Case Study: Ash and Lean Stack
Know where progress begins and ends.
I met Ash Maurya at the 2013 Lean Startup Conference in San Francisco. As a presentation was about to start, I took a seat near the front of the room. Ash soon sat next to me, and we chatted a bit.
I learned a bit about his experience as an engineer and entrepreneur. In 2002, he had started WiredReach — a software product that simplified file sharing over the Internet. Eight years later, he sold it. He began blogging about his experiences starting and running a company, and he came across early writing from lean start-up pioneers. This philosophy suggests that innovations should be designed in small, low-risk steps that are tested along the way. It struck a chord with Ash because a lot of its ideas about innovation matched his own experiences. Inspired, he self-published his first book, Running Lean (later republished by O’Reilly Media).
Now he’s building another company: Spark 59. It offers a collection of books and tools for entrepreneurs. In June 2014, on a podcast, I heard him share his thoughts on Customer Jobs and how he had been combining it with lean business principles. I wanted to know more about Ash’s thoughts on Customer Jobs and if he had applied its principles to his most successful product, the Lean Canvas.
Ash used Customer Jobs to help him learn about why customers were churning from his product, about how he could deliver customers more value with new products and services, and about the benefits of interviewing customers who use his product in novel ways.
What is Ash’s latest product for getting a Job Done? Most recently, Ash has focused on helping entrepreneurs get started on the right track and avoid what he calls the “innovator’s bias.” He said,
It’s when people get hit with an idea and then get carried away with it. They lock themselves up, and they start building the solution. They feel like they need to get it all out. They tend to be perfectionists. They spend a long time building a product, exhausting all their resources — and then end up building something no one wants.
Ash is describing a scenario that happens all too often: innovators think they have a brilliant idea for a product, they spend time and money building it, but when they release it, no one buys it. At this point, they either give up or scramble to recover. Ash said, “Because [innovation is] such a long and hard process, many people also spend time trying to find the investors, or the stakeholders, that will give them the resources to continue building their product.”
Ash helps innovators be more successful by helping them avoid the pitfalls associated with the innovator’s bias. A popular tool he has developed for this Job is the Lean Canvas. It’s a diagram you use instead of writing a long-winded business plan — most of which is speculative anyway. Instead, the Lean Canvas asks innovators to answer a set of important questions about how their businesses will deliver value to customers. They then go on to build the first version of their products.
Another problem that the Lean Canvas helps with is building consensus and a shared understanding around the business model for a product or company. But what about other struggles for progress? Has Ash found them all?
Can studying atypical customers reveal other innovation opportunities? Even though Ash had known about JTBD for a few years, he had never thought about applying any of its concepts to his own product, the Lean Canvas. This changed when he got an e-mail from Franco, a salmon fisher from Chile, who was having trouble using his site. Ash said, “We have the Lean Canvas as an online product. Every day, there are lots of people coming to the site and using it. When I read that e-mail from the salmon fisher, my first reaction was, ‘How the heck did he find us?’”
Most of the customers who use the Lean Canvas come from the lean start-up community. Ash knew the product’s audience had been broadening, but a salmon fisher from Chile was a dramatic outlier. This is the moment when Ash thought that a Customer Jobs approach could be helpful to him. Ash set up a call with Franco, asking him to describe what made navigating the Lean Canvas website difficult for him.
He was lost. At the time, the website assumed customers knew about the lean start-up community. He didn’t know anything about that. Instead, he told me that he had been at a networking event a few nights before. He was talking about wanting to get a loan from the bank for his business. He thought he had to put together a business plan for the bank. The person he was talking with said, “Don’t bother writing a whole business plan. Instead, go to leancanvas.com and create a one-page version of it.”
Ash began to understand Franco’s struggle: Franco wasn’t sure how to convince the bank that his business would be profitable and that it was safe for the bank to invest in him. This proved to be a tremendous insight for Ash and his team — but not the way you might think. The value wasn’t so much in that Ash had discovered a new Job; rather, it made him revisit a question that had lingered in the back of his mind: “Are we sure we know why people are coming to our website and trying out the Lean Canvas?”
You can gather JTBD data from customers who stop using your product. Ash and his team decided to do a new round of customer interviews to discover what Jobs customers were using the Lean Canvas for. They would talk with those who had recently signed up and those who had canceled their subscriptions.
They wanted to know the emotional motivations and expectations of the first group, and the second group’s answers would help the team learn how, or if, the Lean Canvas was failing to make customers’ lives better in the way they expected it to.
