We talked about how the canvas is going to work for you depending on the type of role that you're in and the project that you're working on. Now you are going to learn where you might focus depending on the phase of your project. Is it really earlier or really mature? And for this purpose, I really like this four steps framework from Steve Blank's book 'Four Steps to the Epiphany'. The idea is that every new venture starts out or should start out with discovery. Who is our customer? And what is really on their A-list? What are their alternatives that they're using now to whatever sort of problem, job, desire we're going to deliver on? And are we delivering on something that's actually important to them? And then we create this mythical MVP. It's a popular thing. If you've watched HBO's, Silicon Valley show, you probably heard about it. And if you live in Silicon Valley and you work in the innovation community you've certainly heard about it. This is a minimum viable product. And the idea is that this is some product proxy that we can use to see if anybody cares about what we're doing. Or, is our alternative to what the customer is doing right now? Is our proposition better enough that the customer is going to buy it, use it, engage with what we have or should we go do something else before we waste a lot of time and money? And with our MVP we go through this validation phase. Like a scientist, we have a hypothesis that we test about whether our customer wants what we have. And we try to do that as quickly as possible with a minimum of costs. So we give ourself lots of chances of being successful. And we exit this with even more fabled product/market fit. This idea is we found a customer who has a certain job where our proposition consistently outperforms whatever the alternative is and they buy, use our product, our proposition. And now we need to go in this customer creation phase and scale that up. And what we need to do here is kind of pour fuel on the fire. And then as we do that we go into this company building phase where we're building and improving our organization and seeding brand new stuff that goes back to the beginning of this process. Now, how is the canvas relevant across these four phases? And the discovery phase, it is a great tool for focusing on what you want to know. And you can put the canvas up and print it out, use post-its to make it really easy to change things out. And its nice because it doesn't have the sort of heaviness of a business plan. In the validation phase, the use of the canvas is pretty similar. At this point, you should have a more specific idea about who you're doing what for, but you're still sort of testing and updating your point of view on that. Canvas is a great focal point especially the sort of right side of the canvas. The relationship between segments and propositions. The relationships and the channels that pertain to the buyer journey. Those things are really your focal points. The canvas is a good transparent way to talk about those with your team. When we get to this product market fit, now you've got the magic and you're trying to just scale it up. There's a fire, you're pouring fuel on it. This is the place where really the whole canvas starts to become very relevant and you're focusing your execution. You're probably growing your team or at least your resources and you've got to keep them align. You got to keep them focused on this scaling mission. The canvas is a great way to look at that whole picture and communicate with your team, your, maybe external stakeholders about what you're trying to do. And then finally, you've got a big company. You're building it. You're keeping it focused. You're pairing off new ideas to renew the company with innovation. The canvas is a great way to drive focus and communicate that focus to your internal stakeholders. So those are some ideas about where you might want to focus with the canvas depending on the phase that you're in with your particular venture or project.
