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How to Use Milestones to Create a Roadmap for Your Business

Posted june 11, 2020 by noah parsons.

Using milestones to create a roadmap for your business is the third step in the lean business planning process . If you’re building a lean business plan, download our free template or signup for LivePlan , and then follow along to create a simple, one-page business plan that will grow your business.

Even if you’re not building a lean business plan, this article series will help you develop your business strategy , develop tactics to support your strategy , create a roadmap to grow your business, and define your business model .

In this step, you’ll learn how to use milestones to create a strategic roadmap for your business.

What are business milestones?

Milestones are goals that you set for business, with dates and the person or team responsible. For example:

The marketing team will launch a new website by the end of the third quarter.

A business plan and strategy can’t turn into a real business without milestones. Milestones are what you use to convert your business strategy and tactics into action.

Just like a milestone on the side of a road marks how far you’ve gone, a milestone in business tracks your progress as you grow and implement your plan. They’re what you use to manage responsibilities, track results, and convert your idea into a functioning business.

How do milestones relate to strategy and tactics?

Previously, I’ve written about building your business strategy and then creating tactics to implement that strategy . Just like there’s a link between tactics and strategy, there’s a link between tactics and milestones. 

Tactics are the things you’re going to do to implement your strategy. For example, using social media marketing might be a tactic that’s part of your marketing strategy.

Milestones are used to add specific details to implement your tactics. Continuing the example above, a good milestone would be to establish a new Instagram account for your business and start updating it regularly. 

It may even be useful for you to outline how your strategy flows into a tactic and then to a milestone like this:

Marketing Strategy: Educate millennials about the environmentally friendly nature of our products.

Tactic: Social media marketing

Milestone: New Instagram account, established by the end of Q3, managed by our social media manager with a promotional budget of $1,000/month.

Now keep in mind that this is a very simple representation of this process. More than likely your strategy will have multiple tactics and each tactic will have multiple milestones. Think of them as a pyramid, building up toward the execution of your overall strategy.

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What makes a good milestone:

A good milestone clearly lays out the parameters of the task at hand and sets expectations for its executions. When planning out specific milestones you’ll need to have:

• A description of the task

And lastly, you’ll need a responsible person to manage and meet these milestones. It may even make sense to work with this individual on setting the specifics of each milestone and task.

Milestones are key to management

You’ll use your milestones to manage your business better . Once a month, when you meet with your team to review your business strategy and business numbers, you’ll review your milestones to make sure your plans are on track. If there are problems or changes, this is when you can make course corrections.

Reviewing your milestones monthly gives you more opportunities to spot problems and identify opportunities. If you only check in on your progress once a quarter, or potentially just once a year, you have fewer opportunities to adjust course and change direction. In virtually every business, there’s always new information to review and changes in what your customers want and need. 

A frequent review of your goals allows you to be nimble and adjust quickly when you need to. For more on why you should review your milestones and other business metrics frequently, check out my post on the topic .

3 types of business milestones

When you’re building and growing a business, you should end up scheduling three different types of milestones:

Plan review

• Assumptions validation
• Implementation

All businesses should have “plan review” milestones. These might be the most important milestones that you create.

The plan review milestone sets aside time to review your business strategy, tactics, forecast and budget. If you don’t regularly check your plan and make adjustments, you can easily get off track. Not to say that you should follow the plan blindly, either. Instead, a regular plan review meeting will give you a chance to look at what’s working, what’s not, and revise as you go.

Here at Palo Alto Software , we have a monthly plan review meeting on the second Friday of the month. We get our management team together, review our financials, and talk about what got done last month and what’s in the pipeline. This monthly meeting is critical for making changes and adjustments to our strategy and changing course as necessary.

For early-stage startups, it might just be a few of you that get together and there might not be much in the way of revenue or expenses to review. That’s okay. Instead, your monthly meeting will focus on the next steps you can take to make your business idea a reality, and what progress you’ve made so far. 

You’ll review your progress on implementing your strategy and tactics, such as developing a new marketing campaign, increasing the number of customers who make a second order by 15 percent, or signing the lease on new office space.

Milestones to validate your assumptions

When you’re just starting your business and figuring out if you’ve got the right strategy, you’re going to create milestones to help you validate your assumptions . These milestones are set for interviewing potential customers to figure out if they have the problem you think they have, and to discover if they’re interested in your solution. You’ll also work to try and figure out what your pricing should be.

Remember, in the early days of your business, you’re making a lot of guesses – assumptions, really – about what your customers need and want. Your initial strategy is a collection of guesses about the problems your potential customers have, how they want their problems solved, and what they’re willing to pay for your solution. Your milestones at this stage should be geared around validating those assumptions so you can build a successful business.

Some example milestones might be:

• Interview 20 potential customers in my primary market segment
• Research pricing models of my competitors
• Creating a preview landing page for my business to see what potential customers think

The milestones that you create at this stage should be focused on the goal of finding what’s called “product/market fit.” This means that you’ve found a target market that’s interested in buying your product and that your product solves a real problem for your customers.

It’s very likely that you find out that you don’t have good product/market fit right away. That’s OK. It’s easy to make changes to your strategy, come up with new assumptions, and go back and test them again with your potential customers. That’s the benefit of validating your assumptions early in the business startup process – you haven’t invested too much in building your business yet and can easily change directions if necessary.

Implementing your strategy

Once your assumptions have been validated, you’ll start creating implementation milestones. These are the tasks you’ll do to actually build your business. You’ll be doing things like building your product, setting up your office or shop, developing your website, and more.

Implementation milestones are typically for companies that have progressed out of the very early stages of starting up and have a proven strategy that they know is going to work. These milestones are all about getting things done to execute your strategy.

With Lean Planning, you adjust as you go

Your milestone schedules will evolve as you go, so don’t spend a lot of time initially documenting every last step you’re going to take to launch your business. Instead, plot out the next few steps you’re going to take. When those steps are done, come back and add more steps as you go.

After all, Lean Planning is an ongoing process, not just a one-time event. It’s all about creating a plan, running that plan, reviewing the results, and revising before you take next steps. Having solid milestones will make that process easier and more efficient, helping you build a better business, faster. The next post in this series talks about your business model —how you’re going to make money. Read on to learn about the final component of your Lean Plan.

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Lean Business Planning: The Modern approach to Business Plan Writing

Free Lean Canvas Template

Ayush Jalan

• December 12, 2023

10 Min Read

Planning is essential for any business to attain success and sustain itself in the market. Traditionally, the goal was to formulate a lean business plan that lasts and works in the long run. However, this conventional way of creating a business plan isn’t flexible and doesn’t provide much room for improvement over time.

In an ever-changing business environment, you need a plan that can adapt to your changing needs and not hold you back with its rigidity. This is true especially when immediate actions are needed.

To facilitate the convenience to make modifications, a new method of planning has surfaced. This is called a lean business plan. This simple yet effective method of planning a business reduces the hassle of dealing with complicated documents—all while increasing efficiency and productivity.

What is Lean Business Planning?

A lean business plan is essentially a one-page business plan for companies to kickstart their businesses. Contrary to traditional business plans which are often bulky and complex documents, a lean business plan is a simple, reader-friendly, and easy-to-make document.

It is a streamlined core plan that acts as a basis for a more elaborate one.

If you want to skip the trouble of creating a plan from scratch, a lean business plan template can help you save a couple of hours. If done right, a lean business plan can guide you to reach your goals, keep track of your progress, and manage cash flow .

Why Choose Lean Business Planning?

A lean business plan is similar to creating a map with steps laid out to run your business. It is favorable compared to a traditional plan because:

• It’s faster: It contains summaries rather than detailed processes in each section of the plan. Consequently, making it a simple process that you can complete within minutes—saves you time.
• It lets you stay up-to-date: It’s flexible and hence easier to update. As your business starts to expand, your goals and strategies need to be modified accordingly.
• It’s concise: Conventional business plans are often too detailed for their own good—making it hard to interpret them and draw out actionable results. A lean business plan is simpler, shorter, and smarter.

Steps to Create a Lean Business Plan

Now that we have the ‘what’ and the ‘why’ out of the way, let’s take a look at the ‘how’. Here are the 5 key steps to creating the perfect lean business plan for your company:

• Lay the foundation for your business plan
• Put your ideas to test
• Review your results
• Revise your plan
• Set to launch

For your reference, we’ve created a simple one-page business plan for a barbershop business:

We have used a lean canvas to fit your plan on one page.

