Product 2019

Lean UX Canvas

Eight boxes that stop a team designing a solution before it has agreed on the problem.

What it is

Eight numbered boxes, worked in order: business problem, business outcomes, users, user outcomes, solutions, hypotheses, what we need to learn first, and the least work needed to learn it. The numbering is the argument — solutions are box five, and a team that jumps there has skipped the four boxes that would tell it whether the solution matters.

Reach for it when

• A team has a feature request and no agreed problem behind it
• A roadmap item needs its riskiest assumption named before a sprint starts
• Design and engineering are arguing about a solution neither has tested

Running it

1. Work the boxes in their numbered order, out loud, one at a time. The order is the method; skipping to solutions is the failure mode it exists to prevent.
2. Boxes one and two are business language, three and four are user language. Do not let the room blur them — the gap between the two pairs is usually where the real disagreement lives.
3. Write hypotheses in box six as full sentences with a measurable claim, not as feature names.
4. Box eight is the deliverable. If it names more than a week of work, it is not the least amount of work and the team should keep cutting.