## What is it and when should I use it?
The 'Affinity map' is a way to organize ideas quickly without imposing an implicit structure. The organization 'emerges' from the ideas.

Starting with a lot of ideas (post-its, cards, or written on another type of 'movable' medium), you and team members cluster them by affinity. Ideas that are more alike end up together - but the way in which they are alike does not need to be specified. This allows associative relations to form.

<ImageMap image="/tools/A4 Affinity Map.png">
    1 | Area | You can use these areas to cluster within (or you can make your own groupings) | 0.5, 0.25
    2 | Label | Each cluster gets a descriptive label | 0.5, 0.75
</ImageMap>

<Steps>
    <Step step="1" name="Place your ideas">
        Place all of the ideas on a surface, in a random order. Make sure the ideas are all visible and readable, and that you have plenty of empty space.
    </Step>
    <Step step="2" name="Cluster ideas">
        Take around 5-10 minutes and have the team move the ideas to cluster them, with the purpose of moving similar ideas closer together, ending up with 3-5 clusters.

        <Tip>
        Something that works really well is to do 'silent clustering', where team members don't talk about the choices they make, and don't communicate. They simply move post-its back and forth.
        When people keep moving a post-it back and forth, step in and either agree to disagree or put the concept aside for discussion.
        </Tip>

        Sometimes you need 2-3 rounds to get through, it is better to have multiple short rounds than one long one.

        As a facilitator, try to see if the clusters are all worked on sufficiently. If there are some concepts that don't find a 'home' in a cluster, that's ok, simply allow for a parking lot.
    </Step>
    <Step step="3" name="Name the clusters">
        Have the team label each cluster, focusing only on what is inside the cluster. The name should describe the cluster.
    </Step>
    <Step step="4" name="Next Steps">
        Now that you have 3-5 clusters that are named, you are ready to use the labels you have created as ‘containers’ for them. If you get stuck on too many ideas per cluster or too many clusters, use a filtering tool the [Risk-reward Matrix](/tools/risk-reward-matrix) or sorting to make more sense.
    </Step>
</Steps>

The 'Affinity map' is a way to organize ideas quickly without imposing an implicit structure. The organization 'emerges' from the ideas.

Affinity Map

## What is it and when should I use it?
The Algorithm Maturity Level is a simple tool that can be very insightful when figuring out with a team where to start the AI transition and what goals to set.
One of the important things to understand when thinking about AI and business is that it is difficult, or even impossible, to start with the holy grail an ‘autonomous’ system.
There are many steps that you need to take before you get to that point (and, in many cases, it’s really not what you want to go for, but that aside).
Even Google can’t do it from scratch. Google has a lot of these prerequisites so firmly in place that they now made it relatively easy to create more and better algorithms. Chances are, your organization has not (yet). So it’s important to find the ‘minimum viable algorithm’ that will take you the first step.
The Algorithm Maturity Level tool is one way to help bridge the gap between often lofty goals of autonomous systems back to what is needed today to take the first step.
The tool classifies algorithms into five categories:
**Descriptive algorithms.** These algorithms are able to accurately describe what is happening. For instance, accurately monitoring a system’s behaviour and describing what is happening to users. The users are the ones that make sense of the information and decide to take action.

0. **Diagnostic algorithms.** These algorithms are able to accurately describe the causes that have led to the monitored data. For instance, in case there is an anomaly in the system’s behaviour, they would be able to specify what likely causes.
1. **Predictive algorithms.** These algorithms can give predictions for the system’s future behaviour. An example is the system in your car that predicts when traffic ahead of you will use their brakes, warning you.
2. **Prescriptive algorithms.** Algorithms that give options for actions based on the system’s behaviour, and prescribe a course of action. The algorithm influences on the decision process, but it does not make the decision. The user can still intervene. An example is the system in cars that takes automatic action to steer the car to a different lane in case of an accident.
3. **Autonomous algorithms.** The algorithm completely monitors and controls the system, without any human intervention. An example is a fully autonomous car.

Each level builds on the previous levels. That means a prescriptive algorithm also has the capabilities of a predictive algorithm.

<ImageMap image="/tools/A4 Algorithm Maturity Level.png">
    1 | Descriptive algorithms | These algorithms are able to accurately describe what is happening. | 0.1, 0.5
    2 | Diagnostic algorithms | These algorithms are able to accurately describe the causes that have led to the monitored data. | 0.3, 0.5
    3 | Predictive algorithms | These algorithms can give predictions for the system’s future behaviour. | 0.5, 0.5
    4 | Prescriptive algorithms | Algorithms that give options for actions based on the system’s behaviour, and prescribe a course of action. | 0.7, 0.5
    5 | Autonomous algorithms | The algorithm completely monitors and controls the system, without any human intervention. | 0.9, 0.5
</ImageMap>

<Steps>
    <Step step="1" name="Map your ideas">
        Plot the different ideas you have come up with (e.g. as an answer to the question “where will algorithms and AI or Machine Learning impact our business?”) on the canvas.
    </Step>
    <Step step="2" name="Describe the ideas">
        In what category does each idea fall? What exactly does it need to describe, diagnose, predict, prescribe, or control? Are you able to define how that is done today? What data, processes, and domain knowledge do you need? What is the quality level needed for the output of the algorithm?
    </Step>
    <Step step="3" name="Map it back">
        For each idea, map it back to the preceding level. Now you have defined a simplified version of the idea. What would that simpler version of the idea look like? Is that already in place? Or is it also new?
        Would that simpler version already be valuable for your customers or yourself? Keep mapping back to the previous stage until you reach the descriptive level, or until there already is an alternative in place.
    </Step>
    <Step step="4" name="Dive deeper">
        Dive deeper into what is needed for the ‘simplest’ version of the idea. Again, ask yourself what data, processes, and domain knowledge you need. What is the minimum quality level needed for the output of the algorithm? When would it start to become useful? Now you have a candidate for your ‘minimum viable algorithm’.
    </Step>
    <Step step="5" name="Next Steps">
        Of course, reality is unforgiving. To see if that minimum viable algorithm would be feasible, other steps are needed. But at the very least you have a way to facilitate the discussion and simplifying a complex, amorphous conversation topic.
    </Step>
</Steps>

The Algorithm Maturity Level can be very insightful when figuring out with a team where to start the AI transition and what goals to set.

Algorithm Maturity Canvas

## What is it and when should I use it?

In your innovation journey, there will be many moments where you haven’t got enough information to move forward with confidence. Experimentation will help you to find that information, by validating or invalidating assumptions. Experimenting takes time and effort, so it makes a lot of sense to be selective in what to validate first. But how to prioritize?

This Assumption Mapping canvas is a lightweight tool that can help you prioritize your assumptions and to find which one to try to validate first. A perfect tool to use before you start experimenting.

<ImageMap image="/tools/A4 Assumption Map.png">
1 | Important things that you have evidence for | Assumptions that have been (in)validated and have a lot of impact, or that you have evidence for from other sources. These nuggets of information are for you to share with your team. | 0.25, 0.25
2 | Important things that you have no evidence for | These are the most important. Assumptions that (you think) have a lot of impact on your progress and your project, but that you have no or little evidence of. These need to be validated or invalidated first. | 0.75, 0.25
3 | Unimportant things that you have evidence for | Assumptions that have been (in)validated or that you have evidence for from other sources, but that don’t have a lot of impact on your progress. These can be safely ‘parked’. | 0.25, 0.75
4 | Unimportant things that you have no evidence for | Assumptions that (you think) have low impact on your progress and your project, and that you have no or little evidence of. These can be ‘dark horses’ in that you could be wrong about their impact. These can be parked for now, but keep an eye on them for later. | 0.75, 0.75
</ImageMap>

<Steps>
    <Step step="1" name="Collect">
        The first step is to collect the assumptions you want to map. Assumptions can come from anything. They come from your vision, business idea, things your customers say, your choice of business model… They can even be hiding in plain sight: things you take for granted or are biased about could be based on (false) assumptions. Finding assumptions is a big part of your job as an innovator.

        To do this, keep a space on your innovation wall during your project where you put sticky notes for your assumptions. You could even use this canvas to map them directly. Convince your team to keep tracking assumptions.

        An ‘assumption’ in this context is something that needs to be true in order for your project to be successful. Assumptions come in three categories.
    
        0. Desirability: Assumptions that need to be true if your project is going to attract customers
        1. Viability: Assumptions that need to be true if your project is going to become a viable business
        2. Feasibility: Assumptions that need to be true if you are to successfully launch your product.

        For example, if you want to create a new app that helps people to invest their savings, some assumptions could be:

        - Potential customers want to invest their money (Desirability)
        - Potential customers trust your app with their money  (Desirability)
        - You are able to ask a monthly fee for customers to use your app (Viability)
        - You are able to build a secure app that does not get hacked  (Feasibility)
    </Step>
    <Step step="2" name="Impact">
        If you ‘collect’ an assumption, put it on the wall. Use color coding to figure out if it is a viability, feasibility, or desirability assumption. Finally, also put on the sticky what parts of your idea would be affected if this assumption were to be invalidated. Would it mean a small adjustment? Back to the drawing board? Or Game Over?

        If you keep doing this during your other brainstorming, visioning, and customer understanding sessions, you’ll quickly end up with a lot of assumptions.

        If you have a fresh start, look at your vision, customer journey and personas, and your business model canvas or lean canvas to get a first stab. Go over these with your team and try to find the (implicit) assumptions you make. What would need to be true for your idea to work?
    </Step>
    <Step step="3" name="Evidence Level">
        The next step is that for each of your assumptions, you want to have an ‘evidence level’. It makes little sense to focus on experiments for assumptions that have a high evidence level.

        0. Very High: Validated or Invalidated by your team: This is the highest level of evidence.
        1. High: Validated or Invalidated through research: Here you’ll need to figure out how much you trust the evidence as it is coming from another source.
        2. Medium: There is some data from research that seems to be in agreement.
        3. Low: There is no data or data is not in agreement.

    </Step>
    <Step step="4" name="Map on the Canvas">
        Once you have a wall filled with 10-20 assumptions, it’s time to start mapping them. Make sure each assumption is color coded for its category (desirability, viability, feasibility). Also, make sure you have labeled each with ‘no impact’, ‘small adjustment’, ‘back to the drawing board’, and ‘game over’.

        Place the sticky notes on the canvas, on the vertical axis. On top, put the ones that have ‘game over’. On the bottom, the ones with ‘no impact’ and ‘small adjustments’.

        Next, move the sticky notes on the horizontal axis. THe stickies with ‘high’ and ‘very high’ evidence move all the way to the left. Stickies with ‘low’ evidence move to the right. Find the appropriate position for each.
    </Step>
    <Step step="5" name="Find the Riskiest Assumption">
        There are in essence 5 big groups that each post-it can end up in. Look at the checklist below, and find the post-its that are low-hanging fruit or that are high-risk. Use that to inform your choice.

        - Top left: High evidence and important. These you have likely already validated or thoroughly researched. Make sure the team members have access to this information. Example: results from your initial experiment on desirability shows that customers care about your problem.
        - Bottom left: High evidence, not important. You have maybe validated these and/or decided they will not impact your business. These can be safely ‘parked’. Example: customers have shown you that they don’t really care about the day of the week your email newsletter arrives.
        - Bottom right: Low evidence, not important. You have little information on these, but you think that being wrong about these assumptions won’t have a lot of impact on your business. Example: You don’t know which of two font styles customers prefer for your app. Note: you might be wrong about the impact you assigned to assumptions in this quadrant, so keep an eye on them.
        - Top right: Low evidence and important. This is the most important quadrant. Being wrong about assumptions in this quadrant has the potential to kill your business. These are the ones you need to focus on.

        In some cases, multiple assumptions end up close together in the top right quadrant and a discussion will happen. To make this a bit simpler, try to do the following:

        - Desirability beats Viability, and Viability beats Feasibility. Validate desirability assumptions first. Then viability, then feasibility.
        - Try to split the top right quadrant in four new quadrants, and repeat the exercise.
        - If there are still two or more assumptions that end up competing, they are apparently so close together that it doesn’t matter which one to validate first. Pick the one that is easiest to validate.

        In some contexts the order desirability, viability, feasibility might not be true: feasibility could come first. For example, if you already know that laws of physics prevent you from building a anti-gravity device, proving its desirability won’t help you much. The same can be true for contexts with high compliance requirements: if you know it will be against the law, you might want to fix that problem first, before looking at desirability.
    </Step>
    <Step step="6" name="Next Steps">
        Use the result as input for your next experiment.
    </Step>
</Steps>


The Assumption Mapping canvas is a lightweight tool that can help you prioritize your assumptions and to find which one to try to validate first. A perfect tool to use before you start experimenting.

Assumption Map

## What is it and when should I use it?

During your innovation journey, there are many moments where coming up with multiple options is an excellent strategy to search for the best way forward. However, coming up with multiple options has a disadvantage: you’ll need to choose.

When there are a lot (>5-7) of competing concepts or ideas to choose from, the human brain has a hard time making that choice. This phenomenon, called [Overchoice](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overchoice) is a cognitive process in which people have a difficult time making a decision when faced with many options (Source: Wikipedia)

To make it easier to choose, sorting can help. This technique allows you to organize a cluster of unorganized items into an ordered list according to some criteria. For instance, you might order ideas based on their potential market size, or their perceived risk.

The way it works is that you pick randomly any two ideas, and place the one that best corresponds to the criteria you chose to the top, and the other one on the bottom. Then, pick another idea, and see where it should go relative to the first two. Keep doing this until you have organised the entire collection of ideas.

<Tip>
    Card sorting can work very well for 'non-analytical' orderings as well, such as questions around branding, or how much an idea excites a team member.
</Tip>

Card sorting can basically be seen as a one-dimensional version of the 2x2 matrix that is used in the [Risk Reward matrix](https://wrkshp.tools/tools/risk-reward-matrix), [SWOT analysis](https://wrkshp.tools/tools/swot-canvas) or the [Uncertainty Matrix](https://wrkshp.tools/tools/uncertainty-matrix).

One of the great things about Card Sorting is that you don’t have to stick to the same organizing principle all the time. You can get other people to give feedback on the ideas, by asking them to organize the cards in order of (their) preference. This will give you insight in your ideas and the person giving feedback at the same time!

<Example>
    [This post](https://wrkshp.tools/blog/optimise-your-value-proposition) has a detailed real-world example for Card Sort.
</Example>

<ImageMap image="/tools/A4 Card Sort Template.png">
1 | Title | The name of the concept this card defines. | 0.25, 0.2
2 | Description | A very short description of the concept this card defines. | 0.2, 0.6
3 | Category | (Optional) If you have different categories, you can use this space to differentiate them, or use a color coding. | 0.85, 0.2
</ImageMap>

<Steps>
    <Step step="1" name="Come up with Ideas">
        To get started, you’ll need to have a (relatively long) list of ideas. Some 20-50 ideas works best, but if you have enough time, you can go up to 100.
        
        It may help you to first cluster your ideas to max ~20 clusters or groups, to make the sorting process faster. Perhaps you can split your list of 50 ideas into 3 categories first.
        
        To get to 100+ ideas, you can use the [Wall of Ideas Canvas](https://wrkshp.tools/tools/wall-of-ideas) or follow the course [Find your Next Startup Idea](https://shop.wrkshp.tools/startup-ideas).
    </Step>
    <Step step="2" name="Create Cards">
        Come up with a design for your cards. Keep it simple. The card should have the name or title of your idea, a (very short) description, and perhaps a category.
        
        Then, make cards for each of your ideas. You can do this by printing them out, if you want to show them to many different people, but it works just as well with index cards or (large) coloured sticky notes.
        
        Create your cards in Google Slides to make printing easy
        
        Use color coding for different categories. For an example, see [this article](https://wrkshp.tools/blog/optimise-your-value-proposition).
        
        If you have a LOT of ideas, try to create a Google Sheet with all of them and give them a unique number.
    </Step>
    <Step step="3" name="Card Sorting">
        When you want to sort the cards, go through the following steps:

        0. Come up with a criterium to sort with
        1. Optional: Select the subset of cards you want feedback on
        2. Show the person that is to sort the cards a few examples and explain what is expected of them.
        3. Shuffle the cards.
        4. Hand the person the cards and ask them to organise them according to the criterium, from high to low.
        5. Optional: If there are a lot of cards, ask them to pick the ~5 cards they rate the highest, and the ~5 cards they rate the lowest for the criterium.
        6. Ask them to sort for ~5 minutes
        7. Take a picture of the result, make sure you can identify the order they used

        Use the Google sheet you created to note down the answers so you can start to see the patterns.
    </Step>
    <Step step="4" name="Next Steps">
        Once you have asked a number of people to sort the cards you can start to see the patterns. Or, if you did so with your own team, you can come to an agreement on the top priorities.
    </Step>
</Steps>

Card sorting is a technique that can help you to prioritise among different options, it can also be user to get insight in the priorities of other people.

Card Sort

## What is it and when should I use it

The problems startup teams and innovators have to deal with are often complex and interconnected. And although it would be nice to have a clear mental model to use for every situation, in reality it’s simply not possible to disentangle the web of relations and consequences connected to the problem you want to solve.
For example, starting to build a new product might require staff to be trained, which will impact hiring and education budgets, and the new product changes staff time allocation, which in the short term influences their business unit’s bottom line. There are myriads of such connections that might be important to your new product or startup.
Systems Thinking – the more ‘organized’ brother of Design Thinking and Visual Thinking – deals with such complex questions. It has been described as a ‘language’ that can help describe and communicate the complex, interdependent issues managers and entrepreneurs face on a daily basis.

The Causal Loop Diagram is one of the tools in the Systems Thinking toolbox. It is a visual representation of the complex entangled net of relationships and dependencies, and it can tell you how one part of the network influences other parts.
By looking at the problem through the lens of the Causal Loop Diagram, you can become more aware of the structural forces that produce sometimes puzzling behavior.
The Causal Loop Diagram can be used very well to help understand the problems a customer is facing, especially in a B2B setting. Try mapping out a diagram together with your customer!

### Nodes and Edges
The Causal Loop Diagram consists basically of two types of visual elements: nodes and edges.

The nodes in the diagram are the variables of the system. Think of variables as (potentially) measurable quantities, such as the number of customers, an NPS score, or market penetration.

The edges (the arrows) represent how variables are connected. If one variable’s change is connected to another variable’s change, there will be a connection between them. The arrow indicates the direction of the influence, and the ‘+’ or ‘-’ sign tells you how the variable will change.
‘Customers’ → + ‘Revenue’

This example has a ‘-’ (negative) sign. That means, when the variable ‘customers’ grows, ‘revenue’ will shrink, and when ‘customers’ shrinks, ‘revenue’ will grow.

The direction of the arrow is important. This example tells you nothing about the other direction, ‘revenue’ might grow or shrink with no effect on ‘customers’
Together, the nodes and edges can create complex networks, and, more importantly, loops. Finding these loops is the point of the exercise, as the name Causal Loop Diagram may have given away.

### Feedback Loops

<Canvas image="https://wrkshp-tools.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/Causal_Loop_1_95ba345b31.png"/>

Think of the adoption of a new app. The example graph shows two feedback loops, a reinforcing loop on the right labeled ‘R’, and a balancing one on the left labeled B.

At first, the app is unknown, and has only a few users. Those users talk to their friends, and influence some to also install it. They are enthusiastic, and tell even more people. The number of users starts to grow exponentially. This exponential growth is driven by the ‘word of mouth’ loop on the right.

After some time, the newest group of people adopting the app runs into difficulties trying to enthuse more people through word of mouth: many of the people they talk to already have the app installed. The growth rate starts to slow down.

Finally, an equilibrium is reached between the two loops.

### Get messy
Of course, in the real world, the loops are not always so neat. They might operate over multiple levels of connections and be much more messy. Luckily, there is a trick to finding these loops, and labeling them as ‘balancing’ or ‘reinforcing’.

The first step is tracing the edges and finding the loops in the diagram. Start with an assumption, e.g. ‘variable 1 increases’. When you have traced the loop and arrive back at ‘variable 1’ with a ‘+’ connection, the loop is reinforcing. When you arrive back with a ‘-’ connection, the loop is balancing.

To be more precise: Reinforcing loops have an *even* number of ‘negative’ links in them (zero counts as even). Balancing loops have an *odd* number of ‘negative’ links in them.

Reinforcement loops are associated with exponential change. Balancing loops are associated with reaching a plateau.

### Delays
The connections in the diagram don’t act all at once. There often are delays, where the influence of a variable change takes time to trickle down to other parts of the system. These delays may influence the strength with which balancing and reinforcing loops work and cause fluctuations to happen.

An example: An entrepreneur of a small company makes a cashflow prognosis, and notices that the next few months not enough projects have been sold. This causes part of his workforce to idle. He kicks off a big effort to turn the situation around, and through this ‘all hands on deck’ situation  the team manages to net a substantial amount of new orders. The team subsequently is swamped with the amount of work, and has no time to do sales. The work dries up, and the system is back to the starting point.

To illustrate this oscillation, the entrepreneur decides to map the system with a causal loop diagram.

First, he defines the different variables: the cashflow situation, a big sales effort, the number of signed projects, and the number of delivered projects.
<Canvas image="https://wrkshp-tools.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/Causal_Loop_4_769eb81b25.png"/>

Next, he defines the obvious relationship between sales effort and number of projects. The bad cashflow situation drives the sales effort, and the sales effort leads to a change in the number of projects. More signed projects means (eventually) more delivered projects, which influences cashflow.
<Canvas image="https://wrkshp-tools.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/Causal_Loop_6_f138601866.png"/>

But, looking at the company situation, he also realizes there is another relationship at play: the delivery effort influences the sales effort.
<Canvas image="https://wrkshp-tools.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/Causal_Loop_5_cd1e3f5324.png"/>

Next, it’s time to see *how* these variables influence each other. Going through the diagram, he asks himself the question: if this variable’s value increases, what happens to the variable it influences? Does it also increase? Or does it decrease? If the increase leads to an increase, or a decrease leads to a decrease, the arrow is ‘positive’ (blue). Otherwise it is negative (red).
<Canvas image="https://wrkshp-tools.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/Causal_Loop_2_ab5877f281.png"/>

Finally, it is time to investigate the loops in the diagram. There are two loops:

0. ‘cashflow’-’sales’-’signed projects’-’deliver projects’
1. ’sales’-’signed projects’-’deliver projects’

The arrow from ‘cashflow’ to ‘sales’ is negative: the reason is that the effect is reversed. Lower cashflow means more sales effort.
<Canvas image="https://wrkshp-tools.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/Causal_Loop_3_82f2d2dfb8.png"/>

Counting the number of negative connections on each of these, it is clear that the first loop (‘cashflow’-’sales’-’signed projects’-’deliver projects’) has an odd number of negative links. This means it is a balancing loop by itself. Cashflow going down drives more sales, which drives more signed projects, which (after a while) drives more delivered projects, which increases cashflow.

The fact that this loop balances itself out is that the sales effort is apparently connected to the cashflow. The direct evidence is the ‘all hands on deck’ effort by the entrepreneur.

The second loop, ’sales’-’signed projects’-’deliver projects’, is also a balancing loop. More sales effort drives more signed projects, which drives more delivery effort. The delivery effort negatively impacts the sales effort.

Looking at these two balancing loops, it is clear that although this system (sort of) protects against a very bad cashflow situation, it will never turn into a reinforcing system. The situation will improve for a while, and then it will reverse itself to where it started.

The entrepreneur can now approach the problem with a better understanding. First of all, removing the dependency between the delivery teams and the sales people, giving each their own role rather than using an ‘all hands’ approach, will remove the second loop. This will make the system’s oscillation time longer, but it does not solve the problem.

<Canvas image="https://wrkshp-tools.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/Causal_Loop_7_6b36523b58.png"/>

What is needed is a way to counter the negative coupling between cashflow and sales. There needs to be a reinforcement happening there. A way to do this might be (but for simplicity other consequences have been omitted) to invest in more sales people:
<Canvas image="https://wrkshp-tools.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/Causal_Loop_8_a261386384.png"/>

In practice, it will be the case for a new situation that another balancing loop would be established. Unchecked growth in essence never happens. In this example, the new loop would probably be that the delivery of products becomes a new bottleneck.

In this way, drawing causal relationships can help give more insight into how different parts of your business influence each other, and help you to find potential options to solve the problem.

<ImageMap image="/tools/A4 Causal Loop Diagram.png">
1 | Core Diagram | Area to place the core elements in your diagram | 0.5, 0.5
2 | Outliers | Area to place links to less relevant outlying variables | 0.1, 0.1
</ImageMap>

<Steps>
    <Step step="1" name="Define your Variables">
        Give the individual team members sticky notes, and reserve a big space on the wall for your diagram. Think of the problem you are trying to solve right now, and ask the team to start writing down the variables that come to mind. Variables are (potentially) measurable quantities that change over time.
        
        After a few minutes, have team members map the variables on the wall. Duplicates can be removed.
        
        Look at your wall together and try to see if you can come up with more variables that come into play. What are the variables you and the team care about the most?
        
        There will be time later to add missing variables so don’t force yourself to be super complete here.

        <CheckList>
        [] Number of customers
        [] Net promoter score
        [] Adoption rate
        [] Customer satisfaction
        [] Resistance to change
        [] ...
        </CheckList>
    </Step>
    <Step step="2" name="Find the Connections">
        Take one of the variables as a starting point, and imagine it has changed over time. Which other variables will it affect? And is that a ‘positive’ or a ‘negative’ link?  Draw the connection between the variables and mark it with ‘+’ or ‘-’.
        
        It may be helpful to rearrange the sticky notes before drawing the link to avoid cluttering your map.
        
        In this stage, you may find that some connections are not direct, but have an intermediate new variable you haven’t mapped before. Simply add that variable to the map.
        
        Repeat this step for the next variable, until you either have mapped all of them or you start feeling the mapped connections are less relevant, for instance because they have a limited effect.
    </Step>
    <Step step="3" name="Find and Label Loops">
        Now that you have mapped variables and connections, it is time to find and label the causal loops.
        
        Perhaps one or two obvious loops immediately jump out at you. If not, there is a recipe to find them.
        
        Start with a variable (for instance one of the variables you care about the most) and imagine its value grows. Follow the connections and try to get back to where you came from.
        
        When you find a loop, it can be helpful to highlight the connections with a different color.
        
        If you work digitally, it can be helpful to take some time to re-arrange the diagram so the loops are more clear and the diagram is decluttered.
        
