Why do the smart people insist that it’s all about asking the right questions?

Like Elon Musk asking, “how many of Twitter’s ‘daily active users’ are fake?” (20%, it turns out - many big account fake follower counts are as high as 70%).

One reason to ask the right questions is that it exposes hidden assumptions. For example, if you believe the ‘daily active user’ numbers that Twitter files in its SEC reports, you might think, “Oh look at all this, I’ll kill it on ad revenue”. You might not even realize or surface that assumption, but it can still influence your actions.

In messaging and business strategy, this one of the most common “wrong questions”: What’s the unique value proposition?

This gets worded a lot of ways but the common assumption is is that there’s this one thing. And if you tell me the one thing, then we have a brand message, we have a marketing strategy, we have a product roadmap.

Here’s the problem - there’s never just one thing. Think about your product - does it have just one thing that makes it valuable?

In Good Strategy / Bad Strategy, strategy is always multiple things pasted together. Actually, this is an integral part of the definition of strategy.

In the world of B2B technology, which isn't so different from the world of anything else, there are always multiple features and benefits – and also multiple value propositions. The mistake is to think of this as some kind of competition, whereby the best value proposition is the "unique value proposition".

There's no unique value proposition - there's a unique set of value propositions. The challenges are (a) not to omit any of them without overwhelming the reader and (b) surface and spotlight the value proposition that’s most relevant to your reader.