Making the Information Product Canvas fit-for-culture
How our data team amended the standard IPC to fit our business culture
My team loves the Information Product Canvas. It’s given us a tool to communicate in business language on product vision, desired outcomes, the required data, the size of the project, and consequently a more accurate prioritisation and understanding of what’s involved.
As we’ve rolled it through the business, we had great adoption with product owners, but found that certain parts of the canvas were often filled out incorrectly.
We did another round of training, but the challenges remained.
Our not-so-unique challenges:
Asking for data just to satisfy curiosity
Viewing data but not taking action on the insights
Data product development with unclear benefits, or benefits not aligned to business strategy
So we adjusted the canvas to focus more on solving for these problems. Here’s our latest design:
You can download this template here.
This canvas has 4 notable changes:
Vision is first to give a quicker understanding of the product
Business Questions area is larger (we were often running out of space)
Business Questions must be linked to actions which must be linked to benefits
Persona’s who ask the questions and take the actions are specified.
With this design, it forces the product owner to declare what actions will come from the dataset, and the expected benefits. Previously these were less ‘officially’ linked.
Now, we see our product owner (and stakeholders) often stuck trying to determine what action they will take. And often explaining that they probably wouldn’t do anything. That can be OK, if the data validates their current process or strategy. But in other scenarios it has really highlighted the ‘I’m just curious’ use case and given us a solid tool to challenge it.
Lastly it gave us clear outcomes to measure.
We expect <X> actions taken by <Y roles> to lead to <Z> benefits.
Our product manager has started interviewing the <Y roles> 1 week, 1 month, 3 months, 6 months after a product launch to see if the actions are being taken and if the outcomes are being realised. If they aren’t, we transparently share that with our product owner and executive sponsor and use it as input to our continuous improvement practice.
Let me know if this method would help your organisation, or how you might curate it for a different business culture.
Will Turner