Business Design Canvas — v2.2

For those of you braving the frontiers — how strong is your business idea? Does it address a worthy problem? Can you tell investors when they will get their money back? Do you have a clear plan to differentiate and scale? Demonstrate the strength of evidence in your business idea by examining its Desirability, Viability and Feasibility using the all-new and improved Business Design Canvas.

19 min readMar 21, 2021

Before you read any further: this is an older version of the Scorecard, find the latest version by following the link to the Lean Business Scorecard which adds considerations for Sustainability and Responsibility.

The Lean Business Scorecard

The fastest-growing businesses in the world experiment on an industrial scale to demonstrate how Desirable, Viable…

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For people who want to read about the old version, keep reading…

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The Business Design Canvas v2.2 — Creative Commons — Attribution to Robin Wong

I am a big fan of experimentation.

Experimentation is the fastest way to test business ideas and create value.

If you’re looking to scale or transform your organisation, search for new opportunities or test out concepts, approaching challenges by testing and learning which ways help overcome them best has helped me and the teams that I work with achieve extraordinary things and brave new frontiers.

I’ve found experimentation useful in a huge range of scenarios, from innovating at places like Google Creative Lab to working at the coal face of Product Management or even advising investors about early-stage investment opportunities.

So when it comes to dealing with complex challenges, if you’re able to apply a little creativity, optimism and grit to testing and learning from your customers, you will massively increase your chances of success.

On those few occasions when I haven’t experimented and I haven’t tested an idea out with customers — often under the illusion of working in “stealth mode” — I’ve invariably failed to learn what works best and this has led me away from success.

So over the last 6 months, I’ve been experimenting with my Business Design Canvas. It’s a way to test your business ideas by articulating them in plain English and then applying a simple scoring system to assess how much evidence you have.

I’ve been testing the Canvas with a variety of people and in a variety of situations and guess what? I’ve found some better ways for the canvas to work and now I’m sharing the all-new and improved version 2.2 with you.

In this article, I will share -

The key challenges that people face coming up with business ideas
How the lenses of Desirability, Viability and Feasibility help stress-test your idea and avoid failure
A Step-by-step guide to using the Business Design Canvas

Key challenges for business ideas

The biggest problem people have when it comes to business ideas is that they jump straight to the solution without first understanding who their customer is and what challenges they face that are worth addressing.

The second biggest problem, running out of cash, is often linked to the first and stems from teams spending time and money scaling a part of their operations before they’ve found a genuine problem or challenge that’s worth addressing.

70% of all new businesses fail for these two basic and avoidable reasons.

So how can you avoid this fate?

I have two answers to this question. First, learn from others who have found useful ways to solve the problem. Second, think like a Designer.

Learning from others

In terms of learning from others, I’ve taken a lot of inspiration for the Business Design Canvas from innovations like Alex Osterwalder’s Business Model Canvas, David J. Bland’s Testing Business Ideas approach, the Continuous Discovery approach of Teresa Torres and Dean Leffingwell’s Lean Business Case.

All of these approaches have helped aspiring entrepreneurs, intrapreneurs and innovators break their business ideas down, identify weak spots and assumptions and helped them create hypotheses that can be used to build confidence in an idea or learn a lesson that could lead to a pivot.

The challenge with these approaches though, is that I’ve found that people can sometimes feel a little overwhelmed by them, especially when they start out or are new to this kind of thinking.

Changing how you think about an idea — especially one that you may already be pretty emotionally and possibly financially invested in — can be daunting. It’s not always clear what kind of steps you should take first to build confidence or how much testing is enough and whether you’re ready to move on and test something else.

That’s when thinking like a Designer and starting by thinking about people first is useful.

Thinking like a Designer

Design is a mindset that helps you identify the needs of people and ensure that you meet their needs by design

The field of Design Thinking is very much grounded in this mindset — of starting with people — and it’s incredibly useful in the context of business because it’s full of useful ways of thinking and working that help you avoid common pitfalls like jumping to solutions. It also helps strike a healthy balance between desirability, commercial viability and technical feasibility.

