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Earlier this week, I was working on a business model canvas. As we brainstormed the business model and the product strategy, I wondered how many organizations bring in a content strategist or a content designer in this canvas design.
For example when they write value proposition, there is a risk that the message or the vocabulary in this canvas stays in the teams’ minds. And since nobody talks about the positioning or message at this stage and assuming that the organization have not discussed these at all so far, the risk travels in the product teams’ discussions, and in the prototyping and the marketing strategy too. (If you are new to business model canvas, see this randomly picked example for reference.)
Likewise when they write customer segments (and sometimes they write the customers’ pain points too), was the content strategist or designer involved in the discovery? If they were, then they need to be in the canvas discussion too. And if they were not, then who takes care of the user-centricity in the language on the canvas—or do they think that it is not important?
I tweeted it (see the tweet) and although I understand the core objective of working on the business model canvas, I see some space for the positioning or the differentiator in the canvas, which means a role for the content strategist or the content designer.
Yesterday, I asked a few of my senior content strategist friends who have worked in the mid-size organizations and in bigger corporations if they have ever been involved in business model canvas or a similar product strategy activity and none of them ever got a chance. This is a gap.
You are never early to involve content practitioners anywhere in your business processes or in organization design. Try it.