        When you have found a loop, count the number of ‘negative’ links in the loop’s connections. Is it an *even* number (including zero)? Mark the loop as ‘Reinforcing’ with a big R. Otherwise, it’s a ‘Balancing’ loop.
        
        An additional way to double-check your loop is to draw the behavior of the system over time. A reinforcing loop shows exponential growth (or decay); a balancing loop tends to produce oscillation or movement toward equilibrium.
    </Step>
    <Step step="4" name="The Story">
        The Causal Loop Diagram helps you to craft a deeper understanding of the system. This understanding can then be shared with other team members. To do that, use the diagram to create a coherent story, explaining how the different parts of the system interact. This story, together with the diagram, can help you to share a deep understanding quickly.
    </Step>
    <Step step="5" name="Next Steps">
        Now that you have your diagram and your loops, you can use it to guide you in your change process and your innovation process.
        
        Perhaps you want more exponential behaviour: think about how you can strengthen your Reinforcing loops, and weaken the loops that counterbalance the same variables.
        
        For instance, how might you make it even easier for people to spread their enthusiasm for your product and thus reinforce your ‘word of mouth’ loop?
        
        Or, perhaps you want to make your business more robust: where and how might you add more balancing behaviour to protect you against ‘bad’ feedback loops?
        
        For instance, how might you protect yourself against a cascading failure in your systems? Or how might you put the handbrake on negative reviews before they start to influence your ‘word of mouth’ feedback loop?
        
        To influence these connections and start to get control over them, think about defining experiments with the purpose of influencing these connections. See the [Experiment Cookbook](https://wrkshp.tools/experiment-cookbook) for more ideas on experiments.
    </Step>
</Steps>
    

The Causal Loop Diagram helps you make sense of a complex web of interlocking causal relationships in a visual way.

Causal Loop Diagram

## What is it and when should I use it?
When innovating, it is important to find the right problems to solve, be it for your own startup, or a customer’s problem. That often involves digging deeper below the surface to uncover the real reason the problem occurs. If you know that, you can solve the problem in a more meaningful way.

Is your startup suffering from low retention? Then this tool may help you to come up with reasons this is happening.

Did you observe that customers can’t complete their Job to be Done with satisfaction? This tool can help you to come up with potential causes to validate with your customers.

A cause-effect diagram is a visual tool designed to help you explore and identify possible causes for a problem or an observed phenomenon. This helps you to come up with possible root causes for the problem you observed, that you can then use to build experiments around.

The cause-effect diagram visualizes the complex reasons a problem might occur visually so it is easy to understand and discuss with your team.

<ImageMap image="/tools/A4 Cause-Effect Diagram.png">
1 | Effect | The observed effect or problem that you want to investigate. | 0.9, 0.5
2 | Major Cause | The ‘major causes’ define groups of potential causes that together produce the | 0.5, 0.2
3 | Cause | Each major cause is split up into several contributing potential causes. | 0.5, 0.35
4 | Underlying cause | Each cause is split into smaller potential underlying causes contributing to it. | 0.35, 0.35
</ImageMap>

<Steps>
    
    <Step step="1" name="Define the effect">
        Start by defining the problem or effect you want to investigate. What is it? Use a few sticky notes to define what it is, and what it is not. When does it occur? Who is affected? How does the problem manifest? Try to be specific.
        Then, try to ‘label’ the small cloud of stickies that you used to define the problem with one word or short sentence.
        Stick the label of the main effect on the canvas. Alternatively, you can use a blank section of wall and (paper) tape to create the horizontal line.
    </Step>
    <Step step="2" name="Brainstorm major causes">
        Now that the effect has been identified, it’s time to define the major causes. The main goal of this step is to identify the main areas causes could come from, as a basis for a more detailed examination in the next step.

        Start by looking at the effect sticky. Ask the participants to come up with the main constituent parts of the effect.

        For example, let’s say you want to investigate an effect you observed on your subscription service, which you labeled ‘low customer retention’. Try to brainstorm the building blocks for that effect.

        For this ‘low retention’ example, there could be several causes. We want to find the major groups of causes.

        Ask team members to brainstorm for 5 minutes individually, coming up with reasons for this low retention, looking at this from a customer’s perspective. Prompt them to think about reasons the situation might occur, no matter how far-fetched.

        They might come up with reasons such as:

        - Customer thinks the service is too expensive
        - Customer does not see the value
        - Customer forgets to renew
        - Customer did not see the renewal email
        - Customer’s credit card was declined
        - ...

        Put each of these answers on a sticky note, and cluster them by themes you spot in the stickies. This will give you your major causes.
        In the example, labels could be:

        - **Conscious decision**: the customer thinks it’s too expensive, or doesn’t bring enough value.
        - **Accidental decision**: the customer forgets to renew, did not receive the renewal email.
        - **Process problem**: the customer wants to renew, but the payment fails.
        - ...

        Try to come up with 3-5 major causes. Place your major causes on the end of the branches of the cause-effect diagram. Finding major causes and clustering will help you to come up with more potential causes in the next steps.
        Look at the [Customer Journey](https://wrkshp.tools/tools/customer-journey-canvas) or the [Job Map](https://wrkshp.tools/tools/job-map-canvas) to find more potential causes.
    </Step>
    <Step step="3" name="Brainstorm underlying causes">
        Next, for each of your major causes, try to come up with more underlying causes. Look for 3-5 causes per group minimum, but 5-10 is better. It may help to look at the causes you found already, and again ask ‘why might this occur?’.
        
        In our example, the cause ‘Customer’s credit card was declined’ for instance, might simply be because there was no money on the card, but, with some extra thought, it is clear that it also could occur for other reasons, such as:

        - Customer changed their bank account
        - Credit card was expired
        - Customer’s address was changed
        - Problem with the payment provider
        - ...

        Some of these might give you ideas for solutions (what if you send an ‘update your credit card information’ email if a card gets close to its expiry date?), or they might warrant some research or experimentation.
        
        Keep asking ‘why?’ for the causes you find, until you have gone two or three steps deep. Sometimes, while coming up with new causes, you may identify a new ‘major cause’ or higher level cause. If that is the case, add these to the diagram.
        
        Timebox this step, taking no more than 30 (or, ideally, 2x15) minutes. Try to spend an equal amount of time for each of the major causes.
    </Step>
    <Step step="4" name="Prioritize causes">
        When going through the previous steps, it is quite normal to end up with a lot of potential causes. Not all of these will be as probable, or as important. To declutter the diagram, try to prioritize these causes.
    
        The best way to do this is to get actual data on the probability of these causes occurring. In the ‘retention’ example above, analytics data may already give you a clear idea of how many customers had their payment rejected, and how many did not open the renewal email.
    
        In many cases, though, the data you need won’t be available. In the example, you will probably not know how many customers consciously chose not to renew, or if they did that because of the price or because of a lack of value. In these cases, try to estimate the impact this cause may have on the end result. Do you think it could be a major contributor? Or something that happens rarely?
    
        Clearly mark the causes and sub-causes that you think are most important. Or, make a copy or photograph of your diagram and remove the causes that are not as important. You’ll end up with a prioritized diagram, that will tell you which (major) causes you currently think could be contributing to the effect you observed.
    </Step>
    <Step step="5" name="Check your work">
        Next, take a step back, and go over your diagram. Are there any major causes that have substantially fewer causes than others? Are your descriptions clear and concrete? Are there causal chains that are much shorter or longer than the others? If this happens, make sure that your diagram looks like this for the right reasons, and not because you forgot to work on part of the diagram. Be critical. Is this really complete? Can you come up with any major causes you missed?

        - [] Prioritized causes and their causal chains make sense
        - [] Prioritized causes are backed up by evidence
        - [] No (obvious) major causes or causal chains missing

    </Step>
    <Step step="5" name="Next Steps">
        Now that your cause-effect diagram is complete, you can start putting it to good use.

        If you have sufficient evidence that points to clear causes to your problem, start coming up with possible solutions. Use the Pareto (80/20) rule: probably, 80% of your problem comes from 20% of your causes.

        If you have missing data that prevents you from determining which of the causal chains is contributing the most, define experiments to help you find out if the causes you came up with actually exist and how important they are.

    </Step>
</Steps>
    

A cause-effect diagram is a visual tool designed to help you explore and identify possible causes for a problem or an observed phenomenon. This helps you to come up with possible root causes for the problem you observed, that you can then use to build experiments around.

Cause-Effect Diagram

## What is it and why should I use it?

The creative matrix is an alternative way of getting to a large collection of new ideas quickly. When you’re finding that everyone’s ideas are falling in and around the same areas of exploration, it’s time to expand the boundaries of your thinking. This is a perfect time to use a creative matrix.

The goal of ideation is to expand the thinking and ideas of everyone on the team, to create something that is greater than the sum of its parts. However, without context and practice, most of us have a tough time expanding beyond what we know (or came up with in the shower).

The creative matrix was designed with this in mind. Essentially, the creative matrix is a tool that will help spark new ideas at the intersections of discrete categories. This tool is all about divergent thinking. Best of all, you get to design your own creative matrix based on your design criteria, the market you play in, or the customers you serve (or wish to serve).

<Tip>
    The matrix as displayed here uses ‘customer segments’ as the horizontal axis, but you are free to use any axis you like. By doing this, the creative matrix can be used for much more than to generate possible business model options. For instance, how about placing ‘Stakeholders’ on the horizontal axis for storytelling or sales ideas? How about having different delivery strategies? Competitors? Or products? The matrix works in all these cases.
</Tip>

<ImageMap image="/tools/A4 Creative Matrix.png">
1 | Customer Segments | Add different customer segments or sub-segments here | 0.5, 0.1
2 | Categories | Add different categories here (see below for examples) | 0.1, 0.5
3 | Ideas | Every cell in the matrix holds at least one idea, combining a customer segment with a category. | 0.5, 0.5
</ImageMap>
<Steps>
    <Step step="1" name="Setup">
        To design your own creative matrix, draw a grid on a whiteboard or poster paper with no more than five rows and five columns. Give it a topic or a central “how might we...?” question.
    
        For each of the columns, designate a customer segment (existing or new). For each of the rows, designate a particular technology, need, or value proposition.

        <CheckList>
        [] Customer Need
        [] Value Proposition
        [] Revenue Model
        [] Channel
        [] Customer Relationship
        [] Technology
        [] ...
        </CheckList>

        You might opt to designate the last column and/or row as a wildcard category, for placing open ideas that don't fit in any of the cells.
    
        When generating ideas around a new investment product for a bank, we came up with customer (sub)segments such as ‘affluent young professionals’, ‘hi-potentials’, and ‘double-income families’. We came up with different categories influenced by quotes from our first interviews with customers, such as: ‘Daily habit’, ‘Easy’, ‘Bragging Rights’, ‘Ecological’, ‘For the Future’, and ‘Bank in your pocket’.
    </Step>
    <Step step="2" name="Diverge">
        With your matrix in place, it’s time to ideate! Using sticky notes, have each person randomly and rapidly add as many ideas as they can come up with to the cells in the matrix. Words are good. Pictures are better! The goal is to fill in every single cell in the creative matrix with at least one idea. You're done when all the cells have been filled!

        To incentivise people to generate more ideas, assign a point for each sticky note. The highest total score wins.

        Combining the customer segments with the categories helped to spark new ways of thinking that went beyond ‘we need to build an app’. Thinking about how a specific ‘category’ might show up for a segment can help you create a deeper story, which helps spark new ideas.
    </Step> 
    <Step step="3" name="Converge">
        Once every cell has been filled in and the time limit is up, it’s time to review everyone’s ideas. Have the team huddle around the creative matrix as if it were a priceless painting.
        
        Have the persons that placed the sticky notes explain in one or two sentences what that sticky note is about.
        
        Once everyone has had an ample chance to look at each other’s work, have each person call out their favourite ideas (or top two). Use for instance dot voting or secret voting to find the top ideas.
    </Step>
    <Step step="4" name="Next Steps">
        Select the ~3-5 most promising ideas to move forward with and base for instance an experiment on.
    </Step>
</Steps>


The creative matrix is an alternative way of getting to a large collection of new ideas quickly. When you’re finding that everyone’s ideas are too similar, it’s time to expand the boundaries of your thinking with the Creative Matrix.

Creative Matrix

## What is it and when should I use it?

The Customer Journey is a tool to help you get insight into, track, and discuss how a customer experiences a problem you are trying to solve. How does this problem or opportunity show up in their lives? How do they experience it? How do they interact with you?

Mapping this journey will provide you with insights into how customers experience a product or service, as well as how they might be better served or even delighted. This is especially true when co-creating the journey together with your customers or when validating your assumptions with them. What are the circumstances? How do customers feel throughout? What are the moments when the experience can best be improved?

Customer journeys are not linear. A customer can jump from one phase to another depending on many factors. They interact with some touch points and miss out others. It is your job, as a designer, to understand the moments when customers engage so that you can design better experiences for them in the future. This tool helps in looking at your products and services through the lens of the customers.

Of course, no customer journey is totally complete or made without assumptions. Mapping the customer journey is based on the knowledge and insights of your team. This tool simply helps you understand and explore from the customer’s point of view.

The customer journey canvas helps make things real. Through the mapping exercise you can identify where customers get stuck, where they have great experiences, and why. One outcome of using this tool with your team will be the so-called low hanging fruit that you can deliver on immediately. Once you have co-created and assembled the customer journey maps, you can add real customer data gathered through customer safaris, interviews, and feedback. This will enable you to make informed decisions based on reality.

The customer journey is relevant for everyone. Everyone on the team, and in your company, must understand what your customers experience, how they feel, what they struggle with, and how you can improve the experience. The underlying goal: to solve our customers’ problems and make them happy.
<ImageMap image="/tools/A4 Customer Journey.png">
1 | Stakeholder personas | The customer that experiences the journey is your stakeholder persona. | 0.25, 0.125
2 | Goals and expectations | The goals and expectations for the stakeholder personas. | 0.75, 0.125
3 | Journey moments | The moments (‘touch points’) that are memorable for the customer. | 0.5, 0.4
4 | Emotional states | How does the customer feel when he/she experiences these moments? | 0.15, 0.65
5 | Opportunities | What are the opportunities to improve the customer experience for these moments? | 0.15, 0.85
</ImageMap>

<Steps>
    <Step step="1" name="Defince your customers">
        To make a good customer journey, you need to define who it is for. Who is the customer you are going to follow? And easy way to do this is by using the persona canvas. You don't want to specify generic customer segments here, but start from specific customers, that you know. This will help enrich the journey. Generalizing it comes later.
    </Step>
    <Step step="2" name="Map the Journey">
        With the team, come up with moments in the journey of your customer. Think from that customer's perspective. His or her goal in life is not to buy your product or use your service, that is (usually) a means to an end. What end is that? How do they experience the problem you are trying to solve? And do they really experience it? What do they currently do to deal with that problem?
        
        While you are defining moments for the customer, try to place them in an order. That could be a short interval, for example a day in the life of the customer, or a longer duration. The goal is to find the meaningful moments for the customer first, and then to look for the touchpoints where your product or service comes into the picture.
        
        An easy way to build moments is to think of what happened first (what would be the movie frame for that moment?) and then to proceed what the customer thinks or feels, and ultimately what their needs are. Make sure it's their needs, don't sneak your product back in!
    </Step>
    <Step step="3" name="Challenge your assumptions">
        Now that you have mapped out a lot of moments, it's time to challenge assumptions. So far, almost everything you have done is an assumption, starting from what you know about the customer, and going all the way to their needs in specific moments. Some of these assumptions are more impactful than others. They need to be checked before you start building product ideas on top of them. To do this, you need to go out of the building, and run experiments.

        Show your journey to actual or potential customers, and see if they recognize themselves. What is their journey? Map it out with them. Once you have done that, you will start to see patterns and learn what the actual needs are that they have. Sometimes they may not even know it themselves!
    </Step>
    <Step step="4" name="Next Steps">
        Check the following items to see if you have worked enough on the Customer Journey.

        <CheckList>
        [] Was the persona specific enough?
        [] Is the journey complete? Are any key moments missing?
        [] Ask yourself where the journey really starts and ends. Are there moments before and after that you should include?
        </CheckList>
    </Step>
</Steps>



The Customer Journey is a tool to help you get insight into, track, and discuss how a customer experiences a problem you are trying to solve.

Customer Journey Canvas

## What is it and when should I use it?

The Customer Need Canvas helps you to make sense of the different needs you have uncovered for your potential customers, and separate the ‘latent needs’ (nice to haves) from the ‘core needs’ (must haves).

When coming up with problems (you think) people face, there are a number of aspects to keep in mind.

- **Market Size** - How many people face this problem?
- **Customer Segments** - What do people that face the problem have in common? How can you group them together and characterize them? And where are they best reached?
- **Real Need vs Latent Need** - Is the problem a real need for the potential customers? Or is is a nice to have?

Think of the Maslow pyramid. At the wide base of the pyramid, you find things everyone needs, such as food, water, rest. These are things you can't do without. At the narrow top, you find things that only become important to people once their basic needs have been fulfilled.

If you think of problems to solve for your business, think about where that problem is in the pyramid. Is it on the bottom, or at the top? This is a way to visualize latent needs vs real needs.

The problem with latent needs is that people don't really know or care about fulfilling them yet. They are 'optional problems'.

That does not mean that a latent need can't be huge: in a 1999 interview, people in Amsterdam laughed at having a mobile phone in their pocket every hour of the day. They simply could not imagine what it would be like yet.

<Example>
    [Interview by Frans Bromet about the use of mobile phones in 1999 on the streets of Amsterdam.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bxcfgfxYJow) (English subtitles)
</Example>

Convincing people of a solution to a latent need is an uphill battle. It can be done, but it is a lot harder than fixing something people are aware of as a problem.

The easiest way to tell if people have a real problem is to look for problems that people actually have a workaround for. Some way that they already solve that problem today. If that workaround is unsatisfactory for them, for instance it is expensive, takes time, or only solves part of their problem, then you have a candidate for a real need.

<ImageMap image="/tools/A4 Customer Need Canvas.png">
1 | Latent Needs | These are ‘optional problems’. People either don’t feel that need acutely yet, or they are preoccupied with more basic needs. | 0.5, 0.15
2 | Other Needs | Other needs end up in limbo between latent and basic needs. | 0.5, 0.5
3 | Basic Needs | These are the problems people must solve. They have to deal with them on an everyday basis | 0.5, 0.85
</ImageMap>
<Steps>
    <Step step="1" name="Gather Needs">
        Using the Persona Canvas, Customer Journey, and qualitative interviews, come up with the needs and ‘jobs to be done’ your customers face. Or, coming from the other side, if you already have a preference for a solution, come up with the needs your solution helps fulfill.  Have team members write each need on a separate post it note.

        <Tip>
            For different customer segments, use different color postits.
        </Tip>
    </Step>
    <Step step="2" name="Map your Needs">
        Have all team members stick their post-its with needs on the canvas, one by one. Have a **very short** explanation with each. Put it where you think it should go for now.
    </Step>
    <Step step="3" name="Silent Shuffle">
        With all team members together, start reorganizing the needs. For each need: if you think there are more basic needs that the customer would need to have solved first, move it up towards latent. If you think that the need you’re shuffling is more basic, move it down. Do this for two or three minutes *in silence*

        <Tip>
            If a need moves up or down three times, put it to the side. We’ll address it next.
        </Tip>
    </Step>
    <Step step="4" name="Discuss">
        Go over the map you have made. Each team member gets the time to address the points he or she does not yet feel comfortable with.

        <Tip>
            It’s okay if you have some needs that you don’t agree on. This is a first pass, and mostly reflects your own assumptions and biases - the fact that you don’t fully agree just means you need to do further qualitative experiments with your customers to find out!
        </Tip>
    </Step>
    <Step step="5" name="Next Steps: Validate">
        Next, validate your map with customers. Focus your attention on the more basic needs first. Only when customers indicate these are solved do the more latent needs become important. And listen very carefully, perhaps your customers will tell you that there are other things they struggle with that are more fundamental.
    </Step>
</Steps>

The Customer Need Canvas helps you to make sense of the different needs you have uncovered for your potential customers.

Customer Need Canvas

## What is it and when should I use it?

When you’re hard at work in your startup journey, it becomes difficult to continuously go back to all of the maps for context, customer, and vision. You just need one piece of paper that holds all of the important decisions and learnings you have already made. For that purpose, we have created the Design Criteria.

There are going to be a core set of values that shouldn’t be up for debate. Should be our north star.

Design criteria form the principles and benchmarks of the change you’re after. They are not formulated from thin air, but incorporate information from your business, vision, customer research, cultural and economic context, and mindset that you have formed along the way.

Design Criteria stay with you for the duration of your journey, and will keep getting new updates.

Don’t think of Design Criteria as simply features of your idea. They can and should be more than that. For example, a design criteria coming from your vision might be that your business must contribute to a greener planet. Or, maybe you want your customers to feel delighted; this is another design criterium. Does your new business idea need to generate a certain amount of revenue within three years? Chalk that up to more design criteria. In short, design criteria are there to make it easy to determine if you are on the right track.

- A 'Must' might be that the startup needs to make 1 million in revenue three years from now.
- A 'Won’t' coming from the team might be that there won’t be any partnerships with non-eco friendly organizations.

It’s up to you to find the criteria that are non-negotiable or nice to have for your situation.

## How to use the Design Criteria Canvas

The Design Criteria Canvas is a simple canvas that captures all of the decisions and learnings you make during your Startup Journey.

The design criteria you capture will likely first come from the vision you’ve formulated with your team. You’ll find that some of the elements in that vision are so important that they are **non-negotiable.** Some other elements may be a bit more flexible or unclear, and are **nice-to-haves.**

To find the most important elements in your vision, use the 'MoSCoW' method: categorize every element under '**Must**,' '**Should**,' '**Could**,' or '**Won’t**.' This will help you prioritize.

Once you’ve done this exercise, you might find that you need to adjust your vision slightly. This may prompt you to take a different direction. If that’s the case, adjust the design criteria so that they match the new direction. As you continue to evolve your point of view, you may need to add or update your design criteria.

<ImageMap image="/tools/A4 Design Criteria Canvas.png">
1 | Must haves | Non-negotiable elements that you can’t leave out. | 0.5, 0.125
2 | Should haves | Elements that you really would like to have. | 0.5, 0.375
3 | Could haves | Elements that are nice to haves. | 0.5, 0.625
4 | Won't haves | Non-negotiable elements that you can’t leave out. | 0.5, 0.875
</ImageMap>
<Steps>
    <Step step="1" name="Collect Criteria">
        Have team-members come up with design criteria individually first, by writing them on sticky note. Sources for design criteria can be: your vision canvas, things you learned when speaking to your (potential) customers, and validation outcomes.

        Besides those aspirative ideas, there are usually also some constraints to take into account: you must deliver a certain revenue, have a fit with a certain infrastructure, you have to deal with time limits, budgets, etc. Make sure to capture all of them.

        Try to make your criteria as clear as possible, so that you and others will still understand what they mean in three months time. Split up more complex design criteria.
    </Step>
    <Step step="2" name="Map them on the Canvas">
        When each team member has a pile of design criteria, take turns to stick them on the canvas. Stick them where you think they should go first, we'll organize them later. Have team members say why they think it is a design criterium and why it should be in the box they put it in. If you find duplicates just stick them on top of eachother.

        <Canvas image="/tools/A4 Design Criteria Canvas.png">
        1 | Criterium A | color1 | 0.5, 0.125
        2 | Criterium B | color2 | 0.25, 0.425
        3 | Criterium C | color3 | 0.75, 0.425
        4 | Criterium D | color4 | 0.45, 0.825
        </Canvas>

        When everything is on the board, take a step back. Have a short break. Did you miss anything? Forget something?
    </Step>
    <Step step="3" name="Organize your Criteria">
        Now, with the team, go over each sticky note and see what are the real non-negotiables. Be strict in this, nice to haves are nice to haves, nothing more! If you get stuck, try to compare sticky notes in the same box and see which ones are the least important. What if you did not meet that criterium? If that does not mean total failure, it's not a non-negotiable.
        
        Organizing on a canvas usually means clustering and removing duplicates. Anything that is not really important should be removed! If you want to keep removed items for later, create a parking lot.
    </Step>
    <Step step="4" name="Make it S.M.A.R.T.">
        Go over the Design Criteria, and make them S.M.A.R.T. (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound). If necessary, replace the post-its with better defined ones. Keep a note of the SMART Design Critera.
    </Step>
    <Step step="5" name="Next Steps">
        Regularly revisit your design criteria, both as a touchstone for ideas and directions, and to see if they need to be updated because your point of view became more informed.

        <CheckList>
        [] You have sanitized the Design Criteria by removing unimportant criteria using e.g. voting.
        [] You have spent time with your team to sharpen and quantify your criteria. Try to make them S.M.A.R.T. (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound)
        [] You've linked your Design Criteria with your 'Why'
        </CheckList>
    </Step>
</Steps>
    

Define the design criteria your product or service should follow and bring clarity to your innovation journey in under 45 minutes using the Design Criteria Canvas.

Design Criteria Canvas


## What is it and when should I use it?

[Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_management#The_Eisenhower_Method)  describes the origin of this tool as follows: the "Eisenhower Method" stems from a quote attributed to Dwight D. Eisenhower: "I have two kinds of problems, the urgent and the important. The urgent are not important, and the important are never urgent." Note that Eisenhower does not claim this insight for his own, but attributes it to an (unnamed) "former college president."
I have two kinds of problems, the urgent and the important. The urgent are not important, and the important are never urgent.
This matrix has been used with great success as a mental model for making better decisions. The split between ‘important’ and ‘unimportant’ vs ‘urgent’ and ‘not urgent’ is very powerful and can be used in two very effective ways in the innovation process.

<Quote author="Dwight D. Eisenhower">
I have two kinds of problems, the urgent and the important. The urgent are not important, and the important are never urgent.
</Quote>

### Make better decisions
‘Important’ things or tasks really have an impact. If you don’t do them (because of time pressure for instance), or if you do a bad job on them, this is going to hurt you. ‘Unimportant’ things, on the other hand, are the things that even if you don’t do them won’t matter that much.

Humans are biased to focus on what is urgent, even if it is not important at all. Spending time on unimportant matters however is a waste of time; that time could have been spent on important things – urgent ones, or the ones that are not yet urgent.

In practice what happens in many businesses and startups is that a lot of energy goes to things that are very urgent but not important. Having a half hour meeting on adding an extra hashtag on your next social media post might be a typical example. The interesting thing is that there are or seem to be many more tasks that fall in the ‘unimportant’ category than in the ‘important’ category.