In short, it’s a way of working and thinking that helps you to ask the right questions at the right times to work out the right things to build.

In this respect, I definitely had a lightbulb, connect-the-dots sort of moment when I first saw David J. Bland’s approach of overlaying the lenses of Desirability, Viability and Feasibility over the Business Model Canvas, because it helped guide me as to what questions to start with when assessing business designs and ideas.

Desirability, Viability & Feasibility

The 3 Design values, or “lenses” as I like to think of them, offer 3 perspectives on your ideas, and used regularly, can help you evaluate, test and strengthen your business ideas to find increasingly better ways to delight people.

First and foremost you need to be confident that you’re creating something Desirable — is your business idea something that you know (and have ample evidence for) that your customers want and need? Is it addressing a real problem for enough people?

Next, you need to know if this is something that’s also commercially Viable — will your idea create a stream of value from your customers that can sustain a business over the long term, that makes more money than it costs? Again, can you prove the key elements of this at some scale?

Finally, is this something that is technically and operationally Feasible — Do you and your partners have the capabilities, operations and channels to offer a product or service that will satisfy your customers?

Note: On this last point, I think almost any solution is feasible, it just depends on how much time and money you have. But the reality is that’s only part of the answer if your goal is to scale.

To drive growth and create a truly scalable operation, you’ll need to test and learn what the most effective ways are to acquire, activate, convert and retain your customers. Without this, you’ll never achieve the break-even point that you set out in the Viability part of your plans and you’ll never be able to convincingly tell an investor when they’ll get their money back.

Using these 3 values, we can explore how well you’ve designed for them using the 3 parts of the Business Design Canvas.

The Business Design Canvas Guide

The canvas is designed to be simple in principle but demanding in practice.

The Business Design Canvas v2.2 — Creative Commons — Attribution to Robin Wong — Download the PDF

It’s simple because it just contains 3 statements, that are designed to be written in plain English, that speak to the Desirability, Viability and Feasibility of your business idea. Each statement contains a set of 5 blank spaces that you can fill in to describe your idea.

It’s demanding because each part of the 3 statements have a scoring system that tests how far up the ladder of evidence you’ve gone. The higher the score, the more you’ve proved that your business has what it takes to create value for customers and generate profits that can sustain growth.

Without evidence and insight, you are not designing a business, you are guessing what might be a good business. Guessing what people want is a path that will lead you to become part of the 70% of new business ideas that fail.

Don’t be a 70-percenter.

Gathering evidence

To build up the right evidence and insight you need to go through a process of identifying what you have made assumptions about in your business idea, then asking the right questions around each part of the Business Design Canvas to bust or validate those assumptions.

Ask the right questions, in the right order and you can create a foundation of reliable evidence and insight that will help you build confidence in your business idea and demonstrate to others that you are focusing on the right opportunity for the right target audience and with the right solution.

To find the answers to questions around the Desirability, Viability and Feasibility of your business idea and assess your levels of confidence in each, you can use the Business Design Canvas to describe your business score each part and assess what steps you need to take to level-up to a higher level of confidence.

To get started, it’s essential to check the Desirability of your idea.

The case for Desirability

The first and most important case to make is that something is Desirable.

If people don’t want something, almost by definition, they’re not going to use it, so it’s not even worth thinking about whether it’s viable or feasible.

I like to understand the following to assess Desirability

A. Who the target audience is

B. The “job to be done” by the audience when they experience a challenge

C, An evidence-based challenge or problem that is backed by an insight about why people experience the problem

D. Any evidence that they are actively seeking a way to solve the problem or a solution that addresses a specific challenge

E. What the customer can achieve in the future that they can’t right now when the problem is solved for them.

Note: I’m not looking for the solution here, but rather a strong understanding of a desirable outcome that a solution would create.

