Solution Overview – What does the business do?

Problem Overview

A one paragraph overview of what is broken with the world and the business problem we seek to solve.   This paragraph is about defining what it is that we're trying to solve for our stakeholders.

Solution Overview

A one paragraph overview of our company and the solution we provide.  This is not a deep technical explanation of vector databases, REST interfaces, LLM training or the like. This is a high level, readily understandable statement of what we do.  The level of technical detail here is governed by what the audience we define in Stakeholder Summary.

Competitive Overview

A one paragraph overview of how what we do compares to the current approach to the problem.  This paragraph directly speaks to what we're competing with - the current approach to the problem.   In most cases these is a functional competitor - either doing nothing or doing it ourselves. 

One Sentence Summary

A one sentence summary of what the company does.

Tagline

A concise, memorable phrase that communicates a company's core value or strategic benefit to its business audience, reinforcing brand identity and differentiation.  It should express what the company does, why it matters, or how it uniquely delivers value—in 3 to 7 words—without relying on emotion-heavy or consumer-style language.  B2B taglines tend to emphasize outcomes like performance, scalability, intelligence, reliability, or transformation.

Stakeholders

I hate the word “stakeholder” but it’s the most effective way to articulate what we want here which is the combination of two discrete groups for people: (i) members of our buying group and (ii) users of the target solution.    This section is about providing a basic overview of each type of person (“persona”) in the combined group.  For each person we provide the following:

  • Job Overview - A one paragraph description of their job and the responsibilities they have that are relevant to our solution.
  • Relevant Key Pains - A bullet list of critical challenges or problems they face in their job that relate to our solution.  Here we only care about core challenges they face in their job that we solve.   If we’re solving for a pain that’s not a core aspect of someone’s job we likely don’t have a viable business.

Core Features

A list of the core features in the product.   These are at most one paragraph descriptions of each of the core functional areas of the product.  This is meant to describe what the function does in a way that's readily understandable by the Stakeholders. 

Stakeholder Pains Addressed

A defined list that includes the name of the Stakeholder and a description of what Relevant Key Pain this feature addresses for the Stakeholdera our solution that addresses the relevant pain.  This should include a description of the business objective the persona will achieve or accomplish when using this aspect or feature of our solution.

As you write up the Stakeholder Pains Addressed you'll want to keep in mind.

  • No More Than Three - I know your product is amazing and has lots of cool benefits and features.   Your prospect's attention isn't long enough to care.   Keep it short.  Keep it punchy.   Make it catchy.
  • Differentiate - Competitive differentiation is about what makes the company stand out from the crowd.  The thing that makes it special, unique, better and more effectively solves the business problem at hand.   Whenever you can if we can highlight solutions to pains we uniquely address it'll accrue to our benefit.   The key thing: a buyer has to care about it.   Differentiation is easy - lots of things make your company different.  Competitive differentiation is tough, that's the set of things that are different and unique about you your buyer cares about.  In a world of same, differentiation is how you get people to choose you, stick with you, and, ideally, pay more for your solution.

Authoring Notes

You'll quickly see that the Solution Summary and Stakeholder Summary are related to one another. As you refine one you'll refine the other and vice versa. Of the two, though I'd recommend really defining who you want to create a solution for (your stakeholders) before you define your solution in depth. Effective communication and software development begins with a detailed understanding of the individuals we serve. There are two key reasons for this focus: first, modern marketing and communication allows us to communicate in a personalized, highly specific fashion.   Detailed personas are key way to enable this. Second, by grounding our messaging in stories of users and buyers we foster a customer-obsessed and user-oriented mindset within our organization.

Persona definition requires a detailed understanding of a person's job function and how our offerings are relevant to their professional or personal lives. For the Stakeholder Summary we're narrowing that focus to how that intersects with our product. Our full Personas, in contrast, will define their broad scope of job and the portions that's specific to our application. All of that is to point out that the Stakeholder Summary section is a summary of the full persona information which you need to produce as well. For this stage we just want clarity on who we are selling to, the compelling pains they experience that we solve, and how we solve them in a unique and compelling fashion.

Once we have a clear understanding of the specific solutions our product offers for each role, we then can figure out the best way to summarize it. This involves taking the detailed Relevant Pain / Matching Features table and refining our overall solution description.

The process of defining these sections is highly iterative. I typically start with a couple of bullet points on a solution and a rough idea of who it's relevant to. I then expand that solution out, explore other personas and refine the ones I've got. In that I'm seeking to surface the best matches between core job problems or challenges a persona has and what we can fix with our software. My experience is you don't need a ton of process for this: over time you'll naturally refine what problem your focused on and who you solve it for.

Finally, no matter how brilliant your are and how much research you've done you'll end up changing this a lot. Expect that you'll iterate through many drafts of this and come back to change points as you develop the concept further. That process is you refining your definition of the problem and your thesis on how that definition is relevant to a very persons daily business life. Once you've got something stable you'll still change it but on a structured, quarterly basis.