I was blown away the first time I saw the Business Model Canvas by Alexander Osterwalder, I thought it was great. Similarly, I really loved what Ash Maurya did in creating the Lean Canvas. One of the things that I love about them is the focus on the most important things.
As cool as they are, they aren’t super useful if your job is creating internal products, like Line of Business Applications.
So I started thinking, could we build a canvas for delivering Enterprise Products?
Of course!
Introducing the Enterprise Opportunity Canvas!
First, let’s cover the name — why Opportunity Canvas and not Product Canvas?
Although it might seem like semantics, because most of what we build are products, I didn’t want to constrain this to be something physical. Sometimes a product isn’t what is needed, it could be a change to a process. I recall one time we were designing an a mobile app to enable managers to approve expense reports and I tried to convince people we should just skip the app and auto-approve expenses and have a simple algorithm that just validated a basic high-level review of the total expenses for a given city — after all, the company had years worth of data. Why not just approve any trip to, say San Diego, that is between $3,500 — $4,500 dollars (or below $4,500). For anything else, they could use the old method. It would probably cut down on 97% of all approvals.
Anyway…
I also wanted to very specifically avoid the word Problem and focus on the more positive “Opportunity” framing. This way, we can create the mental constraint of only being useful if there is a “problem”. Besides, even if it is a “problem”, we have the opportunity to fix it!
Now, there are a lot of things that one could put on this, and I’ll list more potential items than I’m putting on version 1.0, and I hope by posting / sharing this I’ll get suggestions for what to keep and what to change.
Here are the initial things that I came up with:
Audience — who are we building this for?
Opportunity — not problem, opportunity! What are we enabling?
Outcomes — how will life be better? Specifically? What are the outcomes?
Solution — what is the solution (note, this comes AFTER identifying opportunity & outcomes)
Validation — how do we know we’re building something useful?
Stakeholders — who do we have to engage as part of this effort? Who will want to have a voice in the process? Who will help us be successful (or, who could undermine our efforts)?
Key Metrics — how do we measure this, how do we know we’re successful?
Cost — what is the cost?
Value — is this really needed?
ROI — how do we measure ROI? Different than Metrics? Importance is enough to call it out? Is there always an ROI? There should be some ‘return’, it just might not be financial.
Hypothesis — what is our hypothesis? How would we test this?
Assumptions — what are our assumptions, in order to make them transparent?
Constraints — similar to assumptions, are there any constraints that we can explicitly state and provide transparency to? Again, this is something that I’ve included in Creative Briefs through the years.
Business Objectives — this is a holdover that I put in nearly every creative brief, so I considered it here obviously.
Strategy — is there some part of the company strategy that this is aligned to?
Given all those, the ones I landed on are now part of 1.0:
I’m starting to experiment with using this in a few different ways. I’ll post an update soon.
NOTE: An editable version of this template is available as part of the Thinking Sheets toolkit on ThinkingSheets.com
In the meantime, what do you think?
