Join Shane and Tammy Leahy as they discuss the Information Product Canvas, what each area of the canvas holds and why you would want to collect this information.

This is the second in a series of podcast episodes that deep dives into the Information Product pattern.

Read along you will

PODCAST INTRO: Welcome to the “AgileData” podcast where we talk about the merging of Agile and data ways of working in a simply magical way.

Shane Gibson: Welcome to the AgileData podcast. I’m Shane Gibson.

Tammy Leahy: And I’m Tammy Leahy.

Shane Gibson: Hey, Tammy. Good to see you again. So last podcast, we went through information product, what they are, and why we should care. And for this session, we’re going to go and jump in and have a look at the thing that we call the information product canvas. So we’re going to do a bit of what is it? What’s in it? Why do we have those things in it? And then after that, we’ll do another recording directly after it, which is where we put the example, we’ve got we rip it to shreds, and give it a good old hiding to see what’s in there from the content point of view. And what would we pick up, before that we refer to there, if anybody wants to look at the canvas, we’ve gone and done an example. So if you go to agiledata.io/ipce, it’ll take you to a copy of the canvas that you can look at and read along as we talk. So the information product canvas, it’s based on the business model canvas that’s been done many years ago, and you’ll pretty much see that you can’t work in the Agile world without creating a canvas to get you some straight creds. Not the reason we did it. Actually, the genesis of this was I worked with a number of customers and we created an information product brief, it was actually a Word document, I had all the same information, a little bit more detailed. And we use that a lot to create those boundaries that we could use, later on some other customers wanted to get it down to a picture. And so we’ve picked up like the canvas format. And we’ve been iterating on that for many years. That’s the genesis of where it came from. Actually, the other thing I always like to mention is Lawrence Corp, and has been methodology he picked up and created a blank canvas. And so that was also part of the inspiration of moving to the IB Canvas. So pick up that Canvas, agiledata.io/ipce, and they have a really long as we pull this one apart and say what’s in there, and why do we do it? First one for me is we look at the top right, and we have a box called outcomes and actions. What we’re looking for there is, if we deliver this information, what action will be taken from it. And once that action is taken, what’s the outcome that will be achieved for the organization? So for me, this is our value statement. This is why should we invest in the effort to create this information for the stakeholder and we use it for prioritization, and a whole lot of stuff we’ll talk about later. So in the right at the moment, rough example is we’ve got an information product called order revenue metrics, and the outcomes and actions box, we’ve got outcomes to increase overall margin and the action that In this aea we channels, optimize the investment in new stores and reduce the number of abandoned orders. Tammy, give me a start at 14 the outcomes and action box. What do you normally put in there? And how do you use it?

Tammy Leahy: Similar, you want to be clear on what action people will take. So what’s the outcome that’s going to be achieved from the data product or the information product? I like to get a bit more specific. I like to try and push people a little bit what is the boundary, in this example, we say reduce abandoned orders, what is the total boundary of abandoned orders, like how much value is involved in that? Because like we talked about before, I’m keen on figuring out at this stage, what is the value, so assign $1 value to assign a metric, to make it measurable, make that outcome measurable? You never deliver a product without choosing to measure how that products performance. So that’s the key one for me in that outcome and actions box is, have actually make it specific and measurable, so that you can test whether or not the information products achieve what you set out to do.

Shane Gibson: And for me is because you’re past the tipping point, you’re at a stage now where you’ve scaled your team. And you’ve done this long enough that you now have a massive amount of information products being thrown at you to build and you have to prioritize and use this to understand the value of the work. And that helps in the prioritization decision.

Tammy Leahy: Yes, that’s part of it. Part of it though, as well as you want to start as you intend to continue. If someone approaches you and says Build me this thing, and you say we’re coming on to the next box, actually, what is the question you’re trying to answer? What’s the outcome actually expect to achieve with this? And they say, I’m just interested, that should be a no, because the time of the people I work with is more valuable than answering and understanding question, because in every single business, I don’t care what business is, there’s going to be a value outcome that can be attached to these things. If you’re not doing that, you shouldn’t be doing something else.