Step 1: Lay the foundation for your business plan

The first step is perhaps the most important one. It includes jotting down everything that your business is and does. Here, you summarize who you are, what you do, and how you do it. The plan can also include your target customer base, your goals, your team, and how you schedule tasks.

The foundational aspects of your business plan include:

• Strategy: Define the actions you will take to achieve your long-term and short-term goals
• Tactics: Describe how you use the resources available to implement your actions
• Execution: Specify how you will implement them
• Business model: Explain how you will generate sales and profits

1. Strategy

A strategy is the brain of your business. It encompasses the core identity of your business and the steps you take to run it. Here, you write your plans of action in simple and precise statements. This includes:

• Business identity: Here, you need to describe who you are and how you want your customers to identify you. This can include your business philosophy, company history, and mission and vision statement .
• Problem: Specify the problem that your customers are facing. Try to be as specific as possible with the claims you make. It is vital to understand that a business’s success depends on its reliability to solve its customers’ problems.
• Solution: Mention the solution to the problems you are tackling with your product. It’s important to note that your ultimate offering to the customer is not the product itself, but the benefit that it gives.
• Market: Your brand identity determines which market you operate in and who your target audience is. To get a clear idea of who your ideal customer is, you must understand their values and priorities. To do so, it is advisable to create a solid customer profile first before you think about allocating resources to marketing.
• Competition: It is necessary to keep a close eye on your competitors. In this step, you list down your top competitors, their USPs, their market share, and most importantly, how you are different than them.

Tactics are the key to implementing your strategies. They’re primarily all your plans and marketing techniques to steer your business toward growth.

• Sales channels: Simply making a great product isn’t enough. You need to make sure that it’s actually reaching your customers. For this, you need robust sales channels. This can include walk-in stores, online retail outlets, and even both. You may also list down whether you want to work with distributors or go solo.
• Marketing activities: Marketing is non-negotiable for any business. After all, what is seen is sold. This is where you will list down your marketing strategies to draw customers in and inform them about your product and persuade them to buy.
• Partners and resources: If you have business partners that manage or finance the business, mention them in this step. You can also add any key resources that you use for running the business.
• Team: Mention the key team members in this step and their respective roles. If you don’t have a team yet, you can write down the primary roles crucial for your business and later recruit relevant talents.

3. Execution

Strategies and tactics are wasted efforts without well-defined execution. Everything you have learned in the previous sections will not convert into growth unless you have a systematic assigning of tasks and deadlines.

• Schedule: It is essential to keep a timeline of all the events taking place in your business, along with a roadmap of all future activities. Review your schedule regularly to keep track of what’s working and what’s not. Making changes ensures that you don’t deviate from your goals.
• Assumptions: Assumptions are needed so you have some ground to make decisions. Without them, your team will have a hard time figuring out new strategies. Listing the assumptions you’ve made about your business ensures that everyone is on the same page.
• Milestones: Milestones are the achievements you aim to make with your business plan. They act as indicators that a plan is working. On paper, they might look like just to-do lists with deadlines, but they help track your progress and tackle standstills.
• Metric: There are several metrics through which businesses measure their success. Some of the fundamental metrics are sales, costs, expenses, and more. You can tailor this to your company and write how you want to judge your business’s performance.

4. Business model

A business model is a description of how your business will make money. The clearer this description is, the better. A sloppy business model is a recipe for wasted resources, and time, and can lead to liquidation .

• Forecast sales: Forecasting your sales means making educated guesses about your sales performance. It need not be 100% accurate. Here, you write how your business will create sales in the future. As hard as it may sound to play the guessing game, forecasting is important to compare expected sales to actual sales.
• Budget expenses: Estimating your future expenses and costs is essential to good management. Budgeting and regularly reviewing it helps you understand where you need to cut costs or increase investments to reach your milestones.
• Cash flow: Cash flow refers to the net inflow and outflow of cash in your business. Keeping track of it helps you foresee when you might run into a cash deficit or a cash surplus. You want to stay away from extremes. This assists you to manage your sales and expenses accordingly to maintain a good ratio.

Step 2: Put your ideas to test

After having your strategies made, milestones set, schedules in place, and a tactical plan to get your business up and running, it is time to test their utility. This helps reduce risks, gain insight, and avoid inefficient use of resources.

In this step, you verify the integrity of your business methodologies via extensive research. One of the best ways to do so is by surveying your target customers directly. Record their responses and compare them with your assumptions.

• Is the problem you are solving synonymous with the problem your target customers are facing?
• Does the solution you provide align with their expectations?
• Is there a solution you can provide that your customers don’t yet know they want?
• Are the sales channels you decided apt for your potential customers?
• Are your marketing techniques persuasive enough?

Asking all the above questions will give you a detailed view of what should be revised and what needs to stick.

Step 3: Review your results

The next step is to examine your results. After having put your ideas to test, you must have received some significant outcomes of your decisions. This is your data. You will use this data to figure out what went wrong with the last plan and come to conclusions.

You can review your results by using the same measuring metrics that we talked about earlier. It is important to choose reliable metrics that suit well with your business model. Opting for metrics incompatible with your business can give inaccurate results—making it harder to evaluate your performance.

Step 4: Revise your plan

One of the best things about a lean business plan is that it’s not set in stone. In other words, it’s a flexible plan and is open to continuous refinements as you go along with your business activities. Considering everything you have learned so far, this step is where you revise your lean business plan.

It includes making changes to your assumptions, sales channels, marketing techniques, schedules, budgets, and even your target customers as your business continues to evolve over time. The more mistakes you detect and revisions you make, the more reliable your lean business plan becomes.

Step 5: Set your business to launch

Now that you have a complete lean business plan in hand, one that is tested and refined, all you need to do is set your business in motion. Keep in mind to come back, revise, and keep updating your business plan as and when required. Usually, for most businesses, a lean business plan is all you need to get started.

However, sometimes a more detailed business plan is more suitable for large-scale businesses. This could include specific steps and instructions for your team to undertake complex operations and perhaps even comments for your investors. In case that’s your requirement, this business plan checklist might help you stay on track.

Creating a business plan is often a difficult and tedious task, but it doesn’t have to be. With the above-mentioned steps and guidelines, you can create a lean business plan that’s right for your company. This compact, tailored, streamlined, targeted, and easy-to-revise document is sure to get your business up and running in no time.

Build your Business Plan Faster

with step-by-step Guidance & AI Assistance.

About the Author

Ayush is a writer with an academic background in business and marketing. Being a tech-enthusiast, he likes to keep a sharp eye on the latest tech gadgets and innovations. When he's not working, you can find him writing poetry, gaming, playing the ukulele, catching up with friends, and indulging in creative philosophies.

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The Ultimate Guide to Creating a Lean Startup Business Plan

Starting a business can be both thrilling and terrifying. On one hand, you have this brilliant idea and can’t wait to bring it into the world. But there’s also the nagging fear that your amazing concept might fall flat or fail to gain traction.

So how do you make sure your startup succeeds? The answer is charting out a solid business plan.

I know, I know. Just hearing the phrase “business plan” brings back bad memories of dry, long-winded documents from business school. But for startups, there’s a better way to plan out your venture – something called the lean startup business plan.

The lean startup approach focuses on streamlining the business planning process so you can start testing your idea faster, without getting bogged down with lengthy sections and financial projections you can’t possibly predict accurately at such an early stage.

In this beginner’s guide, I’ll walk you through exactly how to create a lean startup business plan template that helps you quickly validate your business idea with real-life customers.

What is a Lean Startup Business Plan?

First things first – let’s define what exactly the lean methodology means when applied to an entrepreneur’s business plan.

Put simply, a lean startup business plan is a streamlined, no-fluff version of a traditional business plan. It’s designed for speed and adaptability rather than comprehensiveness.

The lean startup movement first became popular around 2008. It emphasizes testing a product or service idea quickly, using a minimum viable product (MVP), and getting real user feedback before committing to long development and release cycles.