When using the Eisenhower Matrix for decision making, think of the different categories like this:

Tasks or activities that are **urgent and important** are things that will have a large impact if they are not accomplished or if they are done badly, and can no longer be put off. They have to be done now, or it will be too late. These are the things you should do right away, things that are sometimes quite literally ‘on fire’.

<Example>
    That client that requested a proposal a little while ago and called you twice to ask you when it will arrive. Wait too long, and the project will go to your competitor.
</Example>

Tasks or activities that are **important, but not urgent** will have a large impact, but you still have time to think about how to approach them. As a startup member or strategic thinker, this is where you should spend your focus. Here, you have room to play, and time to think about the best approach. While they are not urgent yet, they will become urgent at some point – and then you may have limited options.

<Example>
    That big change in legislation that will come in six months time. The next big update of your SaaS platform that will enable you to expand your service to a new market.
</Example>

Tasks or activities that are **urgent, but not important** are things that seem super pressing right now, but won’t have a really big impact if you don’t get to them. These are the real time sinks, the sources of busy-work in many companies. Eliminating or delegating these tasks will save you a huge amount of time.

<Example>
    Having an hour long meeting about whether or not you should post that social media message that supposedly needs to go out today.
</Example>

Tasks or activities that are **neither urgent nor important** are things that you should run away from fast. These are also big time sinks that have no positive impact on your business, and they are everywhere.

<Example>
    Spending a day gold-plating an edge-case feature that will be used by 1% of your users, writing an extra desk-research report on that potential business development opportunity, thinking about contingency plans for imagined future calamities with very low impact and probability.
</Example>

As **focus** is one of the most important factors for the success of a startup, it is super important to filter out the ‘important’ tasks and concentrate on them, dropping or delegating the unimportant tasks. Your startup has limited time and resources, you can’t afford to spend them on the things that have low or no impact.
Still, figuring out **how to categorize** the tasks on your plate and how to deal with them can be hard, especially in a startup team. Not everyone might agree, and that in itself can be a time sink. This tool helps you get on the same page and focus on what is important. The steps below describe how to use the matrix to categorize your tasks.

### Understand your customer’s needs

When you’re vetting potential startup ideas, it is super important to get a clear read on your customer’s needs. What are their real problems? Are they nice-to-haves? Or need-to-haves?

One way to do that can be seen in the [Customer Need Canvas](https://wrkshp.tools/tools/customer-need-canvas), which differentiates latent vs true needs. But sometimes it is not so simple to make that difference.

The Eisenhower Matrix can help here, too. For the different business ideas you are vetting, put the problems your customers face in the matrix.

First, decide if the problems are ‘important’ or ‘unimportant’ **for your customers**. That means, is solving the problem something that has real impact for that customer? Or is it a nice to have? If it’s not important, or not important enough, then chances are you’re going to have a hard time convincing your customer to spend money on your solution.

Knowing a problem is important for your customer is very good, but there is another factor. Sometimes, a problem can be very impactful and thus important to a customer, but not urgent. This is where some of the ‘latent needs’ for customers live. For instance, we worked on a project for a large pension fund in the Netherlands. From customer interviews and surveys, it was known that their (prospective) customers really thought that having a good pension was super important, and not a nice-to-have. Still, they struggled convincing people to start investing in their pension today. The reason was that for many people, having a good pension is simply not seen as ‘urgent’. They feel they can safely postpone it to later.

<Tip>
    The propensity to choose short-term actions over long-term benefits is a well-known cognitive bias, but there are [many more cognitive biases](https://medium.com/wrkshp/10-cognitive-biases-that-can-kill-your-startup-270a8c70e763) that you should learn about in order to better understand your customers and have a more successful startup.
</Tip>

Understanding that the problem your business idea is solving is something that is ‘urgent’ or ‘not urgent’ for your customers should influence your decision. Does that mean that you should only try to solve ‘urgent, important’ problems? No. But if you do make a different choice, be aware that you have an extra job, either convincing your customers of importance, or convincing them of urgency.

<Tip>
    Not all customers are created equal, and there are often sub-segments of customers that do think the problem is both urgent and important. Finding those customers is something to focus on.
</Tip>

When using the Eisenhower Matrix for vetting startup ideas, think about the categories like this:

Problems that are **urgent and important** to your customer are things they can’t ignore and feel the impact from. This are things they will probably actively try to solve already, and they will most likely be interested and eager to learn about your solution. Since these customers will be active and vocal, it will probably be easier to find them and to talk to them.

<Example>
    We explored a product for a law firm that wanted to go online to help people whose driver’s license was revoked to expedite the process of getting it back. People need their car to go to work, so importance and urgency coincide. The fact that we could easily find search traffic online and were able to get a high conversion rate for our MVP proved this.
</Example>

Problems that are **important, but not urgent** are things that your customer might think they ought to do, and they might have taken some steps, such as finding information. They might still be mildly interested to hear your solution, but you should really focus on what is urgent to them, and how you can make them feel more urgency for the problem. This is the case with ‘latent needs’. You’ll need to convince the customer of the urgency.

<Example>
    We worked with a large dutch pension fund to figure out a way to convince their prospect customers of the urgency of investing in their pension, something they all said was important, but would only pay out 20-30 years from now.
</Example>

Problems that are **urgent, but not important**, are things your customer is probably less interested in, but due to the cognitive biases we humans have they might still respond more actively than with the ‘latent need’ category. This is the category of ‘impulse buys’, upsells, and add-ons. Things you don’t really need, but find yourself shell out for. If your solution is in this category, you’ll need to find a way to convince your customer of the importance of the problem.

<Example>
    There is tons of marketing out there that tries to trick you into thinking things are much more important than they really are, using fear, information overload, fear of missing out, and other cognitive biases. Of course, ethics comes into play here big time!
</Example>

Problems that are **neither important nor urgent** are the ‘duds’. It is generally very hard to even get people to hear you out on ideas solving problems in this category. People are simply not interested, or they don’t get it. That does not mean it’s a bad idea per se, or even that you should not pursue it; it just means that your job is much harder. Not only do you need to convince people that they have this problem and that it is important to solve it (i.e. if they don’t it has a negative impact on them), but you also have to convince them of the urgency.

<Example>
    Sadly, climate change falls in this category for many people. The negative impact of not solving this problem is unclear on a daily basis, the changes are gradual and opaque. The urgency is also not clear – the timescale involved is hard for people to deal with. To get people to start investing in this problem, you’ll need to create more urgency and show the impact it has on timescales that humans can understand.
</Example>

The steps below will help you use the matrix to to categorize your startup ideas.
<ImageMap image="/tools/A4 Eisenhower Matrix.png">
1 | Urgent & Important | This quadrant holds the most impactful tasks or problems. The ones you can’t ignore or postpone, that will have a big impact on your future. | 0.25, 0.25
2 | Urgent & Not Important | This quadrant holds tasks or problems that don’t have a big impact, but are urgent: you either have to deal with them now, or you won’t have the opportunity | 0.25, 0.75
3 | Not Urgent & Important | Things and problems that you still have time to think about, but will have a big impact. | 0.75, 0.25
4 | Not Urgent & Not Important | Things that are neither urgent nor important, they won’t have a big impact and you don’t have to deal with them right now. | 0.75, 0.75
</ImageMap>

<Steps title="Decision Making">
    <Step step="1" name="List tasks and activities">
        Start by putting together a list of things you want to categorize. For instance, a list of all the tasks and activities your startup has planned for the coming months. Ask each team member to come up with their own list. Write each task or activity on a single sticky note, but don’t stick them on the canvas just yet.
    </Step>
    <Step step="2" name="Map on the Canvas">
        <CheckList>
        [] Is it important? (What would happen if we don’t do this?)
        [] Is it urgent? (Can we do this later?)
        </CheckList>
    
        For each new sticky note, have the team member explain why they think it should go on that spot. Don’t have a discussion just now.
        
        <Tip>
        If you have notes that are ‘duplicates’, then either stick them on top of each other or leave them out – the person with the duplicate is allowed to move the sticky note.
        </Tip>
    </Step>
    <Step step="3" name="Silent Shuffle">
        Once all the notes are on the board, have the team go over the board and silently, so without discussing, move the sticky notes to where they think they should go. Try to enforce clear decisions, so no ‘in the middle’ stickies! Take 5 minutes to do this. Keep a clear eye out for the sticky notes that are disputed, e.g. they move around more than 2 times. Put these to the side of the board.
    </Step>
    <Step step="4" name="Finalize">
        Chances are, there will be some stickies that everyone agrees on. That’s great, we don’t have to spend more time on those. Then, there are some sticky notes that are on the side, and were disputed. Go over these one by one, and see if you can agree on either importance or urgency. Narrow down the options. Have the proponents of the different viewpoints make their case, and vote.
        
        You should end up with a board that has clear categories for each task or activity. Use the Eisenhower Matrix to define what to do with them:

        <CheckList>
        [] Do them
        [] Defer them (Schedule them for later)
        [] Delegate them
        [] Or Delete them
        </CheckList>

        <Canvas image="https://wrkshp-tools.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/A4_Eisenhower_Matrix__-_Decisions_370291e0c5.png"/>

    </Step>
    <Step step="5" name="Next Steps">
        A great way to increase efficiency in planning meetings is to use this canvas, and re-visit it from time to time. Some of the non-urgent things may have become urgent, some of the non-important things may have vanished altogether
    </Step>
</Steps>

<Steps title="Vetting Startup Ideas">
    <Step step="1" name="List Customer Problems">
        Start by putting together a list of customer problems. For each of the business ideas you’re vetting, write down the problem you’re solving for your customer. Ask each team member to come up with their own list. Write each task or activity on a single sticky note, but don’t stick them on the canvas just yet.
    </Step>
    <Step step="2" name="Map on the Canvas">
        <CheckList>
            [] Is it important? (What would happen if the problem isn’t solved?)
            [] Is it urgent? (What would happen if the solution is postponed?)
        </CheckList>
        Remember to step into the shoes of your customer while doing this! It’s about what is important and urgent **for them**!

        For each new sticky note, have the team member explain why they think it should go on that spot. Don’t have a discussion just now.

        If you have notes that are ‘duplicates’, then either stick them on top of each other or leave them out – the person with the duplicate is allowed to move the sticky note.
    </Step>
    <Step step="3" name="Silent Shuffle">
        Once all the notes are on the board, have the team go over the board and silently, so without discussing, move the sticky notes to where they think they should go. Try to enforce clear decisions, so no ‘in the middle’ stickies! Take 5 minutes to do this. Keep a clear eye out for the sticky notes that are disputed, e.g. they move around more than 2 times. Put these to the side of the board.
    </Step>
    <Step step="4" name="Finalize">
        Chances are, there will be some stickies that everyone agrees on. That’s great, we don’t have to spend more time on those. Then, there are some sticky notes that are on the side, and were disputed. Go over these one by one, and see if you can agree on either importance or urgency. Narrow down the options. Have the proponents of the different viewpoints make their case, and vote.

        Rather than voting, it is even better to find **evidence** coming from actual customers. Do an exploration experiment and ask them how they feel about these particular problems. Have them tell you if these problems are urgent or important.

        You should end up with a board that has clear categories for each business idea. Use the Eisenhower Matrix to define what to do with them:

        <CheckList>
        [] Clear Opportunities
        [] Latent Needs
        [] Impulse Buy
        [] Duds
        </CheckList>

        <Canvas image="https://wrkshp-tools.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/A4_Eisenhower_Matrix_-_Problems_0577b81dad.png"/>
    </Step>
    <Step step="5" name="Next Steps">
        Combining this with [Design Criteria](https://wrkshp.tools/tools/design-criteria-canvas) and the [Design Criteria Scorecard](https://medium.com/design-a-better-business/using-the-design-criteria-canvas-as-a-scorecard-to-evaluate-business-model-options-26ca4e292f2) makes this an even more powerful tool for vetting new startup and innovation ideas.
    </Step>
</Steps>


Use the Eisenhower Matrix to figure out what tasks to focus on – or to help you vet different startup ideas.

Eisenhower Matrix

## What is it and when should I use it?
The purpose of the experiment canvas is to design the right experiment at the right time, facilitating a team to have the right conversation. With the experiment canvas, it is easy to design a well-defined experiment.

Track the data immediately and write everything down, so that you can check afterward if you interpreted the results correctly.

<ImageMap image="/tools/A4 Experiment Canvas.png">
1 | Riskiest assumption | The assumption you want to validate | 0.3, 0.15
2 | Falsifiable hypothesis | A statement defining your hypothesis, the way you will know your assumption is valid or invalid. | 0.3, 0.6
3 | What actually happened | The results for each of the items in the hypothesis. | 0.7, 0.6
4 | Conclusion | The outcome of the experiment. | 0.9, 0.6
5 | Next steps | The next steps you take (pivot or persevere). | 0.8, 0.15
</ImageMap>

<Steps>
    <Step step="1" name="Select your Riskiest Assumption">
        Start with identifying the current Riskiest Assumption and describing it in a way that you want to test. What will it mean for your idea if this fails? How can you tell?
    </Step>
    <Step step="2" name="Define your Hypothesis">
        Specify a clear, falsifiable hypothesis and experiment setup. After running the experiment, check the results and plan your next steps.

        Your hypothesis is a statement you believe to be true about your riskiest assumption. Write it down before you run the experiment. It is too easy to change the conditions afterward to make the data fit, and this robs you of valuable insight.

        For this version of the canvas, the original hypothesis formula is extended so it is easier to make it quantifiable.

        **Hypothesis**: *'We believe, that (specific testable action) with at least (minimum number of respondents) selected from our (target audience) results in at least (percentage) responses like (what counts as a positive result) within (time frame).'*

        Each of the elements in brackets need to be quantified.

        It’s okay to use a bandwidth for this, as long as you specify it upfront. The metrics you define need to be actionable (i.e., they need to directly relate to the hypothesis) and accessible (i.e., you need to be able to see the results).

        Try to find benchmarks to define percentages, and allow for the fact that if you have small numbers of respondents, you will need quite large measurements to be sure. Look for large percentages.

        - **Specific testable action**: This is what you will do as your experiment. It usually ties in with the prototype and the method of your experiment. Examples are: get people to click on an online ad, run interviews, or have a user test.
        - **Minimum number of respondents**: You will need some lower bound on this. If you fail to meet that lower bound, you won't be able to get any results from your experiment. If you have an experiment with a clear yes/no answer, go for at least 30-50 people. More is better.
        - **Target audience**: The group of people you will select from. Also think about how you will select them. Is it random? Or do they already know you?
        - **Percentage positive results**: The percentage above which you will define the experiment outcome as validating your assumption. When talking to people, try to go for larger percentages (>50%). If you have an online experiment, try to find a conversion benchmark, and aim for at least double.
        - **What defines a positive result**: The type of answer or customer behaviour you count as a positive result. In the best experiments, it is a commitment the customer gives. This can be a small commitment, such as giving their email address or showing up at a meeting, or a larger one such as giving access to network, or actually buying a product or service. The stronger the commitment, the more significant the result. This aspect is linked to the protocol you define.
    </Step>
    <Step step="3" name="Define a Protocol">
        Having a good protocol to run the experiment is key to quality results. It's a complete science to do this right, but for our purposes it is sufficient to just avoid the biggest mistakes.

        <CheckList>
        [] Create a Google Sheet accessible to all the team members that will run the experiment.
        [] Create a uniform list of questions or observations. Include some questions to establish rapport with your respondent.
        [] Define how you will demonstrate prototypes, and ask questions. How long will the experiment take?
        [] Define how you will score the results. E.g. when your respondent volunteers they have a certain problem, that counts as 5 points. When they only acknowledge it when you ask about it, it's just 1 point. For a prototype, the amount of time the respondent is engaged could be part of the score, or the number of features they tried out.
        [] Make sure your scores are meaningful.
        [] Define how you select respondents
        [] Define how you'll tally up the score, and what score will mean the interview or demonstration counts as positive. Specify any qualitative outcomes and variables. What different answers you are expecting? How will you cluster them?
        </CheckList>
    </Step>
    <Step step="4" name="Build the experiment">
        Here, you'll need to come up with the questions or prototypes you need in detail.
        
        The materials you'll create fall broadly in three categories: interviews, offline prototypes, and online prototypes.
        
        You rarely need to test a technical prototype at this stage. In most cases, if it actually works in reality only becomes interesting after you have made sure people are waiting for it. So when we say 'prototype' we really mean something that looks ‘just real enough’ that customers are able to react to it in a meaningful way. And when we say 'just real enough' that is really telling you to do the bare minimum. No difficult branding exercises, technical setups, or scalable solutions!
        
        Never forget the golden rule: KEEP IT SIMPLE!
    </Step>
    <Step step="5" name="Run the Experiment and Collect Data">
        Ok, so you have an experiment setup. Now it's time to get out there and collect the data. Use the protocol to your advantage! Make sure you record everything of value (and use for instance a google sheet to fill in the data).
    </Step>
    <Step step="6" name="Interpret the Data">
        Once all the data is in, it's time to go over it. Get your team together and score the data. For qualitative experiments, have a look at the Experiment Outcome Canvas also included.
    </Step>
    <Step step="7" name="Draw conclusions">
        Once you have your data all interpreted and scored, it's time for conclusions. Get your scores together and compare what you got with the hypothesis you setup.

        <CheckList>
        [] Do you have enough respondents?
        [] Are the respondents in the right target group?
        [] Are the respondents diverse enough?
        [] Did you get enough positive scores?
        </CheckList>

        If you can answer 'yes' to all of them, then you'll have a validated assumption. If you can answer 'yes' to the first three points, but didn't get enough positive scores (the last point), you'll have invalidated the assumption. If you can't answer points 1-3 with 'yes', you'll likely have a botched experiment, and the result is inconclusive.
    </Step>
    <Step step="8" name="Next Steps: Pivot, redo, or persevere">
        Ok, you've got your conclusions. Time to act on them. There are three paths forward:

        - **Validated**: You can persevere. Pick your next Riskiest Assumption and do an experiment to validate it.
        - **Invalidated**: You'll likely need to pivot. Go back to the drawing board and see how you can modify your idea armed with this new knowledge about your Riskiest Assumption.
        - **Inconclusive**: You'll need to take a hard look at your experiment. Did you perform it right? Did you have the right setup? The right hypothesis?        
    </Step>
</Steps>

The experiment canvas helps you design the right experiment at the right time. With this canvas, it is easy to design a well-defined experiment.

Experiment Canvas

## What is it and when should I use it?
As a startup founder, the Lean Startup methodology tells you that you should be running experiments all the time. You should be out validating your idea, problem-solution fit, and product market fit.

In theory, this makes total sense. In practice, however, it can be quite difficult to make sense of the results of your experiments. Especially in the early stages, when you are running qualitative experiments, it is hard. First of all, you need a way to collect and share the information you received with your team. And, even more important, how are you going to draw conclusions from the results?

People tend to focus on the interviews they have conducted themselves. They notice the things that they already agree with, or have noticed before. This leads to a **strong confirmation bias**. The method you use should be able to deal with this.

Initial interviews are necessarily exploratory in nature. At this point, the team can’t really know in detail what they are looking for. There won’t always be a clear script to follow, and the answers are varied.

You simply can’t follow the approach that would be used for a large scale survey and use statistics. The low number of responses and the unstructured nature of the results make that impossible. This makes it very difficult to make a clear ‘validated or invalidated’ decision.

From a statistical point of view your results are a complete waste of time. But at the same time, they are a treasure trove of information about your customers.

## How to fix it?
So, what can be done? How can we explore qualitative interview results in a workshop setting in a meaningful way? A way that is as objective as possible? How can we extract as much useful information from the interviews as possible?

- **Homework**: First, going over the results in detail is required. That takes more time than you generally have in a workshop. So, first of all, homework is required. Doing time-consuming and sometimes expensive interviews and then avoiding to dive into the results is a total waste. If the team is prepared to interview 10 people, then they should also be prepared to read all the results before going into the workshop. Only looking at your own results means you’ll open the door to extra confirmation bias.
- **Framework**: Second, a framework is needed to organize the results. The Experiment Result Canvas below was created as one (highly effective) way of doing that.

<ImageMap image="/tools/A4 Experiment Outcome Canvas.png">
1 | Quotes and Stories | Actual quotes, answers and stories your respondents gave you. | 0.4, 0.1
2 | Perceived problem | How respondents experience the problem you want to solve. | 0.4, 0.25
3 | Perceived needs | What respondents tell you about what they think they need. | 0.4, 0.37
4 | Behaviour | What respondents have already done in the past to deal with the problem. | 0.4, 0.5
5 | Your observations | What observations were made by the interviewer? | 0.4, 0.65
6 | Your conclusions | What conclusions did they draw? | 0.4, 0.77
7 | Next steps | What follow up questions would you like to ask? What other things would you like to know? | 0.4, 0.9
</ImageMap>

<Steps>
    <Step step="1" name="Quotes and stories">
        The first category is filled with raw quotes and stories selected from interviews.
    </Step>
    <Step step="2" name="Perceived problem, perceived needs, and behaviour">
        The second category splits results in information about the respondent’s perceived problem (how they experience the problem you want to solve), their perceived needs (what they tell you about what they think they need), and their actual behaviour (what they have already done in the past to deal with the problem).
        
        This distinction is important, because it is so easy to pick up only on what you’d like the respondent to answer to your question. It’s so easy to hear that they like your solution, or that they really need it. But that information is close to worthless. (They’re probably lying — or being polite).
        
        Solutions and opinions volunteered by respondents, telling you how they might solve the problem in the future, are also close to worthless information. People don’t know what they will or won’t do in the future, and they have a very difficult time predicting their own feelings.
        
        The thing to look for is behaviour. Have they actually experienced the problem in the past, and did it bother them enough that they actually found or tried to find a solution for it? That is what you need to hear if you’re looking for information coming from early interviews. It’s much harder to ‘be polite’ about actual behaviour. It’s the actions that count, not the words and opinions.
        
        Sticking this information in separate boxes means it is all there, but it’s organized in an ‘evidence pecking order’. The behaviour box is the most important one. But, if a lot of people say the same things, or have the same opinions, you might want to run a separate experiment based on that and see if their actions reflect those opinions.
    </Step>
    <Step step="3" name="Your observations and conclusions">
        The third category can be filled with the interviewer’s notes. What observations were made by the interviewer? What conclusions did they draw?

        It is important to keep this information separate so that it won’t get mixed with the results coming from the respondents.
        
        It’s great to collect these observations, and they may help you a lot, but they are your observations. They are something that you added — and therefore, based on what you already knew before you conducted that interview. They reflect your view of the world and your biases more than anything else.
    </Step>
    <Step step="4" name="Next Steps">
        Finally, there is space for next steps. What follow up questions would you like to ask? What other things would you like to know?

        This tool can be used as a guideline to structure unstructured interview results, and to cluster results together. You can use it to prepare for the workshop and pre-process your interview results. In that way, you can use your time in the workshop to make sense of the results, and, once you have done that, vote—but in an effective way.

        Now at least, if you do place your dot vote sticker next to an interesting behaviour, it’ll be clear that that is much more valuable than a vote for your own observation or opinion

        You can more or less see from where the dots are on this canvas if they are more likely to be influenced by confirmation bias.

        Finally, using this tool can help to compare results over time coming from different interview settings with different formats.
    </Step>
</Steps>

The Experiment Results Canvas helps you to make sense of the outcomes of a qualitative experiment in a workshop setting.

Experiment Results Canvas

## What is it and when should I use it?

Coming up with a vision statement and ‘rallying cry’ is often the hardest part of defining your vision. To do it, start with the following exercise, using the Golden Circle Canvas based on [Simon Sinek’s Golden Circle](https://www.ted.com/talks/simon_sinek_how_great_leaders_inspire_action?language=en).

<ImageMap image="/tools/A4 Golden Circle Canvas.png">
1 | What? | The concrete activities you are employing. | 0.5, 0.92
2 | How? | How you do those activities. | 0.5, 0.72
3 | Why? | Why you do those activities. The reason your organization exists. | 0.5, 0.46
</ImageMap>

<Steps>
    <Step step="1" name="Collect">
        Put the Golden Circle canvas on the wall, and hand your team a stack of post it notes. Set an alarm for 5–10 minutes. Ask the team to come up with things that define the company in the future state (1, 2 or 5 years in the future). Ask them to write down as many things as they can come up with that they find important about the company or the product on post-it notes.
    </Step>
    <Step step="2" name="Categorize">
        Once the timer rings, have each team member stick post-its on the Golden Circle canvas. Try to categorize what they came up with in ‘What’, ‘How’, and ‘Why’. If there are similar post-its, cluster them together (skip identical ideas).
    </Step>
    <Step step="3" name="Ask 5x 'Why?'">
        Now that you’ve filled the Golden Circle canvas like this, take a step back. Look at your canvas, and try to see if there is a balance between ‘What’, ‘How’, and ‘Why’ post-its. Chances are, there will be a lot more ‘What’ and ‘How’ post-its than ‘Why’ post-its.

        Go over the different post-its and use the ‘5x Why’ approach to get to the deeper reasons that you find them important. Start with ‘Why is this post-it important?’, and keep drilling down, asking for the deeper reasons. Add the new answers to the Golden Circle.
    </Step>
    <Step step="4" name="Next Steps">
        The Golden Circle reflects your current ideas about your idea or startup. It can change, so revisit it every so often.

        <CheckList>
        [] You have sanitized the post-its and removed all the less important or duplicate ones
        [] You have asked 5x Why on the most important post-its
        [] You have checked your canvas with people that were not in the meeting – do they understand it?
        </CheckList>
    </Step>
</Steps>


Coming up with a vision statement and ‘rallying cry’ is often the hardest part of defining your vision. The Golden Circle canvas helps you take the first steps.

Golden Circle Canvas

## What is it and when should I use it?

Perhaps this sounds familiar: you pickup your phone to look something up or use an app, but 10 minutes later you find out you totally forgot about that and have been scrolling Instagram or Whatsapp instead. These are great examples where apps have ‘hacked’ your habits in such a way that you come back to them almost subconsciously.

<Quote author="Nir Eyal">
79 percent of smartphone owners check their device within 15 minutes of waking up every morning.
</Quote>

For these apps, this is a great thing. And it can feel great for customers, too. Acting on habits can feel relaxing and rewarding.

The Habit Designer can help you to create ‘habit loops’ in your own products and services.

This is important for three reasons.

