Running Lean, 2nd Edition

Chapter 3. Create Your Lean Canvas

Capture your business model in a portable, one-page diagram.

The Lean Canvas is the perfect format for brainstorming possible business models, prioritizing where to start, and tracking ongoing learning.

The best way to illustrate the use of the canvas is through an example. I’ll describe the thought process that went into building my first product, CloudFire, using this methodology.

Brainstorm Possible Customers

When you first start out, all you have is an inkling of a problem, a solution, and maybe a customer segment. Just as rushing to build a solution can lead to waste, so can prematurely picking a customer segment or business model. The danger here is that this “selection bias” is untested and may result in a suboptimal business model or local maxima.

The Hill-Climbing Algorithm and the Problem of Local Maxima

In computer science, hill climbing is a mathematical optimization technique. It is an iterative algorithm that starts with an arbitrary solution to a problem, then attempts to find a better solution by incrementally changing a single element of the solution. If the change produces a better solution, an incremental change is made to the new solution, and the process is repeated until no further improvements can be found.

Hill climbing is good for finding a local optimum (a solution that cannot be improved by considering a neighboring configuration), but it is not guaranteed to find the best possible solution (the global optimum) out of all possible ...