What the canvas is good for, and what a session still has to settle.
The value proposition canvas is Alex Osterwalder's tool for laying out what a customer is trying to get done, what gets in their way, and how what you sell maps onto both. It is a good organiser. Teams that use it come away with their existing knowledge arranged clearly.
I use it inside a day when a group has plenty of customer knowledge and no shared structure for it.
The canvas organises what you already believe. It has no opinion about whether what you believe is true, and it does not ask you who you are giving up.
So a canvas session works when the customer evidence going into it is real. Fill it in from the leadership team's assumptions and you get a tidy diagram of the same guesses you walked in with.
Buyer interviews happen first, and the canvas gets filled in from what those buyers said rather than from the group's memory. Pains get ranked by what customers spent money on. The fit between what you offer and what they need gets marked honestly, including the parts where the fit is weak.
Then the group writes the proposition in prose, because a filled canvas is an input rather than something you can put on a website.
No. It helps some groups and slows others down.
Different tool, wider scope. The business model canvas covers how the company makes money. This covers why a customer would choose you.
Yes, and the part worth paying for is the customer interviews rather than the facilitation.