Lean Canvas Introduction

In the last few months I got involved with Lean methodology. After doing some research, I really got excited with a ground-breaking approach for building your future products. This approach helps any company to define a business proposition without writing long, time consuming documents.

In this article I am going to focus on the Lean Canvas tool. Originally presented in Business Model Generation by Alexander Osterwalder & Yves Pigneur and further developed and adjusted in Running Lean by Ash Maurya.

The following image presents the Lean Canvas template. The numbers will help you follow the methodology step by step. I have included a brief description of each step below but for more details you should definitely read Running Lean.

1.       Write down the top 3 problems that your product is going to resolve
2.       Customer segment are you targeting
3.       Unique Value Proposition that is created for targeted customer segment
4.       List solution possibilities
5.       Specify which channel are you going to use to reach you customer segment
6.       Identify different revenue sources
7.       Put all your development cost and ongoing operational cost
8.       Specify what are the key numbers that tells you how your business is doing
9.       Specify the unfair advantage that you have that is going to make your competition harder to build a similar offer. This is usually the hardest section to fill.

References:

Books:

•       Business Model Generation by Alexander Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur, Published by John Wiley & Sons
•       Running Lean by Ash Maurya, Published by o’Reilly
•       The Startup Owner’s Manual by Steve Blank and Bob Dorf, Published by K&S Ranch, Inc.

Web Sites:

•        http://leancanvas.com/
•       http://canvanizer.com/new/lean-canvas
•       http://leanspirit.com/leancanvas
•       http://www.netprofess.com/canvas.php
•       http://www.startupkitchen.ca/home/2012/2/1/our-lean-canvas.html
•       http://www.steveblank.com/