The Lean UX Canvas

In most of my work these days I don’t often use an official canvas. I prefer to pick and choose the assumptions that can be found on the Business Model Canvas, Lean Canvas and others as appropriate for the client, project or initiative I’m working on and weave them together to form testable hypotheses and experimentation plans. Recently, I was asked by a client to codify some of the product discovery training we had worked on together. As our engagement was winding down I wanted to leave them with a clear, step-by-step guide to product discovery. To that end, I created The Lean UX Canvas.

This canvas codifies the process we first introduced in the Lean UX book. Today, I use this process to help teams frame their work as a business problem to solve (rather than a solution to implement) and then dissect that business problem into its core assumptions. We then weave those assumptions into hypotheses. Finally, we design experiments to test our riskiest hypotheses.

V1 of The Lean UX Canvas

I encourage you to download the PDF or the PNG (above) and try it out. Share it with your colleagues. See if it works for your teams. See where it struggles. I’d be grateful for your feedback either here in the comments or via email.

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