Introduction

The Product Team Canvas is a powerful tool that allows product teams to visualize and align their vision, goals, responsibilities, and actions. By creating a clear and shared framework, the Product Team Canvas promotes communication, creativity, and collaboration while improving the chances of success for your product.

There are two versions of the canvas: the “basic” version and the “classic” version, which takes longer to complete. We will apply the classic example of “Driving School” together to experiment with a concrete case.

Team Canvas Basic

Explanation

• Goals: What are our goals as a team? What does the company expect from us?
• Roles and skills: What are our skills? What are our roles and responsibilities?
• Values: What are our values as a team? Strong values allow us to collectively adhere and move forward with conviction.
• Rules and activities: What rules do we need to establish? How do we communicate and make decisions together?
• Purpose: What are our priorities as a team? What will we focus on initially to achieve our goals?

Example

Goals:

• Revolutionize driver’s education by offering a comprehensive and innovative digital solution.
• Simplify the process of obtaining a driver’s license by making it more efficient and accessible to all.
• Improve road safety by training responsible and well-prepared drivers.

Personnel, roles, and responsibilities:

• Product Manager: Responsible for the overall product strategy, team coordination, and user satisfaction.
• Developers: Responsible for creating and maintaining the application, ensuring its smooth operation and scalability.
• UX/UI Designer: Responsible for the user experience, user interface design, and application ergonomics.
• Driving Expert: Provides expertise in the field of driving education to develop educational content and practical tests.
• Marketing Manager: Responsible for promoting the application, user acquisition, and customer retention.

Values:

• Collaboration: Working together as a team to achieve common goals, sharing knowledge, and fostering mutual support.
• Transparency: Maintaining open and honest communication among all team members, fostering mutual trust.
• Commitment: Being dedicated and passionate about our mission to improve driver’s education and road safety.
• Empathy: Understanding the needs and expectations of the team and users to provide a personalized and quality learning experience, creating a positive work environment.
• Growth: Fostering continuous learning and constant improvement, staying informed about the latest trends and best practices in driver’s education.

Operating rules:

• Regular and transparent communication within the team, with weekly meetings to share updates and challenges.
• Data-driven decision-making, based on user feedback and testing, with regular analysis and testing.
• Meeting deadlines and set objectives, with effective planning and organization of tasks and resources.
• Close collaboration among all team members to ensure consistency and quality of the application.

Purpose:

• Facilitate access to driver’s education by offering an intuitive and comprehensive digital platform.

Team Canvas

Here, we make a few changes: Goals become Common Goals and Personal Goals, and we add:

Explanation

• Needs & expectations: The expectations and needs of team members.
• Strengths & assets: The team’s strengths and resources.
• Weaknesses & risks: The team’s weaknesses and the risks it faces.
• Personal Goals: The individual goals that each team member sets and contribute to the overall group.
• Common Goals: The common goals that the team commits to achieving collectively. This represents what the company expects from the team as a whole.

Examples

Needs & expectations:

• Students: Easy access to high-quality driving lessons, personalized progress tracking, availability of online practical exams.
• Driving instructors: Tools to organize and manage lessons, track learner progress, ability to share teaching resources.
• Driving school company: Improved reputation, increased number of learners, increased operational efficiency.

Strengths & assets:

• Driving instructors’ expertise in the field of driver’s education.
• Strong technical skills of the development team.
• Team’s commitment to innovation and quality.

Weaknesses & risks:

• Lack of experience in developing mobile applications.
• Possibility of conflicts of opinion among team members.
• Risk of not meeting learners’ expectations in terms of functionality.

Personal Goals:

• Instructor wants to improve teaching skills and obtain additional certification in driver’s education.
• Administrator wants to develop skills in operations management and learn to optimize the school’s internal processes.
• Marketing manager wants to improve digital marketing skills and develop effective strategies to attract new students.

Common Goals:

• Increase students’ success rate in driving exams by implementing effective and personalized learning methods.
• Increase the driving school’s reputation and attract a larger number of prospective students.
• Improve the overall student experience by providing high-quality customer service and meeting their specific needs.

Conclusion

The Team Canvas is a team exercise that can be used to collaborate better, get to know each other better, align on a product vision and common commitment. It is a quick workshop that can benefit team dynamics and understanding of roles and responsibilities.