How A Business Model Canvas Helps Agile Teams

Healthy Developer

If you’ve ever thought “who came up with these ideas?”, you probably need a business model canvas on your agile development team.

Even if you don’t consider yourself able to steer the direction of a software product (you’re a programmer, in UX, operations, QA etc.) it’s critical that sound decisions are made about the business.

Without a comprehensive plan forward, ego can easily take over your agile backlog.

In this episode I share what a business model canvas is, examples of common software products and how the canvas (also known as a lean canvas) can help you as a software developer or any other discipline on your team.

The business model canvas, business canvas, or “lean canvas” has been popularized by Eric Ries, Alex Osterwalder, and Ash Maurya.

It divides up the aspects of a business into 9 sections that a software company should experiment with to increase profit.

When your team is deciding “what features should we build in our software?” the business model canvas should be the first lens through which decisions are looked at.

Any user stories your team adds to their backlog should tie back to these sections of the business model canvas, otherwise they can easily be “gut decisions” with no sound business backing.

The canvas can provide your software development team with an array of potential opportunities to explore, other than just “cranking out features”.

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