Introducing the Lean Product Canvas

Hey folks,

Some tools need to evolve as our industry does. After five years and countless pieces of feedback, Josh Seiden and I realized it was time to refresh our Lean UX Canvas. But this isn't just a simple update – we've transformed it into something bigger: the Lean Product Canvas, along with a brand new Lean Strategy Canvas to complement it.

In this newsletter, I break down why we made these changes and how these two canvases work together to help cross-functional teams align on everything from strategy to customer success.

Speaking of evolution, I'm also excited to share a new partnership with OKRmentors. Through this partnership, you can receive limited time bundle pricing of my OKR training course and OKRmentors’ OKR Practitioner certification. You won’t want to miss this opportunity.

Let's dive in.

- Jeff

P.S. Want to connect product strategy and OKRs in a meaningful way? Join Josh and me for our next free webinar, “Product Strategy and OKRs for 2025,” on December 4, where we'll show you how to make the most of both tools for 2025. 

Article: The Lean Product Canvas

It’s been five years since we last updated the Lean UX Canvas. On its own, this is no reason to update it now. However, five years of feedback and a recent insightful brainstorming session with our Certified Training Partners over at Sense & Respond Learning made it clear that it was time for a refresh. 

As Josh Seiden and I synthesized the feedback, two things became clear – fundamentally, there was nothing wrong with the canvas in its current state. Instead, its positioning and prompts had to shift to reflect a broader scope. In doing so, we took the opportunity to add a Lean Strategy Canvas as well to round out the conversation. Let’s take a look at what’s changed, what stayed the same, and what’s completely new. 

The Lean Product Canvas – a new name, with better prompts

The scope of Lean UX has grown significantly since the first edition of the book was published in 2013. In fact, the phrase Lean UX was keeping the work from having the broad impact it deserved. This is the first change we made – the name. The canvas is now called the Lean Product Canvas. Why? Because the work this canvas has covered for years and continues to cover encompasses the entirety of a product, not just UX. This is a tool for cross-functional teams and it needed a name that spoke to that. 

We want this tool to be used by entire product teams. To enable that, the prompts have been updated for clarity and better hints and examples. These aren’t prompts specific to UX designers, product managers, or software engineers. Instead, they’re targeted at the entire product development team. 

We explicitly added in the language from our new book on OKRs, Who does what by how much?, in Box 2 so teams would write better business outcomes. Box 4 now has explicit “jobs to be done” language – something we’ve been teaching for years but hadn’t added to the canvas until now. And Box 7 now makes an explicit reference to the Hypothesis Prioritization Canvas as the tool for deciding which hypothesis to test first. This is something that, again, we’ve been teaching for years but hadn’t yet added to the canvas. 

The Lean Strategy Canvas – a prerequisite for doing great product work

Over the past five years, Josh and I have been teaching a lot of product strategy and even more Objectives and Key Results. We felt that these two conversations were missing from the new Lean Product Canvas. However, no matter how hard we tried to design these components into one canvas, it felt overloaded and less useful. Solution? Two canvases! 

Introducing the Lean Strategy Canvas. This is a facilitation tool for teams designed to set up a more focused work using the Lean Product Canvas. Product development and discovery work better in service of an aligned strategy and goals. This is the leanest framework we could come up with to get teams started down these two paths. 

Box 1 asks what goal you are trying to achieve in the immediate term. You can apply this question to a feature, product, initiative, campaign, business unit, or an entire company. 

Box 2 then challenges the team to come up with the obstacles keeping it from achieving the goal in Box 1. Once identified, which one obstacle is the biggest one we need to tackle right now?

Box 3 brings in Roger Martin’s strategy questions from his landmark article, “The Big Lie of Strategic Planning” (HBR 2014). The first question asks, where will you play? In other words, what market will you target first? You can define the market any way you like – industry vertical, demographic, geographic, etc. – but you have to be specific on where you want to go first. 

The second question asks, how will you win? This isn’t a question about solutions (you get to those in Box 5 of the Lean Product Canvas). This is a question about value, competitive advantage, or other aspects that are unique to your organization. This is the way you believe you’ll win the market you defined in the previous question. 

Box 4 asks you to set success criteria in terms of Objectives and Key Results. If we achieve the strategy, what future benefit will we create for our target market? And which behavior changes will we measure (key results) to tell us we’ve achieved that future state (objective)? This is the most basic formula we could distill for OKRs. 

Two canvases for a complete, cross-functional product development journey

We designed these two canvases to help teams have the right conversations as they set out on new initiatives together. We explicitly do not want teams dividing up between functional silos. Instead, we want teams working together from strategy to feature to customer success. Building a shared understanding of the product strategy and goals and then getting into specific problems to solve, customer personas, and product discovery work means our product teams are aligned from Step 1. 

We hope these two canvases help you have those conversations, together as a team and that the work we continue to do together builds better products for the customers we serve. 

Finally, as with all work like this, it’s as good as we could get it within our own circle of reviewers. Now it’s your turn. Take these two canvases out for a spin. Try them out. See what happens. And, most importantly, let us know what you think. Did it work well for you? Amazing. Did it fail miserably? Less amazing but equally as important. In any case, please let us know. 

P.S. – I recorded a short video walkthrough of both canvases. Take a look.  

What I’ve been up to

I've been spending a lot of time lately thinking about how traditional goal-setting continues to hinder innovation, creativity and agility in many organizations. The annual ritual of trying to predict next year's targets, only to have them become irrelevant or ignored, continues to be a real problem.

In a recent article for Porchlight Books, Josh and I explore why this happens and share a better approach - making your customers, not your company, the focus of your goals. When teams use OKRs to measure success through customer behavior changes instead of just revenue targets, the work becomes more meaningful and the results more sustainable.

I break down how this shift helps teams stay agile, build stronger customer relationships, and create work they actually care about. Hope you find these insights helpful for your own goal-setting journey.

In other news, I recently did a talk at Norssken House in Barcelona where I positioned OKRs in the context of personal wellbeing. I won’t lie. It was a challenge to not only make the ideas work in the context but to convince people that this was a better way to set goals for themselves as they seek to improve their physical and mental wellbeing. In the end, we landed on something good. It could use some iteration (as all things can), but I was pleased to see how OKRs can find a home in so many different contexts. Keep an eye out for a post on this topic soon. 

Other than that, I actually took a business trip (who knew these would become rare?!) to London to kick off a new consulting engagement with a well-known financial services company. In this context too, we’re stretching OKRs out of their “comfort zone” in product development and applying them to leadership work and organizational transformation. I look forward to sharing  more on that soon. 

Watch, Listen, Read

Watch: Just finished KAOS on Netflix with my daughter. Though it sadly got canceled, we really enjoyed its fresh, over-the-top take on Greek mythology. Despite some gross moments, it was a fun watch - especially Dionysus's character who stole every scene. 

Listen: Been diving into The Dare lately—imagine if LCD Soundsystem and Fontaines DC had a musical lovechild. I actually discovered them while planning my annual Primavera Sound pilgrimage. It's my 11th year going, and while the headliners are leaning heavily pop this time (not really my scene), digging through the rest of the bill has led me to some exciting finds like The Dare. 

Read: I'm deep into Atomic Awakening by James Mahaffey right now. I'll admit, I was skeptical when I first saw the title, but it's turned out to be this fascinating journey through the history and future of nuclear power. It's been eye-opening to connect the book's historical insights with the innovative work happening in the industry today.