I use this simple product type canvas in conjunction with the product decomposition model to identify digital products in an organization. This simple template gives every product team enough information to understand customers and users and really measure the value their products create.
Download the canvas here, or by clicking the image.
Unpack your digital products outside-in
Name: What do you call your product or product area? You’d be surprised at how many customer, employee, and product team enabling products don’t have names. Your team should talk about giving it a useful name if you don’t have one.
Product type(s): What type of product is it? End-product, customer enabling, employee enabling, product team enabling, or partner enabling.
Many products are multiple types at once.
There’s room here for 2 types. Remember each product type implies different sets of customers and users.
Users: start here because they may be the easiest to identify. They’re the people who actually put hands on keyboards or fingers on touchpads. You can segment them by their different job roles or needs.
Uses: what does each user type do with your product? Uses will be short verb phrases. For example: in Spotify the primary uses would be “play music”, “play podcasts”, or “look up information on artists.”
Metrics: How would you measure if your users are really using it? For Spotify you might have metrics like: songs played per user per week.
For employee enabling and business to business products look for efficiency and effectiveness metrics. For a retailer’s point of sale system a good efficiency metric might be: average time to ring up a transaction. A good effectiveness metric might be: number of mistakes made per transaction, or the average transaction size.
Customers: customers are the choosers – the people who make the buying or funding decision. For consumer products customers and users are often the same people. For B2B products or employee enabling products they’re usually different. For example: if your product is something used by bank tellers in a bank, those tellers would be users. The customer, or chooser, would be someone responsible for bank branch operations. We often call those people business stakeholders.
Value proposition: Why do customers buy this product? Hint, it usually has something to do with saving money, or time, or providing entertainment or enjoyment. My value proposition for Spotify is the entertainment I get from listening to music. If your company uses JIRA, it probably does so to increase efficiency and visibility.