Lean Canvas — a Compass For Product Development

An overview about what makes Lean Canvas🗒 such a useful tool to evaluate business concepts👍🏻, and how it helps aligning an idea with a need📐, to help a product succeed📈.

Although UnscrewMe started as a useful side project, not primarily aiming to become a money-printing machine, it seemed sensible to think about ways to monetise the idea, even if just to keep it running. So, why not develop a business model? Or at least, why not think about all the different aspects that define a product and differentiate it from other offerings available.

Simple and succinct: Lean Canvas 🗒

We mentioned this concept before, but now we want to go into more details to explain why and how we think Lean Canvas helps with product development, product positioning and prioritisation. If you haven’t read it already, you should probably put Running Lean by Ash Maurya on your reading list. And if you don’t have a reading list, it might be a good idea to start one!

Lean Canvas really is simply an empty sheet with nine headings. That’s it. No spreadsheet or convoluted text, nine headings on a single page is just enough space for a few bullet points below each heading. Or, as stated on the website:

Lean Canvas is a 1-page business plan template created by Ash Maurya that helps you deconstruct your idea into its key assumptions using 9 basic building blocks.

If this sounds familiar, it might be, because it is — Lean Canvas builds on an existing tool and tweaks it a little bit:

It is adapted from Alex Osterwalder’s Business Model Canvas and replaces elaborate business plans with a single page business model.

If you have an idea yourself and want to dive deeper into business model development and understand the concept better, the article ‘An Introduction to Lean Canvas’ by Steve Mullen is a great starting point that gives a good overview.

For more information about Lean Canvas, see also ‘Don’t Write a Business Plan. Create a Lean Canvas Instead.’ and LEANSTACK, the product built around Lean Canvas by its author.

Quick run through Lean Canvas sections 🏃🏻

What Lean Canvas does is really helping you structuring the development of a business model or product. The basic sections or building blocks are mostly intuitive and allow you to focus on what counts, instead of filling tables with random numbers.

Perhaps the most important sections to start with are the definition of the problem, the pain points, and suggesting a solution to convert the pain points into a value proposition for future users.

Based on problem and solution, Lean Canvas places emphasis on key metrics. These should be easily measurable and be closely tied to your business objective, allowing you to decide if the service is successful.

The section we found most difficult was unfair advantage. First, we do not like the name, in the end, this is not about fair or unfair, but about the competitive edge you have over others pursuing a similar idea.

The two sections about channels and customer segments can be closely related, defining who you want to reach and how to get to them.

Finally, Lean Canvas also captures financial fundamentals about the business opportunity that can help understand whether the idea can lead to a viable business or a pivot might be needed to align the original idea better to the cost structure and possible revenue streams. At this stage, no detailed multi-year planning is needed like in traditional business plans, but instead a basic estimate about cost and revenue.

Adapting for practical usage ✍🏻

While we really liked the idea of having a nicely formatted sheet with all core questions and answers on it, using our basic set of tools, that original format seemed somewhat impractical and maybe not ideal to track and maintain. So we adapted the Lean Canvas layout and “flattened” the structure to a simple collection of lists with the key areas as headings.

The advantage of lists over a more visual arrangement is that it is so much easier to write and update using Markdown formatting.

The fact that it does not look as catchy as the standard Lean Canvas layout is not really a problem, and it is just much more convenient to handle.

Benefits of Lean Canvas 👍🏻

Probably the main motivation for us to create a Lean Canvas for UnscrewMe was to confirm to ourselves that there is a very real and ripe business opportunity.

What we found most interesting about Lean Canvas is that it helps to think about different options and business models. The idea of writing several different Lean Canvas versions, and choosing the one that looks most promising was an inspiration to us.

While for us, UnscrewMe is not primarily a money-making business idea at the moment, even just for choosing the right audience, it helps to contrast a couple of alternatives. Thinking through options and writing down various implications in key areas is a great way to get a more nuanced grasp of the market.

Once the preferred option has been identified, the Lean Canvas sections help prioritise what should be implemented first in the Minimum Viable Product, and what could come later.

Getting the focus right 📍

I have written business plans before, but making three-year financial and budget projections based on hot air and guesswork always seemed like a largely unhelpful and not very useful exercise. Reading about Lean Canvas then was an eye-opener to me. Lean Canvas includes the key questions, without focusing too much on finances, which are difficult to predict anyway at the start of a new project.

I think, for every product idea, one should write up at least one Lean Canvas. This is a quick idea to better understand the potential business models and implications. Compiling a Lean Canvas mainly requires some thinking, but in the end is not too complex or time-consuming.

The first Lean Canvas provides a great foundation for iterations to explore and refine the product and the underlying business model to come up with an original, functional and sustainable offering and business proposition.

The flexibility and light weight of Lean Canvas can also be used to identify pivots worth considering early on. This allows a startup to potentially streamline the overall business development process and cut costs — or losses.

Having a goal and knowing what’s important is essential. But an idea only becomes a product when it gets implemented — so in the next article, we will write about about the technology stack we are using to build UnscrewMe.

(While I wrote this article, I enjoyed a range of great and interesting wines. At Humble Grape Fleet Street, I had a really nice 2014 Zweigelt from Winzer Schup in Austria. On a Friday evening, I stopped at Sager + Wilde on Hackney Road to do some editing and had a funny Pinot Gris from Craven Wines in Stellenbosch, South Africa, that looked very much like a rose wine and had a particular and somewhat steely taste. Followed by a pretty acidic and refreshing, uncommon and unfiltered Riesling called “Handcrafted” by Martin & Anna Arndorfer from Kamptal in Austria.)