# Minicanvas

- Link: https://www.solmesz.com/portfolio-items/minicanvas-en
- Published: 2019-05-28T17:31:35-03:00
- Author: Sol Mesz

# The Minicanvas

## What is the Minicanvas?

In my Design Thinking, Product Innovation/Strategy and User Centered Product Design
workshops, the first activity of the day is to fill out the canvas in order to lay
out the key product hypothesis. These hypothesis are the starting point for the 
problem/solution and product/market fit validation stages.

In other words, I use the Canvas for product design purposes, not as a business 
plan or as a product pitch.

**And since the point of filling out the canvas is to _Get Out Of the Building_ 
and start talking to users in order to validate product hypothesis, the information
entered on the canvas needed to be actionable and written from a user perspective,
not from a product or business point of view. **

For this activity I used to use the Lean Canvas and I only asked participants to
fill 4 out of the 9 boxes (problem, segments, solution, unique value proposition).
However, I found that time and again, attendees asked the same questions around 
the same business areas of the canvas.

So I came up with the Minicanvas, which is an adaptation from [Ash Maurya’s](https://leanstack.com/leancanvas)
Lean Canvas, and introduces two key changes:

 * I only kept the core product areas: Problem, Segments, Solution, Unique value
   proposition
 * I rearranged and renamed some of the areas to help users of the canvas enter 
   better quality information

These changes proved to have direct impact on the quality of the information users
entered, which in turn improved the validation process and ultimately, the quality
of the resulting product.

## The 4 core product areas

I only ask participants to concentrate on Problem, Segments, Solution and Unique
Value Proposition because these are the core of the product and need to be validated
before thinking about the other 5 (Unfair advantage, Channels, Key metrics, Cost
structure, Revenue streams).

Therefore, before validating the first four, there is no point in spending time 
on the rest. Conversely, there is no point in validating the 5 secondary areas if
you don’t have the first 4 validated because you may be optimizing for something
that won’t work: there is no point in thinking about Revenue Streams if I don’t 
know if I have the right product.

 

## What changed from the Lean Canvas to the Minicanvas?

So, given that I use the canvas for user centered product design, and that I need
product hypothesis written from a user perspective, I made four key changes to the
Lean Canvas so participants could write better product hypothesis.

  |

[⌊Minicanvas used for Design Thinking, Product Strategy, Product Innovation⌉⌊Minicanvas used for Design Thinking, Product Strategy, Product Innovation⌉[

Minicanvas

 |

[⌊Lean Canvas⌉⌊Lean Canvas⌉[

Lean Canvas

 |

**Replaced CUSTOMER SEGMENTS for USERS**

When you use technical terms, users feel that they needed to get technical too, 
so they wrote “female, university degree, with an annual income between …” instead
of a more organic definition of the segments.

When I changed “Customer Segments” for “Users”, which is a less technical word, 
participants started using a more qualitative description of the users such as “
those who like to keep plants indoor” or “people who like exotic fruits”.

And this description gave participants a better starting point for validating the
potential users of their product.

 

**Added OPPORTUNITY to the PROBLEM box**

Not all products stem from a problem. Sometimes entrepreneurs or companies see an
opportunity and they create a product from it.

When the box was called “Problem”, participants who had products that were born 
out of an opportunity didn’t know what to enter here and started making problems
up. So adding opportunity in this quadrant helped users fill our this box with better
quality content which, again, had a direct impact on the outcome of the exercise.

 

**Replaced SOLUTION with PRODUCT DESCRIPTION**

When filling out the Solution box, most participants entered the benefit, sales 
pitch or, in some occasions, a technical description of the product.

What I really needed here was for them to describe their product as if they were
explaining it to a friend. So replacing “Solution” for “Product Description” helped
users enter a better product description.

 

**EXISTING ALTERNATIVES**

In the Lean Canvas, Existing Alternatives is nested inside the Problem box. However,
I gave it a box of its own in order to stress its importance.

You can’t design a product if you don’t know how users are solving their problem
right now:

 * Existing Alternatives are your direct competition, and
 * your Unique Value Proposition stems directly from getting a thorough understanding
   of the current alternatives.

 

**UNIQUE VALUE PROPOSITION**
 This is the only area that I kept unchanged. I just
improved a little the description, to help users better understand what needed to
go here.

## Conclusion

 * I came up with the Minicanvas in order to improve the process of designing User
   Centered products.
 * The Minicanvas is a reduction of the Lean Canvas and was created to focus on 
   the core components of the product.
 * The quality of the tools you use to define the product hypothesis, determines
   the quality of the information you get. So using the right tools is key to getting
   quality information. If users don’t understand what information they need to 
   fill out, they’ll just comply with the task mechanically instead of entering 
   quality information.
 * Obtaining quality information is key for the outcome of the exercise. So the 
   better the quality, the better the results. And better results in this case, 
   equals better products.
 * Using business or technical terms, elicit business or technical responses. So
   if you’re using the canvas to for user centered design, it is best to complete
   it with user centered descriptions. This is the first step in trying to understand
   and empathize with your users. Using business/technical terms, will result in
   a business/technical view.

[Download the Minicanvas](https://www.solmesz.com/wp-content/uploads/Minicanvas-en.pdf)