What Is the Four Actions Framework

What does the Four Actions Framework mean?

The Four Actions Framework is a strategy tool built around four questions: what factors should be eliminated that the industry takes for granted, what factors should be reduced well below industry standard, what factors should be raised well above industry standard, and what entirely new factors should be created that the industry has never offered. Blue Ocean Strategy's own Four Actions Framework page says Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne designed the four questions to "break the trade-off between differentiation and low cost", a combination they call value innovation. The output is often drawn as an eliminate, reduce, raise, create grid, which turns the four questions into a working worksheet rather than an abstract exercise.

What is the ERRC grid (eliminate, reduce, raise, create)?

The ERRC grid is the four-box worksheet where a team writes its answers to the four questions: one box each for Eliminate, Reduce, Raise and Create. Blue Ocean Strategy's ERRC grid page describes it as a tool that "pushes them to simultaneously pursue differentiation and low cost to break the value-cost trade-off", and adds that it "immediately flags companies that are focused only on raising and creating, thereby lifting the cost structure and often over-engineering products and services." That second point is the one product teams most need: a typical roadmap is a list of things to raise and create, and almost never a list of things to stop doing.

The two left-hand boxes cut cost. The two right-hand boxes add buyer value. A grid with all four boxes filled is the evidence that a team made a real trade-off rather than a wish list.

How does the framework widen the value gap?

The value gap is the distance between what your product delivers to a buyer and what the next-best alternative delivers, relative to what each costs to build and buy. Blue Ocean Strategy's value innovation page spells out the arithmetic: "value to buyers comes from the offering's utility minus its price", while value to the company comes from price minus cost. The same page maps the four actions onto those two sides: "Cost savings are made by eliminating and reducing the factors an industry competes on. Buyer value is lifted by raising and creating elements the industry has never offered."

Kim and Mauborgne's own research is the usual evidence that the gap is worth chasing. Strategic Management Insight summarizes it this way: across an analysis covering 108 companies, the 14% of launches aimed at creating blue oceans contributed 38% of revenue and 61% of total profits. That is the authors' own sample, and it shows correlation across launches, not proof that running an ERRC grid causes profit. What it still shows is that the few launches that changed what a category competes on carried a share of profit far larger than their share of launches.

For a product team the practical reading is simpler: every factor you eliminate or reduce frees capacity you can spend raising or creating something alternatives do not offer, so the gap widens from both ends at once.

Why the Four Actions Framework matters for product managers

Builders Camp's Product Strategy certification quiz asks two separate questions about the Four Actions Framework: what it is for, and why it matters in strategy. The framing matters for a PM working inside a crowded category: instead of asking how to match the leader feature for feature, the framework forces a decision about which industry norms are actually worth keeping and which ones exist mostly out of habit. A roadmap built by copying a competitor's feature list one item at a time never produces this kind of decision, since it treats every existing industry norm as a fixed cost of entry rather than something worth challenging.

How do you run an ERRC grid exercise with a product team?

Run it as a working session with product, design, engineering and one person who talks to customers every week (sales, support or success), and bring evidence rather than opinions. The steps below are the version that holds up when the output has to turn into roadmap decisions.

1. List the factors the category competes on. Pull 8 to 12 factors from competitor pricing pages, lost-deal notes, support tickets and review sites: things buyers compare, such as setup time, integrations, reporting depth, price model, support channel. Write each as a factor, not a feature.
2. Score your product and two real alternatives on each factor. Use a simple 0 to 5 scale and plot the three lines. This is a value curve, and it shows where you already look like everyone else.
3. Eliminate. For each factor, ask whether the target buyer would notice or care if it disappeared. Usage data is the tiebreaker: a capability almost nobody opens is a candidate, however standard it is in the category.
4. Reduce. Find the factors where the category over-serves your segment. Keep them, but at a deliberately lower level than competitors.
5. Raise. Pick the one or two factors buyers complain about most across every alternative, and commit to being well above the category on them.
6. Create. Name a factor no alternative offers. Every create entry must trace to a customer problem you can quote from an interview or ticket; if it cannot, it goes back in the parking lot.
7. Check the balance. A grid with nothing under eliminate or reduce fails the exercise, for the over-engineering reason Blue Ocean's ERRC page gives.
8. Redraw the curve and turn it into work. Plot the new value curve against the same two alternatives, then convert each raise and create entry into an opportunity on the roadmap and each eliminate and reduce entry into a deprecation or scope cut with an owner.

Step 8 decides whether the session mattered. A grid that never changes the roadmap was a brainstorm, not a strategy.

Four Actions Framework example

A budget airline applying this framework eliminates assigned seating and free meals entirely, reduces the amount spent on lounge access and interline agreements, raises on-time departure reliability well above the industry average, and creates a new factor competitors had not offered, rebooking within two hours of a delay. Builders Camp's Beyond Agile certification quiz includes a question on the purpose of the value curve, the chart this kind of grid is usually plotted on, so the airline's choices can be compared against competitors on one picture rather than just described in a strategy memo. None of the four moves requires new technology or a bigger budget; each one is a deliberate choice about where the airline's existing resources go instead of spreading them evenly across every industry norm.

What does an ERRC grid look like for a software product?

Take a hypothetical booking tool for independent physiotherapy clinics, competing against large practice-management suites and against a paper diary plus phone calls. The suites win on breadth; the diary wins on zero setup. The team's grid:

Action	Factor	Decision
Eliminate	Multi-site admin console	Remove it: single-practitioner clinics never open it, and it drives most of the permissions complexity
Eliminate	Custom report builder	Replace with three fixed reports clinic owners actually ask for
Reduce	Calendar integrations	Support the two calendars most clinics use instead of matching the suites' long list
Reduce	Onboarding calls	Swap live onboarding for a setup flow a clinic finishes alone
Raise	No-show protection	SMS reminders plus an optional card hold, since missed sessions are the loudest complaint about every alternative
Raise	Mobile booking speed	A patient books a follow-up from the reminder message in a few taps
Create	Home-exercise follow-up	After each session, the patient gets the physio's exercise plan and a check-in two days later

The left side of the grid lowers build and support cost; the right side targets the two problems buyers raise about both alternatives. The create entry only earns its place if clinic interviews show patients dropping their home exercises between sessions, which is exactly the evidence step 6 above asks for. Once validated, each raise and create row becomes an opportunity to test, and the team can sequence them with the three horizons model, since home-exercise follow-up is a riskier, further-out bet than SMS reminders.

Where does the Four Actions Framework fit in a product strategy?

The Four Actions Framework sits between understanding the market and writing the roadmap. It turns market and customer evidence into a short list of opportunities, and those opportunities are what a product strategy chooses between. The page on product vision vs strategy vs roadmap lays out that chain from mission down to roadmap, and the ERRC grid is one of the more reliable ways to fill the opportunities layer with options that differ from what competitors are already doing. Inside each opportunity, a prioritization method such as MoSCoW then decides which pieces ship first.

How Builders Camp teaches the Four Actions Framework

Product Strategy, a 2 week bootcamp with 4 live sessions and 8 microlessons taught by Andre Albuquerque, tests the Four Actions Framework directly in its certification quiz, and Builders Camp's template library includes a Value Curve Analysis template for plotting the result against competitors. Beyond Agile comes back to the same value curve when comparing operating models beyond standard Agile ceremonies. See the Product Strategy bootcamp for the full curriculum.