What’s the one sentence that describes your product?

We all know about the Elevator Pitch – the 30 second pitch that you would deliver to your CEO or to an investor whom you meet in an elevator, where you have until the elevator doors open to pitch your great idea. I’ve written before that it’s essential for every Product Owner to not only have his or her elevator pitch always ready and prepared, but even to practice it so that every opportunity you have to deliver it is as good as it can be.

In our modern world of constant interruptions, short attention spans, skim reading and ever-faster elevators, however, you might not get 30 seconds. You certainly won’t get 300 words.

I think what we need to understand is the tweet pitch. What is the core essence of your product, in 140 characters or less?

It’s an interesting exercise because, like preparing an elevator pitch, it forces you to boil your product down to the fundamental core.

For sure, you can’t say everything about your product in 140 characters – you can’t describe your vision, your market segment, your business model and your strategy – but that’s precisely what I like so much about the tweet pitch. It forces you to get to the core.

Several other products (probably) do the same thing or something similar. So what is important about you? What makes your product different?

Every product has a market segment. But is that what is unique about yours?

If you only had 140 characters to sell your idea – which characters would you choose?

(I cannot claim that I coined the term “tweet pitch”. It’s been written about before at least here and here, and I have to give credit to Timm for putting the idea in my head this week).