<CheckList>
[] Lowering Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)
[] Increasing Customer Lifetime Value (CLTV)
[] Blocking competition
</CheckList>

First of all, the success of your business depends for a big part on the number of people you can convince to become customers. After all, this is likely how you generate revenue.

To convince a customer, you need to bring them from a state of blissful oblivion about your product or service to where they are ready to shell out their hard-earned cash.

In doing so, there are big hurdles to overcome. They need to be aware of a need for your product, find it, and, importantly, trust it enough to purchase it, to name but a few.

It will cost you (money, time, energy) to help them overcome these hurdles. This represents the Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC). To be successful, the amount of revenue your customer generates (Customer Lifetime Value) will need to be higher than the CAC.

And it’s not just about people buying your product once: looking at the [Pirate Metrics](https://wrkshp.tools/tools/pirate-metrics-canvas) Funnel, Retention and Referrals are just as important as Revenue. It is much more expensive to convince a customer that first time than it is to get them to come back after a good experience. Getting a customer to come back requires much less work: they already know your product and have experienced its quality first hand. A lot of the hurdles mentioned above have been cleared already. And it becomes even better if your customers start referring your product to others: they will be actively helping you to convince new people by increasing trust.

<Quote author="Nir Eyal">
Users who continually find value in a product are more likely to tell their friends about it.
</Quote>

The benefits are huge. It is estimated that a 5% increase in retention (i.e. 5% more returning customers) can drive an increase in profit of up to 70%.

So, how do you get people to become a repeat customer?

The first thing to understand is that your product or service needs to be good, meaning that it fulfils your customers’ needs. But the real keyword is trust. People need to trust you and your product before they spend money on it. And people tend to trust what they know.

When they have had a good experience, they trust that the next experience with your product will also be good. When they don’t have that experience yet, they will rely on other things to indicate trustworthiness: the opinions of their friends, people reviewing the product, authorities or celebrities endorsing the product. This is what a lot of marketing relies on. But, nothing beats personal experience.

Giving people positive experiences with the product is key. Start creating small habits that give people rewarding experiences. If people have fun, and their reward systems are stimulated, they come back. The more they come back, the more they trust your service, and the more likely they are to take the plunge and buy your product or service.

<Quote author="Nir Eyal">
As customers form routines around a product, they come to depend upon it and become less sensitive to price.
</Quote>

Once people are habitually using your product, it becomes much harder for competitors to convince them to switch. Your customers spend more time with your product, and that leaves little time to look for competing products; besides, they feel they are satisfied with your product and don’t need to switch.

## What is a Habit Loop?
In his book ‘[The Power of Habit](https://amzn.to/31wQhH9)’, Charles Duhigg defines the components of a habit loop:

<CheckList>
[] A Cue (or Trigger) that starts the loop,
[] A Routine (or Action) that is performed in response to the trigger,
[] A Reward that is the result of the routine.
[] A Craving that drives the loop and reinforces it
</CheckList>

The Reward triggers the dopamine neurotransmitter in our brain, which helps us learn. In effect, it teaches us that the Action was the correct response to the Trigger, reinforcing the likelihood of performing that action the next time the trigger appears. This is called conditioning.

All humans are motivated to seek pleasure and avoid pain, to seek hope and avoid fear, and finally, to seek social acceptance and avoid rejection.

The interesting thing is that this conditioning moves the dopamine reward forward, to where it happens even *before* the Routine. The dopamine response to the reward creates a Craving to receive that reward again, and – in effect – to *look for the cue* associated with the reward.

This system mostly works great. It helps us to learn many things, the right rewards conditioning us for a variety of behaviours, such as to eat when hungry, study to get good grades, and be friendly to other people. But it can also be hacked. You can reward people for any behaviour you want! The proof is smartphone addiction: if you think about it it is ridiculous we all spend hours every day staring at a tiny screen.

It turns out that it is very difficult to create new habits that require a big change in behaviour, but that it is much easier to change, ‘hack’, or build on existing habits.

For inspiration, have a look at successful gamified apps such as Duolingo.

In the definition of a habit loop given above one piece is still missing: the Investment. What is a customer willing to do or spend to keep this loop going. What does their ‘craving’ cost them? This is something that can be very important to your business.

<ImageMap image="/tools/A4 Habit Designer.png">
1 | Trigger | A trigger or stimulus that starts the loop. | 0.2, 0.5
2 | Action | The action that the user performs in response to the trigger. | 0.5, 0.2
3 | Reward | The reward that is the result of the routine. | 0.8, 0.5
4 | Investment | The investment your user makes to be part of the loop | 0.5, 0.8
5 | Craving | A ‘craving’ the user develops that drives the loop and reinforces it. | 0.5, 0.5
</ImageMap>

<Steps>
    <Step step="1" name="Find existing habits">
        The first step is to look at the habits your customers already have. The reason is, it is much harder to remove habits or create new habits than it is to change existing ones slightly.
        
        <Quote author="Charles Duhigg">
        The Golden Rule of Habit Change: You can't extinguish a bad habit, you can only change it.
        </Quote>
        
        Try to find the current ‘habitual users’ of your product. How many of your customers fall in this category? What is the pattern you see in their behaviour? Look for what Nir Eyal calls the ‘Habit Path’, a series of similar actions shared by your most loyal users.

        <Quote author="Nir Eyal">
        You’re looking for the ‘Habit Path’, a series of similar actions shared by your most loyal users.
        </Quote>

        If you do not have a product yet, you can also look at other things: what does your customer’s day look like ([Customer Journey](https://wrkshp.tools/tools/customer-journey-canvas))? What other products are they using, and how do they do that? What are the things they already do?
        
        Using sticky notes, plan out your customers timeline, just as you would in the Customer Journey (You can use the customer journey template). Pay special attention to things that people do every day, and try to identify habits.
        
        Look for ‘keystone habits’, the habits that matter the most. These are the habits that influence how people work, eat, live, play, spend, and communicate.
    </Step>
    <Step step="1" name="Map existing habits">
        Using the Habit Designer template, map out the existing habit. Find the Cue, Routine, and Reward. What is the investment people make? How often do they do this? And how do they feel afterward?  What is the underlying craving?
        
        Map out 3-5 current habits. These will form the basis of new habits.
        
        <Tip>
        Sometimes the investment is just the time they spend
        </Tip>
    </Step>
    <Step step="1" name="Hack the Habit">
        Next up is creating the habit you need. As said, it is difficult to create a totally new habit, and easier to change or hack an existing habit.

        <Quote author="Charles Duhigg">
        Rather, to change a habit, you must keep the old cue, and deliver the old reward, but insert a new routine
        </Quote>

        There are three ways to do this:

        <CheckList>
        [] Before the trigger: Pre-emption
        [] During the action: Redirection
        [] After the action: Chaining
        </CheckList>

        You can try to insert your own trigger just before or at the start of the existing trigger. You can try to come up  with a new action for the trigger. Or, and this is the easiest one, you can use Chaining, and add the new action after the existing action.

        For your selected current habit, try to see if you might insert or emphasize a trigger that occurs just before the trigger that is driving the current habit. Try to figure out if there is a way to prompt your users to perform a different action. Or try to see if you can prompt them to piggyback a new action at the end of their routine.

        Over time, your ‘hack’ can grow and even take over and replace the old habit.

        <Tip>
        In each case, try to come up with a ‘nudge’ to change the current behaviour, rather than a radical change.
        </Tip>
    </Step>
    <Step step="4" name="Hack the reward">
        When designing a new habit, it is very important to look at the reward that drives the conditioning.
        
        One thing to remember when designing habit loops is that reinforcement is stronger when there is a smaller distance between the Cue, Routine, and Reward. Think about breaking Routines that take longer into smaller pieces, and rewarding these subroutines. Instant gratification is king. Many small rewards strung together work better than one big one in the distant future.

        The strongest kind of reward is the variable reward. The human brain is very susceptible to variable rewards, and will tend to make a bigger Investment if it has a shot (even a tiny shot) at a huge reward, even when the expected reward is small. As an example look at lotteries and gambling addiction, but also at popular online games where ‘lootboxes’ drive a big part of the game.
        
        <Warning>
        Variable rewards are a powerful weapon. Handle with care.
        </Warning>
    </Step>
    <Step step="5" name="Next Steps">
        Put your habit loop in practice, and monitor the result. It really helps to measure the transitions between each of the stages so you can see how many people were triggered, how often they responded with the action, and how many then get the reward and come back.
        
        Try to define experiments to make your loop stronger. Remove friction, change the reward, or break it into smaller pieces. Build new habit loops on top of your existing loops.
        
        Keep track of your experiment results and improve your loop.
    </Step>
</Steps>

Increase sales, satisfaction, and retention by designing the primary interactions your customers have with your product or service as habits.

Habit Designer

## What is it and when should I use it?
*'Ikigai'* is Japanese for *'a reason for being'*, which can be loosely translated as *'purpose'*.

The Ikigai exercise can help you to define your personal perspective, by asking yourself four key questions. The questions to answer are: ‘what do you love?’, ‘what are you good at?’, ‘what can you be paid for?’, and ‘what does the world need?’. By answering them and mapping the results in the Ikigai canvas, you see if there are any entries that are closer to the center of the diagram. If there are things you love and are good at, for instance, they end up in the part of the diagram where those two circles overlap. Try to find out if there is anything that you came up with that is the answer to all four questions.

The tool classifies algorithms into five categories:

If you get stuck doing this, simply go over all the different things you have done in your life, plus things you’d love to do, and see where they end up in the circle. Find inspiration in what other people in the world are doing.

<ImageMap image="/tools/A4 Ikigai Canvas.png">
1 | What you’re good at | What are you good at? What are skills and talents you have? What do you have experience doing? | 0.3, 0.55
2 | What the world needs | What are things the world (or people in it) need? What are the problems that need solving? | 0.7, 0.55
3 | What you love | What do you love to do or experience? What are the things that make you happy? | 0.5, 0.25
4 | What you can be paid for | What are the things you can make money with? Things you can do or create that you can get paid for? | 0.5, 0.9
5 | Your Passion | Things that you are good at and love to do are probably things you are passionate about. | 0.4, 0.4
6 | Your Mission | Things you love to do that are also what the world needs are things you could see as your mission. | 0.6, 0.4
7 | Your Profession | Things that you are good at and can get paid for are candidates for your profession. | 0.4, 0.6
8 | Your Vocation | Things you can be paid for that are also what the world needs are your vocation. | 0.6, 0.6
9 | Your Ikigai | Your ikigai is what is your personal intersection of what you are good at, what the world needs, what you can be paid for, and what you love to do. | 0.5, 0.55
</ImageMap>

<Steps>
    <Step step="1" name="Collect">
        Sit down, and for each of the four outer circles, come up with 3-5 items. If you get stuck, ask yourself: what would somebody else answer about me? Or, simply ask someone that knows you well. Stick these on your canvas.
    </Step>
    <Step step="2" name="Connect">
        Try to see if there are any items you already put down that can be placed on the overlap of any of the large circles.

        Then, go over the overlapping circles that are still empty and try to see if you can combine items that you already have to fill them. Of course, if you come up with new items that is also fine, just make sure that they are really what you feel and are comfortable with.
    </Step>
    <Step step="3" name="Ikigai">
        Try to connect items further until you have something that can be placed in the center. Perhaps you didn't find it yet, if so, go back to step 1 and try to talk to close friends and relatives about what they think you are good at, can make money with, etc.
    </Step>
    <Step step="4" name="Check">
        Check your Ikigai, first with yourself. Is this really something that feels right for all four aspects? Is there nothing else that could take its place? If you aren't completely sure, come back to it a few days later and repeat the exercise. Then, check it with close friends and relatives. Do they agree?
    </Step>
    <Step step="5" name="Next Steps">
        Keep revisiting your Ikigai. What has changed?
    </Step>
</Steps>

The Ikigai exercise can help you to define your personal perspective, by asking yourself four key questions.

Ikigai Canvas

## What is it and when should I use it?

Ever since Clayton Christensen’s iconic [‘Milkshake Video’](https://vimeo.com/235555189) his ‘Job to be Done’ framework has earned its place in the innovator’s toolbox. Thinking about what your customer is trying to achieve as a way to define your value proposition just makes a lot of sense, instinctively.

<Quote author="Clayton Christensen">
What job are you trying to hire this milkshake for?
</Quote>

But how do you actually define that elusive Job to be Done? What *is* the job your customer tries to achieve? And how do you get more insight in it?

Service designers have used different approaches to this same problem. Looking at your customer through the lens of anthropology, documenting the thinking process and activities they go through in detail helps a lot to get intimately familiar with what drives your customer, but can take a large investment of time and requires experts.

Visualizing the ‘customer journey’ with a customer journey canvas or diagram helps a team to develop a common understanding of what drives a customer. The inviting blank page of the customer journey exercise is deceptive, however. Many teams run into problems as they try to figure out where to start, how to agree on a scope, and how to subdivide the different activities.

The Job Map as developed by [Tony Ulwick](https://jobs-to-be-done.com/mapping-the-job-to-be-done-45336427b3bc)  provides an intermediate approach. When analyzing customer activity, it turns out that they tend to go through the same sequence of eight steps, whatever they are trying to achieve.  This sequence can be used as both a handhold in detailing the Job to be Done and a checklist to make sure all the important stages have been addressed.

### The Eight Stages of the Job Map

The stages Tony Ulwick defines in his Job Map are:

0. **Define**: The customer defines what they are trying to achieve. For instance, they might notice they have a problem and decide to solve it.
1. **Locate**: The customer locates more information and resources to support what they are trying to achieve.
2. **Prepare**: The customer prepares the environment to start executing.
3. **Confirm**: The customer confirms they have everything that is needed to start executing.
4. **Execute**: The customer starts executing the task.
5. **Monitor**: The customer monitors the execution of the task to see if they are making progress.
6. **Modify**: If necessary, the customer modifies how they are executing the task.
7. **Conclude**: The customer decides that the task has been completed.

Not *all* the steps in this sequence are explicitly necessary or very elaborate, but in most cases they can all be found when looking at any customer journey or job to be done. Note that some steps might be part of a ‘loop’ in the sequence, or have links back to an earlier stage.

### The Job Map Canvas

To help with mapping out Jobs to be Done, I have created the Job Map Canvas, based on this universal sequence of steps (and the implicit loops). Going from left to right, you will see the same sequence of steps. I have further divided this in three stages: preparation, execution, and conclusion.

<Tip>
It may be interesting to notice that the ‘Execute, Monitor, Modify’ loop in the diagram is very similar to the ‘Build, Measure, Learn’ loop in the Lean Startup.
</Tip>

<ImageMap image="/tools/A4 Job Map Canvas.png">
1 | Define | Define goals | 0.14, 0.5
2 | Locate | Locate resources | 0.28, 0.3
3 | Prepare | Prepare the environment | 0.28, 0.6
4 | Confirm | Confirm you have everything needed to execute | 0.43, 0.5
5 | Execute | Execute the task | 0.57, 0.6
6 | Monitor | Monitor the execution of the task | 0.71, 0.5
7 | Modify | Modify the approach if necessary | 0.57, 0.3
8 | Conclude | Take the steps needed to finish the task | 0.85, 0.5
</ImageMap>

<Steps>
    <Step step="1" name="Setup">
        To start designing your Job to be Done, you will need to have an idea of the tasks your customers want to solve (or at the very least have your own assumptions of what these tasks are – which will need to be validated!)

        Ask yourself: what is the problem customers are trying to solve? Are all of my customers similar? Or are they in different groups?

        With the team, come up with 1-3 different customers from your customer segments. For each of these customers, stick a large sheet of paper (or the Job Map Canvas) on a wall. Clearly write the name of your customer on the sheet.

        <Tip>
        Use the [Personas Canvas](https://wrkshp.tools/tools/persona-canvas) to make your customers more specific.
        </Tip>

        For each of these customers, we want to come up with problems they are trying to solve. Hand out sticky notes to the team, and ask team members to (silently!) write 3-5 problems to solve per customer. This will take 3-5 minutes.
        
        Once everyone is done, have them stick their sticky notes next to the appropriate Job Map Canvas. Don’t stick them on the canvas just yet!
    </Step>
    <Step step="2" name="Organize">
        Go over each of the customers and look at the list of sticky notes that has been created. What jumps out at you? Are the ideas clear? Do you understand the problem? If anything is unclear, add (or replace!) sticky notes.
    </Step>
    <Step step="3" name="Map">
        The next step is to start mapping the stickies onto the Job Map Canvas. Try to organize the stickies you have in the correct stages. Are they about execution? About preparation?
        
        In many cases, people have a good idea of what someone might do to ‘fix’ their problem, i.e. the ‘execution’ step, but there is not a lot of information in the other steps.
    </Step>
    <Step step="4" name="Fill the Blanks">

        1. **Define**: How does your customer define their goals? What might these goals be? How do customers know they have a problem?
        2. **Locate**: How and where do customers look for information? What resources do they look for? What resources are they not aware of yet? What are their trusted channels?
        3. **Prepare**: What do customers do to prepare for execution?
        4. **Confirm**: How do customers know they are ready to execute? Do they make the correct assessment?
        5. **Execute**: What do customers do when they execute? How do they start?
        6. **Monitor**: What do customers do to monitor progress? How often do they do that? How do they know if execution is going in the right direction?
        7. **Modify**: What modification steps do customers take in response to monitoring? Are these the most effective steps? How do they know?
        8. **Conclude**: When do customers decide the task is finished? What activities do they do to wrap up? How do they feel?

        <Tip>
        Look for missing steps or steps where many customers fail or get sidetracked.
        </Tip>

        <Tip>
        Typically, customers have only a very implicit idea about the steps ‘prepare’, ‘confirm’, and ‘monitor’. These steps, however, tend to have a large impact on the success. For instance, not monitoring progress correctly can make it seem a task never ends. How can you help them to make this easier and reduce dropoff?
        </Tip>

        <Tip>
        Take a hint from the customer journey canvas and describe how customers feel at each of the steps. Where are they ‘underserved’?
        </Tip>
    </Step>
    <Step step="5" name="Next Steps">
        As always, facts and data beat assumptions and anecdotal evidence. Where do you have solid data? Mark these places in your map. Where do you need more evidence? What steps might you take to get this data? Try to run experiments to fill in missing details or confirm (or falsify) your assumptions.
        
        Once you have a solid foundation, the Job Map can help you figure out your value proposition in more detail. What are the steps you previously ignored? What are steps where you can make a big difference?
    </Step>
</Steps>

Thinking about what your customer is trying to achieve as a way to define your value proposition just makes a lot of sense, instinctively. But how do you actually define that elusive Job to be Done? The Job Map Canvas can help!

Job Map Canvas

## What is it and when should I use it?

In your startup journey, there is a lot of uncertainty. Is your idea good enough? Do people really like your proposition? Can you reach the right customer segment? These are but a few of all the questions you’ll run across.

The Landing Page Canvas is useful when you have decided to run an **online experiment** that you need a Landing Page for. Typical examples are a ‘smoke test’ experiment, where you want to see if a certain value proposition gets any attention from potential customers, or a pricing experiment, where you want to validate different prices with potential customers.

<Tip>
More types of experiments you can run can be found in the [Experiment Cheatsheet](https://wrkshp.tools/experiment-cheatsheet) and the [Experiment Cookbook](https://shop.wrkshp.tools/experiment-cookbook).
</Tip>

<Example>
[This article](https://wrkshp.tools/blog/what-lean-experiment-to-run) contains a number of insights to get you going when you’re starting out with your first experiments.
</Example>

Before you start designing a Landing Page, it makes sense to have a look at your risky assumptions with the [Riskiest Assumption Canvas](https://wrkshp.tools/tools/riskiest-assumption-canvas) and to define an [Experiment Canvas](https://wrkshp.tools/tools/experiment-canvas), so that you’re completely clear on what you want to test.

<Tip>
The steps below will help you set up your landing page, but to successfully launch and run the experiment you might need a bit more. A detailed writeup of how to run a landing page experiment, how to collect the results, and how to interpret them can be found in [this article](https://medium.com/wrkshp/experiment-recipe-landing-page-d51407748e2).
</Tip>

<ImageMap image="https://wrkshp-tools.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/A4_Landing_Page_Canvas_6d103a7c6f.png">
1 | Experiment | What hypothesis do you want to test with this landing page? And how will you know it’s a success? | 0.25, 0.1428
2 | Key Image | Add an interesting and descriptive image for your experimental value proposition. | 0.5, 0.1428
3 | Main CTA | What do you want people to do after they see this landing page? | 0.75, 0.1428
4 | Features | What features do you expect people to respond to the most? | 0.5, 0.286
5 | Examples | What examples do you have to explain to people what you’re offering? | 0.5, 0.429
6 | Proof | What proof do you have for what you claim to do? Do you have testimonials? | 0.5, 0.571
7 | Signup Form | What is on your signup form? Where do the signups go? | 0.25, 0.714
8 | Pricing Table | What different pricing levels do you offer? What features are linked to them? | 0.75, 0.714
9 | Analytics | What are you going to measure? And how will you measure it? | 0.25, 0.857
10 | Traffic | How will people find your landing page? How will you direct traffic towards it? | 0.5, 0.857
11 | Footer | What is going to be in the footer? Do you need contact details? Disclaimers? Legal information? | 0.75, 0.857
</ImageMap>

<Steps>
    <Step step="1" name="Prepare">
        Before you start, make sure of the following:
        - You have defined a [Riskiest Assumption Canvas](https://wrkshp.tools/tools/riskiest-assumption-canvas) and/or [Experiment Canvas](https://wrkshp.tools/tools/experiment-canvas) that defines what you want to achieve with your landing page.
        - Using the information from these canvases you can also estimate the cost for your experiment using the [Experiment Cost Calculator](https://wrkshp.tools/interactive-tools/experiment-cost-calculator).
        - You have (or know how to get) access to a large enough number of people that will interact with your landing page. Do you have for instance people on an email list that you can reach? Or existing customers? Or will you have to be creative to get people to see your new page? The [Experiment Cookbook](https://shop.wrkshp.tools/experiment-cookbook) has tips on how to do this.
        - You have access to hosting or a landing page tool such as e.g. Squarespace (see below for all the options)
        - You have defined your Value Proposition for this experiment, e.g. with the [Value Proposition Canvas](https://designabetterbusiness.tools/tools/value-proposition-canvas).

        In your war room, stick the big printout on the wall or draw the canvas on a big sheet of flip over paper. Set aside 30-45 minutes with your team.

        Stick the key items from the [Experiment Canvas](https://wrkshp.tools/tools/experiment-canvas) in the top left corner. Copy the hypothesis and the riskiest assumption.

        <Warning>
        This is an experiment! It’s not about your ‘final product’. Remind yourself of the hypothesis you’re testing while defining the Landing Page. If you don’t do that, you risk drifting towards making a page about your ‘final product’ instead of one that really tests your hypothesis.
        </Warning>
        
        Remember that you’ll be able to change the page at any time. Things that help you prove or disprove the hypothesis take center stage, everything else should be omitted if possible.
    </Step>
    <Step step="2" name="Key Image and Call to Action">
        Go back to your Value Proposition and extract the key items for your value proposition. This is the hardest part of the canvas, so don’t be afraid to iterate on this.
    
        <Tip>
        Based on what you already did, start with your ‘best guess’ and come back to it when you are a bit further along in the canvas. You’ll probably get more or clearer ideas while doing that.
        </Tip>
    
        Once you have defined the key elements, try to come up with ideas for images that you could use to show this value proposition to people that have never heard of it. Take some inspiration from other landing pages.
    
        <Tip>
        Take some inspiration from other landing pages. [Google ‘best landing pages’](https://lmgtfy.com/?q=best+landing+pages) or [click here](https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/landing-page-examples-list) for examples curated by Hubspot.
        </Tip>
    
        When you have an idea for a top image, start thinking of your main call to action. Refer back to your Experiment Canvas, and see what kind of output you need to validate or invalidate your experiment. This should inform your main Call to Action (CTA). Come up with a text for your call to action as well as a reason for people to signup.
    
        <Example>
        If you have defined an experiment that requires users to signup to an email list as a key metric to validate interest in a product, then your call to action should trigger people to signup. An example of a CTA would be ‘sign up now!’. The ‘reason’ for people to sign up is your hypothesis of why they would sign up. It could be: “I want to know more about this product and stay up to date!” or “I want to be the first to know about it when this product becomes available”. Or even: “I want to sign up so I can get a discount.”
        </Example>
        
        <Tip>
        Use the [Eisenhower Matrix](https://wrkshp.tools/tools/eisenhower-matrix) or the [Customer Need Canvas](https://wrkshp.tools/tools/customer-need-canvas) to explore the reasons why your customers might be interested in the Call to Action.
        </Tip>
    </Step>
    <Step step="3" name="Key Features">
        Now that you have created your main image and CTA, spend some time to come up with 3 features that really showcase your product to users. What are the most interesting features? What have they already told you? What features do you need to test for your experiment?
        
        The ‘Product’ here is just what you want to show as an experiment. It does not need to reflect your final product; it could for instance be a particular mix of features you want to test.
        
        For each feature, come up with a variation on the call to action.
        
        <Tip>
        Once you have a few people signed up or in your network, ask them about the features they like the best. Come up with 5-10 possibilities and have them pick the 3 most interesting ones.
        </Tip>
    </Step>
    <Step step="4" name="Examples and Proof">
        A lot of people love seeing concrete examples of a product or service before they sign up or buy anything. Come up with the most important things people want to know about.
    
        <Tip>
        Once you have a few people signed up or in your network, ask them about the examples they want to see. Come up with 5-10 possibilities and have them pick the 3 most interesting ones.
        </Tip>
    
        The next step most people take, once they are interested, is to look for proof. Examples are one kind of proof, that show how something works. But social proof is just as important. Testimonials and ratings show people that others also like your product. Sometimes, when your product or service is very fresh, you may need to be ‘creative’ to get some good ratings here. Make use of any customer interviews you have done already. Our tip is to stay away from making things up.
    </Step>
    <Step step="5" name="Sign up and/or Pricing">
        The last step of getting together page content is to decide on a signup form, or e.g. a pricing table. Again, this depends on your experiment. This is where your CTA’s point to, and so this is the spot where you will be very convincing. What do you want to test?
    
        <Tip>
        Test what you did with colleagues. Come up with a few alternatives and find out which ones are resonating the most. Can you come up with alternative texts? Different formats?
        </Tip>
    </Step>
    <Step step="6" name="Final Details">
        The bottom of the canvas has three sections that are sometimes forgotten. These should not be just an afterthought! First of all, as you’re running an experiment, how are you going to measure your progress? How and what are you measuring things?
        