The key principles of lean startup are:

• Rapid build-test-learn loops
• Scientific testing with real customers from day one
• Iterating based on validated learning

Most new companies that take the lean approach never reach an official launch stage. Instead, they continuously test with and adapt to real customers – refining their MVP and pivoting directions based on evidence of what does or doesn’t get market traction.

So how does that tie in with writing a business plan?

Well, the traditional business plan model doesn’t fit the lean paradigm shift.

Lengthy, complex, intricate business plans take too much time to write. Attempting to project multiple years of expenses, sales, hiring, growth rates etc…..it’s all just guesswork when you haven’t started selling anything yet.

The lean startup business plan tosses unnecessary details out the window and instead focuses only on critical hypotheses and assumptions that must be tested as quickly as possible.

Investors like this approach because it shows you:

• Know what assumptions make or break your business
• Can test them quickly at low cost
• Will adapt based on real data

So if you’re an early stage startup looking for funding or entering an accelerator program like Y Combinator, a lean business plan is likely your best bet to showcase your entrepreneurial abilities.

Now the big question….

What Does a Lean Startup Business Plan Include?

The lean startup template pares down the typical business plan format to just the essential elements early-stage investors care about:

• Problem  – What pain points will your product address? Why are those needs not being met?
• Solution  – How will your product alleviate that pain better than alternatives? Why will customers buy from you over other options?
• Target market  — Who has that specific problem and will buy your solution? ( Note: Be specific!  “Everyone” is never the right answer.)
• Competition  — Who else is tackling that customer problem? How is your solution fundamentally better or different?
• Key features  – What’s the minimum feature set to address target customers’ needs on day one and provide value?
• Marketing & sales  – What tactics will you use to reach early adopters? ( Note: For most startups, digital sales & marketing channels rule supreme. )
• Operations  – Outline your core business processes. Don’t go into granular detail, just highlight how you’ll deliver value to customers.
• Milestones  – What big assumptions will you test? Include timelines + costs to conduct experiments so you can demonstrate a logical thought process.
• Financials  –  Optional  Breakdown high-level estimates only if useful. For the lean startup plan, elaborate projections are unnecessary and speculative. Focus everything on testing key assumptions.

You may have noticed one conspicuously absent item – the Executive Summary. We’re skipping it because unlike traditional business plans sent to various stakeholders, your lean startup plan has just one audience – startup investors.

And remember, the lean methodology is all about using real-life data instead of guesses and best-case scenarios. So even if some assumptions in your original lean business plan don’t pan out, that’s actually great news! It gives you hard evidence to adapt intelligently while developing your MVP.

Now that you know what the lean startup template includes at a high-level, let’s go through each of the core sections in more detail.

First and foremost, you need to spell out exactly what customer problem your startup aims to solve. (And yes, it needs to be an actual must-solve problem, not a nice-to-have).

Start by broadly describing the pain points your target customers face. Get tactical by including stats, data or quotes that showcase why this issue is so urgent for them.

Then explain how the problem ties into a larger trend in your target industry. Paint a big picture view of why common solutions up until now have failed to address this pain sufficiently.

Essentially, convincingly convey that there’s a pressing customer need ready for innovation.

You need to display beyond any doubt that you:

• Deeply understand your target customers’ challenges
• Can explain why those problems exist in the first place
• Will provide a compelling solution tailored to fix them

This sets the stage for why launching a startup to address this issue makes so much sense.

2. Solution

Now that you’ve framed the problem, shift gears into explaining your startup’s solution. Start by providing an overview of your product and how it alleviates target customer pains better than alternatives already on the market.

Then embellish with details on:

Product Benefits

How specifically will your product make customers’ lives easier? Don’t just describe product features or functionality. Speak directly to how you’ll empower them to achieve something that’s currently difficult, inconvenient or even impossible for them to accomplish on their own.

Competitive Advantage

What specifically sets your solution apart from potential competitor offerings and substitutes? Is it higher quality, better convenience, lower cost, less hassle, faster performance – or perhaps an innovative model that’s never been seen before in the market?

Highlight your startup’s special sauce that no one else can easily replicate. Explain barriers to entry that will hinder copycats.

Customer Incentive

Why will target users’ purchase from your brand over chasing other options? It usually comes down to believing you can deliver significantly MORE value than alternatives or solve an urgent pain nothing else currently satisfies. Make your case for why you fit one or both scenarios.

Scalability

Particularly if you are pursuing venture capital investors, explain how your business can rapidly scale up to tap a very large global market with your solution. Outline a blueprint for how you realistically grow from thousands to millions of customers in the coming years.

Remember, don’t drown potential investors in intricate details about every single product feature and technical specification. They care most about how your solution nails the value proposition trifecta:

• Targets an urgent customer problem
• Provides 10x+ better value over existing options
• Can scale to a very large market long term

If you can compellingly check all three boxes, you’ll spark investor interest even with limited hard evidence at such an early phase.

Of course, that doesn’t mean you won’t eventually need to back up your claims. However, the lean startup plan is more about framing hypotheses than definitive proof. We’ll cover how to demonstrate enough evidence to warrant launching experiments soon.

For now, stick to crafting an intriguing startup story that sets you up to start testing fundamental assumptions very soon after funding. There will be plenty of time to figure out minor product details once you validate solving a pressing problem for real paying customers.

3. Target Market

Up until now, I’ve used the term “target customer” quite loosely. But it’s time to get very specific on who those real-world people actually are for your startup.

Venture capital investors want to quantify the population size and traits of target buyer personas in precise detail. So you need to describe exact psychographic and demographic qualities of your beachhead market – the subset of overall customers you tackle first to gain a foothold quickly.

Start by explaining your total addressable market (TAM) – the entire population who could plausibly need and want your solution for the core problem it tackles. Depending on the ubiquity of that issue for consumers and/or businesses, the TAM could be very narrow or encompass hundreds of millions globally.

Then segment down from that full market to identify your specific beachhead target customer population. The ideal beachhead often has these characteristics:

• Suffers from the problem much more painfully than casual groups
• Has already tried existing solutions without sufficient success
• Has disposable income to purchase a premium solution for relief
• Is easy to access and serve operationally in early phases
• Isn’t incredibly price sensitive
• Can provide extensive feedback on the product
• Has influencer qualities to attract wider market segments

Nail down quantifiable population size estimates for this core beachhead subset. Combine publicly accessible data from existing market research reports with reasonable inferences or assumptions from adjacent industries.

But resist the founder’s tendency towards magical thinking – “If we nailed even just 1% of the market…!” Generic hypotheticals don’t sway experienced investors focused on tangible traction signals.

Paint a detailed demographic picture of exactly who fits the mold of a hot prospect customer for you in the beginning.

For B2C startups , call out relevant attributes like:

• Marital/family status
• Home ownership

For B2B startups , highlight qualities like:

• Industry vertical
• Company size
• Title seniority
• Annual revenue
• Tech adoption habits

Then outline statistical commonalities across your core beachhead buyers – what key similarities unite this subgroup vs. the entire population facing the problem?

Finally, convey TAM expansion opportunities once you solidify solutions tailored for that first niche. But defer outlining detailed ways to extend your reach right now since nailing product/market fit with just one segment is the critical prerequisite to win over adjacent groups.

Position your solution as optimized for an underserved niche ripe for disruption based on competitors failing to deliver adequate solutions. Then segue into how your distribution plan concentrated on this “low-hanging fruit” beachhead will purposefully evolve later to expand TAM reach long term.

4. Competition

What the competition section lacks by traditional business plan standards in length, it more than makes up for in strategic rigor.

The core question competitive analysis must answer:

Why are current solutions in the market failing to adequately alleviate your target customers’ pain?

Start by inventorying existing competitor products/services currently used by prospects experiencing this problem. List out the main options your target persona has for solving their struggles today, even if those solutions don’t perfectly fix the issue or fully satisfy them.

Then contrast point-by-point specifics on why your solution beats competitors, especially on the metrics most important to your target niche. Show how you will “disrupt the disruptors” because even pioneering products have limitations needing innovation.

Criteria to call out where you claim competitive advantage:

• Convenience
• Scale potential
• Business model innovation

Back up any bold claims of superiority with limited initial evidence beyond conjecture — data from beta user testing prototype versions, customer quotes from initial beachhead outreach, or precedents from analogs in adjacent markets.