Ash crafted two e-mails. One was a thank-you to new subscribers, and it also conveyed that Ash’s team wanted to hear more about what they hoped to achieve with the Lean Canvas. The message to those who had canceled offered an Amazon.com gift card in exchange for a conversation about why they had canceled. Though Ash got valuable information from both groups, the most useful was from those who had canceled:
One unexpected thing that we learned was that customers weren’t leaving because we were doing a bad job. They were actually leaving because they felt like they had been satisfied. They had created their initial business model. They had, in some cases, invalidated it and moved on. They didn’t really see any other purpose to stick around and continue using the Lean Canvas.
It appeared that the Lean Canvas was, in a way, a victim of its own success. Innovators would sign up to use the Lean Canvas, get a lot of value from it, and then move on. But that wasn’t how Ash had envisioned the product. The Lean Canvas had been designed for long-term use, but clearly, many customers saw it as a short-term product. What should Ash and his team do? Should they accept a moderate churn rate for customers?
You may discover that your product is being used for very different Jobs. If Ash and his team wanted to keep their customers, they needed a better picture of what Job(s) they were hiring the Lean Canvas for. More interviews brought insight.
One group of customers took the Lean Canvas as a starting point and then began integrating it into their own product-development processes, altering the Lean Canvas to connect to things like bug-tracking systems and company documentation. Ash found this particularly interesting. He had designed the Lean Canvas as a tool for entrepreneurs to develop business models for start-ups. Yet these particular customers were using the Lean Canvas to help them design features for an existing product.
Ash and his team were at a turning point. Which opportunity would they pursue? Should they address the high churn among the original audience (entrepreneurs)? Or should they extend the Lean Canvas to include customers who were using the Lean Canvas in novel ways?
Narrowing what Job(s) your product should be used for has benefits. After some discussion with this team, Ash decided to focus on their core audience: innovators who needed help creating and iterating on a business model.
Our audience was already broadening on one end [more entrepreneurs were using the Lean Canvas], and if we went down that path of extending the Lean Canvas in all these ways [supporting corporations], we’d be catering to smaller segments. That is the point where you have to decide where your product starts and stops. For us, we said, “That’s out of scope. If they want to do those kinds of things, there are many other options.” We’re not going to bloat our software with extra features. Instead, we decided to focus on what we do best.
Ash is doing something important here. Instead of trying to grow revenue by serving many different Jobs, he’s choosing to focus on the few Jobs that he and his team can deliver the most value for. Instead of turning the Lean Canvas into a Swiss Army knife — a tool that does a lot of things OK but not any one thing great — he was going to evolve it into a scalpel — a specialized tool that is invaluable for a select group of people.
The decision was made. Now it was time to figure out exactly how to grow the business.
How does thinking about delivering progress help you discover innovation opportunities? To figure out where to take his business next, Ash asked a simple but powerful question:
To help us figure out what path to take, we asked ourselves, “What comes after that initial canvas?” Our answer was to develop two additional boards that would be used with the Lean Canvas. We wanted to extend the customer’s story in a way that emphasized more than just capturing your idea for a start-up. It’s really about creating a valid business model through experimentation and research.
Once again, Ash is doing something very smart here. His team had a question: “How can we increase revenue by getting customers to use the Lean Canvas longer (i.e., reduce churn)?” Many innovators in this position would be tempted to make changes to their existing product, usually by adding more features. But Ash didn’t do that. The Lean Canvas was great the way it was. Changing it would waste time and money in overengineering a solution and risk upsetting the habits of existing customers.
Instead, he made his original product more valuable to customers — not by changing it but by developing new, complementary products. This is when he developed two more boards: an Experiment Report and a Validation Plan. In this new vision, entrepreneurs would first hypothesize and document their business models using the Lean Canvas. Next, they would formulate a strategy for validating their hypotheses, using Ash’s Validation Plan to structure and document that. Then, they could run experiments that would either validate or invalidate parts of that business model; the results of these experiments would be documented on the Experiment Report. Finally, they would update the Lean Canvas and form new hypotheses as needed.
Ash both helped his customers be more successful and kept them using his products longer by extending his business with additional products. Customers stopped seeing the Lean Canvas as an end but rather as an ongoing companion.
Shift from selling one product to selling a combination of products that work together as a system. Now that Ash had added complementary products, he decided to rebrand his business. The Lean Canvas became the Lean Stack. This change represented the extended value that Ash’s business now offered.
In the beginning, there was the Lean Canvas and the various Jobs that people hired it for, such as the following:
- Cofounders starting companies use the Lean Canvas’s structured approach to help them overcome doubt and uncertainty.
- Entrepreneurs use it to avoid the mistake of wasting time and money building a product no one wants.
- Some entrepreneurs, like Franco the salmon fisher, want help “selling” themselves and their businesses as investment opportunities.