        <Example>
        If you’re going to use Google Analytics to track page visits, this is where you specify the different pages you want to measure. Are you going to use specific UTM tags to differentiate between paths users took on the site? Are you going to track extra things such as hidden fields?
        </Example>
        
        Traffic is just as important. Just throwing your page online and not thinking about how users will find it will make your experiment fail. You need to think about how people will end up on your page. Do you have access to audiences you can engage, such as existing email lists or newsletters, or existing facebook groups? Or will you need to build your audience from scratch?
        
        Your footer is the last thing to do. Make sure you comply with any rules you should comply with and have the right disclaimers. If you’re running an experiment, make sure you explain that. And should people contact you? Can they find you on twitter? Make sure to collect the relevant links.
        
        <Canvas image="https://wrkshp-tools.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/A4_Landing_Page_Canvas_2a984f4ade.png"/>
        *Example of a filled out landing page canvas for a juice delivery concept called “Jooz”*
    </Step>
</Steps>
<Steps title="Making it real">
    <Step step="A" name="Building the Page">

        Now that you have your template filled out, it is time to build your page.

        Before you do any design or implementation work, make a wireframe based on the information in the Landing Page Canvas. Simply make a neat version of the canvas, with the information filled in, and present it to a few test users. Do they understand it? Do they have any questions? If you find that you need to change something, do so. It’s still super cheap!

        Now, use a landing page builder such as Squarespace, Mailchimp, Unbounce, or Launchrock. (See below for links) They have tons of standard templates you can use. If you already have some branding, you can use that as a base. Otherwise, try to find a template that matches the look and feel you’re after as well as possible. It’s (probably) not the point to test your branding (you might even do well to use a ‘fake brand’ to experiment with), so as long as it looks ‘plausible’ it’s fine. Choose the color palette that fits your vision and product idea for this experiment. And go crazy building the page!

        - Great photos can be found on [Unsplash](https://www.unsplash.com)
        - Great free fonts can be found on [Google Fonts](https://fonts.google.com)
        - [Squarespace](https://squarespace.com) has good support for a lot of other things as well, make sure to look at their help files. You can use a standard URL so you don’t need to own a domain, which is perfect for experiments with throw-away test brands. Of course, a real domain name looks more impressive!

        In your page builder of choice, make sure you implement the Analytics and Traffic boxes you filled. If you for instance test a pricing model by counting how many times people click specific pricing links, you will need to tag those links. Making them go to separate thank you pages is often the easiest way to do this. Now you can count the differences in Google Analytics.
        Finally, add your signup mail service (we prefer [Mailchimp](https://mailchimp.com) and [Drip](https://getdrip.com)) and create the appropriate lists and standard reply mails that people get on signup.
    </Step>
    <Step step="B" name="Before you launch">
        So you’re ready to launch your landing page! Awesome. Don’t click launch just yet. Test it with a small user group first. Are there any stupid things you missed? Does it look like their behaviour will validate or invalidate the experiment?

        Test the flow of the page. Do people actually get signed up in the email list?

        Also, how are you going to get people to your page? You will need to do something in order to get people to look at your page and express the behaviours you want to measure for your experiment. A good way to do this is to advertise on e.g. Facebook, or to send a mail to an existing mail list. Prepare your posts for that. And don’t forget to test those too :)
    </Step>
    <Step step="C" name="Launch!">
        Once you did your final check, it’s time to hit launch! Good luck!
    </Step>
    <Step step="D" name="Extra: Tweak">
        After launching, keep an eye on the analytics. Do you see what you expected? Do you get any feedback? Update the page if needed to remove any noise that is not helping you validate your experiment. Try to get in touch with some of the people that signed up and find out why they did so. You might get some super valuable and unexpected results!
    </Step>
</Steps>
    
## Resources to get you started

- [Examples for landing pages](https://www.mockplus.com/blog/post/best-landing-page-design-examples)
- Landing Page Builders: [Squarespace](https://squarespace.com), [Unbounce](https://unbounce.com), [Launchrock](https://launchrock.com), [Carrd](https://carrd.com)
- Mailing list tools: [Mailchimp](https://mailchimp.com), [Drip](https://getdrip.com)
- Analytics: [Google Analytics](https://analytics.google.com), [Google Tagmanager](https://tagmanager.google.com), [Hotjar](https://hotjar.com)
- Fonts and typography: [Google Fonts](https://fonts.google.com), [Unsplash photos](https://unsplash.com)
- Color palettes [Coolors color palettes](https://coolors.co/)
- [The Noun Project](https://thenounproject.com/term/open-source/) open source icons, or open source illustration via [Undraw](http://undraw.co/)
- Or, better yet: find a designer on [Dribbble](https://dribbble.com/search?q=landing+page) or [Behance](http://behance.com/). If you really want to keep it cheap: [Fiverr](http://www.fiver.com/).


The Landing Page Canvas is useful when you have decided to run an online experiment that you need a Landing Page for.

Landing Page Canvas

## What is it and when should I use it?

Similar in purpose to the Business Model Canvas, the Lean Canvas is a single-page representation of all of the important aspects of a new business idea. It is the perfect one-page format for brainstorming possible business models.

Where the Business Model Canvas can be used very well for both startups and existing companies, the Lean Canvas is specifically geared towards startups and new ideas. The Lean Canvas has been adapted by Ash Maurya from the very popular Business Model Canvas that was developed by Alexander Osterwalder.

The Lean Canvas uses the same 9 blocks concept and layout, but here they’ve been modified slightly to suit the needs, purposes, and requirements of a Lean Startup.

<ImageMap image="/tools/A4 Lean Canvas.png">
1 | Problem | The top-3 problems you are trying to solve for your customer segments. | 0.1, 0.5
2 | Solution | The top-3 features your solution has in order to solve the problems. | 0.3, 0.2
3 | Key Metrics | How will you measure your progress | 0.3, 0.6
4 | Unique Value Proposition | The single, clear, compelling message that states why your solution is different and worth buying | 0.5, 0.5
5 | Unfair Advantage | What makes your solution difficult to copy? | 0.7, 0.2
6 | Channels | How your customers find and acquire or access your solution | 0.7, 0.6
7 | Customer Segments | Your customer segments | 0.9, 0.5
8 | Cost Structure | What does it cost to create and produce your solution and get it in the hands of your customers | 0.25, 0.9
9 | Revenue Streams | How will you generate revenue? | 0.75, 0.9
</ImageMap>

<Steps>
    <Step step="1" name="Define the Problem and the Customer">
        Start by figuring out the problem you want to solve, and for whom you are solving it.  You can easily come up with different variations, but to start a great business, you really must understand the problem. Without a problem to solve, you won’t have a product/service that anyone needs.
        
        Each customer segment (CS) you are thinking to work with will have a set of problems that they need solving. In this box try listing the one to three high priority problems that your customers have.
        
        ‘High priority’ problems means that the problems are high priority to your customers, not to you! To make sure that your problems are high priority and not unimportant or latent needs, have a look at the Customer Needs canvas.
        
        The problem you want to solve and Customer Segments are intrinsically connected – without a customer segment in mind you can’t think of their problems, and visa-versa.
        
        Try to come up with 2-3 combinations of customer segments and problems. Once you have defined your customer segment and your problem, it is good practice to set up a small experiment to validate this problem really exists and is high priority for your customers.
    </Step>
    <Step step="2" name="Solution">
        Once you have defined your problem and your customer segments, it’s time to think about your solution. To do that, try to come up with different ways to solve the problem for your customers. This is a real brainstorming part of the process – there can be multiple possible solutions to mitigate or avoid the problem.

        The solutions you come up with  will have different implications and different values for your customers. In the innovation process, that is another moment you should validate. It can be very hard to know what your customers find an acceptable solution for their problems – and even harder to figure out what is their preferred solution! Making sure your solution matches your customers is top priority early in the innovation journey.

        For each of the solutions you come up with and validate, try to define the 3-5 top features that make that solution stand out.
    </Step>
    <Step step="1" name="Channels and Unfair Advantage">
        Now that the solution is more or less defined, it’s time to think about the ‘backstage’ part of your business. How are you going to deliver your solution into the hands of your customers? And what makes it difficult for competitors to copy your solution?
    </Step>
    <Step step="4" name="Unique Value Proposition">
        Now that you know the most important features of your solution as well as an unfair advantage and channels, it’s time to turn it into a Value Proposition. What makes your solution preferable for your customers? What turns it into a simple, clear message? You’ll probably need to work on your value proposition throughout your innovation journey, so don’t burn too much time on it the first attempt: your customers will give you feedback soon enough to help you sharpen it.
    </Step>
    <Step step="5" name="Cost Structure and Revenue Streams">
        The next step is to figure out how you are going to generate revenue and what your cost structure is going to be. Think about different revenue streams, revenue models, and pricing models you might use, as well as tallying up what it costs to produce your solution, deliver value and operate the business.

        When defining the cost structure, one helpful way of looking at the costs is to divide them into fixed and variable costs. Fixed costs remain (more or less) the same regardless of how many solutions you sell. Think of IT cost, salary, or housing Variable costs vary with the amount you sell. Think of marketing cost, production cost, and logistics costs.

        Another great lens is to look at how much a new customer costs you, vs how much revenue that customer will generate for you over their lifetime. Customers have a life cycle for your company: they first need to be convinced to become a customer (which costs money, e.g. through marketing). Once they are customers, they do one or more transactions, bringing in revenue. At some point, they stop being a customer, for instance because they have no further need for your product or service or because they have found a product that they like better. The ratio between the cost of acquiring a customer and the amount they generate over their lifetime is an important metric to pursue.
    </Step>
    <Step step="6" name="Key Metrics">
        And that brings me to the last building block of this canvas: Key Metrics. This block helps you guide your innovation journey. Here, you can define the metrics you want to monitor to see if you are making progress. These can range from Monthly Recurring Revenue, Number of Daily Active Users, or the length of your customer lifetime. Your metric will evolve over time, and needs to fit the stage your business is in. At the start of the innovation journey you might be most interested by the number of new customers, but later it becomes more important that these customers also stay customers for a longer period of time.
    </Step>
    <Step step="7" name="Next Steps">
        Just filling nine building blocks of your canvas won’t make your idea a reality. Now it’s time to see if your idea has any merit, by validating it. Earlier, in steps 1 and 2, there were already experiments mentioned, but in effect every single building block you define needs to be validated in the real world. Your idea for a channel may look great on paper, but until you try making it work you won’t know for sure. Checkout the Experiment Canvas and the Experiment Cookbook to get your experiments flowing.
    </Step>
</Steps>
    
    

Similar in purpose to the Business Model Canvas, the Lean Canvas is a single-page representation of all of the important aspects of a new business idea. It is the perfect one-page format for brainstorming possible business models.

Lean Canvas

## What is it and when should I use it?

This tool will help you to flesh out the clusters of ideas you have come up with previously and to make them presentable so they can be shown to potential customers very quickly. This means you'll be able to start gathering data on what people think about your ideas almost immediately. That means you'll be using early validation to help you guide your selection process.

It allows you to get a clear picture of what the ideas you created could become, while still postponing deciding on one single idea.

The point is to try to explore the most interesting aspects of the ideas you came up with in isolation, by making simple (but compelling) propositions that focus on those interesting aspects and leave out everything else.

The Mini Proposition canvas was adapted from the Ad Lib Value Proposition by Alex Osterwalder et al. in Value Proposition Design and the value proposition statement introduced by Geoffrey Moore in Crossing the Chasm.

### Example

Let's say you are working on an idea that will help people to travel more efficiently. You have done the Wall of Ideas exercise and have come up with a ton of ideas, clustered into a number of clusters.

One cluster focuses on ideas around scheduling and journey planning. In the cluster there are ideas that are broad and work for all travelers, but you have also come up with a few ideas that are targeted specifically at busy executives.

A second cluster focuses on ideas around a trend you have observed, namely social travel and ride sharing.

For cluster one, you decide to take the focus on the executives to the extreme, and you come up with a virtual assistant that will track and predict your movements 24/7, and keep you on schedule.

For cluster two, you decide to focus on the social aspect of traveling and you come up with a mini proposition of an app that will always allow you to find like-minded travellers nearby.

Note that in both cases, this proposition is not aimed to be a valid business model. That is not what you are testing at this moment. What you are trying to do is to see which of the potentially interesting ingredients you have come up with has the most potential, and how customers respond to it. By doing this in isolation you make it much easier to focus the conversation.

Later, you'll face the task of balancing all of the features you have come up with into one coherent, overarching value proposition. That is very difficult. It will help you a lot to focus first on small aspects and learn how people respond to them. Perhaps some resonate strongly, even if they require adjustment. Perhaps others that you felt confident about before do not strike a chord with customers at all. It's better to find that out right away

<Example>
For a cyber-security proposition, we came up with a certificate that small business owners could get when their security was above a certain level. From initial data it seemed that this would be a sure bet, and we expected entrepreneurs would be interested in this. When we made the mini proposition, and tested with actual customers, we found out that they didn't like the idea at all. They strongly preferred another mini proposition that we decided to include only as a wildcard.
</Example>

<ImageMap image="https://wrkshp-tools.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/A4_Mini_Proposition_4ba67c264c.png">
1 | Product or service | What is this mini proposition about? Name it! | 0.5, 0.125
2 | Customer type | What defines the customers you want to target with this mini proposition? | 0.5, 0.25
3 | Problem | What problem are you solving for these customers? | 0.5, 0.375
4 | Key part of problem | What is the most important aspect of the problem you are solving? | 0.5, 0.5
5 | Key benefit of solution | What is an additional key benefit of your solution for your customers? | 0.5, 0.625
6 | Solution | Describe the solution | 0.5, 0.75
7 | Type of transaction | How and what do your customers pay? | 0.5, 0.875
</ImageMap>

<Steps>
    <Step step="1" name="Before you start">
        Make sure you have done a ‘Wall of Ideas’ [https://wrkshp.tools/tools/wall-of-ideas] exercise where you have come up with a whole list of ideas. Cluster your ideas in ~5 clusters.
        
        Once you have created ~5 main clusters of ideas, it’s time to create ‘mini propositions’ that you can use to test with your customers or users.
    </Step>
    <Step step="2" name="Label your clusters">
        Go over the clusters on your wall of ideas. Can you already picture what the idea in the cluster looks like to a customer? Try to give each cluster a descriptive name. Write it on a big post it, and put it on a fresh piece of wall (keep some space around it).

        Answer the following 8 questions for each cluster and put your answers in the Mini Proposition Canvas.

        0. The (placeholder) name of your product or service
        1. What is the customer segment?
        2. What exactly is the problem you solve for your customers?
        3. What is the most important pain your customers have that you take away?
        4. What is the most important bonus your customers get from using your product/service? This is your most important 'gain'.
        5. How do you solve it? What is the product or service description?
        6. What is the unique aspect of this idea?
        7. How do they purchase it? Do they pay once? Or a subscription? How will you make money?

        <Example>
        Mini Proposition: "Our journey assistant helps busy executives who need to travel to multiple meetings every day reduce lost time and stress and stay on schedule effortlessly through a mobile journey assistant for a monthly fee of 5€"
        </Example>
    </Step>
    <Step step="3" name="Be as varied as possible">
        The point of this exercise is to get possible mini-propositions that could be a solution to the problem you want to solve that are as different as possible. Each cluster should become as different as possible from all the other clusters, in terms of customer segments, specific take on the problem, how it’s solved, how they pay, etc.

        The idea is, that you can test how your customers respond to these different options in isolation, so that you get a better idea of the direction you want to go next.

        <Tip>
        Remember that the goal is to figure out what possible solutions to the problem resonate with your customers, not to see if one specific solution is the right one!
        </Tip>

        That also means that you’re perhaps coming up with some mini-propositions that are not completely in line with the design criteria you put up earlier. That’s ok. Don’t worry, you won’t ever force yourself down a path that clashes with the ‘why’ you have formulated earlier.
        
        But it is good to see what happens if you explore the boundaries a little. Who knows, you may learn something from your customer feedback that you can transform into something that does fit exactly with your design criteria.
    </Step>
    <Step step="4" name="Flesh out the Mini Propositions">
        Go over each proposition and try to find:

        <CheckList>
        [] Examples of similar products or services (How are they similar? How are they different?)
        [] An example that describes how it is used by a customer. How does it work?
        </CheckList>
    </Step>
    <Step step="5" name="Next Steps">
        Do a round of voting with the team on what you think the most promising of these mini propositions is. Pick the top 3 to validate with customers and see how they respond.
        
        Your mini-propositions are done when:

        <CheckList>
        [] Each mini proposition has a name
        [] Each mini-proposition has a 3-5 line description
        [] Each mini-proposition has an example
        </CheckList>

        Now, use the [Experiment Canvas](https://wrkshp.tools/tools/experiment-canvas) to setup an experiment where your potential customers can give input on this proposition.

        Combining the answers from multiple mini propositions will give you a much better idea about what customers like the most and what type of solution they prefer.

        If you'd like to learn more about this tool and how to use it in practice in a real innovation journey, check out the course [Find your next Startup Idea](https://shop.wrkshp.tools/startup-ideas)
    </Step>
</Steps>

This tool will help you to flesh out different value proposition options and to make them presentable so they can be shown to potential customers very quickly.

Mini Propositions

## What is it and when should I use it?
The Persona Canvas is organized in nine different sections. It is designed to be worked on as a team with postits and markers, and to give you an easy to read visual of your persona once you’re done.

The most important element in any persona is the representation of the person itself. The heart in the center defines the need your persona has. What is his or her goal? What is he or she trying to achieve? Completing the representation of the person, there is space on the bottom to add identifying information such as a name and a role, and any other facts you gather.

The next thing that stands out, is that the persona is divided into a left and a right side. The left side has space for negative aspects the persona has to deal with in their life, such as fears and trends with negative impacts. The right side has positive aspects. Using this left/right split, it becomes much easier to get a picture of what is going on in the life of your persona.

<ImageMap image="/tools/A4 Persona Canvas.png">
1 | Name, role, and personal details | Giving your persona a real name and role helps anchor them in reality. Using a real person as a basis is even better. | 0.5, 0.8
2 | Photos | The canvas is designed to make it easy for you to add photographs of your persona. Is it a man? A woman? Is he or she happy? Or sad? | 0.5, 0.15
3 | Need | This is the goal the persona has, their job to be done. What do they really want? What decisions will they make? | 0.5, 0.6
4 | Positive Trends | What are positive trends the persona experiences in their life? | 0.8, 0.2
5 | Opportunities and positive events | What are positive opportunities the persona experiences in their professional or private life? | 0.8, 0.55
6 | Hopes for the future | What hopes does the persona have for the future? | 0.8, 0.8
7 | Negative Trends | What are negative trends the persona experiences in their life? | 0.2, 0.2
8 | Headaches and daily problems | What are headaches and roadblocks that the persona experiences in their life? What is blocking them from achieving their goal? | 0.2, 0.55
9 | Fears for the future | What fears does the persona have for the future? | 0.2, 0.8
</ImageMap>
<Steps>
    <Step step="1" name="Define your goal">
        Why are you creating a persona? What do you want to achieve? Are you trying to create a persona for design? For marketing and sales? For customer validation? Or for storytelling? Although the steps to follow are the same, knowing what to focus on will help you to ask the right questions and get a better result.
    </Step>
    <Step step="2" name="Gather Criteria">
        This step is critical. As we have seen, it is vital to base your personas on real data. On the other hand, gathering data can be very time consuming, especially if you don’t know very well what you’re looking for – which will most likely be the case if you’re just starting a new design journey.
        To be efficient, there is a balance to maintain. You will have to spend some time and energy researching, but at the same time, you can already start by coming up with what you think is relevant for the persona and make your assumptions explicit. Both your research and your assumptions will need to be validated, so on your first stab at the persona, it is fine to mix these up.
        The important thing to remember is, don’t try to create a perfect persona on your first attempt. Not only does such a perfect persona not exist, but spending too much time researching or coming up with stories isn’t going to get you there, even if it would. The real value is in validation. What research should you do on your first iteration?
    </Step>
    <Step step="3" name="Cluster the Data">
        In this step, you’ll filter your incoming research data and cluster it. An effective way to do this is in a workshop format. With your team, take 30-45 minutes to go over each of the pieces of information uncovered.

        Try to see which pieces fit well together, and come up with 3-5 clusters. These are the nuclei for your personas. Each of the clusters should have a selection of demographics, sentiments, quotes, etc. Look for themes and characteristics that are specific, relevant, and universal to the cluster.

        When you have done a first clustering, take a step back. Are your clusters distinct enough? Or are they all focusing on the same pieces of data? Do they make sense? Are the most interesting bits of research you have uncovered incorporated in the clusters? If you answer ’no’ to any of these questions, adjust your clusters.

    </Step>
    <Step step="4" name="Define your personas">
        The next step is to take your clusters and turn them into personas. To do that, stick a printout of the persona canvas above each of the clusters. Looking at the clustered data, fill out the canvas.

        - **Name and role**: Start by choosing a name and role to go with your cluster, and defining other relevant demographic facts.
        - **Goals**: Then, come up with a goal. What is your persona trying to achieve? What is the Job they are trying to get done? What is the problem they are trying to solve? What is the attitude they have towards this goal? Is it a pain? Or a nice to have?
        - **Trends**: Next, go over the data you have uncovered and try to come up with positive and negative trends that impact the daily life of your persona. What are things that are happening in their world that are impacting them? It could be anything from the rise of AI or climate change to the rising popularity of K-pop. What is relevant totally depends on your project.
        - **Headaches, opportunities, hopes and fears**: The next step is to fill out headaches and opportunities, and hopes and fears. Headaches are things that are blocking your persona from reaching their goal. What are they struggling with, in their daily life. Opportunities help your persona achieve their goal. Fears are things they hope will not happen in the future, and hopes are things they would like to happen in the future. People can be highly motivated by fears and hopes.
        - **Quotes**: Finally, come up with quotes for each persona. What would be a typical thing for them to say? Use the sentiment analysis and online research as a base.

    </Step>
    <Step step="5" name="Create a Rich Picture">
        The next step is to create a ‘rich picture’ of your persona. The persona canvas is designed to do this. You should get a complete picture of who the persona is, just from looking at the canvas.
        
        Create a complete picture: not only the facts and data points, but also the character of the person. What do they look like? What is their world like?
        
        You can go overboard with this, but in the first iteration, it makes sense to go easy: after all, your work may come undone after validating it. You can either draw the person on the canvas, or stick photos, quotes, etc on it. Create a collage of the person, his or her environment, and what they hold important.
        
        Once you’re done, spend some time to go over a day in the life of the persona. With your team, map out a few of the key moments during their day. See if you can add these moments to your canvas. If you don’t, the persona will remain a couple of datapoints, and nobody will get a ‘personal’ connection.
    </Step>
    <Step step="6" name="Mark your assumptions">
        Go over the persona you have created, and mark the things you have added to it that you have not validated or directly copied from data. These are your assumptions.

        Then, add one extra assumption: that the 3-5 personas you have defined accurately cover your entire target audience. When validating, you’ll probably discover missing personas.
    </Step>
    <Step step="7" name="Validate your assumptions!">
        This is another crucial step. Luckily, it doesn’t have to take a lot of time and energy. Likely, you’ll be talking to (potential) customers anyway, so if you do that, mix in some questions about your persona.

        Test if the goals, attitudes and preferences you have mapped out really exist. They won’t perfectly match, in most cases, and that is fine; but if you only get answers that are totally at odds with your persona, it’s back to the drawing board.

        Another way to validate is to try and find a number of people from your target audience, and interview them face to face. Using your persona as a guide, come up with interview questions, and once you’re done, see if what you find matches your persona, or if it is totally at odds.
    </Step>
    <Step step="8" name="Next Steps: Iterate">
        Now that you have validated your persona, it’s time to find the problems and fix them. To do that, go back to step 1, and proceed from there. Of course, you probably won’t need to start from scratch this time, so there will be a lot less work to do. Rinse and repeat!
        
        A persona is never completely ‘done’. Keep revisiting it throughout your design journey, and keep referring back to it.
    </Step>
</Steps>
    

The Persona Canvas gives you an easy to read visual of that can help you to understand your users or customers. What are their goals? What are they trying to achieve?

Persona Canvas

## What is it and when should I use it?

When you are developing a new digital service or startup, it is vital to understand how you will reach your customers. And to do that, according to the originator of Pirate Metrics, Dave McClure, who first presented it in 2007 at Ignite Seattle, it’s best to think like a pirate.

<Example>
The [video of the original presentation](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=irjgfW0BIrw&feature=youtu.be) of Pirate Metrics in 2007
</Example>

The idea is to map out the entire journey a customer makes to go from someone who doesn’t know the service at all through different stages to someone that is a paying customer. What are the different stages a customer goes through? What are the decision points? What are the conversion rates between subsequent stages?

Knowing this will help you calculate those all important metrics: the CAC (Cost of Acquiring a Customer) and the CLTV (Customer Lifetime Value). If you know your CAC and CLTV, you also know what your profit margin is.

A customer has to go through these stages to go from someone that does not know about the service all the way to a customer that generates revenue. Each of the transitions between stages has a conversion attached to it. Not all customers that you acquire end up using the service, and not all of these may become paying customers. That means, you will lose customers going from stage to stage.

To get more paying customers, you can do two things. You can get more customers into the system (by working on the acquisition stage), and you can increase the conversion rates on each of the stage gates. Both strategies, typically, come with a cost. The total cost that you incur in order to get a customer from the acquisition phase to a paying customer is what determines your CAC.

## Strategic Questions
Typically, this means early stage startups have questions such as:

<CheckList>
[] What are the channels we have available to acquire customers?
[] What strategies can we use to influence the conversion rates between stages?
[] Where should we spend our money in order to lower CAC, raise CLTV, and increase user growth?
[] Should we focus on getting more active users? Or more paying customers?
</CheckList>

Strategically, finding the answers to these questions is super important. That means that discussing the current state of the Pirate Funnel and the strategies to the future should be an integral part of the innovation journey, especially once you start to work towards product-market fit.

To enable that discussion and make it easier to keep track of the current situation and the focus for the near future it is super helpful to have a visual aid for team discussion that you can come back to check later: a canvas.

I have turned the original idea into a canvas that you can use to make sense of what the Pirate Funnel looks like for your service or startup.