It’s essential to gather both qualitative and quantitative evidence here because I’m looking for patterns of evidence I can rely on to repeat in the future. That evidence is going to be crucial later for designing the right solution and making informed, insight-driven decisions around how I will be targeting and marketing to people. I don’t want to be making leaps of faith about this, as this will waste time and money.

To try and make the Desirability statement easier to understand and flow nicely, I use the following format, designed to be written in plain, jargon-free English in the first column of the Business Design Canvas as a way to articulate these dimensions of Desirability and set myself up for scoring how desirable the idea is

we have evidence that [A. a group of people]
who are [B. trying to do something]
and are currently challenged by [C. some challenge]
are looking for [D. a product or service]
so that [E. they can do something they can’t right now]

Scoring Desirability

Once you’ve articulated each dimension of the desirability of your opportunity and how you seek to address the customer’s needs, you can then proceed to give each part of the statement a score out of 3.

The key to starting to build confidence in your idea is to move up the ladder of evidence for Desirability and you achieve this by demonstrating evidence of a market of people who have the same want and need for a way to solve a shared problem or challenge.

So ask yourself, is your idea just a hunch right now? if so you’re at…

Level 1 — Desirability

Everyone has to start somewhere, but if you haven’t actually spoken to anyone about your idea then you will probably find that it’s probably a 1 out of 3.

Note: if you’re really unsure, or can’t even explain it in your own head, it is possible to get a score of zero on any of these questions.

Level 2 — Desirability

To go from a hunch to the next rung up the ladder, from a 1 to a 2, you’ll need to get out of the building to speak to people, whether that’s virtually or physically. I look for qualitative evidence here. Evidence that shows that you’ve spoken to a sample of your target audience to broadly understand what it is they’re doing when they experience problems or challenges. You’ll need to understand what’s getting in their way and why that might be happening.

Note: I am not looking for any testing of solutions here. Solutions too early can be a distraction and can lead to situations where your confirmation bias (the subconscious thought that you’ve nailed the idea already) can trick you into finding self-affirming “research” that really is of little value.

I’m interested in understanding what’s happening today — in terms of the landscape of opportunities and what the biggest opportunities to address are — and I’m looking for an understanding of what the customer will be able to do if they can overcome the challenges of today. This shows an understanding of the value any potential solution will need to offer.

Typically, by speaking to around 5–10 people I find that you’ll start to see common patterns of “jobs to be done” and associated problems appear.

Level 3 — Desirability

To get to the next level of evidence, you’ll need to show that you have validated the biggest challenges by gathering quantitative evidence around the key problems. What proportion of your target audience experiences the same problem? Do you understand why that’s happening? What’s the underlying driver of this behaviour or experience?

If you show me evidence of having tested this with a representative sample of your audience, you’ll get 3 out of 3.

What the Desirability scores mean

To help understand the scoring and how to use the statements, I’ve shared an example of a hypothetical business idea called Wonderfitkit. It’s a very early stage idea that is showing promise in terms of its potential desirability, but that has a lot of work to be done in other areas.

Once you have scores for each part of the Desirability statement, add them all up for a score out of 15, then consult the score ranges below

Desirability Score of 1–9

You’ve got homework to do. Get out of the building, talk to potential customers to explore and test your hypotheses about what they’re doing and what’s getting in their way. Once you think you know what the biggest challenges are, run some surveys and find some evidence that the problem you think they have is worth focusing on.

Desirability Score of 10–12

Ok, this is starting to look interesting. It’s time to really focus on understanding the big problem that your customers have. Keep asking why the problem happens. What might be at the root of the problem? Once you think you’ve found it, keep pushing to learn more about it and try to understand what your customer is trying to achieve that they can’t today.

Desirability Score of 13–15

You’re definitely on to something. You know your customer, what they’re trying to do, the challenges they face and why it happens. You’ve also got a good idea of what they’ll be able to do if you solve the problem for them

The case for Viability

Once you have sufficient evidence that you’ve found a real problem or opportunity to address for a real group of people, you then need to prove you can get paid enough to do it to actually have a commercially viable business on your hands.

