Startups Stack Exchange Archive

What goes between Business Model and Project Plan?

I’m struggling putting business ideas in place. Fact is, I’m always stuck at the same point:

  1. Define Idea: I have a business idea than I can clearly describe.
  2. Business Model: I usually use the Strategyzer Business Model Canvas to make the Business Model (at that point I have an high level overview of who are the main partners, resources needed, potential consumers, …)
  3. … And now I need to describe the business processes to be able to switch to project mode and plan each step. But each time I try to draw it or describe it, it tends to be complex, contains lot of pages, and at the end I lost the clarity of the processes.
  4. Project Plan: …

So first, is there a name for this step?

Second, is there a well-known standard way to describe the processes in a startup?

Answer 11435

A leading reason people use Business Model Canvas is that it lets you focus on the architecture of the business rather than getting lost in the detail.

So what comes next after Canvas 0.1 that captured your idea isn’t an implementation plan, it’s an engagement plan. The canvas captures hypotheses, and helps you to document them systematically, en route to testing them against the world out there.

If you do that, it’s a safe bet that you’ll learn enough to persuade you to reshape your idea. In the Lean world, your approach is to pivot - that is, to hold everything fixed except the hypothesis you couldn’t validate, and identify a new direction. That leads you to Canvas 0.2, and so on.

If you start documenting processes early on, human nature being what it is you’ll want to preserve that work, which will hold you back from gaining and using the learning you need. So it’s not just misplaced doing that work early, it’s counterproductive.

Paper is cheap. Time is priceless. So if you lean in to the Business Model Canvas way of doing things, you’ll invest time early on where it does most good - getting from the germ of an idea to a description of a business with evidence that it’s viable.

Get there and you can use the humdrum activity of turning a Canvas into a detailed project and process plan as a nice relaxing activity before you get into exciting, exhausting execution.

Answer 11371

I would suggest you put together a “strategy roadmap”. This will help you identify high-level milestones and achievements required. This can be done on a single page. Every milestone/deliverable of the roadmap should have a business process or sub-project to delivery it.

That way your planning will have a cohesive structure to it. Is this document for you or the bank/funders? You will need to tailor it differently depending on the focus.

Don’t know why start ups would not just call a business process a business process…

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