<ImageMap image="/tools/A4 Pirate Metrics Canvas.png">
1 | Potential customers | Anyone that may be interested in the service | 0.1, 0.5
2 | Acquisition | The activities you do to reach potential customers | 0.2, 0.5
3 | Acquired customers | People that have engaged with your product or service | 0.35, 0.5
4 | Activation | The activities that turn engaged people into actual users | 0.5, 0.5
5 | Active customers | People that are actively using your service | 0.6, 0.5
6 | Retention | The activities that make people come back to your service | 0.7, 0.2
7 | Retained customers | The people that come back to use your service again | 0.9, 0.2
8 | Referral | The activities that make people refer your service to others | 0.8, 0.5
9 | Referred customers | People that have been referred to your service | 0.9, 0.5
10 | Revenue | The actions you take that make people want to pay for your service | 0.7, 0.7
11 | Paying customers | People that pay for the service | 0.9, 0.7
12 | Lost customers | Customers that were lost in conversion steps (grey) | 0.5, 0.85
</ImageMap>

<Steps>
    <Step step="1" name="Fill in what you know">
        The canvas is best used with a small team. Fill in the canvas the first time with what you know or guesstimates, and keep updating it during the innovation journey with real data to see how you might improve. The first pass of the canvas is to fill in what you know already.
    </Step>
    <Step step="2" name="Potential customers">
        Find out how many Potential Customers your market has (roughly). Use demographics or for instance Facebook’s audience targeting system to get an idea of the maximum number of people you might reach. Stick these numbers on post-its in the potential customers area. It may be helpful to define customer segments when they have different preferred channels.
        Next, find out how many of these potential customers you can already reach. What are the channels you already have (or would like to have) to reach potential customers? How many people interact with these channels? List them as well. This is probably a lower total amount. Think of channels such as:

        <CheckList>
        [] Your existing website and social media
        [] Partner websites and social media
        [] Advertising
        [] Blogs
        [] ...
        </CheckList>

    </Step>
    <Step step="3" name="Acquisition">
        Define what ‘acquisition’ means for your situation. When do you count a customer as acquired? When they end up on your landing page? When they are on your email list? When they open the App Store page? Or something else?

        For different channels, list conversion rates. How many people in the channel can you direct towards your service? If you place an ad, how many people click on it? If you write a blog, how many people read it? Try to find the typical conversion rates from your data (if you have it), or find appropriate benchmarks online. Later you’ll be able to figure out what the actual rates are.

        Using the conversion rates for each channel, figure out how many of the potential customers made it to the 'acquired customer' stage. How many people make it to your landing page? The rest has left and ended up in the ‘lost customers’ box.
    </Step>
    <Step step="4" name="Activation">
        Define what ‘activation’ means for your situation. When do you count a customer as active? When they download and install your beta? When they posted on your forum? It has to be an activity they perform at least once and that is specific to what you’re selling.
        
        How many people will become active users of your service? Find conversion numbers in your data or look for suitable benchmarks online. Later you’ll be able to figure out what the actual rates are.
    </Step>
    <Step step="5" name="Retention, Referral, and Revenue">
        Here it becomes a bit more complex. Each Activated customer can end up in zero, one, two, or even all three of the boxes to the right.
    </Step>
    <Step step="5A" name="Retention">
        This is the most obvious step to look at. How many active customers come back to use the service again. When they come back, that means the service has value for them. They are obviously happy about at least some aspects. Improving this rate means you are able to zoom in on how you deliver value to the customer, and how you make your service addictive (Check out the awesome book Hooked by Nir Eyal to read more about addictive services).

        Retention is a really important metric, especially for subscription based models. Most successful businesses get upwards of 70% of their revenue from loyal customers, and improving retention (lowering churn) by even 5% can mean a difference of 95% in your revenue.

        <Tip>
        The longer a customer stays in a subscription model, the higher their CLTV will be, and therefore, relatively, the lower their CAC is.
        </Tip>

        <Tip>
        Important metrics startups use that are influenced by retention are ‘daily active users’ and ‘churn’.
        </Tip>

        Again, try to get numbers from the data you have, or look at online benchmarks.
        Calculate how many users will be retained based on the number of active users and the retention rate.
    </Step>
    <Step step="5B" name="Referral">
        This is arguably the most important thing to look at if you want high growth and lower CAC. Dropbox famously influenced their referral rates by giving free storage for bringing in new users. Referrals mean free advertising. People referring your service give it a warm introduction to others: their referral is much more likely to be trusted. It also means that people need to be quite convinced of how much they like your service before they refer it.

        As before, try to get numbers from the data you have, or look at online benchmarks. Also come up with an idea of how many people they will refer. When they take the decision to refer people, and especially when there is an incentive such as with Dropbox, they will likely refer more than one person.

        How many people will be referred to your service? This is a function of the number of active users, the referral rate, and the number of people referred on average.
    </Step>
    <Step step="5C" name="Revenue">
        This is the bottom line. How many people end up paying for the service. If you have a freemium model, for instance, not every active user may be a paying customer. Again, come up with a conversion rate.

        Again, come up with a conversion rate. Calculate how many people will pay for the service.
    </Step>
    <Step step="6" name="Strengths and Weaknesses">
        Now that you have filled the canvas, take a step back. With the team, identify strengths and weaknesses. Where are you doing better or worse than your benchmarks? Where do you have missing information? Mark these out with coloured dots.
        Then, go over each step. For each step:

        <CheckList>
        [] Come up with 3 ways to influence the conversion rate (negatively or positively). This could be adding a different channel, sending a personal message, making something easier to understand, …
        [] Come up with 3 reasons for a customer to convert to the next stage.
        [] Come up with 3 reasons for a customer to become a lost customer. Try to focus on things you can influence.
        </CheckList>

        Stick these on the board on post-its.
        
        Note that in some cases it’s great that people don’t convert: if you already know a person is not going to be an active customer, for instance, it’s better they don’t pass the acquisition stage. The funnel is also a filter to find those customers that are the best fit for your service.
    </Step>
    <Step step="7" name="Define Experiments">
        Use the strong/weak spots and your calculated numbers to find likely candidates for improvement. Where can you influence the end result in the most effective way? That should be your focus for the near future.

        Also, if you haven’t done so, setup the necessary tooling to measure the different transitions and stages in your model.
    </Step>
    <Step step="8" name="Next Steps">
        After a month or so, revisit your canvas, and update the numbers with real data. What have you learned? Where were your numbers spot on? Where were they way off? Try to see if you understand what is going on. And then iterate: find the next weak spot, and define a new experiment.
    </Step>
</Steps>

When you are developing a new digital service or startup, it is vital to understand how you will reach your customers. The Pirate Metrics Canvas helps you make sense of this process.

Pirate Metrics Canvas

## What is it and when should I use it?
The Pitch Canvas © is a brainstorming tool developed by David Beckett that helps you visualise your entire pitch on a single page. That makes it easy to get the structure right (just follow the proven 10 steps) and it helps you and your team focus on the right questions and bring together the right content.

<Quote author="David Beckett">
Pitch to win.
</Quote>

In any innovation journey there is going to be a time when you need to convince others, be it stakeholders, investors, or prospective co-founders, of what you're doing. Maybe you want to enlist their support, or you would like them to invest in your company. In those situations, you'll likely need to come up with a pitch.

<Tip>
This tool helps you build and structure your pitch. Of course, that is just one part of the equation. The other part is delivering it. Telling you how to do that is beyond the scope of this website. We advise you to follow David Beckett's amazing course at [Best3Minutes.com](https://best3minutes.com).
</Tip>

<ImageMap image="/tools/A4 Pitch Canvas - Landscape.png">
1 | What change are you making? | A simple statement of the change you and your product are making in the world, wrought into a memorable one-sentence explanation. | 0.5, 0.1
2 | Pain (+ Gain) | What is the problem that you are trying to solve? What opportunities do you provide? | 0.25, 0.2
3 | Product | As simple as possible, what does your product do for customers? How does it work? Have you tested it with customers? | 0.75, 0.2
4 | Product Demo | Live demo (risky!), screenshots, or a physical product. Can you show a real customer using it? Do you really need a demo? | 0.25, 0.3
5 | What's unique? | What is unique about your product? What technology, relationships, or partners do you bring to the table? How are you different from competitors? | 0.75, 0.3
6 | Customer Traction | Did you have any successes so far? Are customers lining up? Did you do a beta or a pilot? What did customers say? Did you have any PR coverage? | 0.25, 0.4
7 | Business Model | How do you get paid? What is the opportunity for growth? How will you scale? | 0.75, 0.4
8 | Investment | What is the amount of investment you need? How many rounds? How many investors? What type of investor? | 0.25, 0.5
9 | Team | What relevant experience does your team have that supports your story? What were their achievements and successes? | 0.75, 0.5
10 | End statement with Call To Action | What would you like your audience to do after they hear your pitch? | 0.5, 0.6
11 | Intrigue/surprise | Don't give the whole game away – leave them wanting to know more. What is your cliffhanger? What surprising facts and new information will intrigue them? | 0.25, 0.75
12 | Why you? | Why do you care about solving this problem for your customers? How has your life been affected by this industry and business? Why should your audience get involved with you? | 0.75, 0.75
13 | Interaction | What challenge questions do you have for your audience? What do you think they might ask you? | 0.25, 0.85
14 | Portable Story | What story can the audience go away with and tell on your behalf? What do you want them to remember about you and your company? | 0.75, 0.85
</ImageMap>

<Steps>
    <Step step="1" name="Define your goal">
        You're about to design a pitch. Not a pitch deck, and not a powerpoint. A pitch is not a bunch of slides, it's a compelling story. And to get started, you really need to know what your goal is with this pitch.  It can be tempting to shoe-horn multiple goals into your pitch, but try to resist and have one **main goal**.
        
        Next, try to step into your audience's shoes: why would they care about your goal? And who are they, anyway? Spend five minutes do write a short profile of your audience.

        <CheckList>
        [] Who is in the audience?
        [] What do they care about?
        [] What are they trying to achieve by listening to your pitch?
        [] What are their biggest challenges?
        [] What are they like? Are they conservative? Risk averse? Enthusiastic?
        [] Do they want to know how things work? Will they ask technical questions?
        [] Are they money focused? And if so, are they interested in reducing cost, finding more profit, or achieving 10x return on investment?
        [] Are they interested in social impact? The environment?
        [] What is their mindset? Are they detail oriented? Thinkers? Doers? Idealists? Practical minded?
        [] What is the next big step your audience can take to help you achieve your goal? What might make them take that step?
        </CheckList>

        <Tip>
        The [Persona Canvas](https://wrkshp.tools/tools/persona-canvas) is a great tool to help you structure the profile(s) of your audience.
        </Tip>
        <Warning>

        Make sure to find some evidence for the assumptions you (may) have made answering the checklist questions. Better safe than sorry: can you find evidence online or by talking to other founders that helps you understand your audience better? Do you know someone that pitched to them before?
        </Warning>
    </Step>
    <Step step="2" name="Define the Pain, Product, Product Demo, and Uniqueness">
        (We skip the topmost statement of the change you're making – don't worry, we'll come back to it later)

        0. **Pain (+Gain)**: With your team, come up with ~5 sticky notes that define the pains and gains your customers have. Preferably, describe pains and gains you have already validated. Add some research to it: how many people have this problem? How much do they spend on it?
        1. **Product**: In ~5 post its, describe your product. What does it do for your customers? Make sure this relates to the pains and gains you just described.
        2. **Product Demo**: If you have something you can show, an MVP, or a demo, take some time to think about how you might show it off. What is its best feature? How does it showcase the product?
        3. **What makes it unique?**: How is your product or solution unique? Why is it hard to copy? Why is it going to dominate the market?
    </Step>
    <Step step="3" name="Traction, Business Model, Investment, and Team">
        The next part is mostly about the numbers. Here, you'll need to present your business case, and why it is a good investment.

        0. **Customer Traction**: To support your pitch, it helps to show that you already have enthusiastic, preferably paying, customers. Showcase this by explaining any results of sales or experiments, what people's feedback on your product was, and if you got any press coverage.
        1. **Business Model**: Next, explain how you are going to make money. How does your business work? How do you get revenue? What are the costs involved? What will it look like when the business will grow? How will you scale?
        2. **Investment**: What investment do you need to achieve the growth and revenue you presented with your business model? How many investors are you looking for? How many rounds? What type of investors?
        3. **Team**: What relevant experience does your team have that supports your story?
    </Step>
    <Step step="4" name="The end and the beginning">
        Finally, it is time to look at the end and the beginning of the pitch. Your pitch should end with a call to action: what do you want your audience to do after they heard your pitch? Cross check this with the 'next big step the audience can take' you wrote down in step 1. Did you provide all they need to make that step?
        
        The last thing to do is to look at the beginning of your pitch. Now that the entire structure stands, you have some time and headspace to craft a one-line sentence that explains what you do for your customers. This sentence should be descriptive - but more than that, it should bring curiosity and excitement. It is the 'movie trailer' of your pitch. Steve Jobs was a master of crafting such sentences.
        
        <Quote author="Steve Jobs"> 
        The iPod. 1000 songs in your pocket.
        </Quote>
    </Step>
    <Step step="5" name="Bonus Sections">
        The bottom part of the canvas contains four more building blocks that you can use to strengthen your story. They don't directly feature as part of your story, but they can serve as a 'landing zone' to brainstorm puzzle pieces to use in the rest of the canvas.

        0. **Intrigue/Surprise**: Your audience likely contains seasoned investors, entrepreneurs, or board members. They have seen it all before. In order to capture their attention and engage them you need to come up with something that will intrigue them or surprise them.
        1. **Why You?**: In this pitching process, you'll be scrutinised in detail about your capability of bringing this project to a success. You'll need to argue why you, personally, and your team are the right people to make it happen. Will you stick it out for the duration? Do you have a personal drive to solve the problem that guarantees your persistence?
        2. **Interaction**: To engage your audience even more, try to incorporate some interaction. Do you have challenges or questions to them? And, just as important, what questions do you expect them to ask? How can you best answer them?
        3. **Portable Story**: When your audience members leave the room, how will they talk about your pitch to others? What is the memorable hook that they can easily relate to others?
    </Step>
    <Step step="6" name="Next Steps">
        When you've filled your pitch canvas with a story, that's when the most important part of building a pitch comes: testing it. You'll need to test it both to practice and to learn where you need to improve it.
    </Step>
</Steps>

The Pitch Canvas © was created by David Beckett to help startups design better pitches. Its building blocks help you structure your story and shows which questions to answer to have a successful pitch. The Pitch Canvas © is used by numerous Startups, Accelerators and Corporates to develop innovative, winning pitches.

Pitch Canvas

## What is it and why should I use it?
Your potential customer or your manager are not impressed by a dry list of specifications or a vague concept description. The Product Box exercise is loosely based on the ‘Design the box’ exercise from the book [Gamestorming](https://amzn.to/3490LiS) by Dave Gray and Sunny Brown, and  the game Product Box in Luke Hohmann’s book, [Innovation Games: Creating Breakthrough Products Through Collaborative Play](https://amzn.to/2CCGze5). It helps you when you need to convert an abstract concept into something tangible that you can evaluate with people that were not intimately part of the design process.

By wrapping your idea in (fake) product packaging, it becomes tangible. People are able to compare your concept with the kinds of products they normally see in stores and on e-commerce websites. This enables them to come up with the same kinds of questions they would have for the actual product.

Presenting your product box, or even better, ‘selling’ it to potential customers or team members, will bring these questions to light very quickly.

And the good thing is, the Product Box exercise uses low-cost, low-fi materials, allowing you to quickly iterate and get even more feedback, faster. And it’s fun, too!

<Tip>
Keeping your Product Boxes on a shelf for later reference can serve as a reminder of how far you have come in your development process.
</Tip>

<ImageMap image="/tools/A4 Product Box.png">
1 | Box | The box that will contain your product or service. | 0.2, 0.5
2 | Front of the box | What is on the front? Can we see inside the box? | 0.35, 0.6
3 | Side of the box | What is printed on the side? | 0.7, 0.6
4 | Back of the box | What is printed on the back? | 0.8, 0.2
5 | Unboxing | Is there an ‘unboxing’ experience? | 0.3, 0.2
6 | Inside | What else is inside the box? | 0.8, 0.2
</ImageMap>

<Steps>
    <Step step="1" name="Prepare">
        Creating a Product Box can be done by drawing it on a sheet of paper, using the canvas presented here. But for maximum impact, it’s better to use physical, tangible materials. Cardboard boxes, markers, colored paper, stickers, tape, magazines, glue, and scissors are all worth it.

        To help get the creative juices flowing, bring in some actual packaging you like, or find example pictures.

        It’s best to work in groups of 3-6 people and to create several variations of the product box.
    </Step>
    <Step step="2" name="Fill the box: key features">
        To get started, it’s important to translate the product’s characteristics and concepts into features that may show up on the product box. Think of:

        <CheckList>
        [] Names
        [] Who is your customer? What are they looking for?
        [] Most important functions or features
        [] What problem does your product solve for your customers?
        [] Pricing
        [] Marketing information
        [] What else?
        </CheckList>

        <Tip>
        When preparing, go over some example product boxes and look at what they have on their box.
        </Tip>
        
        Come up with 5-10 features for the product.
    </Step>
    <Step step="3" name="Design the box">
        Next, give your teams around 30 minutes to create the box. Using the ideas you have found in the previous step, start cutting, glueing, and creating.

        Now is the time to also look at some of the details. For example, think of legal information, disclaimers, and other ‘expected information’ (it’s not important what it says in detail, but if your product is required to have this kind of information, make sure you can point it out)

        <Example>
        When we were experimenting with packaging for a non-dairy milk alternative, we first forgot to add the nutritional value table. It turned out that customers almost immediately looked for that.
        </Example>

        While creating their boxes, it is possible to divide the features into three groups:

        0. Awareness
        1. Activation
        2. Acquisition

        Awareness attracts people to your box. Why does it catch their eye? Think of size, color, messaging, or positioning.

        Activation gets customers interested once they have become aware of the product. Why are they going to pick it up? Do they recognize the problem it solves? Is their first impression positive?

        Finally, Activation drives customers to buy the product. Is the price right? Do they believe what you are selling them?

        Make sure that each includes features around Awareness, Activation, and Acquisition.

        <Tip>
        Look for the reactions to each of these steps when you are testing with customers.
        </Tip>

        Questions to ask yourself while creating your box:

        <CheckList>
        [] What’s it called?
        [] Who’s it for?
        [] What’s its tagline or slogan?
        [] What are its most compelling features? Benefits?
        [] What imagery would make it stand out to you?
        </CheckList>

        <Tip>
        As a hack, consider designing your box together with customers.
        </Tip>
    </Step>
    <Step step="4" name="Sell the box">
        When the time is up, and teams have created their boxes, have the teams in turn present and sell their product to the other teams. Give them a short time to pitch and sell, e.g. 5 minutes to prepare their pitch, and then a 2 minute pitch. What questions are asked by the audience? How might it be improved? What were the strongest / weakest points?
        
        Alternatively, present or ‘sell’ your product to potential customers. A great experiment to do this is defined it the [Experiment Cookbook](https://shop.wrkshp.tools/experiment-cookbook).
    </Step>
    <Step step="5" name="Next steps">
        Keep your boxes for future reference and display them in a prominent place. They can serve as tangible evidence of the design process. Recording the presentations / sales pitches the teams give for the boxes can also be helpful for future reference.
        
        Doing extra experiments with (potential) customers, either ‘selling’ the box or having them compare it to competing products can be a great way to home in on the key features from the customer’s perspective.
    </Step>
</Steps>

The Product Box exercise helps you when you need to convert an abstract concept into something tangible that you can evaluate with people that were not intimately part of the design process.

Product Box

## What is it and when should I use it?
When ideating, and coming up with different options, you often end up with a long list of ideas. How to choose the ones to work on?

One way is to look at the impact vs uncertainty these ideas might have on your business (see [Uncertainty Matrix](tools/uncertainty-matrix)). But another, highly effective way is to look at how risky vs rewarding the ideas or directions might be.

The Risk Reward Matrix helps you map ideas, strategies, and directions, allowing you to make more informed decisions.
<ImageMap image="/tools/A4 Risk Reward Matrix.png">
1 | Risky | Things that involve a high risk. | 0.15, 0.5
2 | Safe | Things that can't really go wrong. | 0.85, 0.5
3 | High reward | Things that will bring in a high reward. | 0.5, 0.15
4 | Low reward | Things that won't bring much of a reward. | 0.5, 0.85
</ImageMap>
<Steps>
    <Step step="1" name="Collect">
        The first step is to collect the things you want to map. The Risk Reward Matrix is a great tool to choose among various options or possible directions, for instance, different business models to explore, different sales strategies to follow, or different experiments to run.
        
        Get a list of ±10-20 items, and make sure you label each clearly on a post-it note.
    </Step>
    <Step step="2" name="Map Reward">    
        First, for each of the post-its you wrote, map them only on the 'reward' axis. It is usually easier to gauge the reward. Have team members pick each post-it, and place it on the vertical central line where they think it should go.
        
        <Tip>
        Have the person that places the post-it explain what it is and why they are placing it there.
        </Tip>
        <Tip>
        When you're done, step back and see if the items are ordered correctly in terms of relative rewards. That means, an item should be less rewarding than all items above it, and more rewarding than all items below it.
        </Tip>
    </Step>
    <Step step="3" name="Map Risk">
        Next, have the team *silently* reshuffle the post-its on the horizontal axis. They can move post-its left and right, reflecting how risky they think achieving them is. If you don't agree on the horizontal position, choose the left-most one (the most risky), as your disagreement reflects that risk. **EXAMPLE** Think of risk as the probability of failure, and the impact of that failure. An experiment by itself may have a risk of failure, but it becomes high risk when it can backfire and the people in the experiment start complaining about your company on social media.
        
        <Example>
        Think of risk as the probability of failure, and the impact of that failure. An experiment by itself may have a risk of failure, but it becomes high risk when it can backfire and the people in the experiment start complaining about your company on social media.
        </Example>

        <Tip>
        When you're done, step back and see if the items are ordered correctly in terms of relative risks. That means, an item should be less risky than all items to the right of it, and more risky than all items to the left of it.
        </Tip>
    </Step>
    <Step step="4" name="Find low-hanging fruit">
        There are in essence 5 big groups that each post-it can end up in. Look at the checklist below, and find the post-its that are low-hanging fruit or that are high-risk. Use that to inform your choice.

        <CheckList>
        [] Top left: High risk, high reward. If you can find a way to de-risk these, they might give you a competitive advantage.
        [] Top right: Low risk, high reward. This is 'low-hanging fruit' that you can work on right away.
        [] Bottom left: High risk, low reward. The Danger Zone. These are things that you should stay away from.
        [] Bottom right: Low risk, low reward. These are things you should automate, reduce, or otherwise stop doing – unless you can find a way to raise their reward level.
        [] Center: Post-its in the center are middle of the road, and probably not that interesting
        </CheckList>
    </Step>
    <Step step="5" name="Next Steps">
        Use the result to inform your next decisions.
    </Step>
</Steps>
    

The Risk Reward Matrix helps you to balance Risk and Reward when choosing among options.

Risk Reward Matrix

## What is it and when should I use it?
We’ve all been there: your idea is so great that you’re literally bursting at the seams wanting to launch it as soon as you can (maybe even today!). Most of us feed on this excitement. But how do you know you’re making the right bet with your idea? Which bets does the success of your idea hinge on? These are your riskiest assumptions; they need to be tested.

Whether you work for a small start-up or an existing large organisation, validate your riskiest assumption as quickly and cheaply as possible so you don’t waste valuable time and resources toiling away at something that likely will never work. But this is often harder than it sound. How to find your riskiest assumption?

In your stack of assumptions, the riskiest one is the first gate. If when testing this assumption it continually comes back as “false,” you don’t get to pass go, you don’t get to collect your $200. This tool will help you rank your assumptions before moving on to experimentation.

The first key to identifying your list of riskiest assumptions is to bring a team together to unpack the idea and brainstorm together.

To identify the assumptions you have made about your business, have a look at other canvases you made, such as your Why, Design Criteria, Customer Journey, or Context Canvas. Each of these canvases contains untested assumptions.

<ImageMap image="/tools/A4 Riskiest Assumption Canvas.png">
1 | Assumptions | Put your assumptions in the middle three boxes. | 0.5, 0.5
2 | Low risk | Assumptions that have low risk or are already validated are moved to the top. | 0.5, 0.2
3 | High risk | The highest risk assumption is filtered down to the bottom. | 0.5, 0.8
</ImageMap>

## Finding the Riskiest Assumptions
Finding the riskiest assumption is not always easy. Discussing assumptions with your team will help to identify the ones to go after. Do this visually so it’s to the point and provides you with the outcome you need! This tool makes it easy for your team to have meaningful discussions on what the riskiest assumption really is, and provides a way to come back to the discussion after validating.

Jenga® is a game where players in turn try to remove blocks from a wooden tower. Each block that’s pulled out may make the tower collapse, but the blocks on the bottom are critical to keeping the tower upright.

Think of your idea as a big Jenga® tower, where all of the bricks are assumptions. When one of the assumptions on the bottom of the stack is invalidated, and the brick is removed, the entire tower may fall. When you remove one from the top, not much will happen.

To make your idea succeed, you need to make sure that the base of the tower is safe. We need to start at the bottom, with what we call the riskiest assumptions. At the moment, all the other assumptions are not important. After all, if the riskiest assumption is incorrect, it may be totally irrelevant to think about any of the others: maybe your idea needs to change completely in the light of the new knowledge!

The goal is to try to make the tower fail fast! So check the bottom-most assumption first, which is the riskiest one. That’s what you’ll want to know more about. If it is right, you can move to the next riskiest assumption. But if it fails, your Jenga® tower falls, and you’ll need to go back to the drawing board to find another approach that works better.

<Steps>
    <Step step="1" name="Identify Assumptions">    
        What are your assumptions? What are the things you’re not sure about? With your team, start by just writing all your assumptions on sticky notes, but don’t stick them on yet. Refer to the war room and your point of view for inspiration.
    </Step>
    <Step step="2" name="Map your Assumptions">
        Then, put the assumptions onto the template, each team member placing them in the middle 3 boxes, where they think it’s best. Don’t discuss yet!
    </Step>
    <Step step="3" name="Arrange the Assumptions">
        Once all of the post-its are on the wall, each team member quickly goes over his or her post-its, and explains why they think they should be in the place they are.
        
        Now, with your team, take turns moving sticky notes around. Try to find out which assumption is the riskiest one. Go over each post it, and see if everyone agrees that it is in the right spot. Remember: the assumptions that absolutely must be true for your idea to work go on the bottom of the stack.
        
