The Product Canvas Creation Workshop

The Product Canvas is a simple, yet powerful tool that helps you create a product with a great user experience and the right features. This post explains how you can create your initial canvas using a collaborative workshop.

Overview

The Product Canvas creation workshop wants to kick-start your product definition activities. It helps you change the focus from discovery and problem validation–exploring if there is a need that the new product addresses–to building a product with the right features and the right user experience. You can also apply the technique to a traditional product backlog. The following picture summarises the workshop, and the rest of this post explains the details.

Attendees

Everyone tasked with creating the product should attend the canvas creation workshop: the product owner, the team developing and testing the product, and the ScrumMaster or coach. This creates shared ownership, and it is likely to result in better decisions, as the entire team’s creativity and knowledge are leveraged.

I generally recommend that the stakeholders – the users, and customers as well as the internal stakeholders – do not attend the workshop, but share their ideas and feedback based on prototypes and product increments, for instance, in the sprint review meetings. This allows the product owner and the team to be creative before the stakeholders provide input.

Input

Before you start the workshop, you should be able to confidently answer the following questions:

1. Who are the product’s users and who are the customers?
2. What problem does the product solve? What benefits does it generate for its users? What is the product’s value proposition?
3. What business benefits does the product creates? Why should the company invest in it?
4. What kind of product is it? What are the three to five features that make it stand out?

I like to capture the insights above using my Product Vision Board, as the following picture shows:

Being able to answer the questions above means that some problem validation has taken place prior to the workshop, for instance, by carrying out user observations and problem interviews. Note that the strength of the Product Canvas is solution validation – building the right product – and not discovering if the product should be built in the first place!

To ensure a smooth workshop, use a facilitator, for instance, the ScrumMaster. Organise an appropriate room with lots of wall space. Have the necessary materials available including paper sheets, paper cards, adhesive notes, masking tape, markers, and pencils. Starting out with paper and pencil is effective and fun in my experience, even if you intend to use a digital canvas.

Steps to Create the Canvas

To create your initial Product Canvas take the following three steps: Create personas; outline the user experience and the features; determine what to do in the first sprint, as the picture below shows:

The first step creates personas based on the insights gained in your problem validation work. The personas allow you to connect with the target users and customers. Their needs enable you to discover the right product features. I also recommend using a primary persona, as it creates focus and facilitates decision-making. You can read more about personas in the post  “A Template for Writing Great Personas”.

The second step describes the product comprehensively but at a rough, coarse-grained level. Helpful techniques to capture the user experience and the product functionality include scenarios, storyboards, epics, constraint stories, and design sketches / mock-ups. Make sure that the product features you identify address the need of a persona, or support the business model.

The third step determines what should be done in the first sprint. As you are about to start building the first product increment, you should address the greatest risk or the biggest uncertainty. This could be a lack of knowledge surrounding the user interaction, the user interface design, a product feature, or the architecture and technology. See my post “Effective Sprint Goals” for more information on choosing the right goal or hypothesis. Finally, determine what needs to be done to reach the goal, or to test the hypothesis, for instance, creating a scenario and a paper prototype to learn more about the user interaction.

The three steps above form a breadth-first approach: The product is sketched holistically, but the details are determined on a sprint-by-sprint basis. This keeps your canvas concise, and allows you to make changes quickly and effectively.

Outcome

At the end of the workshop you should have a Product Canvas that is good enough to start sprinting: to start building product increments/MVPs, gathering feedback, and integrating the insights gained, as the following picture shows:

Make sure you create a good-enough canvas, but not a perfect one. Your Product Canvas will change and evolve anyway based on the feedback you receive!

Duration

Four to eight hours should be enough time to create your initial canvas. If you require more time, then this may be a sign that you haven’t got enough information available and may have to carry out more product discovery.

Employing a collaborative workshop, and following the process described above creates an initial Product Canvas that allows you to focus on solution validation – building the product with the right user experience and features. Make sure you understand the product’s value proposition before you enter the workshop, describe the product holistically at a coarse-grained level, and don’t worry too much about the product details: These will emerge incrementally based on the feedback you gather.