Shane Gibson: So an empty pen for that box is the words. I’m interested in what this data will tell me, because there is no action that’s been thought about, there’s no outcome of that. We’re just exploring it, which may have value. And that’s a different value proposition.

Tammy Leahy: Yes, totally. And the other thing to think about, and there is an outcome might be risk mitigation as well, which might be slightly harder to attach value to, but it’s still valuable, if you think about it. So dollars is not the only metric we care about. It’s just that how do you measure it? What is your measure of success here?

Shane Gibson: Examples I use when I’m teaching people was, they’re all bound around increasing revenue or decreasing cost? Because that third one of reducing risk, those kind of things. That’s a harder one to quantify. So let’s go into the second box, which is business questions. So in the revenue of credit, ones of how many orders have been placed? What is the total value of orders placed? What is the percentage of abandoned orders, what store regions has the most orders? And what channel was driving the largest increase in order value? So, for me, the business questions, we start with how many? What, how long, who, those types of things. And what we want is, we want the top three to five questions that they have in their head that they think information will be able to answer and that drives some of the action they want to take. What I find is that question is typically the one that gets answered quickly. And well. Normally, people can just rattle off those business questions. One of the things I found is, if I asked the outcomes or actions first, I tend to get given business questions. For some reason people haven’t thought about the action they’re going to take, they’re just fixated on getting an answer to that business question. So I’ll often ask them what the business questions are first, I want answered. And then I will say, what actions are you going to take? Once you have that information? Once you know how many orders have been placed? What are you expecting to do to change the way the organization behaves? So how about you? How do you use those business questions?

Tammy Leahy: It really similarly, actually, the way I think about it is I do them at the same time, it’s an open conversation of what questions are you trying to answer and why. And that sort of fills both of those boxes? And I think for me, some of the business questions help you to understand where they’re at as well, where the person asking the question is that from an understanding of what’s possible? How open they might be to suggest in a different way of doing things? Should it come to that? That’s the one thing that how, and what kind of questions is? How and what questions are, how many? And what questions are quite dashboard. And this is a dashboard example. They’ll show me a report or a visualization when there could be why questions and the why questions are much trickier, but are equally relevant when it comes to the business questions, because that might suggest that they might think they’re in this for a dashboard. But if they’re asking a question, that’s not a dashboard question, this is a different proposition here, look out for what kind of questions are asking and then how that might influence the type of information product we provide.

Shane Gibson: For me, it also becomes around level maturity. So often people have a latent demand where they just can’t get access to simple, how many? How much questions? Once you go in, this is your first question. And then they’ve got a bunch of other ones which go back to the where or the why or those kinds of ones.

Tammy Leahy: It’s the classic you give them the first information product, which answers those questions in the very next question, but will be, so why is that number going up or down or trending ‘X’, almost want to take it to that next step to understand if they’d be open to thinking about that next step. At the same time, it all comes to size.

Shane Gibson: And again, one of the reasons we do this is to understand the amount of investment or effort required to get their value. I’m always happy to just produce some simple what and how much and how many questions answered those early, get it back to them really quickly, and then wait for the next one and then iterate through. So that’s okay. Business questions typically get answered really well, because they’ve been ruminating on them for a while, before they come to you. The next one I tend to jump over to is this idea of Persona, understanding who’s going to use this information has some value for us, that we would ideally have already mapped out personas in our organization. And for me, personas are things like internal information consumer, versus an external information consumer, the different personas, the way we produce the information for them, the things we have to do are slightly different. We might have a data analyst, a data engineer, a data scientist, a senior leader, there’s just ways of breaking up the people who consume information or your access and what they want to do. In this case, we’ve got two information consumer and data analysts. And then when we talk about user stories in that later, you’ll see how we see some value in defining those personas, we often want to see whether those personas have different business questions, or if they want different content delivery types. So if I just jump over to that one, there’s a box equal type and we put in the last mile information at delivery mechanism. So is it a dashboard? Is it a report? is it a file? Is it an API? We want a hint of how they’re expecting to get it, we’re looking for disconnects between the persona and the type of delivery sometimes. So what are your personas and delivery type?