The Lean Canvas is brilliant at these Jobs. The downside is that not a lot of people experience them, and there is a lot of competition among solutions for these Jobs. This means that the Lean Canvas, by itself, had limited growth potential. But Ash extended his business by serving up a collection of products that work together, as a system, to help customers make progress. This was how he was able to activate much more revenue potential. He said,
Going back to the salmon fisher, yes, he will create a canvas, but what if he wants to raise money afterward? We could help him down a particular path. We might actually show him how to pitch the canvas to investors. There could be additional products that tie him together with people who can look at his pitch and maybe help him raise money. We’re even developing features that help entrepreneurs run effective board and adviser meetings.
Ash’s switch from the Lean Canvas to the Lean Stack puts him in a better position to help his customers with a larger JTBD: Help me become a better and more successful entrepreneur.
What is the future of Lean Stack? Ash continues to help entrepreneurs become successful. He is in the process of releasing his next book, Scaling Lean — a follow-up to Running Lean. He’s also just released his BOOTSTART Manifesto — a rallying call for entrepreneurs, reminding them that there has never been a better time to start one’s own business.
For the Lean Stack itself, Ash is looking at more Jobs that entrepreneurs struggle with:
We’ve learned about many different struggles that people face: starting projects, big companies sustaining innovation, and even release management. As a result, we’ve discovered many different Jobs. We want to continue to learn more about those Jobs and decide which ones we’d like to help customers accomplish.
What’s the JTBD?
Ash’s case study doesn’t offer much data about one JTBD. Instead, it offers a lot of data about delivering progress for a higher level struggle. You become better at seeing the big picture when understanding the high-level progress your customers are struggling to make. In Ash’s case, his customers are struggling to become successful entrepreneurs. Along the way, however, they run into various challenges. A good example comes from the salmon fisher who wanted help persuading bankers that his business was worth investing in. Once he secured financing, he could get back to growing his business.
Ash’s case study is also interesting because he understood that his Lean Canvas was great at helping people get their Jobs Done. So, instead of trying to make it better — which would most likely only make it worse — he focused on future products. He chose to offer progress with a collection of products that work together as a system:
- Tools. Lean Canvas, Validation Plan, Experiment Report
- Books. Running Lean, Scaling Lean
- Training. Online courses, workshops, boot camps
Each product is serving one or more Jobs to be Done. Collectively, they work together to help people become better entrepreneurs.
Put it to work
Ash’s Lean Canvas (now Lean Stack) is a great finale for our case studies on applying Customer Jobs theory. Let’s review some specific lessons.
Grow your business, reduce churn, and capture more profits by delivering progress to customers. Nowhere is the Customer Job principle of favoring progress over outcomes and goals clearer than in this case study. Ash began his business by delivering well-defined, static outcomes: better business plans and/or consensus among founders. The Lean Canvas does these tasks beautifully — so well, in fact, that some customers don’t need to use the Lean Canvas for long. In this way, the Lean Canvas was a victim of its own success.
Ash fixed his high-churn problem by changing his business from one that delivered a static outcome to one that delivers progress. Instead of solely focusing on helping customers create better business plans, he also began helping them become better entrepreneurs. This strategy creates more touch points between his business and his customers’ lives, making it more relevant and valuable to them.
When you design a product for a specific outcome, customers leave when the outcome is realized. However, improving a customer’s life never ends. As long as Ash helps customers become better entrepreneurs, he’ll retain them.
Avoid overengineering your product; develop complementary products. If you sell a software product, offer different versions of it that tailor to different vectors of progress. Ash made a brilliant move that far too few innovators do: he made the Lean Canvas more valuable to customers not by changing the product but by adding complementary ones. Ash knew that the Lean Canvas was great the way it was, so changing it would neither make it more valuable to customers nor bring any new ones to his business. At best, nothing would improve; at worst, time and money would be lost in development, and the changes would upset existing customers.
As I keep pointing out (it’s important), adding features to a product doesn’t mean customers will realize more value from it. Remember when we discussed that a technology and innovation can be pushed only so far and deliver customers a finite amount of progress. This is because customers realize value only when they make progress with your product. Unless you can directly connect a change to your product with how it helps make customers’ lives better, you’re likely overengineering your product and wasting money.
Unlock your innovation creativity by asking, “What comes after?” This is a question every innovator should ask about his or her innovations. After your customers use your product, then what? Do any new challenges arise when customers successfully incorporate your innovation into their lives? Learning these things from your customers will keep your innovation efforts relevant and profitable.
Learn more
This story is an excerpt from the book When Coffee and Kale Compete. You can download it as a free PDF, or buy it in paperback & kindle right here.
If you have more questions about Jobs to be Done, or want help applying JTBD concepts to your business or startup, contact me.