        The ones that are less important or depend on other assumptions go higher up. Compare pairs of post-its to see which one has priority. When sticky notes move back and forth between boxes, put them halfway between.
    </Step>
    <Step step="4" name="Fundamental Assumptions">
        Finally, go over each box and see if there are any assumptions in there that really depend on others (move them up) or that are fundamental (move them down).

        After about 15 minutes, you should have only a few left in the lowest box. Vote with your team as to which one you think is the most fundamental one.
    </Step>
    <Step step="5" name="Describe your Riskiest Assumption">
        Now that you have identified a riskiest assumption, try to describe what it means with your team. When is the assumption true? Does it depend on something else? How can you make it s.m.a.r.t.?
    </Step>
    <Step step="6" name="Next Steps">
        Next, design an experiment using the Experiment Canvas. 

        You're done when:

        - You clearly identified **one** riskiest assumption
        - You have described your riskiest assumption
    </Step>
</Steps>

How do you know you’re making the right bet with your idea? Which bets does the success of your idea hinge on? These are your riskiest assumptions; they need to be tested.

Riskiest Assumption Canvas

## What is it and when should I use it?
The Stakeholder Map gives insight in the various stakeholders (partners, investors, …) that need to be kept in mind while developing the startup or project.

‘Stakeholders’ are defined here as decision makers that influence your startup journey, that have a stake in the outcome. A stakeholder could be your managing director in a company, or your boss, but it could also be a key partner or an investor. Each of these stakeholders has their own agenda. They want different things. Knowing what their agenda is and how you are best able to help further it is key to the success of your startup.

It’s important to understand that there are many different ways to map your stakeholders. To get the most out of your stakeholder map, make sure you understand what you want to achieve with it. Understanding this will inform the questions you would like to answer with your stakeholder map.

- Understand the people that can make or break your project
- Explore their characteristics and find out how to influence them
- Explore and navigate potential blockers and supports

This tool is a combination of three views that are often used to map stakeholders:

- Internal - external view, how ‘far’ are they away from you? Useful to find out who you can talk to or influence (radar view)
- Stakeholder matrix with axes ‘power vs interest’ (quadrants)
- Stakeholder matrix with axes ‘support vs influence’ (quadrants)

The two stakeholder matrices can be seen as the same one, where the axes are swapped; ‘support’ can be equated with a form of ‘interest’, and ‘power’ can be equated with ‘influence’. If you look at it like that, the quadrant view can be superimposed over the radar view.

<Tip>
The downloads section also has the Stakeholder Matrix as a download as an alternative, simpler view.
</Tip>

<ImageMap image="/tools/A4 Stakeholder Map.png">
1 | Team | The people that are involved in the project directly. | 0.5, 0.5
2 | Internal | People inside your own organisation that are indirectly involved in the project. | 0.5, 0.375
3 | External | People outside the organisation or other organisations that are indirectly involved in the project. | 0.5, 0.25
4 | Public | People or organizations that are aware of this project and operate in the public domain. | 0.5, 0.125
5 | Low Interest, Low Power | This slice of the diagram houses stakeholders that are not very interested in the project, and don’t have a lot of influence or power over it. | 0.15, 0.85
6 | High Interest, Low Power | In this slice, place stakeholders that have a vested interest in the project but don’t have a lot of direct influence or power over it. | 0.15, 0.15
7 | Low Interest, High Power | In this slice, place stakeholders that don’t have a large interest in the project, but could potentially have a lot of power or influence over it. | 0.85, 0.85
8 | High Interest, High Power | In this slice, place stakeholders that have a large interest in the project, and also have a lot of direct or indirect power or influence over it. | 0.85, 0.15
</ImageMap>

<Steps>
    <Step step="1" name="Who?">
        With your team, come up with the different stakeholders for your project. You can either do this by having everyone write stakeholders on sticky notes by themselves or by comparing them.

        Think about the following roles stakeholders can have for your project:

        - **Users**: Customers or clients using the end product or service
        - **Buyers**: Stakeholders deciding to buy your product or service (may be different from Users!)
        - **Budget-holders**: Stakeholders who govern spending for your product or service (may be different from buyers!)
        - **Gatekeepers** that prevent you from getting access to other stakeholders
        - **Influencers**: key people other stakeholders listen to already

        But also:

        - Investors or financiers (in the case of startups)
        - Your team
        - Internal stakeholders such as direct management
        - Internal executive level stakeholders and ‘sponsors’
        - ...

        Some of these might not be obvious. Why is a ‘user’ different from a ‘budget-holder’? Well, if you’re developing a simple business-to-consumer app, the same person may hold both roles. The same person decides to purchase the app, pays for it, and then uses it. But for more complex situations, usually for B2B propositions, that’s not the case. A manager might recommend buying your product to their manager, who then has to go to procurement to secure the funds, so that the manager’s team member can finally use the product. All these stakeholders need to be convinced that agreeing is a good idea, and they all decide for their own reasons.

        Once you’re ready, have team members stick the stakeholders on the canvas one by one. We’ll discuss the various stakeholders in the next step, but make sure you have the following aspects noted down for each stakeholder

        - Name
        - Company / Organisation
        - Role in their organisation
        - Role(s) for this project (see above)

        <Tip>
        Use different color sticky notes for different types of stakeholders, e.g. internal vs external, different business units, hierarchy levels, or different roles. The key in color coding is to choose a coding that you expect will bring a valuable visual grouping to the map that you can use later to quickly see patterns.
        </Tip>
        
        <Canvas image="https://wrkshp-tools.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/A4_Stakeholder_Map_-_Network_739e40d1e2.png"/>
        *Stakeholders on the Stakeholder Map*
    </Step>
    <Step step="2" name="What? How? Why?">
        For each stakeholder, try to find two reasons for them to support the startup, and two reasons to be against it. Write these on two different color sticky notes(suggestion: green for positive, red for negative) and stick them next to the appropriate name. Then, write one sticky note with their own immediate goal (color suggestion: yellow) and stick it at the end.

        The reasons they might have to support the product or service or not can be various. Think of the following:

        - Financial reasons (budget) – either to create opportunities or to reduce cost
        - Efficiency reasons
        - Reasons of status (maybe they can show off with a shiny product)
        - Risk avoidance
        - To keep their personnel happy
        - Alignment with company strategy and vision
        - Alignment with personal ambitions
        - ...

        If you don’t know exactly what a stakeholder’s agenda is, that is fine - you can make an educated guess now, as long as you are absolutely committed to find out the truth. Using the quadrants, it makes sense to focus on your relationships with the top-right high-influence, high-interest stakeholders first, and then work your way through the rest.

        Use the [Persona Canvas](https://wrkshp.tools/tools/persona-canvas) to map out the most important stakeholders and gather information on how they make their decisions, what their ambitions are, etc. These personas can be developed over time and are a great source of information. (Remember to be discreet and ethical in what you research and what information you store on your stakeholders!)

        Figure out how you might best communicate with the stakeholders. A useful way to categorise the communication strategies you might have with your stakeholders is the following:

        - **Inform** - inform stakeholders in a one-way communication
        - **Consult** - reach out to stakeholders to get specific feedback only when required
        - **Involve** - get regular feedback from stakeholders and proactively inform them about decisions
        - **Collaborate** - develop partnerships with stakeholders and decide together
        - **Empower** - delegate final decision making to stakeholders

        The example below gives a starting point on what might be a good strategy to communicate with stakeholders in different quadrants in your stakeholder map, but of course you are completely free to decide otherwise.

        <Canvas image="https://wrkshp-tools.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/A4_Stakeholder_Map_-_Quadrants_7f0ba27b3e.png"/>
        *Engagement strategies on the Stakeholder Map*
    </Step>
    <Step step="3" name="Connect the dots">
        Think of your stakeholder map as a **network**. Unlocking the network aspect can give you a leg up on your innovation journey.
        
        To do that, try to figure out how the stakeholders work together. Ask questions such as:

        <CheckList>
        [] Which stakeholders are linked together?
        [] Who influences who?
        [] Who share similar interests and agendas?
        [] Who might oppose each other?
        [] What are the key moments they make decisions?
        [] How can you get more information on how they make these decisions?
        </CheckList>

        Using color coding and linking the stakeholders together in your map will help you see the pattern. Simply connect the sticky notes with a line or use pins and strings like a 1960s super villain in a Bond movie.
        <Canvas image="https://wrkshp-tools.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/A4_Stakeholder_Map_-_Network_Connections_1e87784cf6.png"/>
        *The Stakeholder Map as a network*
        
        Once you have mapped out the different connections, it might make sense to also map out **what** is being communicated over these connections. What is the sentiment? A nice way to do this is to use emojis. In the example below they are printed, but you can easily draw them on sticky notes.
        <Canvas image="https://wrkshp-tools.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/A4_Stakeholder_Map_-_Network_Labels_6cfd878aac.png"/>
        *Visualising the connections between stakeholders*

        The example shown here immediately gives more insight. It depicts the stakeholder map for a startup that is in trouble. Although internally everything seems fine (as can be gauged from the emojis labeling the connections within the team and the connection to the CEO) the users are not happy. Somehow they fail to communicate the full force of that to the team, but they apparently do have a link to the media, and love to post negative comments. This gives the investor the impression that the platform is on fire, which impacts her relationship with the CEO. The CEO is forced to make apologetic statements to the press, which doesn’t help.

        This picture is a snapshot of the situation, and can be used to come up with ideas to ‘fix’ it. What if you could create a direct link between the team and the media and use positive PR? What if you could make the users much more happy? What if you could convince the investor that all is well? What if you could give users more influence over the product (i.e. move them more to the right in the diagram)?

        This simple example shows the power of a networked stakeholder map.
    </Step>
    <Step step="4" name="Next Steps">
        In order to really understand your stakeholders and share that understanding within a team, a great thing to do is to create personas [LINK] for your key stakeholders.
        
        Another thing you might do with your stakeholder map is to organize it in the form of a timeline or sequence, where you figure out how you can ‘hop’ from one stakeholder to the next in order to win them over to your idea. On the timeline you can also plot key moments that will influence your stakeholders that you can see coming. For example, if you know your investor wants to see the quarterly results, and they are not positive, you can see that coming and possibly preempt negative fallout by communicating about it early.
        
        Understand that your stakeholder map is in flux, over time stakeholders and their points of view change. Keep revisiting it to figure out what the most likely scenarios will be, especially before important decisions.
    
        Figure out which stakeholders to inform, consult, involve, collaborate with, or empower, and set up a communication strategy that achieves that.
    </Step>
</Steps>

Map the different stakeholders that influence your project and explore how they are linked together and how you might influence or navigate them.

Stakeholder Map

## What is it and when should I use it?

When helping startups, it is very difficult to judge how far a startup has progressed, especially when you base your judgement only on a shiny pitch deck and the (imaginary) numbers on their 5-year business plan.

<Quote author="Steve Blank">
It’s not clear there’s a correlation between giving a great PowerPoint presentation and a two minute demo and building a successful business model.
</Quote>

What is needed instead is an **evidence based, measurable progression** towards a viable business, with clear next steps and milestones. To do that, you need to know where you’re coming from, where you’re going, and where you are now on your journey.

After all, startups don’t all follow the same route. And running a startup is far from predictable. That’s why it’s so hard. Yet still, startups do need to reach similar milestones, and their journeys do have similar stages. Mapping those stages is what the Startup Readiness Level is all about.

The Startup Readiness Level was inspired by Steve Blank’s Investment Readiness Level. (To read the blogpost by Steve Blank that describes the Investment Readiness Level, follow this link.)

The original Investment Readiness Level is geared towards understanding when a startup is ready to invest in. And sure, investment can be super important for startups, but it’s not the only thing that startups work towards. Investment Readiness is simply a part of a bigger story.

To look at the journey a startup takes from the startup’s perspective, you have to include the rest of that story.

With the Startup Readiness Level as a guide, it is possible to look at evidence-based entrepreneurship. It is possible to track the progress of a startup through different stages towards success.

## The Startup Readiness Level
The Startup Readiness Level divides the typical startup journey in ten levels. Every startup starts at level zero, and works its way towards level 10.

Every level is a stage that needs to be cleared before going to the next one. Sometimes, you can get stuck on a level for a while, before figuring out how to clear it, grinding your way forward like in a difficult video game. But keep working at it and trying new things until you get past the hurdle. Don’t try to tackle that level 61 elite boss when you’re just starting out in the game.

If you’re a startup, you’re playing an unfair game. You need to be smarter than the rest. You not only need to **be** right, you need to **prove** you’re right. The only way to do that is with data. No more discussions about whose opinion is better, when those opinions are not backed up with data. Without data, it’s all talk.

That’s why every level has clear metrics. Using these metrics it becomes crystal clear in which level you are and what you can do to progress. Each stage also has different typical tools and activities associated with it.

Of course, every startup will have slightly different metrics to deal with. What is a substantial number of customers to one business is peanuts to another. It depends on the goals you set for yourself, and the business model you’ll come up with. So for every stage, you’ll need to use your brain to come up with the exact values for the metric you need to achieve.

<Quote author="Steve Blank">
It’s time to play Moneyball.
</Quote>

<ImageMap image="/tools/A4 Startup Readiness Level.png">
1 | Define your Idea | Define your idea and focus on what you want to achieve | 5, 0.9
2 | Understand the Problem | Focus on understanding the problem from your customer's perspective | 0.5, 0.8
3 | Explore potential solutions | Come up with different ways to solve the problem | 0.5, 0.7
4 | Validate Problem / Solution | Find out what solution your customers prefer over all alternatives | 0.5, 0.6
5 | Build and validate Lo-Fi MVP | Create your first rough MVP and gauge customer reaction | 0.5, 0.5
6 | Validate Product / Market | Tune your product until customers can't do without it | 0.5, 0.4
7 | Validate your revenue model | Figure out what the best way is to get revenue | 0.5, 0.3
8 | Validate value delivery | Tune the way you deliver value at scale | 0.5, 0.2
9 | Validate growth | Validate if you can grow beyond your initial target customers | 0.5, 0.1
</ImageMap>

<Steps>
    <Step step="1" name="Define your Idea">
        <CheckList>
        [] Do you know why you want to start your journey?
        [] Do you know what you want to achieve, and with whom?
        [] What are your design criteria?
        [] What is your vision?
        [] Find at least ten people that your idea and vision resonate with
        </CheckList>

        ‘Resonate’ here does not necessarily mean that they agree with you – just that they think it is an important and interesting idea. At this stage you have all the freedom in the world to change your ideas – if you can’t excite or interest people in this stage, perhaps you’re barking up the wrong tree.
        
        It’s important to start out with a vision. If you don’t, you’ll run the risk of running out of steam, doing something that you don’t care about. Starting a business is hard, so you’ll need something that drives you even when the going gets tough.

        - [Golden Circle Canvas](https://wrkshp.tools/tools/golden-circle-canvas)
        - [Ikigai](https://wrkshp.tools/tools/ikigai-canvas)
        - [Design Criteria Canvas](https://wrkshp.tools/tools/design-criteria-canvas)
        - [Stepping Stones Vision Canvas](https://wrkshp.tools/tools/stepping-stones-vision)
        - [Trend Map](https://wrkshp.tools/tools/trend-canvas)

        **Typical Duration**: A few days to weeks
    </Step>
    <Step step="2" name="Understand the Problem">
        **Key Questions**
        - Do you really **understand** what problem you want to solve?
        - Do you really know the people that experience the problem every day?
        - Do you know what this problem costs them? What do they currently do to solve it?
        - How many people have this problem?

        **Key Metrics**
        - Can you find (and connect with) **at least ten people** that experience this problem on a regular basis and that care about the problem being solved?
        - Can you do the ‘back of the napkin’ calculation to show that there will be **enough customers ready to pay** to make this **a problem worth solving**?

        Here, it’s time to get curious. It’s not about the solution, it’s about the problem. Find a problem people care about. Talk to as many people as you can that you think might be experiencing the problem. Try to learn how the problem manifests itself in their lives. Is it a nice-to-have or a need-to-have? How many people have this problem? What does it cost them today?
        Learning not only who the people are that experience the problem but also how to reach them is vital for the success of your business.

        **Key Tools**
        - [Customer Need Canvas](https://wrkshp.tools/tools/customer-need-canvas)
        - [Customer Journey Canvas](https://wrkshp.tools/tools/customer-journey-canvas)
        - [Persona Canvas](https://wrkshp.tools/tools/persona-canvas)
        - [Card Sort](https://wrkshp.tools/tools/card-sort)
        - [Experiment Result Canvas](https://wrkshp.tools/tools/experiment-canvas)
        - [Job Map](https://wrkshp.tools/tools/job-map-canvas)

        **Typical Duration**: A few weeks to a month
    </Step>
    <Step step="3" name="Explore Potential Solutions">

        **Key Questions**
        - Did you explore multiple solutions to see what aspects of a solution are important to your customers?
        - Did you run **at least three experiments** with three different potential solutions?

        **Key Metrics**
        - Did you manage to **positively validate** at least **one possible solution**?

        Now that you have found a problem worth solving it’s time to look at solutions. It’s important to start from the problem and the people experiencing it when coming up with potential solutions, and it’s important to stay ‘out of the box’ for a bit. Sure, you may have a gut feeling that a certain solution is the way to go, but why not take a little bit of time to prove that it’s really the best solution you can come up with? And, maybe even more importantly, do your customers agree?

        **Key Tools**
        - [Creative Matrix](https://wrkshp.tools/tools/creative-matrix)
        - [Mini Propositions](https://wrkshp.tools/tools/mini-propositions)
        - [Experiment Canvas](https://wrkshp.tools/tools/experiment-canvas)
        - [Experiment Cookbook](https://shop.wrkshp.tools/experiment-cookbook)
        - [Experiment Result Canvas](https://wrkshp.tools/tools/experiment-results-canvas)
        - [Lean Canvas](https://wrkshp.tools/tools/lean-canvas)

        **Typical Duration**: A few weeks to a month
    </Step>
    <Step step="4" name="Validate Problem / Solution">
        **Key Questions**
        - Can you find a **substantial number** of customers that **prefer your solution** over any other solution to their problem?

        **Key Metrics**
        - Can you find **at least ten people** that were prepared to **give a commitment** to show they want your solution? And were they each willing to introduce you to people in their trusted network that also should know about this?

        This level is about making an awesome solution. Not just a meh, me-too kind of thing, but something people feel they **must have**. You will only know this if they want to make a commitment, for instance by **actually paying for it**. If people want to introduce your solution to people in their trusted network, it means you’re really helping them.
        It can be tempting to squeeze past this stage, taking leading indicators that there are some people out there that stand not entirely negative towards your solution as ‘evidence’ you have achieved product-solution-fit. Don’t do it. At this stage, you’re still small and agile. Better to get it right before moving forward.

        **Key Tools**
        - [Mini Propositions](https://wrkshp.tools/tools/mini-propositions)
        - [Storytelling Canvas](https://wrkshp.tools/tools/storytelling-canvas)
        - [Experiment Canvas](https://wrkshp.tools/tools/experiment-canvas)
        - [Experiment Cookbook](https://shop.wrkshp.tools/experiment-cookbook)
        - [Experiment Result Canvas](https://wrkshp.tools/tools/experiment-results-canvas)
        - [Landing Page Canvas](https://wrkshp.tools/tools/landing-page-canvas)
        - [Product Box](https://wrkshp.tools/tools/product-box)
        - [Lean Canvas](https://wrkshp.tools/tools/lean-canvas)

        **Typical Duration**: A few months
    </Step>
    <Step step="5" name="Build and Validate Lo-Fi MVP">
        **Key Questions**
        - Can you find early traction, where early adopter customers are ready to pay for your solution?

        **Key Metrics**
        - Can you reach **100 actual customers** to sell your product to? Do they love it? Were you able to serve them and keep them happy and engaged?

        This is where it starts to become serious. The numbers of customers start to grow. Where before you may not have really had a product yet, now you’ll need to start building, delivering, and learning about serving customers and retaining them.

        **Key Tools**
        - [Job Map](https://wrkshp.tools/tools/job-map-canvas)
        - [Experiment Canvas](https://wrkshp.tools/tools/experiment-canvas)
        - [Experiment Cookbook](https://shop.wrkshp.tools/experiment-cookbook)
        - [Landing Page Canvas](https://wrkshp.tools/tools/landing-page-canvas)
        - [Product Box](https://wrkshp.tools/tools/product-box)
        - [Lean Canvas](https://wrkshp.tools/tools/lean-canvas)

        **Typical Duration**: A few months
    </Step>
    <Step step="5" name="Validate Product / Market Fit">
        **Key Questions**
        - Can you scale up your customer base, and find customers in sufficient quantity to make your business work?

        **Key Metrics**
        - **>70%** of your customer base **would really hate not being able to use your product**

        **Key Tools**
        - [Pirate Metrics Canvas](https://wrkshp.tools/tools/pirate-metrics-canvas)
        - [Experiment Canvas](https://wrkshp.tools/tools/experiment-canvas)
        - [Experiment Cookbook](https://shop.wrkshp.tools/experiment-cookbook)
        - [Lean Canvas](https://wrkshp.tools/tools/lean-canvas)
        - [Startup Calculator](https://bit.ly/startup-calculator)

        This is where the pedal meets the metal. The make-or-break moment. You’ll need to show that you have built a product that a sizable chunk of your target customers can’t do without.
        
        **Typical Duration**: A few months to a year
    </Step>
    <Step step="7" name="Validate Revenue Model">
        **Key Questions**
        - Can you make money?
        - Do customers like your revenue model?

        **Key Metrics**
        - You have a CLTV of 2-5 times CAC.
        - You are growing towards MRR of > 10K per month

        Here you’ll start to really experiment with your revenue model. You’ll need to understand how you generate (recurring) revenue and make a profit delivering your product – while at the same time growing your customer base and developing your product.

        **Key Tools**
        - [Pirate Metrics Canvas](https://wrkshp.tools/tools/pirate-metrics-canvas)
        - [Experiment Canvas](https://wrkshp.tools/tools/experiment-canvas)
        - [Lean Canvas](https://wrkshp.tools/tools/lean-canvas)
        - Business Model Canvas

        **Typical Duration**: A few months to a year
    </Step>
    <Step step="8" name="Validate Value Delivery">
        **Key Questions**
        - Can you deliver at scale?

        **Key Metrics**
        - You are able to keep your growth rate up
        - You are able to keep your customers happy
        - You are able to improve quality and reduce cost on the value delivery side?
        - You have a CLTV of 5-8 times CAC.

        You have a sizable customer base now and you’re able to run a profit. But can you scale it up? Can you prove you can deliver value for your customers at scale? For most businesses, getting to this stage is already proving it’s a solid business model. But of course, you can still try to level up.
        At this stage, the tools in the Startup Readiness Level start to become less important. They’re still useful as mental models, but you should really have built your own business intelligence and analytics by this stage that are tuned to the intricacies of your business.

        **Key Tools**
        - [Pirate Metrics Canvas](https://wrkshp.tools/tools/pirate-metrics-canvas)
        - [Experiment Canvas](https://wrkshp.tools/tools/experiment-canvas)
        - [Lean Canvas](https://wrkshp.tools/tools/lean-canvas)
        - Business Model Canvas

        **Typical Duration**: Over a year
    </Step>
    <Step step="9" name="Validate Growth">
        **Key Questions**
        - Can you acquire more customers in more markets?

        **Key Metrics**
        - Are you able to reach other markets successfully?

        Can you grow your business beyond your initial target market? This is where you go beyond ‘normal’ businesses into ‘unicorn territory’.
        At this stage, the tools in the Startup Readiness Level start to become less important. They’re still useful as mental models, but you should really have built your own business intelligence and analytics by this stage that are tuned to the intricacies of your business.

        **Key Tools**
        - [Pirate Metrics Canvas](https://wrkshp.tools/tools/pirate-metrics-canvas)
        - [Experiment Canvas](https://wrkshp.tools/tools/experiment-canvas)
        - [Lean Canvas](https://wrkshp.tools/tools/lean-canvas)
        - Business Model Canvas

        **Typical Duration**: Over a year
    </Step>
    <Step step="10" name="Do the Unicorn!">
        🍾 🦄 🚀 !!!
    </Step>
</Steps>

It is very difficult to judge how far a startup has progressed. What is needed is an evidence based, measurable progression towards a viable business, with clear next steps and milestones. The Startup Readiness Level (inspired by Steve Blank’s Investment Readiness Level) tries to give you that map.

Startup Readiness Level

## What is it and when should I use it?
The stepping stones vision canvas combines the ‘north star’ you defined in terms of your statement and themes with the steps you can take to get there.

<ImageMap image="/tools/A4 Stepping Stones Vision.png">
1 | Your vision statement | The vision statement represents the future you’re working towards. | 0.8, 0.2
2 | Themes | The themes describe important aspects of your mission, how your quest towards your vision shows up in your everyday processes. Together, the themes describe your mission: they tell a coherent story of how you will achieve your vision statement. | 0.75, 0.15
3 | Your starting position | This is where you are right now. Your starting position on your journey towards the vision. | 0.2, 0.8
4 | The River | The ‘river’ describes a gap you will need to cross to go from your current situation toward your vision. | 0.3, 0.3
5 | Blockers | Place the obstacles you see on your journey in this part of the river. These are things holding you back or  preventing you from progressing towards your vision. | 0.2, 0.2
6 | Supports | Just as there are obstacles there are also supports that help you progress towards your vision. | 0.6, 0.8
7 | Stepping Stones | The Stepping Stones are a progression of steps that will take you closer to your vision. Just as with real stepping stones, you don’t need to use all of them: perhaps when you get to that point, you’ll find you can safely skip some of them. But it’s good to know they are there. | 0.3, 0.5
</ImageMap>

<Steps>
    <Step step="1" name="Collect themes">
        First, look at the Golden Circle canvas and find the themes you have come up with from the how, what, and why sections. What are the major themes if you cluster them? Copy the themes to the stepping stones canvas.
    </Step>
    <Step step="2" name="Find evidence">
        Next, try to come up with evidence for each theme. How will it show up in the everyday life at the company? How does the theme define what, how, and why you do things? Together, the themes and this evidence should  logically support your vision statement.
    </Step>
    <Step step="3" name="Starting point">
        Find out where you are now, what is your starting point. How can you define the situation you're in? Where have you not yet achieved your vision statement?
    </Step>
    <Step step="4" name="Define steps, supports, and blockers">
        Come up with a number of steps you may take to lead you closer to the vision. It doesn’t matter if you don’t have a clear order in mind. The stepping stones allow you to take a free-form path. It’s about alternatives, not a definite map.