Take care to focus specifically on competitors targeting the same early adopter beachhead market segment though. Details contrasting solutions for other peripherical segments are unnecessary right now.

Round out competitor analysis by itemizing macro trends almost certain to diminish prospects for legacy products over the next 5-10 years. These should make the rationale behind your startup now abundantly clear even to skeptics.

5. Key Features

Thus far you’ve made a case for:

• A pressing customer problem inadequately solved
• Your startup’s superior solution
• Quantified target beachhead market

Now it’s time to shift to specifics on the crucial product and feature details enabling your entire value proposition.

Remember – only include what’s absolutely necessary for launch based on addressing revealed target customer needs!

Err on the side of a minimal feature set early on. Describe additional functionality prospects request once you start serving initial customers.

Outline the critical set of features required to deploy a minimum viable product (MVP) with just enough core attributes to satisfy early adopters on day one.

Organize by:

Must-Have Features

What feature absolute “must-haves” must be ready for early adopters to provide enough value converting from current solutions?

Nice-To-Have Features

What would enhance perceived value but aren’t imperative to activate paying users? Defer these to later product milestones.

Future Features

Briefly mention functionality on the long-term roadmap to showcase platform potential.

Think of must-have features as the “walking version” of your product – unscalable manual processes providing baseline value perfect for testing with friendly early adopters.

Then nice-to-haves represent the “jogging version” – automating more of the workflow via technology – while future functionality serves as the “running version” enhanced for steep vertical scaling.

In conjunction with digital tools, brainstorm creative ways to manually deliver MVP experiences centered around must-haves. This showcases your determination to activate solutions for that first tiny niche even sans a fully built production-grade product.

Emphasize with investors that you respect their money enough to not waste it on premature optimizations. Your plan ensures you build and roadmap additional functionality responsibly IF AND ONLY IF initial feature experimentation proves substantial product/market fit warranting doubling down.

6. Marketing & Sales

Thus far you’ve covered the key value proposition and functionality your startup will offer. Now shift to tactical specifics on how you’ll connect your novel solution with that clearly defined target beachhead.

Start by breaking down your blended omni-channel market blueprint to cut through the noise and achieve conversion lift.

Here is an ideal framework pairing both scalable and targeted elements for seed-stage ventures:

Paid Digital Marketing

• Targeted Facebook/Instagram/TikTok Ads
• Search/Display Retargeting
• Streaming Radio Spots
• Industry Forum Sponsorships
• Highly-Targeted Content Marketing

Grassroots Outreach

• Beachhead Email Outreach
• Beachhead Calls/Texts
• Industry Event Networking
• Local University Campus Reps
• Early Adopter Referral Programs

Earned Media

• Contributed Articles
• Podcast Interviews
• Reviews / Testimonials
• Referral Partnerships
• PR Launches & Press Releases

The glaring omission? Sales team headcount.

Early on, founders must handle sales themselves to economize cash burn. Hiring reps too early risks overextending finances before ensuring product viability.

So spotlight your personal founder sales fit first. Play up hands-on selling experience within the specific market context you’re pursuing with this venture.

Then convey a scaling plan centered on refining and automating conversion funnel elements that empirically guide qualified leads to become delighted long-term customers.

The core funnel methodology goes:

• Broad-based brand awareness marketing → Baits wide audience
• Lead capturing mechanisms → Filters for buyers
• Consultative selling touchpoints → Focuses high-potential targets
• Frictionless conversion → Delivers ROI proof

If your business model doesn’t fit this framework, adapt concepts accordingly while sticking to the seed stage constraints of capital efficiency and lean experimentation.

7. Operations

By this point you’ve described WHAT your startup does and WHO it serves. Now it’s time to explain HOW you’ll deliver on ambitious promises to customers.

Start by simply framing core business processes required to get your product or service from raw inputs all the way through to solving target user pain points.

For physical products, that could involve flows like:

• Design concepts → Engineering specifications → Prototyping → Manufacturing → Quality assurance → Packaging → Distributing → Support

For software platforms:

• Product requisites → Cloud infrastructure → Coding → Version control → Usage analytics → Onboarding → Technical support

For services:

• Prospecting → Onboarding → Account Management → Delivery capacity → Quality control → Supplemental services → Support

You get the idea. Just define macro processes without diving into granular details. Those come through experimentation!

Primarily, concentrate operational details on two crucial pillars:

• Proprietary unfair advantages that supercharge efficiency to delight customers while maintaining profit margins despite tight costs. Common examples include algorithms, datasets, novel business model frameworks, or embedded industry experts.
• Partnerships or platforms enabling you to deliver baseline functionality matching incumbent competitors on day one. Don’t attempt to build everything end-to-end or innovate across every dimension from the start! Leverage existing commoditized solutions while you test differentiated value propositions focused on solving target customer problems 10x better.

Essentially, convey you grasp the key 20% inputs that drive 80% of customer value. If the processes seem complex, find ingenious ways to simplify. Position enhanced intricacies as optional add-ons once baseline product/market fit is proven vs. overbuilding the wrong advanced solution.

8. Milestones

The milestones section represents the culmination of everything you’ve documented thus far. Here, outline the step-by-step process for methodically testing the riskiest assumptions underlying your startup.

In conjunction with the experiment design, detail concrete metrics or signals indicating whether hypotheses prove true or false. Then estimate costs, durations, and resource requirements for rapid experiments.

Frame assumptions through statements structured like:

We believe [this capability] will result in [this customer reaction]

Then design tests around the ability to measure:

• behavioral changes
• sentiment improvements
• usage increases
• revenue lift

Common milestone tests to consider:

• Solution Viability – Manual then automated demonstrations quantifying interest
• Demand Validation – Willingness to prepay as a signal
• Market Sizing Accuracy – Applying proxies from analogous use cases
• Business Model Fit – Contrasting pricing sensitivity across customer segments
• Feature Prioritization – Gauging reactions to mockups or limited functionality
• Operational Scalability – Maximizing utilization before adding overhead

Combine testing both internally-facing operations and externally-visible customer experiences. But concentrate on product/solution related hypotheses first.

Beating competitors takes precedence over backend experimentation. Optimize business operations AFTER establishing winning customer value propositions.

The key is conveying to investors an empirical, metrics-driven approach centered on turning critical assumptions into facts or disproving them faster than incumbents hampered by legacies and red tape.

Cement belief you’ll double down on evidence proving repeatable formulas to acquire and monetize target niche segments. And quickly cut losses spending minimal capital if data suggests limited viability.

9. Financials

We’ve made it clear that traditional multi-year financial projections typical of standard business plans are counterproductive guesses for early stage startups.

However, seed investors still want to see back-of-napkin math you’ve done to quantify potential venture scale. So mock up top level metrics more as directional guidelines than definitive targets.

Take utmost care however NOT to pull imaginary hockey stick numbers from thin air. Founders claiming $100 million valuations on basic eCommerce stores face extreme investor skepticism…and deserve to!

Baseline financial model components should include:

• Estimated Customer Acquisition Costs Per Beachhead Channel
• Willingness-To-Pay Price Range For Target Personas
• Logical Volume Estimates Based On Analog Use Cases
• Assumed Conversion Rates Each Funnel Stage
• Operational Unit Economics At Various Scale Points

Use inherently bottom-up thinking grounded in realities of what combination of inputs would need to scale to hit specific 8-figure outcomes. Top-down abstract number picking lacks validity.

And remember, early-stage startup financial models serve more as instruments of learning than definitive targets. Adapt projections based on empirical evidence once live.

Concentrate everything on validating customer demand first. Defer advanced modeling of operational minutiae or elaborating hockey stick projections.

Getting REAL buyers is all that matters initially.

Bringing It All Together

Despite extending 3k+ words at this point, the lean startup methodology boils down to an elementary formula:

• Start by deeply understanding a pressing customer problem
• Design an innovative solution specifically addressing root causes
• Concentrate on dominating an underserved niche beachhead market segment
• Validate demand empirically through rapid testing
• Scale up deliberately only once achieving initial product/market fit

In that sense, think of the lean business plan format as more of an exercise in startup soul searching than a stuffy document.

It pushes founders to pressure test their value proposition, business model, and operational viability through the lens of target customers rather than theoretical academic assumptions.

