To discover company’s real needs, one needs to take the time to understand them. There’s no shortcut for meaningful projects and some projects need specific tools for the job.

For some, it’s considered a luxury to stop day-to-day activities. However, others will know that one session can make you move three times faster and most importantly more wisely.

It’s worth the time to stop and be conscious enough to invite your client to reflect on its own business. You can learn about their business and you’ll also be enhancing collaboration from, potentially, meeting one (briefing meeting).

At Monday we believe in this approach and we are starting to test it so we can apply it internally. For a small test-run, we challenged ourselves to learn to use collaborative tools to inform our briefing sessions: Business Model Canvas followed by Value Proposition Canvas.

The objective behind doing a Value Proposition Map is to get to a simple sentence that summarises the real value proposition of a business through the eyes of your client, an empathy exercise which attempts to validate that you’re doing everything your client is looking for. In turn, Business Model Canvas attempts to summarise your business onto a simple canvas.

Moderation through practice

We wanted everyone in our team to be part of this test run experiment, especially people at Monday who talk directly and daily and directly with our clients.

We knew that we had to start with some kind of internal exercise first to fully comprehend the tools. After some meetings one of Monday’s founders came up with the idea: Let’s spend next Wednesday evening at a school!

Who loves to ask questions more than kids?

No one. 🙂

Quickly the idea became clear. He knew a school where it’s 7th graders were focusing on building an app. It was a national school competition ‘http://www.applica-te.com/’. Kids were already designing their app screens on paper and ideas were thriving!

This was the perfect challenge for us. For starters, kids love to ask questions, so what better to challenge to test your own knowledge than spending a few hours with the most curious people on the planet (kids)?

Plus they already had so many concrete ideas! Quickly this could become a very realistic picture of what might happen in a real meeting with a client. People love to start building something but placing them in a reflective perspective first will make the whole objective of the product clearer.

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About the session at the school

Before we went, for preparation, we met internally and together we simplified the canvas’ areas for the kids but also for ourselves so we could keep words simple and concepts tidy.

In the afternoon we went to the school with our notes and metaphors ready.

We organised the session like this:

1. How your business/product is going to work (Business Model Canvas)

2. What will your customers want/need/feel? How will you deliver that value (Value Map)

3. A sentence that summarises the value of app for its customers. (Using short template)

Conclusion and next steps

As moderators, our job is to keep people in that space of reflection while asking the right questions to keep people motivated and we made it happen! We all got good insights and more doubts from practice. This was good to consolidate knowledge for next coming sessions. For the next steps, we decided that, as a team, we would make a solid example that all of us could relate to.

So, earlier this morning we designed our own Value Proposition Map for Monday. We are still working on it but the discussions are becoming clear insights for the future already. Quoting our founder this morning: ‘It’s great to stop and make these sessions to talk about issues that we think are not important but truly are’

Let’s see what happens next!

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Monday is a full service digital and interactive agency based in Lisbon. Weʼre a team of designers, builders & thinkers who craft digital experiences. Clients include: Snickers, Red Bull, Twix, Philips, M&M’s