Using a build—measure—learn canvas

A simple way to create clarity when beginning to design your product or service.

Build Measure Learn, or Learning Canvas for short, is used to define the unique value proposition of your product. It helps do this by outlining the problem and or opportunity, customer segment based on their needs and metrics used to monitor the success of your build. This is the intersection between the value the product delivers for your user’s needs and your product offering. Products can have a single value proposition or multiple value propositions.

Teams often start building early versions of our products and services way too soon. They don’t realise that the discovery phase of building a new product or service is optimised for learning. The goal is to create learning early on and as quickly and efficiently as possible through experimentation and hypothesis development. This enables the product team to deliver a Minimum Viable Product or MVP to allow them to maximise learning and develop using an iterative design cycle.

The goal of this feedback loop is one of the core components of the Lean Startup methodology. The objective is to turn uncertainties, assumptions and risks into knowledge or ‘sure things’ that will eventually guide your development team. Using this process, the key unknowns can be transformed into knowns you can use in your product development.

These assumptions can be then captured into a single-page Learning Canvas that will help define how the team will start to experiment. Strategyzer’s simple Learning Canvas is a great reference point for how your team can create their own. Embedding your product's value proposition into the heart of the canvas ensures the development team can capture value for both the business and your customers.

Strategyzer’s example of a Learning Canvas

Once your team completes the Learning Canvas filling it with their hypothesis and assumptions, they can use it to design, build and run their experiments. This traditionally happens in three phases:

Design the experiment: In this first stage, teams have to build out the details of their experiment and figure out how everything will fit together. For this, they must have a reliable method of collecting data allowing what’s gathered to be reliable and actionable.

Build the experiment: In this stage, teams must think simple and small. Teams sometimes tend to go big and complicated at the start. They end up being overwhelmed and unable to handle the size of what they are trying to do. It is better to build in small increments that will still be enough for them to use to validate or reject the hypothesis they have made previously.

Run the experiment: This is where teams will collect the data. The most common methods include conducting user interviews or testing low-fidelity prototypes.

A Learning Canvas can have many different variations on the content your team want to capture — for instance, a variation on Strategyzer’s model is to understand your users and identify the needs of early adopters.

Here are some of the categories I’ve used in the past:

Customer segments: These are the groups of users or personas that will be using the product. The product or organisation aims to reach and create value for them with a dedicated Value Proposition.

Early influencers: Who is a potential early user of the solution, and what features will we need to ensure they use and advocate our solution?

Value propositions: This is based on a bundle of products and services that create value for the users or a specific customer segment.

Problem and opportunity: What are the top problems faced by our target user base or customer segment?

Channels: These describe how the Value Proposition is communicated and delivered to the users or customer segment through communication, distribution, and sales channels.

Customer relationships: This outlines what relationships are established and maintained with each user group or customer segment, explaining how users are acquired and retained.

Stakeholders + decision-makers: This outlines the most important stakeholders and key executives within the organisation to ensure no hold-ups during the development sprint cycles.

Key Resources + partnerships: What are the critical internal resources and external network of suppliers the team needs to deliver the solution to the user?

Key activities: These are the most important activities the development team needs to perform to deliver the product.

Revenue/business value: This results from a value proposition successfully offered to a customer segment. It is how the business captures value from the users.

Cost structure: This describes the costs incurred to operate the business model. Things such as which activities are most expensive or what are the most important costs inherent in our product model?

In summary

Using a Build—Measure—Learn canvas is a fantastic way to help your development team articulate the product's business model on a single page. Essentially forming an easy-to-understand blueprint that can be used to steer the direction and capture insights about your product as the team starts to design and develop.

If you want more information on the Build Measure Learn method or how and when to use Canvases during your product development, you can access the full paper I wrote here.