You can’t survive let alone thrive in the brutally competitive startup game without getting inside the hearts and minds of actual buyers needing your solutions.

So escape the temptation to overly complicate initial planning with intricate spreadsheets and 40-page reports professional managers expect.

Instead, concentrate efforts on distilling explanations of the crucial assumptions requiring testing above all else before launch.

Then close your lean startup business plan with next step calls-to-action so readers clearly understand how you’ll leverage funding to start rapidly experimenting using the scientific method.

Now…go show the world what your brilliance is made of!

Related Posts

Partha Chakraborty

Partha Chakraborty is a venture capitalist turned entrepreneur with 17 years of experience. He has worked across India, China & Singapore. He is the founder of Tactyqal.com, a startup that guides other startup founders to find success. He loves to brainstorm new business ideas, and talk about growth hacking, and venture capital. In his spare time, he mentors young entrepreneurs to build successful startups.

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How to make a lean business model canvas

Imagine that you have an idea for a new product or business. Yet, as enthusiastic as you are about the potential for this nugget of inspiration, you’re also plagued by this question: Will it work? Is it actually a viable idea?

A lean business model canvas is a one-page business plan that helps you break down your product or business model, question and test your assumptions, and determine if your idea actually has legs.

Lean business model canvas explained: What is a lean canvas?

You might also hear a lean business model canvas referred to as a variety of other, similar terms like a lean business canvas, lean business plan, or even simply a lean canvas.

This tool was created by Ash Maurya and is an adaptation of the original business model canvas by Alex Osterwalder .

You can think of a lean business model canvas as a straightforward business plan that skips the fluff and gets to the most important elements you need to identify or evaluate (primarily, the problem you’re solving).

When you have an idea for a product or business, you’ll use a lean business model canvas template to fill in the various sections (more on those in a minute) and validate your idea.

The lean canvas is most frequently used by lean startups, which use a lean startup methodology to deliver products to customers faster and determine whether or not the business model itself is viable. In short, lean startups and lean canvases are all about moving fast, testing, and iterating.

Lean canvas example

One of the best ways to understand a lean business model canvas is to see one. So, let’s set up a lean canvas as an example.

Perhaps you have an idea for a business: You want to create an app or a website that’s essentially a database of parks and playgrounds, which parents can search and filter using location, features (splash pad, baby swings, etc.), and more.

You want to dig into your idea even further using a lean business model canvas. Here’s a simple peek at what that could look like after jotting your initial notes down:

Lean canvas vs. business model canvas

There’s a lean business model canvas and then simply a business model canvas . The two terms are often confused, as they have a lot in common — and the lean canvas is an adaptation of the business model canvas.

However, the biggest difference is that a business model canvas is focused on a specific product while a lean canvas focuses on a specific problem.

This means that the business model canvas has a few blocks that you won’t see on a lean canvas. These are:

• Key partners (lean canvas replaced with problem)
• Key activities (lean canvas replaced with solution)
• Key resources (lean canvas replaced with key metrics)
• Customer relationships (lean canvas replaced with unfair advantage)

That’s the gist, but here’s a chart that digs even more into the difference between a business model canvas and a lean canvas:

What is included in a lean canvas?

Now that you have a better grip on what exactly a lean canvas is let’s break it down even further. The typical lean business model canvas has nine elements or quadrants. These are:

• Problem: A brief description of the top three problems you’re addressing.
• Solution: The proposed fix for the problem you’ve identified.
• Unique value proposition: Why your solution is different and what will make people buy.
• Unfair advantage: Something you have that can’t be easily copied or bought.
• Customer segments: Who your target customers or users are and if they can be further segmented.
• Key metrics: The important numbers that will indicate how your business is doing.
• Channels: The free and paid channels you’ll use to reach your customers.
• Cost structure: All of your fixed and variable costs.
• Revenue streams: How your business model will earn income.

However, our lean canvas template here at Miro dives even deeper with the addition of a few more elements, including:

• Existing alternatives: How these problems are currently solved today.
• High-level concept: A simple X for Y analogy (e.g., “Zillow for playgrounds”).
• Early adopters: Characteristics of your ideal customers who will jump right on the bandwagon.

How to make a lean canvas in Miro

A lean canvas can provide a lot of clarity about a business model or a product idea. Ready to create one with your own team? Getting started is easy.

• Grab our lean business model canvas template and create a new Miro board . You can put as many canvases on one board as you need.
• Define the product or business idea you’re working on, and then fill in the blocks with different types of content. You don’t just have to use text — you can also use pictures, videos, and more.
• Invite your team and/or advisors to the board so you can brainstorm , collect feedback, and collaborate in real-time.
• Come back to the board regularly to make necessary changes, add new information, and discuss progress.

And that’s it! Once you’ve created your own lean business model canvas, you can move forward with a product or business idea with more strategy — and a lot more confidence too.

Get started on your own lean business model canvas with Miro

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Free Business Plan Template for Small Businesses (2024)

Use this free business plan template to write your business plan quickly and efficiently.

A good business plan is essential to successfully starting your business —  and the easiest way to simplify the work of writing a business plan is to start with a business plan template.

You’re already investing time and energy in refining your business model and planning your launch—there’s no need to reinvent the wheel when it comes to writing a business plan. Instead, to help build a complete and effective plan, lean on time-tested structures created by other  entrepreneurs and startups. 

Ahead, learn what it takes to create a solid business plan and download Shopify's free business plan template to get started on your dream today. 

What this free business plan template includes

• Executive summary
• Company overview
• Products or services offered
• Market analysis
• Marketing plan
• Logistics and operations plan
• Financial plan

This business plan outline is designed to ensure you’re thinking through all of the important facets of starting a new business. It’s intended to help new business owners and entrepreneurs consider the full scope of running a business and identify functional areas they may not have considered or where they may need to level up their skills as they grow.

That said, it may not include the specific details or structure preferred by a potential investor or lender. If your goal with a business plan is to secure funding , check with your target organizations—typically banks or investors—to see if they have business plan templates you can follow to maximize your chances of success.

Our free business plan template includes seven key elements typically found in the traditional business plan format:

1. Executive summary

This is a one-page summary of your whole plan, typically written after the rest of the plan is completed. The description section of your executive summary will also cover your management team, business objectives and strategy, and other background information about the brand. 

2. Company overview

This section of your business plan will answer two fundamental questions: “Who are you?” and “What do you plan to do?” Answering these questions clarifies why your company exists, what sets it apart from others, and why it’s a good investment opportunity. This section will detail the reasons for your business’s existence, its goals, and its guiding principles.

3. Products or services offered

What you sell and the most important features of your products or services. It also includes any plans for intellectual property, like patent filings or copyright. If you do market research for new product lines, it will show up in this section of your business plan.

4. Market analysis

This section includes everything from estimated market size to your target markets and competitive advantage. It’ll include a competitive analysis of your industry to address competitors’ strengths and weaknesses. Market research is an important part of ensuring you have a viable idea.

5. Marketing plan

How you intend to get the word out about your business, and what strategic decisions you’ve made about things like your pricing strategy. It also covers potential customers’ demographics, your sales plan, and your metrics and milestones for success.

6. Logistics and operations plan

Everything that needs to happen to turn your raw materials into products and get them into the hands of your customers.

7. Financial plan

It’s important to include a look at your financial projections, including both revenue and expense projections. This section includes templates for three key financial statements: an income statement, a balance sheet, and a cash-flow statement . You can also include whether or not you need a business loan and how much you’ll need.

Business plan examples

What do financial projections look like on paper? How do you write an executive summary? What should your company description include?  Business plan examples  can help answer some of these questions and transform your business idea into an actionable plan.

Professional business plan example

Inside our template, we’ve filled out a sample business plan featuring a fictional ecommerce business . 

The sample is set up to help you get a sense of each section and understand how they apply to the planning and evaluation stages of a business plan. If you’re looking for funding, this example won’t be a complete or formal look at business plans, but it will give you a great place to start and notes about where to expand.

Lean business plan example

A lean business plan format is a shortened version of your more detailed business plan. It’s helpful when modifying your plan for a specific audience, like investors or new hires. 

Also known as a one-page business plan, it includes only the most important, need-to-know information, such as:

• Company description
• Key members of your team
• Customer segments

💡 Tip: For a step-by-step guide to creating a lean business plan (including a sample business plan), read our guide on how to create a lean business plan .