Tammy Leahy: That top right corner is all connected, for me persona is delivery type and data single frequency or how often they want it refreshed. Interesting though, just looking at it. Now again, I’m thinking in personas, I also want to know more audience, but that’s covered under the vision and user stories a little bit because that gives you a bit more specificity of actually who is the person I’m delivering this for. So agree, personas is the personas that you’ve talked about. And I also like to do also exactly which audience, so it can be analyzed in a different domain, so in this case, we’re talking about orders. And you probably have revenue optimization, or a store or kind of analytics group that might be looking at this. But equally, if you’re looking at in a finance team, they might have a different flavor or depth of insight they need. Sometimes that’s helpful as well. But I think you’d probably get that out of that vision and user stories potentially.

Shane Gibson: It’s important to understand the organization topology, the hierarchy, so that we have different business units. And it’s valuable to say, look, this is for the finance business unit primarily. This is the human resources or the revenue or the operations, then you either create a new area into the canvas and whack it in the air or just slip it into that persona one, and change it to persona/audience. So one of the things with the canvases, it’s open source, pick it up, hack it, put in the boxes, it makes sense to you, because all you’re trying to do is gather information that creates that boundary quickly for you and sync your data. So I use that in terms of frequency of refresh. And when we speak about data net, is it daily, is that a weekly? Is it a monthly? Is it before 5am? Is it every hour? Is it every half hour? Is it using air quotes real time? So those things we want to know and again, often hard for people to give you an answer.

Tammy Leahy: The other thing that’s people get confused by it. One sometimes is they think what you mean by that is the granularity of the information that they want, in their head, they’ll have a picture of the dashboard or the report that they want. And they’ll think that data sync means that they’re going to get every day. So daily refresher information. In this example, before 7am, and I’ll show them the hourly ordered data, by day and week compared to same time last year or something, in their head, they’ve got a picture of what it might look like. And sometimes that’s useful to get out as well, because it doesn’t always come out in the business questions. And unless you’re going to do that second page, for example of a little quick wireframe, you’re not going to get it out of them necessarily head. That’s almost like a delivery. So like what is it going to be really for me versus actually what is it going to show me? So there’s just the two different things.

Shane Gibson: Yes. When you’re talking about that data sync, that when and how encouraged to then information be, then you will break down into those conversations. And I tend to put the results of those into user stories or well wait sections, if they’re valuable, what are the things you we often get as a i want to buy this? And I want to buy that. And I want to buy that there’s a little bit of skill and saying how many of those buy variables are actually important for us to document right now? How many impact the boundary, or how many do we just expect to do?

Tammy Leahy: Equally sometimes they’re like, I want to buy half hour and I actually given the outcome you’re trying to achieve, is that going to actually make a difference the decision you’re going to make, I think that’s also a useful conversation to have. Because your scope can get massive if you’re not careful. And suddenly, it’s not even useful to them to deliver their outcome, it is useful to have that conversation.

Shane Gibson: The other thing that’s important around the canvas is, it’s the beginning of a conversation. So it’s just starting the conversation quickly. If they go, I want half hourly data, then we document that in the canvas, then when we get closer to delivering, the team pick it up and they look at it, they go right now we’re recording data at an hourly green. So there’s a massive amount of rework to do to bring that down to half hour. And then we have a conversation with the product owner. And we say I’m doing an hourly green, low cost piece of effort, doing it to half an hour. This is massive. Why do you want to do? What’s the trade off? Are you willing to trade off the hourly? Or actually it sounds important that is it half hour that it’s worth the investment. And that’s just a conversation to get their boundary.

Tammy Leahy:  I actually had examples where someone’s prefilled this and then we’ve had a conversation about what they’ve preferred, have sat down someone in the business, it was actually someone who’s working quite closely with us. And he prefilled it and he ended up extending the business questions to two pages. That was a very interesting conversation when it came to it really. So I agree completely. It’s the conversation is the more important but there the documented no evidence in that conversation. For the next step.

