Product Canvas

Product Canvas

According to Roman Pichler the Product Canvas is a simple but powerful tool that helps you create a product with a great user experience and the right features.

It combines Agile and UX by complementing user stories with personas, storyboards, scenarios, design sketches and other UX artefacts. It’s designed to work with Scrum, Lean Startup, and Business Model Generation. The canvas supports Lean UX by combining user centred-design and agile techniques.

As you have probably noticed, the Product Canvas combines form and function, a structure together with suggested techniques. The biggest challenge when developing a new product is to deal with uncertainty and lack of knowledge. We may not know, for instance, if there is enough demand for the product, or how users will interact with the product. The Product Canvas is designed as a learning tool: to sketch our initial ideas, to get enough stories ready for implementation, and to adapt and refine the content based on the insights gained.

Dustin Ryan states that if you ever find yourself working on a product that requires an emphasis on the user experience you’ll be happy to know there is a tool that will help you collect all of your research, personas and UX artifacts in one place and streamline the creation of ready stories (development tasks) to be put into production.

This tool is the product canvas and is important to note that it is used to validate product solutions — not to validate whether the product should be built in the first place.

So the first thing you need to understand is that the product canvas is a system within a bigger system and its function is to kick-start your idea/problem validation and product definition process. It helps you go from ideas to validated solutions that are actionable. The second thing to note is that you are going to need a workshop to create the canvas, but the time invested (4–8 hours) will easily save you days and even weeks later.

So he says that before tackling the Product Canvas you will need to have solid answers for the following:

1) Who are the product’s users and who are the customers?

2) What problem does the product solve?

3) What benefits does it generate for its users?

4) What is the product’s value proposition?

5) What business benefits does the product creates?

6) Why should the company invest in it?

7) What kind of product is it?

8) What are the three to five features that make it stand out?

Checkout other business canvases in our Canvas Database