The key dimensions I look at for the Viability of the business are as follows —

A. Have we got a large enough group of people we can do business with?

B. How much value will that group of people provide?

C. What types of product or service are we offering?

D. What does it cost us to offer that product or service in a profitable way?

E. At what level of cost or scale do we break even?

If you have this information ready to go, you can put it into the second column to detail the Viability of your idea.

We have evidence that [A. a large-enough addressable market of people]
are willing [B. to provide something of value to us]
in return for [C. providing a product or service]
which generates [D. some form of profit]
when [E. we operate at some level of cost and scale]

Scoring Viability

When assessing commercial Viability, the key question I’m looking to answer is — When will an investor get their money back. The scoring here is intended to stress-test the assumptions around the key elements of the Business Model. Ideally, you would have tested the assumptions at some scale.

Questions I’m interested in finding answers to include

Does this team understand how they will get paid?
How much money will they charge each customer?
How many customers are in their addressable market?
How many of those can they acquire and convert?
At what cost they will do this?
What volume of customers will they need to convert to break even?

Level 1 — Viability

The first rung of the Viability ladder of evidence is a bit higher up than Desirability as you need to prove yourself to reach it. You need evidence that a customer is willing to exchange something of value for your product or service.

At this stage, having some form of a prototype starts to become useful. For example, a landing page that invites people to sign up for updates to your business idea could be a great way to test your value proposition. This gives you a way to demonstrate a willingness to part company with an email address without the need to actually build a product or service.

You can also conduct surveys to assess how much money people would pay. Understanding what would seem cheap and what would be too expensive can help assess the window you are working within.

Level 2— Viability

To move from early indications of value to more concrete ones, and go from a 1 to a 2, it’s likely you’ll need to show people the most basic version of your idea. Something that not only shows the customer the value they will get from using the product or service, but that also tests the way that you will acquire and activate that customer.

I like to set up what I call a Minimum Viability Test to do this. It’s a test that helps you prove that you know where potential leads exist today and how to attract them to your product or service in a way that actually demonstrates that they will give you something of monetary value in exchange for using it.

These kinds of figures — conversion rates, volumes of customers, average customer acquisition costs, average revenues per customer — are all essential to bolster your business case. Without them, you’re guessing, and savvy investors don’t like to take risks on too many guesses.

Level 3— Viability

To get to a 3 you need to have operated at some level of scale that gives investors a statistical degree of confidence in the variability of your forecasts. This very much depends on the nature of your business, the sample size will likely be smaller for Business-to-Business concepts and much larger for Consumer ideas.

What the Viability scores mean

Once you have your total Viability score, you can assess what this means for your business idea.

Here’s an example of a low Viability score for our very early stage idea.

Viability Score of 1–9

It’s time to start testing your concept. At first, it just needs to be a simple prototype, something you can get into your customer’s hands to see if it’s a decent solution to their problems. Following Teresa Torres’ advice, I always think it’s best to compare and contrast several options, partly to avoid confirmation bias, but also to get feedback on a range of ideas that could be recombined. Place lots of small bets and double down on the ones that give you the desired return.

Don’t just test the solution, make sure you test out how you’re going to drive traffic to your solution. you’re looking for early indicators of success for a robust business model.

Viability Score of 10–12

From an investor’s point of view, things are starting to look really interesting. if you’ve made it this far without building the full solution you dreamed of and you’ve managed to acquire potential customers and got them to exchange something of value for your product or service, you’ve done very well.

It’s time to think about how you can scale what you’re doing to validate or bust some of the remaining assumptions around what levers you have under your control to get to the next level.

Viability Score of 13–15

Your idea is clearly demonstrating commercial value. The case is there to attract investment if you want to accelerate that growth, but equally, if you want to stay in control of your destiny and you have the funds to sustain growth you have the option to keep going till you hit your breakeven point.

