Lean Capability Canvas
Maximise the performance and impact of your product teams
Building High-Performing Product Teams
Empowering teams to build a continuous improvement mindset is the most effective way to create sustainable and scaleable change across your organisation.
Incentivising them to focus on areas of improvement and allowing them time and space to experiment, will ensure they’re effective at bringing customer value and business benefit.
I’ve never come across a team that didn’t want to improve how they were working together. However, how many of those ‘ways of working’ meetings do we see driving any real change?
If you’re building high-performing teams then the Lean Capability Canvas is a powerful tool at all levels of the product organisation.
How do we define a high-performing team? This is a question that product leadership should be asking, aligning on and communicating to their teams. For me that looks something like this — “We consistently get things to customers that they value enough to [pay for].” Replacing the words in the brackets to something that fits your organisation, product or team.
Product leadership needs to incentivise teams to maximise their performance and impact, enabling strong product thinking and continuous improvement mindsets.
The Lean Capability Canvas aims to very quickly move the team into a position where they can take those theoretical “We want to improve!” conversations into the practical actions required for change.
Whether you’re part of the cross-functional product leadership that leads multiple teams, a member of a product team looking to improve working practices, or a Product Ops practitioner accountable in enabling teams to become more effective — the canvas will be an invaluable tool that provides the structure for real actionable change.
Sustainable change can only be achieved via ground up co-creation. Without a self-driven continuous improvement mindset, or the tools that allow for it to grow, product organisations will be unable to drive feasible change within teams. Equally critical is the ability to replicate that success across the wider organisation for a sustainable competitive advantage.
While frameworks themselves do not solve problems, the value that is driven from the time carved out to have strong discourse about team challenges and where to go next, is where they excel.
Introducing the Lean Capability Canvas
To structure the team’s continuous improvement conversation, the Lean Capability Canvas is a powerful tool that allows teams to map and discuss areas of improvement along with associated team actions. It will lead them to building a strong product thinking mindset.
The canvas is made of three sections:
- Belief Statement — a clear and impactful statement the team agrees on together. This will define the area of improvement the team care about.
- Capability Level — given the belief statement, the team decides the capabilities that define when they’re at the ‘Good’, ‘Better’ or ‘Best’ stage.
- Team Actions — given their stage of capability, the team will decide on which actions they need to take to improve, optimise or maintain.
Here’s an example of what that might look like if the team wanted to be more ‘data informed’:
Start to maximise the performance and impact of product teams today. I encourage you to download, use and share the canvas with your colleagues, teams and network. Let me know how you get on, I’d love to see your progress and use your examples in future case studies.
Product Thinking Workshop
Book a full or half day workshop and master the fundamentals of the Lean Capability Canvas and how to scale best practice across your product organisation.
This workshop is aimed at individuals and companies looking to take their first step into building high-performing teams with strong continuous improvement mindsets.
After this workshop you’ll be equipped you with the capabilities and tools to self-diagnose team challenges and define areas of improvement. Allowing you to maximise your performance and impact. You’ll leave with a deeper understanding of how to use the Lean Capability Canvas and how to build upon it for a future of continuous improvement.
We’ll spend the workshop focused on the Lean Capability Canvas to map and discuss a defined area of improvement.
During the workshop;
- We’ll go through why continuous improvement is so crucial to product teams, and what it means to be effective at product thinking.
- We will run through the sections of the Lean Capability Canvas, discuss each one and the importance of encouraging change within an organisation.
- Together we’ll discuss and map the capabilities required for each stage of the improvement process and the actions required to improve, optimise or maintain the highest level.
- Finally we’ll discuss which other areas your teams might focus on in the future.
I’m a Product Enablement & Ops Consultant with over a decade working in technology organisations, enabling product leadership to maximise their performance and impact.
Visit chriscompston.com to find out more.