Benefits of writing a solid business plan

It’s tempting to dive right into execution when you’re excited about a new business or side project, but taking the time to write a thorough business plan and get your thoughts on paper allows you to do a number of beneficial things:

• Test the viability of your business idea. Whether you’ve got one business idea or many, business plans can make an idea more tangible, helping you see if it’s truly viable and ensure you’ve found a target market. 
• Plan for your next phase. Whether your goal is to start a new business or scale an existing business to the next level, a business plan can help you understand what needs to happen and identify gaps to address.
• Clarify marketing strategy, goals, and tactics. Writing a business plan can show you the actionable next steps to take on a big, abstract idea. It can also help you narrow your strategy and identify clear-cut tactics that will support it.
• Scope the necessary work. Without a concrete plan, cost overruns and delays are all but certain. A business plan can help you see the full scope of work to be done and adjust your investment of time and money accordingly.
• Hire and build partnerships. When you need buy-in from potential employees and business partners, especially in the early stages of your business, a clearly written business plan is one of the best tools at your disposal. A business plan provides a refined look at your goals for the business, letting partners judge for themselves whether or not they agree with your vision.
• Secure funds. Seeking financing for your business—whether from venture capital, financial institutions, or Shopify Capital —is one of the most common reasons to create a business plan.

Why you should you use a template for a business plan

A business plan can be as informal or formal as your situation calls for, but even if you’re a fan of the back-of-the-napkin approach to planning, there are some key benefits to starting your plan from an existing outline or simple business plan template.

No blank-page paralysis

A blank page can be intimidating to even the most seasoned writers. Using an established business planning process and template can help you get past the inertia of starting your business plan, and it allows you to skip the work of building an outline from scratch. You can always adjust a template to suit your needs.

Guidance on what to include in each section

If you’ve never sat through a business class, you might never have created a SWOT analysis or financial projections. Templates that offer guidance—in plain language—about how to fill in each section can help you navigate sometimes-daunting business jargon and create a complete and effective plan.

Knowing you’ve considered every section

In some cases, you may not need to complete every section of a startup business plan template, but its initial structure shows you you’re choosing to omit a section as opposed to forgetting to include it in the first place.

Tips for creating a successful business plan

There are some high-level strategic guidelines beyond the advice included in this free business plan template that can help you write an effective, complete plan while minimizing busywork.

Understand the audience for your plan

If you’re writing a business plan for yourself in order to get clarity on your ideas and your industry as a whole, you may not need to include the same level of detail or polish you would with a business plan you want to send to potential investors. Knowing who will read your plan will help you decide how much time to spend on it.

Know your goals

Understanding the goals of your plan can help you set the right scope. If your goal is to use the plan as a roadmap for growth, you may invest more time in it than if your goal is to understand the competitive landscape of a new industry.

Take it step by step

Writing a 10- to 15-page document can feel daunting, so try to tackle one section at a time. Select a couple of sections you feel most confident writing and start there—you can start on the next few sections once those are complete. Jot down bullet-point notes in each section before you start writing to organize your thoughts and streamline the writing process.

Maximize your business planning efforts

Planning is key to the financial success of any type of business , whether you’re a startup, non-profit, or corporation.

To make sure your efforts are focused on the highest-value parts of your own business planning, like clarifying your goals, setting a strategy, and understanding the target market and competitive landscape, lean on a business plan outline to handle the structure and format for you. Even if you eventually omit sections, you’ll save yourself time and energy by starting with a framework already in place.

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Business plan template FAQ

What is the purpose of a business plan.

The purpose of your business plan is to describe a new business opportunity or an existing one. It clarifies the business strategy, marketing plan, financial forecasts, potential providers, and more information about the company.

How do I write a simple business plan?

• Choose a business plan format, such as a traditional or a one-page business plan. 
• Find a business plan template.
• Read through a business plan sample.
• Fill in the sections of your business plan.

What is the best business plan template?

If you need help writing a business plan, Shopify’s template is one of the most beginner-friendly options you’ll find. It’s comprehensive, well-written, and helps you fill out every section.

What are the 5 essential parts of a business plan?

The five essential parts of a traditional business plan include:

• Executive summary: This is a brief overview of the business plan, summarizing the key points and highlighting the main points of the plan.
• Business description: This section outlines the business concept and how it will be executed.
• Market analysis: This section provides an in-depth look at the target market and how the business will compete in the marketplace.
• Financial plan: This section details the financial projections for the business, including sales forecasts, capital requirements, and a break-even analysis.
• Management and organization: This section describes the management team and the organizational structure of the business.

Are there any free business plan templates?

There are several free templates for business plans for small business owners available online, including Shopify’s own version. Download a copy for your business.

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Planning, Startups, Stories

Tim berry on business planning, starting and growing your business, and having a life in the meantime., 5 management benefits of lean business planning.

Don’t think of a business plan as a formal document that’s hard to do, useful only for startups, bank loan applications, and seeking investment. Think of it as lean business planning that’s just lists and tables and is vital for optimizing business management. You plan, run, review, and revise. It’s a process. A constant cycle.

1. Manage strategy

Not that opportunity is bad. But a lot of the shiny new things that seem like opportunities are just distractions. Pursuing them dilutes the focus and weakens the business. Trying to do everything is too often a quick path to failure.

What to do? Manage strategy with planning. Set strategic priorities thoughtfully and use a simple planning process to manage them. Have a monthly plan review. Take time to reflect on results and assumptions and change and adapt carefully.

That starts with a plan that sets the key points of strategy. Make it a lean plan, just bullet points, extreme summaries. You do it for yourself, not outsiders. So keep it simple. And then add the entire lean planning process for regular review and revision.

2. Align strategy and tactics

It happens so often. You set back to develop strategy, but get back into the routine and don’t follow up with real tactics, real business decisions and activities, to execute strategy. For example, the computer store decides to focus on small business owners who appreciate service, but continues to advertise low prices, doesn’t insist on installing every system, and doesn’t offer good training and frequent upgrade reminders. The tactics don’t match the strategy.

To manage strategic alignment, do a lean business plan that lists tactics in simple bullet points. Tactics include pricing, channels, messaging, product and service mix, and so forth. Make sure the tactics execute the strategy.

Then review tactics and compare plan to actual results every month in a planning review meeting. Check strategic alignment as strategy, tactics, and assumptions change. Expect to revise often.

3. Manage execution

Thing of ongoing business management, and strategy and execution, as a process of taking steps towards goals. Goals include short- and medium-term goals you can call milestones. In your lean plan, you set the milestones you can see for the near future. You list important milestones for the team. You assign dates, deadlines, budgets, performance expectations, and responsibilities.

Then you manage progress towards milestones during the monthly lean plan review meetings. Bring up the milestone schedule, discuss progress, revise as necessary, and manage the ongoing flow from plan to meaningful activities to results. Review and revise as needed.

4. Manage people

People work better when objectives are clear and measurements are specific. People like to control their own performance numbers (also called metrics) so they can see their own progress towards goals and level of performance. Which would you rather have for yourself: an objective numerical goal you can see and share, or the subjective approval and review of your supervisor?

With lean planning, you have the regular review of expectations and results. It’s an easy forum for reviewing performance of team members, revising expectations, and applying both management and, where appropriate, peer pressure. Once a month you review results and compare them to expectations. Sometimes the plan was too ambitious and expectations too high, so you revise the goals. Sometimes the review turns up problems in execution and poor performance.

That’s where management comes in. Make expectations explicit, review results, and make people accountable for performance. All of which is built into a healthy planning process.

5. Manage cash

Cash flow is critical to a healthy business and it’s not always as simple as profits. Businesses that manage products and inventory can be profitable on paper but have all the working capital tied up in inventory. Businesses that sell to other businesses can be profitable on paper but have all their working capital tied up in Accounts Receivable, waiting for their business customers to pay their invoices.

A good lean planning process lays out expectations for money coming in and money going out to manage cash flow. Each money you have a plan vs. actual review to highlight developments, re-allocate spending as the need comes up, and make sure the cash flow is running as expected.

Conclusion: Planning is Management

Forget the myth of the big formal business plan that makes most business owners grateful they don’t have to have one. Instead, think of business planning as a simple lean business plan – bullets and tables for strategy, tactics, milestones, metrics, and essential projections – with a process that includes regular review and revision.