The case for Feasibility

I tend to consider Feasibility last because, in my experience, anything is possible, it just depends on how much time and money you have.

That said, if your idea is particularly technically ambitious, you will need to assess Feasibility early on and work out how you can break your idea down into small slices that you can deliver early and often. Done always beats perfect when it comes to getting something into your customer's hands. It’s better to learn sooner rather than later if something is or value or not rather than labour over something more fully formed that nobody wants or needs.

Ambitious technology risks aside though, the key question I look to answer here is generally not “Can we build it?” but rather “Can we scale the minimum viable operations?” — Do we have the capabilities, skills and understanding of how to experiment to find better ways of acquiring, activating, converting and retaining customers?

The key dimensions I look at to assess Feasibility in terms of the capabilities and differentiators of my idea are -

A. Who will help and support the creation, delivery and operation of my product or service?

B. Are we set up to do this now, or do we need to borrow, build or buy something to make it possible?

C. What activities do we need to day-to-day to attract and win our customer’s business?

D. How are we going to target and do business with our customers?

E. How are we going to play to win in this market? What will make us stand out from the competition and offer something that’s hard to copy?

Note: This may be one of the trickiest questions to answer. To stand out from everyone else — especially if it’s a busy market you’re heading into with lots of competitors — you will need something that gives you an unfair advantage, something that you can defend and that other’s will find hard to copy. This part is critical, but not before you establish the desirability of your idea.

For the final part of the canvas, this is the construct we use to establish how feasible an idea is -

We have evidence that [A. our organisation & partners]
are capable of [B. providing a core product or service]
by [C. conducting this set of activities]
via these channels [D. that connect us to our customer]
which we can win by [E. doing something others can’t]

Scoring Feasibility

The scores for Feasibility are closely entwined with those for Viability as they’re geared to check for evidence that you have the capabilities not just to create and offer a product or service, but to drive growth for the business.

Level 1 — Feasibility

I’m looking here for evidence that you’ve done the least amount of work possible to get a product or service into a customer’s hands that delights them in some way.

If you’ve done your homework on Desirability and Viability, you should understand and have tested what your audience both wants and needs. It’s this kind of insight that will save you from offering features or benefits that nobody needs.

Level 2— Feasibility

To get to the next level, you need to demonstrate that you’ve understood where you might be able to acquire and convert your customers from.

You need to have created funnels to channel them to your offering and see how well you can convert them. You’ll need ways to measure the conversion rates at every step of the journey, not just to assess your business model, but to make sure that you’ve got a way to experiment and compare the results of your experiments to a baseline set of conversion rates. Something you can build on over time and identify the most efficient ways of converting your efforts into sales.

Level 3— Feasibility

You’ll reach level 3 if you’ve proven that you’ve tested multiple channels for your target audience, found the channels that convert most effectively and in the most cost-efficient manner and you've doubled down on what works and cut out the channels that aren’t giving you such strong return on investment.

What the Feasibility scores mean

The steps you take to improve your Feasibility scores are all about making your business more sustainable and capable of driving growth in sales.

In our example, no Feasibility testing has been carried out, so it’s yet to score anything on these scales.

Feasibility Score of 1–9

Your solution is probably good, but the way you’re driving traffic to it needs work. “Build it and they will come” only works in highly limited circumstances if your name is Kevin Costner, you’re living in the pre-internet 1980s and you’re building Baseball stadiums with little else to do.

Feasibility Score of 10–12

Your experimentation game is starting to get strong. It’s worth reading up on techniques like Pirate Metrics and investigating solutions that can help you track and automate your funnels to run as many experiments as possible to identify the channels, value propositions and signals you can send customers that drive the highest conversion rates.

Feasibility Score of 13–15

If you’ve scored highly on Desirability and Viability and you’re in this range for Feasibility, then quite frankly, you’ve nailed it. Go forth and brave those frontiers!

Start testing your idea now

You can get started by downloading your free copy of the Business Design Canvas breaking your idea down into the 3 statements.