Shane Gibson: I often see that how many orders have been placed by store, by region, by type of day, by whether it was sunny or not, those by variables often give us a lot more breadth on those questions. But we talked about how many orders have been placed versus what’s the total order value, both of those questions that we probably want by store, by region, by time of day, by whether it was sunny or not, which takes us to the next one, which stands out on its own. And it’s what I call business events. And again, this is following who does what? being framework from Lawrence core, that I use a lot, is this idea of understanding the core business processes that the ones we’ve got in the areas customer places, or what customer pays for or what store ships product pays, customer returns product, these four core events here. The reason we put these in as this gives us a data requirements, lets us understand the data that has already need to been produced and captured for us to fulfill this requirement. To fulfill this canvas, this information product delivery, what we’re looking for is those types of sentences because that will help us and the future map, back to the systems that capture and created though, that information has helped us look at other information product canvases we’ve done and delivered already to see whether those core business events have already been recorded and captured on our data platform, which means we get reuse which is less effort ideally. And it also gives us a sense of complexity, counting the number of core business events as a great way of understanding the complexity and effort required to deliver this.  So what about you? What do you put in there for the core business events?

Tammy Leahy: It’s a very similar it is core business events, It was like a process flow in a way. Because for me, if you start with the beginning of a customer places an order, and it ends with the customer pays for the order and returns the product, if the outcome here is figuring out which stores to invest in a margin for stores, then I’ve tried and map the process to get straight in my head, where again, data flows are similar to you whether or not you use beam, It’s so useful to think of this way because I honestly could not say that I’ve used beam. But I still think of it this way, because it’s helped me think about the subject areas or the data entities that you’re dealing with. So you’ve got a customer, you’ve got orders, you’ve got stores, you’ve got products, you’ve got returns. And so you’ve got states, and you’ve got transactions, and you’ve got all these different things, and it starts to help form that picture for me, agree about mapping them in this way, whether or not use beam, it doesn’t matter. Because this helps you start to define the bits of things that you need to pull in. I would say customer places an order on a website or customer places an order via phone or whatever it might be, because it’s their next level of contact, you can still gather that somewhere else, if you need to. These conversations for me are typically about an hour long, an hour and a half long, when I talk to people. And that includes writing up the whole canvas, basically while we’re there. And so you do get quite a lot of information out quite quickly, I find. So if I get a snippet of information, even if it doesn’t seem to fit anywhere in the right box, I make sure it’s there. Because it’s context, you don’t want to lose.

Shane Gibson: For me that idea of core business concepts that’s really important. Again, if I look at those four customer places, or the customer pays for order, store ships product and customer returns product, I can see that we’ve got a core concept of customer, we’ve got a core concept of order, we’ve got a concept of the place in order. So there’s an ordering process in there that we need a word for, we can see a payment in there, we can see a shipment, we can see a store and we can see a return and we can see the product. So it’s quite a few concepts in there. And if we’ve already defined some of those previously, if we’ve already done some information product delivery that says we’ve already got customer, we’ve already got order, then we nicely fit it but if we haven’t done any of these, we know that’s a big piece of work. And what we can do is we can also map that back to our business questions to try and reduce the scope of the initial delivery, the initial iteration. So we could go back and say, if we look at those business questions, is probably only one of them that’s driving the need for shipment and return and payment, actually, and that is what’s the percentage of abandoned orders depending on what the definition of abandoned orders is? So actually, if we remove that question, then how many orders have been placed? What’s the total value of orders? Which region are they been ordered from? And where’s the growth and channel happening, then we could probably remove three of those events for now. But then the next question I’ve got is, we talk about a question of answering what channels driving growth. Now, if we have more channels and stores, then potentially we’re missing some core business events. So again, I use it to triangulate the business questions to the events and just see if we’re missing anything really important.

Tammy Leahy: That’s the interesting thing. While these boxes, you don’t necessarily work through them in any predefined sequence, except I think you do always start with outcomes and questions. I always start there. And then I work my way through. And sometimes depending on the way the conversation flows, you’ll be jumping all over the place and forming a picture of how it all hangs together. Do you do come back to the business questions and cross reference and validate in that way.