(Note: this post appeared first on the SBA Industry Word blog, as 5 Things Business Owners do Better with Lean Business Planning . This is a slightly modified version.) 

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Discover the world’s #1 plan building software

• Agile project management
• Lean Methodology

What is Lean methodology?

Browse topics.

Like NASA mission control specialists, project managers must track numerous aspects to ensure their team delivers projects without incident. But while NASA manages spacecraft, project managers monitor deliverables.

Lean methodologies can help prevent project management disasters akin to the Apollo 13 catastrophe, allowing you to deliver projects on time and within budget. 

Lean methodology facilitates an ongoing process of incremental adjustment, significantly accelerating product delivery by optimizing resources and effort and allowing teams to work efficiently and effectively.

In this article, you will learn more about Lean methodology, its benefits, and how  Jira can help your software team implement its principles.

History of Lean methodology

Lean methodology aims to fully optimize your team’s process and output through continuous improvements. When done well, Lean allows teams to deliver customer value efficiently. 

Toyota Founder Kiichiro Toyoda developed the Lean methodology after World War II to conserve resources and eliminate waste. After observing the purchasing and restocking of items at a supermarket, he conceived the just-in-time concept, which focuses on making products exactly when customers need them. 

Toyoda's concept morphed into the Toyota Production System , which eventually became the Lean methodology. From these small beginnings, Lean evolved into the foundation of Agile project management —several industries, including software development, construction, and healthcare, now use Lean methodology.

Overview of Lean methodology

Lean methodology rests on two pillars that provide a framework for all Lean projects: Continuous improvement and respect for people.

• Continuous improvement : An ongoing feedback loop helps teams make progressive changes to processes, products, and personnel to improve systems continuously. By identifying, evaluating, and modifying existing processes or systems – one cog at a time – teams can eliminate waste and improve efficiency on the whole.
• Respect : Managers recognize the value of team contributions and customer feedback, and take those insights and ideas seriously. Lean managers distribute work throughout the workflow in the most efficient manner to encourage close collaboration and maximize value to customers. 

The core principles of Lean methodology have been developed with both of these factors.

Principles of Lean methodology

It’s essential to consider the impact your work will have on the customer experience. Lean’s five core principles help teams organize tasks and provide project managers with oversight. These five core principles include:

1. Identify value

To deliver value to your customers, you must first understand their needs. You can do this by:

• Engaging directly with customers to learn about their pain points.
• Identifying how your product helps mitigate those pain points.

Next, you need to define your product’s value in meeting customer needs and communicate this with your team. You can do this by framing the team’s work around how it impacts the customer experience and researching the best tools to help your team deliver value to your customers.

Identifying value saves time and money by ensuring your team builds only features that add value for your customers. 

2. Map the value stream

The activities needed to deliver quality customer experiences form part of the value stream. Value stream mapping uses diagrams to help visualize the project process, aiding in value stream management , which is critical to eliminating waste. 

Value stream mapping involves the following activities: 

• Identify the problem and choose the right team : Identify your customers’ main pain points, and then choose a team with the skills to solve these problems. 
• Bound and map the process : Limit the project's scope to necessary activities. You can then map the process using the Scrum board template in Jira and set dates for each deliverable. 
• Collect data : Understand what resources are needed by tracking data such as the hours the team spends working on the project.
• Assess and adjust : To ensure continuous process improvement, constantly assess processes and ask the question, “Is there a better way to do this?”

3. Create a flow

A flow state is when the team is in a groove and work is moving smoothly, so much so that we don’t notice the passage of time. Creating a flow state increases team engagement and performance. 

Team flow reflects the efficiency of the value stream, which you can continuously fine-tune using the ongoing feedback loop. Lean methodology requires a smooth and continuous flow to reduce delays and minimize handoff times.

“When implementing Lean, focus on flow,” says Atlassian’s Modern Work Coach Mark Cruth. “Flow is at the center of each element of Lean, whether it’s reducing waste, eliminating silos, or continuously improving…all elements come back to flow!”

You can improve your team’s flow by implementing the following: 

• Cross-functional collaboration : Silos are the kryptonite of Lean. Your team should participate in the entire process and collaborate with other teams, if necessary, to accomplish their tasks. For example, this might involve looping in customer success teams and getting their input on customer pain points. Moreover, your team can deepen their knowledge of how other departments operate.

Task tracking : Kanban boards , or the Kanban template in Jira, can help you assign tasks, visualize work, and coordinate your team. These cards help teams track the progress of tasks throughout the project lifecycle . 

4. Establish pull

With a pull system, teams only work on what the customer needs when they need it, producing according to actual customer demand, not forecasted projections. 

To accurately assess customer needs, the team must talk to customers and seek their input.

5. Seek perfection

Lean requires a growth mindset and strives for perfection through continuous improvement, using an ongoing feedback loop to help the project manager, team, and company reduce waste and enhance efficiency. 

Benefits of Lean methodology

As a project manager, you’ve probably encountered a project hiccup or two, such as waiting for stakeholder feedback. If the feedback comes too late, the entire project stalls. Lean methodology has many benefits that alleviate such roadblocks, such as:

• Increased efficiency : By mapping the value stream, you can center work around customer needs, eliminating unnecessary work on products and services customers do not want. 
• Fewer issues : Lean mitigates issues, such as lack of communication and unrealistic deadlines, before they become larger problems. In the case of communication, Lean provides tracking and transparency so everyone is clear on tasks, responsibilities, and deadlines. Since the team participates more closely in the process, they can also push back on any unreasonable timelines. 
• Reduced costs : By creating a clear plan and eliminating roadblocks, you can save money by producing just enough to meet customer demand. That way, you’re not producing more stock than necessary, which is especially important for physical products. 
• Improved customer relationships : By focusing on customer value, you create stronger customer relationships, which is crucial to a business. 
• Continuous improvement : Lean’s ongoing feedback loop helps refine and continually improve processes to deliver value efficiently. 
• Team investment : Because Lean requires more involvement upfront from your team, they’ll be more engaged with the outcome. They’ll have a say on what they’re working on and when they expect to complete it. An empowered team is an engaged one. 

Potential challenges of Lean methodology

Despite its numerous benefits, practicing Lean may present some challenges that project managers should recognize and learn to overcome. These challenges include:

• Fix : Get the team’s buy-in as early as possible and show them how Lean can help.
• Fix : When onboarding the team, provide adequate training in Lean methodology. You can enroll your team in a Lean certification program that will provide hands-on training. With a certification, you’ll be confident that they have the proper knowledge of Lean methods. 

Focus on tools rather than culture : Putting tools before people decreases team engagement. An emphasis on tools in Lean may dehumanize and devalue your team and their work. When a team doesn’t feel valued, they’re less likely to give their best.  

Fix : Build a culture of trust using Lean's philosophy of continuous improvement . Providing continuous feedback and opportunities for growth shows that you, as a manager, are interested in your team’s career development.

• Fix : Pay attention to the metrics to measure project success and look for improvement areas to develop your team.

Use Jira for project management

Lean accelerates your project management and keeps team agile by eliminating waste and continually streamlining processes. 

Jira can help software teams stay lean and deliver more customer value. Contextual insights empower teams to build and train muscles to continuously learn and improve their way of working. Scrum and Kanban boards give your team full visibility into what’s next so you can continuously deliver maximum output in minimal time. With Jira as the backbone of collaboration, all teams can stay in lockstep with each other and the rest of the organization.

Jira  also enables enterprises to visualize value streams. With this, your enterprise can:  

• Set up process flow automation . Give your teams time back and reduce manual work with Jira’s powerful automation engine.Align work with business needs. See how day-to-day work ladders up to the strategic objectives and keeps important stakeholders informed with ready-made agile reports. 
• Track investments . Understand what resources are being used and the time invested in any project so you can allocate efforts appropriate for the next. 
• Uncover roadblocks . Identify potential roadblocks and prevent them before they happen. 
• Deliver continuous value . With more clarity and insight, your team will be able to consistently deliver value to customers and the company as a whole.

This solution also works well for other methods such as Agile, Open DevOps , and value stream management. 

Lean methodology: frequently asked questions

What is the difference between agile and lean.

