The My.Skill.Base team has been having a lot of debates over how to proceed after the LLP is over. It’s hard to know when you’re “finished” the customer development phase, because I don’t think you ever are.
In Paul Graham’s essay, “Frighteningly Ambitious Startup Ideas”, he talks about how hard it is to know the right route to your big idea:
I think the way to use these big ideas is not to try to identify a precise point in the future and then ask yourself how to get from here to there, …
Start with something you know works, and when you expand, expand westward.
During our journey in the LLP, we’ve had countless debates over where to “point the needle” and then how this translates into the frameworks we’re using.
In my opinion, there needs to be two canvases, the blurry, “westward”, visionary canvas. Then there needs to be a next-foot-forward canvas that’s our next step at getting there, because you need to start with something you know works.
As a developer, I need that “right now” canvas. It’s not just pointing the arrow, it’s giving me step by step instructions. Each one of these smaller scoped canvases is related to one value proposition. It decides whether that idea ever makes it into the grander scope.
Once we’re finished developing that feature, or most likely during, customer development begins again, driving the company onward towards the blurry unknown of our company canvas.
So my question is this – is it necessary to have two canvases? Do you keep the here-and-now and discard the future vision? Or can these frameworks encapsulate both?