Shane Gibson: And it’s not linear. You’re right, when you’re giving us information, you are bouncing around. But I started with business questions first. And there’s somebody’s done it before. And then we’ll talk about what happens about self service filling out of the canvas. And what happens when you work with somebody, they’re seeing you do this process before because I find that really intriguing. The last few boxes I want to talk about are user stories and information product worldwide. Now one of the key things about this, when people look at them, is you can often put something in either box, and that is okay. We just want some assumptions and constraints, some of those other words that we use to understand the scope, for user stories box at the moment I’ve got as a consumer, I want to be able to drill down from the summary numbers to see the transactions that make up the numbers, so I can scan for outliers. As an analyst, I want to be able to export the data so I can use it on another tool. And as a consumer, I want a single view of orders regardless of the system, the orders are captured it. So for all the Agile practitioners out there, I am really bad at writing user stories. So don’t beat me up for the quality of those stories, I’m just going to jump across to well, won’t, that’s the last box the information product, well, won’t, it won’t break down by customer or supplier type, it will include return products in the order value calculation, it will collect data from the website, the point of sale, the order management, the shipping management and the financial management systems. And we’ll backfill data from the previous 24 months. So those boxes were using a scope statement. So if I look in user stories, there’s some data scope statements there and there’s some feature functions of the data platform scope statement and the worldwide there is some feature function scope statements in there and there’s some data scope statements in there. Again, I don’t really care which box they go in and just one that feels the most natural for them and we just tried to document some assumptions, some things we know that we’re going to agree, we won’t do, because if we tried to do them, the delivery gets too big, we probably do it in another iteration, but just not this one. So what are you? What are you putting those two boxes?

Tammy Leahy: At the user stories, I tend to try and force the size of the information product down, I suppose, if I think about my process and focus solely on the vision, as in the who is the primary user here for who and so I will look at the will, won’t as what will or won’t this do for that primary user. And this is where this one was interesting, because you’ve got your personas and information consumer, who looks like for the chief revenue officer. And the other persona is interested in the data analysts, the user stories as well, who else is going to consume this information product and find some use from it, that if I can help them get it great. But if I can’t, well, that’s not my primary focus, my primary focus is on that core user. The will, won’t was more important to me than the user stories, they were almost like the good nice to have, that helps me contextualize, that helps me understand who else might use it, which I think is slightly different to how you use it. Because what you’re saying is, these are your personas, who you’re delivering it to, or will be using this data product.

Shane Gibson: User stories start off as, right, so I tend to use the persona terms. And I use it as a way of understanding the features, or the things that are unique to each of those personas, that we would naturally do or have a cost. So in that example, I’d cross references and it says, if we remove the persona of data analyst, then what happens? Well, we remove the need to be able to export the data, we haven’t built that capability in our data platform, we may be able to reduce the effort of delivering this one and get it out early. And here’s the blast radius, here’s the impact, the analysts can still go into the dashboard, they just can’t get the data. So really, the dashboards are a little value for them. But that’s a trade off decision with the product, is that valuable? Whereas if we go into the world won’t and we’re saying we’re getting data from five different systems, if we haven’t collected that data, we know, every data collection process is a nightmare and expensive and hard and lots of effort. So we look at there we go all these five of them, does it really matter to the end term? Maybe not? Does it matter to the business questions, we’re answering yes. Which of those can we remove, and we’re not forcing to the remover, we’re just saying each one of these, we know is a big piece of that, we’re happy to invest in it. Because you call the value conversation, you tell us what’s most valuable for the organization. And then we’ll just tell you how long, which equals, how much and so it’s just a conversation.

Tammy Leahy: Yes, in the user stories, I almost never start them with a persona name, I almost always start them with as accounting manager. I want to be able to drill down because I’m being very specific. I don’t know if it’s just a specificity thing. I like that. But it’s more that specific audience because I know that person’s or consumer, it’s a little bit slightly different, the approach, but the intent, I think is the same.

Shane Gibson: It used to get a finer grained, you’re saying, you understand your audience, and it’s not at a persona level, it’s at a more detailed level. So there’s a difference between a finance analyst and a HR analyst.

Tammy Leahy: In some ways, it might influence how they consume the data, because they’re all consumers, but they might consume them through different applications potentially, or they have a different UI or whatever it might be, it really does depend on how much you get out of that first conversation, how much detail you put in, how much you want to go into the detail here. Sometimes I think about those almost as acceptance criteria, they’re not acceptance criteria, but this whole thing starts to form up, what is almost the definition of done.

