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Experiementing with the business model canvas

Whilst exploring the ideas in the lean startup I received the excellent news that my fiance had got an interview for a promotion at her school. The downside to this was it was the next day and also required a full presentation on how she would improve the 6th form of the school.

Perfectly happy with creating presentations for her classes every day this seemed like an easy task. But on this presentation she became a little stuck due to one of the requirements for this presentation, it should be 1 sheet of A4 with no graphical elements. For an illustrator by training I could see the pain in her face of not being able to use her honed skills.

She asked for help seeing as it hit 2 of my key skill sets, spec gathering and documentation. To this end I showed her the business model canvas to help her define her ideas for the 6th form.

Using the canvas we together constructed several different models based on her ideas for the 6th form. Treating the students as the clients we segmented them based on the 3 main groups. Using the deliverable of improved grades we determined several correlations and from those derived some hypotheses. 

Selecting the top hypothesis for each key segment we were then able to define the problem, outline a solution and finally determine the key metrics to measure. This data was then easy to transfer this onto A4 document in a tabular form to make it incredibly easy to read without having to be overly verbose.

Armed with her new found knowledge and A4 presentation she nailed the interview!

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Learning lean

In 2011 I introduced my colleague to agile methodologies, namely scrum then later Kan-ban  I was fortunate enough to have a manager willing to explore these techniques to see how they could improve our internal processes. We purchased a white board and I set about reorganising how we carried out our projects.

A few months ago in return he introduced me to the lean startup (even though it then to me a month or two to then read it...).

The concepts in the book brought together the tools I already had in my tool box into a methodology that just made sense.  I decided to try apply these techniques into my new job.

Since then I have been seeing where the concepts of the lean startup could be applied within the company I work for which is already established but is trying to grow from a small company into a much larger one. 

 

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