3.6: Build a Product Canvas - Video Tutorials & Practice Problems

<v ->Now, let's talk about a product canvas.</v> We mentioned that the concept of a one page business canvas was invented by Alex Osterwalder, a Swiss business theorist. It is a visual tool with elements describing a company's value proposition. It describes the infrastructure, customers, marketing channels, and finances. User experience guru Jeff Gothelf came up with his UX canvas for product development. His canvas provides a summary view of the problem to solve, solution ideas, users and customers, hypothesis that need to be validated, and questions to answer before building a product. It helps define the minimum viable product or MVP. Remember, we introduced this concept in lesson one by asking what is the least amount of work we need to do for the customer so that the customer can receive value from this feature or this product? The canvas developed by Jeff Gothelf is a very useful tool in how you build a new product. It significantly minimizes the risk of building high quality products. And this way, we build the product that customers are actually interested in using. Customer experience changes throughout the product life cycle. In its life cycle, each product passes through the following five stages. First one is development, including customer research, product design. Second one is introduction of this product to the customer. The third one is growth. Fourth is maturity. And finally, every product reaches the decline phase. Usually, agile teams are not directly involved in product life cycle management. However, it is important to be aware of the concept which is called product life cycle management or PLM. PLM has a significant potential to scale given this ability to help organize disparate development strategies, information, and capabilities. PLM is a data driven concept and it's focused on visualizing how the product is performing and how it's being used in real time without waiting for customers to do their reports. PLM lowers the cost and speeds the time to market. Whether the new product consists of incremental or derivative changes to old products or disruptive new items, so maybe it's the next generation of a specific platform, each organization develops a process to manage it. And the process has three elements. The first one is information and communication. That includes platforms, systems, architecture, tool standards, and so forth. Second one is processes. That includes people, their skills, and work structures, and so forth. And the third one is methods, procedures, rules, practices, and tools. In 1991, Jeffrey Moore introduced the concept of product adoption curve. It's a very important concept in making decisions about product features, marketing, and delivery. So let's imagine the whole continuum in time. And we are talking specifically about IT products because they have very specific adoption time. So when the product is introduced first, there is a really small group that is willing to try and test this product. So we refer to this group as innovators. They're ready to innovate even if they do not really know what the product may do for them, and they're not even confident in the quality of the product. Once innovators become comfortable with the product and the product becomes more well-known, the idea is to start building features there. And then early adopters start using the product. And there are more and more of those. Early adopters are really excited about the product because of the features, and they're willing again, live with some imperfections or constraints related to the product. But then if the product is done well, we are adding more and more features and fixing those imperfections. And then there is time for late adopters. The terms that Jeffrey Moore is using here is early majority and late majority. This is where most of us will start using using the product. By this time, most of the bugs have been resolved, the features have been developed, and it's a really exciting product to use. And then it just becomes obsolete and some people still use it just because they're familiar with it. They're called laggards. So laggards are still using the product, but actually, there are so many newer and more exciting products that are developed on the market. And actually, what we want to do from product ownership perspective is discourage laggards to use our product because of the maintenance cost and because of the end of the product life cycle. And we want to move them to the new product that by that time probably is already ready for late adopters. And that's usually the time when they join the product. So this is a great way of thinking how you market product. Obviously, you do it differently for your innovators versus your late adopters, which have to have it bug free, well-defined, with a lot of features. And innovators, all they're interested in in trying out new technology, understanding new features, and just having a cool new product where they're comfortable with some imperfections.