Shane Gibson: I tend to focus on the whats. And that’s actually more than a will. Because of my experience. Everybody expects everything to be done. And so it’s highlighting the things that won’t be done, won’t include breakdown by supplier or customer type.

Tammy Leahy: As soon as you say those words, there’s a business question. It says, I want to know orders placed by and you’re like, but hang on, we’ve just said no, we’re not going to do that down here. Like you said, it’s a conversation starter, it’s a useful thing to have the conversation around. And we put it in a word statement. And more often than not, because everybody expects everything to be done, won’t statement actually forces that really good conversation about do you actually need that? We’re saying that so won’t, do you actually need it to achieve your outcome?

Shane Gibson: And there’s won’t and this iteration, doesn’t mean we won’t never do it. It’s just we won’t do it in this one, and the same as the wills, the wills as the ones where I write them down in here where I know, there’s a high amount of effort or uncertainty for the team. So we’ll include return products in the order value calculation, that’s a big red flag to say, actually, what’s the business rule for that? How do we describe a return product? How does it affect the order value? There’s a whole lot of work that needs to be done on that business definition, the rule for that one. So again, we’re saying it has to be there. So we’re saying to the team, you’ve got some work to go and discover that rule and make sure we get it right and we tested and it’s fit for purpose is the Weinstein to go back to our stakeholder our product owners, say we’ve agreed this is out of scope for now, the world’s tend to be the hunt for the team of here’s some big gnarly pieces of effort we’ve picked up, let’s start worrying about it, like backfill of data for the previous 24 months. But if at the end to get that going, and that brings us on to our last box, which is the vision statement. This is grabbing the full whose statement that came out of Geoffrey Moore’s book “Crossing the Chasm”. I tend to use it here as a way of creating a really short sharp sentence, we can say and the lifts that anybody could scan in 10 seconds and understand the core crux of this information product. The one I’ve got here is for the chief revenue officer, who needs to optimize the investment in new stores or new channels. The order revenue metric is a dashboard that can automate the collection and consumption of whatever revenue data to understand the total order revenue and where it’s driven from, unlike the current manual Excel process. For is typically quite focused, who’s the key person that would get upset if this wasn’t done? Who, what do they need to do effectively? And that is, it should be back to that outcome action, thought the task at hand, that we just put it in basically the information product name and the delivery mechanism. That’s the more business equation stuff that we’re answering, what are we getting out of this? And the unlike is what’s currently happening. If we don’t deliver this, what is the current state that will survive? So what is the bad thing? So it’s typically things like, currently manual process or information isn’t available? Or it’s too late? What do you put into that vision box? And when do you do it?

Tammy Leahy: Same things, put exactly the same things, I do at the same time as the outcomes and business questions. It’s really early on, because I want to have a really focused conversation about it. This is a really good example of it. Often what you’ll find is the person you’re talking to so in this case, I’m assuming I’m talking to Eddie or top, who’s I’m assuming, it’s like the information product owner, and they’re saying the chief revenue officer, I’m like, really? Is the Chief Revenue Officer really going to be looking at this dashboard? Yes, they are the one who maybe owns that outcome, sometimes what I find is you’ll get the CEO who wants to like really? Is it really that person? Or is it someone slightly different that needs to own that outcome? or keys that this thing exists? That’s an interesting one, because sometimes they get people trying to almost not pull rank, but I need this because i needs that thing.

Shane Gibson: And for me, that is almost customer paying, if we had one that was for the CEO, and we had one for the chief revenue officer. And the chief revenue officer took both canvases to the CEO, and said, Look, I really want to do my one. But your one seems to be prioritized before me and the CEO has never seen that Canvas before and doesn’t understand why this thing’s being prioritized, is going to go badly. We shouldn’t pretend that somebody wants it. And it’s we’ve had a conversation with them, I still tend to do these at the end. Because I find it easier. I find it easier. Once I’ve got all the other stuff to draft the vision statement and then use it as a test. I give them just that at the end of it and say, right, here’s the vision statement. Did we nail it? I find that valuable. And I use it in the prioritization process, I tend to write those out on cards and use that as a way of prioritizing the information product to be delivered next, back by a canvas. That is the one thing it’s like the summary, we should have the standard on the left side in three seconds and people go, I know what you’re talking about, lots of questions, but I get it, compared to another one.

