ERRC Four Actions Framework
Type: template
Stage: Stage 2: Positioning Proof
Difficulty: advanced
A strategic alignment tool for designing a Value Innovation curve — forcing explicit decisions on what to Eliminate, Reduce, Raise, and Create to reduce operational cost while delivering the outcomes customers value most.
Overview
The ERRC Four Actions Framework is the operational companion to the Strategy Canvas. Where the canvas shows you the competitive landscape visually, the ERRC grid forces you to make explicit decisions about how you will diverge from that landscape. The discipline of naming what you'll eliminate and reduce — not just what you'll raise and create — is what produces positioning that is both differentiated and economically sustainable.
The four quadrants
The ERRC framework organizes positioning decisions into four categories:
• Eliminate — which factors that the industry competes on should be removed entirely from your offering? These are factors that have become industry convention but add cost without delivering proportional customer value.
• Reduce — which factors should be delivered below the industry standard? These are factors that are somewhat valued but overbuilt by incumbents competing on them as table stakes.
• Raise — which factors should be delivered above the industry standard? These are the dimensions where your target customer is underserved and where your differentiation will be most visible.
• Create — which factors should be introduced that no current competitor offers? These are the new dimensions of value that your category hasn't recognized yet.
The ERRC grid is a commitment mechanism. Until you've named what you'll eliminate and reduce, you haven't made a positioning decision — you've made a wish list.
The economics of ERRC
The strategic logic of the framework is that Eliminate and Reduce fund Raise and Create.
Incumbents compete on a full set of factors because they've been adding capabilities for years without removing anything. The result is feature bloat — a product that does many things adequately and nothing exceptionally.
By deliberately eliminating factors that your target customer doesn't value, you free the resources (engineering time, support bandwidth, sales motion, pricing capacity) to invest deeply in the factors your target customer values most.
Example: a tool that eliminates enterprise SSO integration, custom branding, and 200-person org management (features that add significant development cost but your SMB customers never use) can invest those resources into best-in-class onboarding, real-time support, and a self-serve pricing model that removes the sales barrier entirely.
The positioning result: 'We've stripped away everything enterprise teams need and doubled down on everything a 5–50 person team actually uses.'
Running the ERRC exercise
Step-by-step using the Umbrex template:
1. Start with your Strategy Canvas — identify the factors of competition your industry competes on
2. For each factor, ask four questions:
• Eliminate: Is this factor something our target customer genuinely needs, or is it industry convention we've inherited?
• Reduce: Is the industry over-delivering on this factor relative to what our target customer actually values?
• Raise: Is the industry under-delivering on this factor despite it being highly important to our target customer?
• Create: Is there a need our target customer has that no current competitor is addressing?
3. Place each factor in the appropriate quadrant
4. Review the completed grid — does the Eliminate and Reduce column fund the Raise and Create column? If Raise and Create require significantly more resources than Eliminate and Reduce free up, the ERRC decisions need to be recalibrated
The output should be a clear, one-page articulation of exactly how your positioning differs from the industry — not at the level of feature comparison, but at the level of strategic choice.
Connecting ERRC to messaging
Each quadrant of the ERRC grid generates positioning language:
• Eliminate generates 'without' statements — 'project management without the enterprise overhead'
• Reduce generates 'simplified' statements — 'the reporting your team actually needs, not the dashboard no one reads'
• Raise generates outcome statements — 'setup in 15 minutes, not 6 weeks'
• Create generates category statements — 'the first [category] built specifically for [your niche]'
The most powerful positioning statements combine all four quadrants into a single sentence: 'The only [category] that [Create/Raise outcome] without [Eliminate/Reduce liability] — built specifically for [ICP].'
The ERRC grid is the bridge between strategy (the decisions you've made about how to compete) and messaging (the words you use to communicate those decisions to the market).