        While defining stepping stones, you can also look out for supports (things that can help you get closer to the vision) and blockers (things that make it harder). In coming up with more steps, try to use your supports and neutralize the blockers.
    </Step>
    <Step step="5" name="Next Steps">
        Look at your stepping stones map regularly and try to see what options you have for your next stepping stone.
    </Step>
</Steps>


The stepping stones vision canvas combines the ‘north star’ you defined in terms of your statement and themes with the steps you can take to get there.

Stepping Stones Vision

## What is it and when should I use it?
We're all born storytellers. Stories are how we have shared knowledge and information since the dawn of humanity. Our brains are shaped by storytelling. Still, not everyone can aspire to be the next Hemingway from the get go. But don't be afraid: stories can be designed! The storytelling canvas helps you to do just that!

We created the storytelling canvas to make it easier to construct a story that people care to listen to. The PowerPoint presentations you give may lack the emotional depth and impact you want to build in a story. However, the stories we design can be told through the medium of PowerPoint!

Like the other tools in this book, the story canvas allows you to collectively design stories that resonate: by harnessing visual, engaging, insightful, controlled, and inspiring elements.

What do you want to achieve with your story? Why do you want to tell it?

<ImageMap image="/tools/A4 Storytelling Canvas.png">
1 | Subject | What is the title and subject of your story? | 0.15, 0.2
2 | Goal | What is the goal you want to achieve? Why are you telling the story? | 0.5, 0.2
3 | Audience | Who is your audience? Map them as a persona!. | 0.85, 0.2
4 | Before | What do your audience members feel, think, know, want, etc. about the subjects in your story before they hear it? | 0.15, 0.5
5 | Set the Scene | Create a context (based on emotion, ethics, or facts) that helps the audience get in the mood of things. | 0.3, 0.5
6 | Make your Point | What is the main message you want to come across which will help support a change of heart with the audience? | 0.5, 0.5
7 | Conclusion | What are the arguments, facts, and anecdotes in your story? Where are you going to place them? | 0.5, 0.7
8 | After | Do audience members feel, think, know, want, etc. after they hear the story? Be specific! | 0.85, 0.5
</ImageMap>

<Steps>
    <Step step="1" name="What do you want to achieve?">
        What you’ll need to understand when designing your story is that there must be a goal. What do you want your audience to know, feel, or do afterwards? Your goal needs to be quite selective: you can make only a few points in your story!

        There are basically four kinds of stories:

        - Stories that **explore** 
        - Stories that **explain** 
        - Stories that **inspire** 
        - Stories that **convince** 

        Which type are you creating?
    </Step>
    <Step step="2" name="Who are in the audience?">
        In addition to knowing what you want to achieve, you need to understand who your audience is. What do they care about? Why should they listen to your story? Different audiences need different stories; one size does not fit all! You might even use the right side of the value proposition canvas or a persona canvas to map the audience. Test your assumptions: while designing and telling the story, revisit your persona, and update it with what you learned.

        <Tip>
        If you are pitching to an investor, the customers of your product are not necessarily the audience of your story. Your investor has a totally different set of needs than your customer.
        </Tip>
    </Step>
    <Step step="3" name="Map the audience's before and after state.">
        In order to be meaningful, your story should change your audience in some way. Their beliefs, emotions, or knowledge should be transformed by the time you are finished.

        First, ask yourself: How does your audience feel about your goal before they heard your story? Do they care about it already? And then, think about what you'd like them to think about once you’re through? Trying to define it from the audience’s perspective is key.

        Next, define the before and after state in terms of: 
        - **Ethics and Authority**: What ethics are in play? Where do people look for authoritative answers? What should change?
        - **Emotion and Empathy**: What emotions do audience members have? Do they feel or lack empathy? What should change?
        - **Facts and Logic**: What facts and rational arguments do audience members have? What should change here?
    </Step>
    <Step step="5" name="Create the story">
        Try to come up with arguments that may change their minds, and make sure you have a list of rational, emotional, and ethical points. What is your “proof”? Do you have examples? Anecdotes? Find the ones that will resonate with your audience.

        There are different key ingredients that you can use to plot your audience's journey through the story. With your team, spend time to come up with a good number of these. Don't bother about the order yet, just try to find as many as you can.

        <CheckList>
        [] Facts & figures. These appeal to logic but can be boring.
        [] Anecdotes. These give personality and a sense of truth to the story.
        [] Examples. Halfway between facts and anecdotes, these bring clarity.
        [] Arguments. What logical pros and cons are there for this story? What about your point of view?
        [] Fun / emotional. What are things you and your team are enthusiastic about? or angry? happy? Try to find a mix.
        [] A-ha moment. The one main point you want to make with the story.
        </CheckList>
    </Step>
    <Step step="6" name="Next Steps">
        Test your story with a friendly audience before using it for real. What do people say? think? do? Did you achieve the transformation you were looking for?
    </Step>
</Steps>


Create better stories and presentations in under 45 minutes using the Storytelling Canvas

Storytelling Canvas

## What is it and when should I use it?
Once you have made an affinity map and clustered your ideas, it is time to start filtering them down. There are many ways to do this, some work best for a small list of ideas, others work well for a large list.

The SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) analysis is a traditional, but very effective tool to zoom in on one idea and really find out its strengths and weaknesses. It can be made to work well with the design criteria scorecard in that respect.

Many of you will know how to do a SWOT analysis, but here I will give a brief overview. To effectively do a SWOT analysis you need a short list (3-5) ideas to compare. For each entry, going through the analysis will take a bit of time.
<ImageMap image="/tools/A4 SWOT Canvas.png">
1 | Internal and External Factors | On the vertical axis, the SWOT analysis splits internal and external factors working on your idea or situation. | 0.5, 0.2
2 | Positive and Negative Factors | On the horizontal axis, the SWOT canvas discerns positive and negative factors. Strengths and opportunities are positive, and weaknesses and threats negative. | 0.8, 0.5
</ImageMap>

<Steps>
    <Step step="1" name="Strengths and weaknesses">
        Go over your idea and come up with at least 5 strengths and 5 weaknesses. To make this easier, go over the different aspects of the idea you previously mapped to a cluster, and refer back to your earlier customer research.

        <Tip>
        To combine multiple ideas in one canvas, use different color postits per idea.
        </Tip>
    </Step>
    <Step step="1" name="Opportunities and Threats">
        Go over the opportunities and threats that face your idea. What are opportunities or threats coming from the market, economy, competition, new technology, demographics, and changing customer preferences? What are the big uncertainties you face?
    </Step>
    <Step step="3" name="Compare">
        Compare the different ideas. Try to see if ideas have strengths that cancel out weaknesses, and that they have strengths that fit well to make use of opportunities.

        <Tip>
        A good way to do it is to give points. Strengths get +2, weaknesses -2, opportunities +1, and threats -1 point. Compare the scores of different ideas and see if (and how) they make sense.
        </Tip>
    </Step>        
    <Step step="4" name="Next Steps">
        Come back to your SWOT and compare the score with the next iteration of your idea. Did you manage to improve it? Did you cancel out negative points?

        <CheckList>
        [] You have filled the SWOT canvas for each of your ideas
        [] You calculated the score and compared
        [] You have an idea how to cancel negative aspects
        </CheckList>
    </Step>
</Steps>


The SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) analysis is a traditional, but very effective tool to zoom in on one idea and really find out its strengths and weaknesses.

SWOT Canvas

## What is it and when should I use it?

When coming up with new directions for innovation, or when you’re taking the first steps on your startup journey, it’s all about understanding the problem you want to solve.

And that requires making sense of a lot of incoming information. Not just information about your customer (see [Customer Needs Canvas](tools/customer-need-canvas), [Persona Canvas](tools/persona-canvas), and [Customer Journey Canvas](tools/customer-journey-canvas) for that), but also information about the state of the world around you.

You’ll probably also do market research, look at competitors, get insights on trends and technological developments, and try to divine what the future may hold in terms of e.g. economic development, environmental change, and legislation.

After all, the product or company you want to build does not exist in isolation. It is connected to the outside world, and it is influenced by it. If you don’t know about that new piece of legislation that will cripple your business model and that is coming next year, you’ll be in trouble. Understanding the context of your business is crucial.

How do you bring together that information, and how do you represent it in such a way that you and your team can build a shared mental map? That is where the Trend Canvas comes in.

<ImageMap image="/tools/A4 Trend Canvas.png">
1 | Now | Trends you see in the world today. | 0.5, 0.8
2 | 2 Years | Trends you expect to become big in the next 2 years. | 0.5, 0.6
3 | 5 Years | Trends you think might show up in 5 years time. | 0.5, 0.4
4 | 10 Years | Long term patterns and scenarios that might play out. | 0.5, 0.2
</ImageMap>

<Steps>
    <Step step="1" name="Collect Trends">
        The first step to mapping the world around you is to find relevant information and make sense of it. There needs to be a sorting principle at work. One great way to do this is to look at relevant trends. ‘Relevant’ here means that it has either a direct or a strong indirect effect on what you are trying to achieve. As always, it is far easier to split the 'collecting' and the 'sorting' steps. So start by collecting trends that you see evidence of in the world around you. Look at articles, forecasts, magazines, and other publications. Have a look at trendwatchers and industry reports. Try to collect as many new developments as you can find, in different areas. The checklist below can give you an idea of areas to look at.

        When you're collecting, make sure you write down the sources where you found your information.

        For each trend, write a post it with a recognizable label (that can be linked back to the source). stick each of post-it note on a big piece of paper or empty wall. We're clustering next, so you can already try to stick post-its that seem related close to each other.

        Color code your post-its for the different areas you're gathering data on. e.g. Red for politics, green for environment, blue for technology. This will help you see patterns.

        <CheckList>
        [] Demographics of your customer segments
        [] Environment
        [] Politics and legislation
        [] Economic developments
        [] Competition
        [] Technological developments
        [] Consumer trends
        </CheckList>
    </Step>
    <Step step="2" name="Cluster Trends">
        Step back, and have a look at your wall. Together with your team, make an 'affinity map' or clustering of your post-its. Simply put things that seem related close together. The color code may help you here.

        Are there areas you found more trends in? Or areas you had a hard time finding any? Think hard if that is an accurate reflection of the influence of the world on your business, or that it is a byproduct of the interests that are prevalent in your team. If you suspect it is the latter, make sure you either spend more time looking for relevant trends or insights, or find an expert that may give you their take on how this may influence your business. Everyone has blind spots, the point is to take action about them.
    </Step>
    <Step step="3" name="Select Sectors">
        While you can (and perhaps should) map out a Trend Canvas for each of the areas mentioned above, in most cases there are a few areas that you are more interested in right now. Select the ~3-5 areas you are most interested in for now. In the visual canvas, there are 5 sectors that you can use for these areas.

        Put your Trend Canvas on the wall, and mark the 3-5 sectors by sticking labeled post-its around the perimeter of the semi-circle.
    </Step>
    <Step step="4" name="Map the trends">
        For each of the sectors, look at your trend wall. Have team members pick trends that they think are important, and put them on the Trend Canvas. They can stick them wherever they want, in the 'now', '2 years', '5 years', or '10 years' areas, and explain why they think they should go there.

        When deciding how far out to place a trend, use the following principle:

        <CheckList>
        [] 'Now': you should see the evidence this trend impacts business all around you
        [] '2 years': the evidence is there, but it is still growing (fast)
        [] '5 years': there may be some evidence today, but it is definitely not mainstream
        [] '10 years': bigger movements and major future scenarios that might shape up. There may not be much evidence today.
        [] Have team members (or the person that did the research) give a bit of background on the trends they pick when they stick them on.
        [] Finally, step back with the team, and discuss the patterns you can see appearing. What are the things you already had on your radar? What are the new developments? What are positive or negative scenarios that may unfold? And how can you prepare for them?
        </CheckList>
    </Step>
    <Step step="5" name="Revisit">
        Now that you have your Trend Canvas filled, it is important to revisit it from time to time. How have your perceptions changed? Do you see new trends pop up? Also have a look at your bigger 'trend wall'.
    </Step>
    <Step step="6" name="Next Steps">
        The Trend Map by itself can be a useful tool, but it becomes much more powerful when you keep it alive and use it as a source to inform your strategy over the longer term. Make sure you stay up to date with trends. And use the [Uncertainty Matrix](tools/uncertainty-matrix) to see which trends pack the most punch.
    </Step>
</Steps>

The Trend Canvas helps you map different trends in the world around your business that may impact you in the future.

Trend Canvas

## What is it and when should I use it?
In any innovation process, uncertainty is a big thing. Most of what you are doing is uncertain. There are many assumptions and blind spots, there is no way around that.

Each of these assumptions or blind spots could have the potential to kill your startup or business. What about that new piece of legislation that you don't know about? Or your assumptions about your customer segment that are just plain wrong?

In the end, you'll need to experiment and validate to find out which assumptions are correct. Check out the [Experiment Canvas](tools/experiment-canvas) and the [Experiment Cookbook](https://shop.wrkshp.tools/experiment-cookbook) for more on running experiments and validating. Blind spots are a bit harder, but the [Trend Canvas](tools/trend-canvas) can help you at least work towards eliminating them.

Knowing your assumptions and investigating your blind spots is one thing to do. But another, equally important step is to understand *how much* you know about them, and *how big* of an impact they may have on your business.

The Uncertainty Matrix helps you map assumptions and guesstimate the impact and uncertainty related to them, allowing you to make more informed decisions, and a direction to reduce uncertainty for the potentially high-impact ones.

<ImageMap image="/tools/A4 Uncertainty Matrix.png">
1 | Negative Impact | Things that have a negative impact on your business. | 0.15, 0.5
2 | Positive Impact | Things that have a positive impact on your business. | 0.85, 0.5
3 | Certain | Things you're certain about. | 0.5, 0.15
4 | Uncertain | Things you're uncertain about. | 0.5, 0.85
5 | Less important | Things that don't have much of a positive or negative impact and you're not certain or uncertain about. | 0.5, 0.5
</ImageMap>

<Steps>
    <Step step="1" name="Collect Assumptions">
        The first step is to collect the things you want to map. One great way of using this canvas is to find risky assumptions in combination with the [Riskiest Assumption Canvas](tools/riskiest-assumption-canvas). Another excellent way to use it is to find out what trends and outside influences (e.g. competitors) to track, in combination with the [Trend Canvas](tools/trend-canvas).Get a list of ±10-20 assumptions or trends together, and make sure you label each clearly on a post-it note.

        If you are looking at trends, you'll first have to 'unpack' the trends into outcomes that may impact your business. For instance, the trend 'Machine Learning' is too broad to effectively map the impact for. You'll need to think a bit on the different outcomes that can be a result of this trend, for instance availability of algorithms, how it influences competition, the need for data to make effective use of Machine Learning, etc. Each trend might lead to ±3-5 of these 'outcomes'.
    </Step>
    <Step step="2" name="Map Impact">
        First, for each of the post-its you wrote, map them only on the 'impact' axis. It is usually easier to gauge the impact. Have team members pick each post-it, and place it on the horizontal central line where they think it should go. If a post-it has both positive and negative impacts, split it up and relabel it.

        Have the person that places the post-it explain what it is and why they are placing it there.
    </Step>
    <Step step="3" name="Map Certainty">
        Next, have the team *silently* reshuffle the post-its on the vertical axis. They can move post-its up and down, reflecting how certain they think they are about them. If you don't agree on the vertical position, choose the lowest one (the most uncertain), as your disagreement reflects that uncertainty.

        Things are most certain when you have proved them, either an experiment (see Experiment Canvas](tools/experiment-canvas) and the [Experiment Cookbook](https://shop.wrkshp.tools/experiment-cookbook)), or, even better, by actual results. If you haven't done that, you're not allowed to but the post-it in the op third of the canvas!
    </Step>
    <Step step="4" name="Find high-impact">
        There are in essence 5 big groups that each post-it can end up in. Look at the checklist below, and find the post-its that you can either start work on today (how many did you not know about before today?), and the ones you really should work toward getting more certainty on. Start designing experiments (experiment (see [Riskiest Assumption Canvas](tools/riskiest-assumption-canvas), [Experiment Canvas](tools/experiment-canvas) and the [Experiment Cookbook](https://shop.wrkshp.tools/experiment-cookbook)) to reduce the uncertainty.

        - **Top left**: Negative impact, high certainty. These are problems you should start to solve today.
        - **Top right**: Positive impact, high certainty. Opportunities you can work on today
        - **Bottom left**: Negative impact, high uncertainty. These are things to worry about. You'll need to start doing experiments that reduce the uncertainty.
        - **Bottom right**: Positive impact, high uncertainty. These are things that might help you but you have not enough information about. You'll need to start doing experiments that reduce the uncertainty.
        - **Center**: Post-its in the center are middle of the road, and probably not that interesting
    </Step>
    <Step step="5" name="Next Steps">
        Start designing experiments (experiment (see [Riskiest Assumption Canvas](tools/riskiest-assumption-canvas), [Experiment Canvas](tools/experiment-canvas) and the [Experiment Cookbook](https://shop.wrkshp.tools/experiment-cookbook)) to reduce the uncertainty for the high impact, high uncertainty items.
    </Step>
</Steps>

The Uncertainty Matrix helps you find threats and opportunities that are uncertain but can have a big impact on your business

Uncertainty Matrix

## What is it and when should I use it?
In any innovation process, uncertainty is a big thing. Most of what you are doing is uThe User Day exercise is an innovative tool that promotes a user-centered approach to product and service innovation. Looking to develop solutions that are tailored to your target users? Want to gain a deeper awareness of their daily experiences, needs, and pain points?

By immersing themselves in an imaginary user's daily routine and pinpointing the obstacles users encounter, teams can gain a fresh perspective on the space their product or service is operating in. Once the challenges are identified, teams can brainstorm on existing or new products/services/ideas that could help address and solve those. 

This exercise is particularly useful during the innovation process when the product team is seeking to develop empathy for their users and center their product ideas around their needs. Really, it's a powerful reminder to always keep the user in mind, regardless of the stage of the project.

### Customer Journey vs User Day 
The most common type of customer journey is the current-state journey. Teams use this approach to map out a user’s experience in relation to their product/service or when exposed to a brand’s marketing approach. 

In comparison, the User Day exercise takes everything a step back. Rather than focusing on specific product moments, the exercise encourages teams to zoom out and gain a comprehensive understanding of the user's experience, even beyond direct product interactions.

### A real user’s day
Of course, this exercise does not replace speaking to actual users. If you want to check your own assumptions about your users’ experiences (which you should), we suggest conducting a real diary study. 

A diary study is a research method that provides an intimate window into a user's life, capturing their behaviors, activities, and experiences over a certain period. Participants are prompted to record their experiences in their own words, giving design teams valuable insights into their daily routines, habits, and emotions. 

<ImageMap image="/tools/A4 User Day.png">
1 | Daily Activities | Write out the experiences and tasks your user goes through. Then identify pain points & possible solutions (step 2 & 3) | 0.5, 0.5
2 | Timestamp | Include rough times for each activity. | 0.15, 0.5
3 | Opportunities | Map out opportunities you find in the daily activities. | 0.85, 0.25
2 | Assumptions | List assumptions you made or found while mapping. | 0.85, 0.75
</ImageMap>

<Steps>
    <Step step="1" name="Sketch out a typical day">
        Use the area next to the timeline to map out a typical day for your persona, including rough times for each activity. You can use post-its or write directly on the paper. 

        The best approach here is to work quickly and creatively, including as many events of the day as possible. Give yourself about 5-10 minutes.

        ### Questions to help you map your user’s day
        - Who is your user persona? Make sure you have a clear understanding of their typical behaviors, habits, or preferences
        - What are their typical working hours or daily schedule? 
        - Who do they interact with during their day, and in what context? 
        - What are their emotions and thoughts during each activity? Consider how they feel and what they think at each stage of their day 
        - What are their needs and wants? Think about what your persona needs and wants to accomplish during their day
        - Are there any moments of stress or uncertainty in the user's day, and why?
        - Are there any moments of joy or pleasure in the user's day, and why?

    </Step>
    <Step step="2" name="Identify Pain Points">
        After you’ve created your baseline day, you should dive deeper into the most significant challenges or pain points that the persona faces during the day. These could be tasks that take up too much time, events that cause frustration, or situations where the user may struggle to complete a task. 

        Ideally, grab a different color of sticky notes. Within a 5-10 minute timeframe, try to brainstorm and jot down as many pain points as possible, and place them next to the corresponding part of the day. Then select the most significant pain points to focus on during the next step.

        <Tip>
        Encourage participants to think beyond obvious pain points. Sometimes small frustrations or inconveniences can add up and cause significant annoyance or wasted time. Remember, small things add up! 
        </Tip>

        <Example>
        If the persona is a busy parent, obvious pain points might be the morning rush or dealing with tantrums. However, smaller frustrations such as constantly searching for lost items or difficulty coordinating schedules with their partner may also be significant challenges that could be addressed with a product or service solution.
        </Example>
    </Step>
    <Step step="3" name="Find opportunities">
        Let’s think of solutions, not problems! Explore how you can make your persona's life easier by reducing pain, increasing efficiency, or boosting happiness. 

        The goal of this exercise is to generate new product or service ideas that are tailored to the needs of the user. The ideas generated should be innovative and always refer to the pain points identified earlier.
    </Step>
    <Step step="4" name="Validate">
        It's likely that some of the assumptions made on the canvas are more valid than others. However, it's crucial to verify them before building product ideas on top of them. Here are three suggestions, ranging from low to high effort, for what to do next:

        <CheckList>
        [] Show your User Day to actual or potential customers and see if they recognize themselves. This can help validate the accuracy of your persona and identify any potential gaps or inaccuracies.
        [] In your next user interviews, ask questions about their daily habits, typical behaviors, or preferences. This can help you gain a deeper understanding of your user and their needs, as well as identify any pain points or challenges they may be experiencing.
        [] Conduct a full-on diary study. As mentioned earlier, a diary study is an excellent tool to gain a better understanding of your user and your product in their life, while minimizing your own biases or preconceptions. 
        </CheckList>
    </Step>    
</Steps>

The User Day exercise is a visual tool that promotes a user-centered approach to product and service innovation.

User Day

## What is it and when should I use it?

The purpose of this tool is to fill up an entire wall with the ideas generated by a team in a short amount of time.

This technique uses trigger questions to get the creative juices flowing. Asking 'what if?' is a powerful way to fill a wall with great ideas. Ask the trigger questions to your team in a fast pace, challenging each person to create lots of ideas.

Using time pressure and a sense of competition (who added the largest number of post-its?) make it easier to shake any creative blocks. In groups of around 10 people, it is doable to reach more than 200-300 ideas in half an hour! From those ideas, there will always be a few that are truly new and interesting. You just need to get past the ideas everyone else already had first…

<Tip>
To incentivise people to generate more ideas, assign a point for each sticky note. The highest total score wins.
</Tip>

Asking people to describe their idea as they fasten their sticky notes to the wall is a great way to get everyone, from the introverts to the extroverts, working together creatively and feeling a sense of achievement. As each team member adds ideas to the wall, the rest of the team will no doubt come up with new ones or point out ones that are funny or interesting.

<ImageMap image="/tools/A4 Wall of Ideas.png">
1 | Ideas | Place your ideas on the canvas | 0.5, 0.5
</ImageMap>

<Steps>
    <Step step="1" name="Prepare">
        The wall of ideas requires preparation. First, decide on a list of trigger questions that you’re going to ask the team in rapid succession (one every 30 seconds or so). Use the What If questions list supplied with the course to get you started, taking out the ones that don’t apply to your business. You can find a selection of trigger questions to start with below.
    </Step>
    <Step step="2" name="Trigger Questions">
        Good trigger questions help you make new connections, and help you to think in a 'what if' mindset. It is perfectly possible to make trigger questions based on for instance your business model, customer journey, persona, or vision. The process will be always the same, and it will help you come up with a lot of options. You'll probably need around 20-40 questions at least.

        Use your existing business model canvas, feedback from earlier experiments, design criteria, context canvas, etc. as fodder for creating new questions. If, for instance, you sell a product today through retailers, what would happen if you sold it directly to customers through an online channel? What would that look like? You get the picture.

        In the course materials for [Find your next Startup Idea](https://shop.wrkshp.tools/startup-ideas) you'll find a list with 200+ trigger questions.
    </Step>
    <Step step="3" name="Diverging: Asking Trigger Questions">
        Have the team members sit individually, with a stack of empty post-its and a good marker. Explain that when the exercise starts, you will ask a question every 10-15 seconds or so. They should write down everything that they think of, and fill as many post-it notes as possible. At this stage, there are no bad ideas. Every idea is a stepping stone that leads you to the next.

        Then, when everyone is ready, set a timer for 15 minutes (you can always do a second run, it's better to do two short runs than one longer one). Let the timer tick down, and keep asking trigger questions every 10-15 seconds. Slowly repeat the trigger questions a couple of times, or come up with variations on the spot.

        <Tip>
        When people seem to not write, or get stuck, remind them that it’s about getting as many ideas as possible in this stage. Judging comes later.
        </Tip>

        As the trigger questions are asked, each person will simply write whatever comes to mind on a sticky note using a permanent marker. By the end of this exercise there should be a pile of at least as many sticky notes as there are questions in front of each participant.
    </Step>
    <Step step="4" name="Sticking it on the wall">
        Once the questions run out, have everyone stick their sticky notes to the wall, one at a time, calling out the idea. Make sure everyone is clear about what’s been added. Don’t worry about organisation too much at first, but whenever someone has had the same idea or a similar one, try to stick them together in the same general area.
    </Step>
    <Step step="5" name="Converging: Clustering your ideas">
        There will be way too many ideas on the wall to make sense of, so the next step is, to organise the ideas into a maximum of ~5 high-level clusters.

        You can define the clusters beforehand, or you can use affinity mapping and let them emerge.

        Have the team members work on the clustering together, and silently cluster them. The point is that they do not talk or discuss the ideas, but simply move them around. If you notice a sticky note that can't find a good home, put it to the side, or agree to disagree.
    </Step>
    <Step step="6" name="Next Steps">
        When you’re done clustering, record your result. Photos make it easy to do that. Send them around to the team and don’t forget to keep them informed of future progress!
    </Step>
</Steps>
    

The purpose of this tool is to fill up an entire wall with the ideas generated by a team in a short amount of time.

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