Tammy Leahy: Well, at first, it doesn’t stay the same. I bounce around a lot in this, once I’ve got through those first two boxes of business questions and outcomes actions, if there are three boxes that are must haves, in a first pass conversation with someone in here. It’s those three outcomes, actions, business questions, envision, for me the other things I could then harvest or do in a follow on conversation. But those are the three critical things for me. And that’s why I tend to go through them first, get a first pass and then go through the rest of it, and then come back and sniff at it again, say does this still stand up given everything else we’ve talked about?

Shane Gibson: And that’s because those three have the value conversation? Why are we doing this? What’s the value of doing the CFO? While the other boxes are helping us understand how big it is? Where the boundary is make trade off decisions, trying to get the cost down, the time down or the delivery early? That’s a good way of thinking of it.

Tammy Leahy: The way I tend to prioritize perhaps is more understand fresh and product name. Because when we’re thinking about the information product, we’re thinking about all three of those boxes at the same time, from a prioritization perspective, plus the t shirt size, which I know this canvas doesn’t show, but I’ve hacked the canvas for myself and added a t shirt size on it as well.

Shane Gibson: I think that’s valuable. We should add that. And one thing I would always encourage though, is the t shirt size nevers disclosed at prioritization, I don’t believe we should be prioritizing products based on how long or how much it costs to deliver, we should do it around the value or the outcome, is this valuable information for the organization?

Tammy Leahy: I think I disagree with you. But this is a different conversation, actually. Because there’s a double pass prioritization process is a pure value conversation. And then there’s how much is it going to cost me to deliver that value? And then there’s actually worth me spending that money to deliver that value? It’s like that payback conversation.

Shane Gibson: So we won’t do it on this one, because then we’re going to get into the whole, your estimate for how long just bollocks is anyway, so don’t use it. I want to close this one out with this idea of self service. One of the things I’ve seen that gives a lot of value to the canvas is this festival, this idea of a quick review, I can walk into an organization, I can pick up a canvas, it’s been well done. And I can understand the boundary of that Canvas. What it isn’t? What the intent of it is by just reading it. That shared language is highly valuable across both your development team and your stakeholder teams. But the second one is this idea of self service. So what I’ve seen in lots of organizations is once you’ve gone through and done the canvass was somebody for a while, talking them through it to get the input that you need to fill it out. If they need to do them in the future, they will tend to just pick them up and have a go themselves and then bring that to the conversation with shortcuts the time, i may say, starting to think about what information you need to get this thing filled out to continue the process. And that’s because it’s actually not that hard. We’re all we’re doing is eliciting the information out of the head anyway. And so after a while, they just get it and they will just pick it up, and they will just fill it out. They do a good job. Sometimes they don’t, but it’s a good starter for 10. Their idea that people can self serve as their information early and help them with their thinking, I think has a lot of value as well. What about you?

Tammy Leahy: Yes, totally. We’ve had we’ve done that before. And we’ve actually had examples where I’ve come across that IP canvas somewhere in the organization, I’ve never even been near before. And somehow it’s magically moved its way across because it’s a useful way to describe an information product and it’s something that people pick up and will use to help elicit information and share information with, what’s interesting sometimes is people turn up with the completed information product canvas and be like sweet, so I’m in now. Thing is going to be built in, so is that conversation or actually this is the beginning of the conversation not so I’ve unlocked the next level and I can get my thing built, which is an interesting behavior that you see. I’ve seen it a couple of times not often but a couple of times.

Shane Gibson: And also it’s not a requirements document and it’s not locked, it’s just the beginning of the conversation we need more detail for the team to be successful, we will need to make changes as we learn more. Information product Canvas one on one goes through each of the boxes. And the next one, what we’ll do is, we’ll pick this one up again and then by you and I can be brutal. There’s probably going to be more you and me but let’s pick it up. Give it a bash. Let’s figure out the things that we would normally scan for, that make us worried about this information product. Things we go, that makes me suck my teeth. Let’s have a look at that one. And why when I wrote it, I left some little fish hooks in there that I’ve seen before and some of the canvases and that always make me go or rip into that one next, another great session I saw on there. I hope everybody has a simply magical day.