is an idea that carries a lot of weight in my work and took me a while to understand: the text in an interface is not an ornament applied at the end, it is the interface itself. Everything else is boxes around some words.

When the words are precise, a good part of the design settles by itself. If you know exactly what somebody has to understand in the first seconds, visual hierarchy stops being a matter of taste and becomes a consequence.

If you do not know, no amount of visual work will fix it. You will be arranging something that has not been decided, and it shows: those are the screens that look correct and that nobody quite understands.

The mistakes I have made here

Confusing the sentence with a tagline. What I am after in this step is not something pretty to set large on the front page: it is a working definition I use to decide what to build and what not to. If it also reads well on the front page, good, but that is not its job.

And writing it by committee. A sentence drafted between four people ends up containing all four sets of priorities, which is the fastest route to meaning nothing. One person writes it and the others attack it.

How I know I have it

When somebody who was not in the conversation can repeat it without getting it wrong, and when I start using it to turn things down. That second use is the real test: a sentence that does not help you say no to anything is not deciding anything yet.

Questions people ask about this

How do I write my product value proposition?

Start with who you are leaving out, not with who you want to attract. Once you are clear about who it is not for, the sentence for the people it is for practically writes itself, because it no longer has to work for everybody.

Why is my home page unclear when the writing is good?

Because being well written and saying something are different things. Correct text that picks no specific reader reads easily and is forgotten immediately. Try asking somebody to repeat back what you do after reading it.

Should I hire a copywriter or sort this out first?

A good writer will ask you the same questions this step asks, and if you do not have the answers they will produce something correct and empty. It is worth taking the decision first, so the writing starts from something firm.

How long should this step take?

Days, not weeks. If a month has gone by and the sentence still will not come, the problem is no longer the sentence: you have not decided who the product is for, and that does not get resolved by writing.