Plan - Understanding Business Goals

Objective

Spending time to critically think through business goals and map out how the product will serve the business is essential for achieving product to business fit.

Principles

We understand that each business is unique and special. As you well know, every business needs to get a few basic things right in order to keep the lights on:

1. Revenue - Make the money.
2. Cost of Revenue (COGS) - Pay for the costs it takes to generate the revenue.
3. Operating Cost - Pay for the costs it takes to operate the business.
4. Profit - Have enough left over to make some sort of profit.

That's definitely a simplified version, but thinking about product development through this lens helps you understand what's really important for your business to be successful. We like to start each potential development project by mapping out the existing or new business on a Business Model Canvas. This gives us a high-level overview of the major components of the business and helps us understand how all the pieces fit together to drive a successful product and business.

Our Process

1. Activity: Fill out the Business Model Canvas
2. Answer: How does this project correlate to positively impacting the revenue, cost of revenue, operating cost, or profit needle in the direction the business needs?
3. Answer: Is the business model and proposed product scalable as they're mapped out?

If you are disciplined and do these 3 checklist items, you will have a clear picture of a business model to iterate on, and the right foundation to start figuring out how to turn your value proposition into a rockin' product.

Services & Tools

Learning Resources

• Business Model Generation - A great starting point for understanding the different business model types and how each component of the business model works together to make the business successful.
• Getting To Plan B