The Lean Product Canvas: The Ultimate Tool for Product Discovery
A few weeks ago, the latest version of the Lean UX Canvas was released under a new name, “Lean Product Canvas”. This article will present my perspective on using this tool in product discovery. If you like to learn about the tool from the creator’s perspective, visit Jeff Gothelf’s website.
I will use real examples to walk through this tool/method.
A few months ago my friend Mario and I started working on his idea for a new application that challenges existing event-based social media. The idea was to create an app that people can use to find events and then find people to attend the event with, so they don’t have to go alone.
I will use the Lean Strategy Canvas & Lean Product Canvas and rework the same business idea from scratch to give you a better understanding of how to use these canvases practically.
It is difficult to discover a product without having a good sense of the business strategy and goals. That is why it is recommended to start with the Lean Strategy Canvas to set up the playing field.
Lean Strategy Canvas
1. Goal
Here, we brainstorm about our end goal or a goal for a certain period. What do we want to achieve? What will make us feel accomplished?
In my example, I define our goals as:
- Go to market: Achieve significant user acquisition to a new event-based social media app
- Monetization: Earn revenue through advertising and partnerships with event organisers
2. Obstacle
Think about that big ugly beast that can destroy us. What would be the biggest barrier as we think now that can get in our way of achieving our goal?
In my example, I can see two main obstacles:
- Competition: There are apps like Tinder, Meetup, and Facebook that operate in the same problem space and they are well-established apps. It would be difficult to enter this market.
- Unrealistic behavioural changes expected from users: There might be a social awkwardness to using an app to find people to go to an event. The idea might not be popular among the majority of people.
3. Strategy
Here we want to define our target audience or market segments that we want to address first.
I assume that the target audience who would use a solution like ours would be in their middle age and most probably be single. We also cannot launch this worldwide and support all the events in the world. We probably need to narrow down our scope to a single city and a single event type. We will need to do more market analysis to figure out what exactly the scope is but we can go with a guess for now.
- Target audience: Middle-aged single people who enjoy going to concerts but find it difficult to find a companion.
- Market segment: Start with people in a single city like New York and interested in a single event type like Concerts.
Thinking about the obstacles we defined in the previous step, what is our strategy to overcome them?
I think we should separate ourselves from dating apps and make it very clear so people would not feel awkward using them. And one of the biggest problems in almost all social media is the problem with the authenticity of the users. We should address that.
How will we win:
- Remove romance and focus on friendship and platonic relationships.
- High security so people won’t get ghosted or scammed.
4. Objectives and Key Results
A good starting point to learn about OKR is to watch this video and read the books Measure What Matters and Who Does What by How Much.
Now, we have a better understanding of what we want to achieve, what obstacles we might face, what is our target market and what success means to us.
It is time to start on the Lean Product Canvas.
Lean Product Canvas
1. Business Problem
How you define the Business Problem depends on what type of a problem it is.
If it is about improving an existing solution, we can use this format:
[Our service/product] was designed to achieve [these goals]. We have observed [in this way] that the product/service isn’t meeting these goals which is causing [this adverse effect/problem] to our business. How might we improve service/product so that our customers are more successful as determined by [these measurable changes in their behaviour]?
If it is about introducing a new solution, we can use this format:
The current state of [domain] has focused mainly on [segments, pain points, etc.]. What existing products/services fail to address is [this gap]. Our product/service will address this gap by [vision/strategy]. Our initial focus will be [this segment]. We’ll know we are successful when we see [these behaviours In our target audience.]
If your problem does not fit into the above two formats, you can state it in your own way but make sure it captures the problem you want to solve and the scope.
I define our business problem like this:
The current state of event-based social media and dating apps has focused mainly on finding events or finding love. What existing products/services fail to address is finding friends to go to events with.
Our product/service will address this gap by making it simple and comfortable to find like-minded people to go to events with. Our initial focus will be middle-aged single people who enjoy going to a specific type of event in a specific city but find it difficult to find a companion.
We’ll know we are successful when we see a significant number of users actively using the app frequently.
2. Business Outcomes
This step is very similar to the step of defining OKR in the Lean Strategy Canvas so you can get inspired by that.
I define the business outcomes as:
- More people using the product: 10% monthly growth in user acquisition.
- More events getting listed in the product: 10% monthly growth in posted events.
- A sustainable business: 10% growth in revenue every month.
3. Users
This step of defining users also is informed by the Lean Strategy Canvas where we defined our strategy and specified our target audience and market segments.
- Middle-aged single people who want to attend events.
- Event organisers.
4. User Outcomes & Benefits (JTBD)
Here, think about what each of your target users is trying to achieve. What is the job that they want to get done by using your product?
- People want to find like-minded people to comfortably attend their favourite events with.
- People want to get rid of the awkwardness of having to go to an event alone.
- Event organisers want more people to attend their events at a lower marketing cost.
5. Solutions
This is the fun part! You get to brainstorm different solutions and features to solve the business problem and meet the needs of your customers. Think about different ways to help your target audience get the jobs done.
6.1 Hypotheses
In product discovery, everything is a hypothesis until validated. This step lets you formulate your hypotheses by combining all the information you have already added to the canvas. A tip here is to adjust the previously added information to be usable for generating hypotheses. Rewrite them if you want to get rid of the grammatical awkwardness in the sentence.
Our hypotheses:
- We believe that we will achieve a 10% monthly growth in user acquisition if middle-aged single people who want to attend events find a way to find like-minded people to attend their favourite event comfortably, with a “Tinder-like” app to find events and people to attend the events with.
- We believe that we will achieve a 10% monthly growth in user acquisition if middle-aged single people who want to attend events feel comfortable and have higher safety and authenticity in making connections with features such as identity verification and peer reviews.
- We believe that we will achieve a 10% monthly growth in posted events if event organisers can make more people attend the events they organise with an event organiser portal to post their events, sell tickets and get insights about potential attendees.
6.2 Hypotheses prioritization
We might not have the resources to test all the hypotheses we defined. Therefore, we need to understand what hypotheses to test, what to ship and measure without testing, and what to discard. The best way to do this is to prioritize the hypotheses based on the perceived value and the risk. Then we can pick the hypothesis with the highest perceived value and the highest risk as the first hypothesis to test.
7. What is the most important thing we need to learn first?
After picking the top hypothesis to test, we need to ask ourselves, what we need to learn first. Think about the riskiest assumptions involved in this hypothesis. It is natural to question the feasibility of the ideas first but it is better to focus on the assumptions we have made about the customer value before validating the feasibility.
What we need to learn first:
- Is there a big enough market to make the business sustainable?
- Will people find it uncomfortable to create platonic relationships or friendships using an app where the norm in this domain is dating apps?
8. What’s the least amount of work we need to do to learn the next most important thing?
Now is the time to be very creative! We do not want to spend a lot of resources on testing. Try to figure out creative ways of learning the things you defined in the previous step at a low cost. It could be as simple as talking to a few people or conducting a survey. If you can spend more resources, we can even do a proof of concept implementation as well.
In our case, these are the actions we take:
- Interview 5 people who fit our user persona to learn about their view of our idea.
- Survey with people who fit our user persona and capture their view on using such an app and the needs they have.
- Do a competitor analysis of similar products in the market to understand their strength and weaknesses
- Build a prototype of the app and test it with 5 users
Try out the Lean Product Canvas and Lean Strategy Canvas in your next product discovery work and leave a comment about the lessons learnt.