At first glance, it seems challenging to distinguish between Lean methodology vs. Agile. While both focus on efficiency and customer value, they emphasize different aspects of project management. Lean focuses on waste elimination, process, and delivering value, whereas Agile focuses on customers, mitigating uncertainty, and delivering working software.

Let’s break that down: 

• Focus : As a top-down approach, Lean is concerned with process improvements. However, Agile is a bottom-up approach where work is broken down into smaller iteration loops. 
• Product delivery : Both Lean and Agile teams work fast to deliver products as soon as possible. However, Agile is less concerned with speed than it is with feedback. So Agile teams build smaller, get feedback, and iterate. Lean is focused on improving the overall process to deliver faster.  
• Frameworks : Lean doesn't have specific frameworks, whereas Agile does. Scrum and Kanban are two Agile project management frameworks that allow you to apply Agile principles. Jira offers a Scrum template and a Kanban template to help project managers get started with the Agile methodology.

What is the difference between DevOps and Lean?

DevOps creates functional collaboration between development and operational teams, allowing for faster software delivery. This is the core philosophy of DevOps: Continually deliver value to the business through a culture of understanding and collaboration.  

In contrast, Lean’s core philosophy is to deliver value through process improvements and waste elimination. 

Lean and DevOps are customer-centric methodologies, but they differ in two main areas:

• Customer value: DevOps creates customer empathy image maps, framing business goals into customer value. Lean chooses customer value activities based on need. 
• Focus : DevOps integrates development and operations with documentation and collaboration. Lean optimizes processes, resources, and effort. 

In addition, DevOps automates mundane tasks, such as pull requests—which the DevOps beginner's guide delves more deeply into. 

If you already use DevOps, Open DevOps —an out-of-the-box DevOps foundation powered by Jira with an open-tool approach and automation—can help your Agile team focus on shipping and operating quality software and ensure the "you build it, you run it" practice associated with DevOps principles.

Can you use Agile, Lean, and DevOps at the same time?

Yes! These methodologies complement each other in their aim to deliver quality and value to customers. DevOps breaks down silos to integrate the development and operations teams. Agile encourages continuous improvement. Lean puts continuous improvement ideals into practice. 

Using all three can speed up product delivery and customer value. For example, your company might be using all three but not in concert. Lean can help improve your Agile process. And Agile’s iterative approach can help with Lean’s continuous improvement. With DevOps, you can improve your cross-collaboration. 

Using all three, your company would become a powerhouse, delivering customer value through more efficient practices. 

You can connect these methodologies using Atlassian’s suite of project management tools.

Lean principles: advancing DevOps efficiency

Explore the power of Lean Principles and DevOps in streamlining project management, enhancing efficiency, and delivering value faster.

Lean Process Improvement [What is it & How to Implement]

Eliminate waste with lean process improvement. Explore how lean process improvement techniques can work with other principles for better project management

14 Reasons Why You Need a Business Plan

10 min. read

Updated May 10, 2024

There’s no question that starting and running a business is hard work. But it’s also incredibly rewarding. And, one of the most important things you can do to increase your chances of success is to have a business plan.

A business plan is a foundational document that is essential for any company, no matter the size or age. From attracting potential investors to keeping your business on track—a business plan helps you achieve important milestones and grow in the right direction.

A business plan isn’t just a document you put together once when starting your business. It’s a living, breathing guide for existing businesses – one that business owners should revisit and update regularly.

Unfortunately, writing a business plan is often a daunting task for potential entrepreneurs. So, do you really need a business plan? Is it really worth the investment of time and resources? Can’t you just wing it and skip the whole planning process?

Good questions. Here’s every reason why you need a business plan.

• 1. Business planning is proven to help you grow 30 percent faster

Writing a business plan isn’t about producing a document that accurately predicts the future of your company. The  process  of writing your plan is what’s important. Writing your plan and reviewing it regularly gives you a better window into what you need to do to achieve your goals and succeed. 

You don’t have to just take our word for it. Studies have  proven that companies that plan  and review their results regularly grow 30 percent faster. Beyond faster growth, research also shows that companies that plan actually perform better. They’re less likely to become one of those woeful failure statistics, or experience  cash flow crises  that threaten to close them down. 

• 2. Planning is a necessary part of the fundraising process

One of the top reasons to have a business plan is to make it easier to raise money for your business. Without a business plan, it’s difficult to know how much money you need to raise, how you will spend the money once you raise it, and what your budget should be.

Investors want to know that you have a solid plan in place – that your business is headed in the right direction and that there is long-term potential in your venture. 

A business plan shows that your business is serious and that there are clearly defined steps on how it aims to become successful. It also demonstrates that you have the necessary competence to make that vision a reality. 

Investors, partners, and creditors will want to see detailed financial forecasts for your business that shows how you plan to grow and how you plan on spending their money. 

• 3. Having a business plan minimizes your risk

When you’re just starting out, there’s so much you don’t know—about your customers, your competition, and even about operations. 

As a business owner, you signed up for some of that uncertainty when you started your business, but there’s a lot you can  do to reduce your risk . Creating and reviewing your business plan regularly is a great way to uncover your weak spots—the flaws, gaps, and assumptions you’ve made—and develop contingency plans. 

Your business plan will also help you define budgets and revenue goals. And, if you’re not meeting your goals, you can quickly adjust spending plans and create more realistic budgets to keep your business healthy.

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• 4. Crafts a roadmap to achieve important milestones

A business plan is like a roadmap for your business. It helps you set, track and reach business milestones. 

For your plan to function in this way, your business plan should first outline your company’s short- and long-term goals. You can then fill in the specific steps necessary to reach those goals. This ensures that you measure your progress (or lack thereof) and make necessary adjustments along the way to stay on track while avoiding costly detours.

In fact, one of the top reasons why new businesses fail is due to bad business planning. Combine this with inflexibility and you have a recipe for disaster.

And planning is not just for startups. Established businesses benefit greatly from revisiting their business plan. It keeps them on track, even when the global market rapidly shifts as we’ve seen in recent years.

• 5. A plan helps you figure out if your idea can become a business

To turn your idea into reality, you need to accurately assess the feasibility of your business idea.

You need to verify:

• If there is a market for your product or service
• Who your target audience is
• How you will gain an edge over the current competition
• If your business can run profitably

A business plan forces you to take a step back and look at your business objectively, which makes it far easier to make tough decisions down the road. Additionally, a business plan helps you to identify risks and opportunities early on, providing you with the necessary time to come up with strategies to address them properly.

Finally, a business plan helps you work through the nuts and bolts of how your business will work financially and if it can become sustainable over time.

6. You’ll make big spending decisions with confidence

As your business grows, you’ll have to figure out when to hire new employees, when to expand to a new location, or whether you can afford a major purchase. 

These are always major spending decisions, and if you’re regularly reviewing the forecasts you mapped out in your business plan, you’re going to have better information to use to make your decisions.

7. You’re more likely to catch critical cash flow challenges early

The other side of those major spending decisions is understanding and monitoring your business’s cash flow. Your  cash flow statement  is one of the three key financial statements you’ll put together for your business plan. (The other two are your  balance sheet  and your  income statement  (P&L). 

Reviewing your cash flow statement regularly as part of your regular business plan review will help you see potential cash flow challenges earlier so you can take action to avoid a cash crisis where you can’t pay your bills. 

• 8. Position your brand against the competition

Competitors are one of the factors that you need to take into account when starting a business. Luckily, competitive research is an integral part of writing a business plan. It encourages you to ask questions like:

• What is your competition doing well? What are they doing poorly?
• What can you do to set yourself apart?
• What can you learn from them?
• How can you make your business stand out?
• What key business areas can you outcompete?
• How can you identify your target market?

Finding answers to these questions helps you solidify a strategic market position and identify ways to differentiate yourself. It also proves to potential investors that you’ve done your homework and understand how to compete. 

• 9. Determines financial needs and revenue models

A vital part of starting a business is understanding what your expenses will be and how you will generate revenue to cover those expenses. Creating a business plan helps you do just that while also defining ongoing financial needs to keep in mind. 

Without a business model, it’s difficult to know whether your business idea will generate revenue. By detailing how you plan to make money, you can effectively assess the viability and scalability of your business. 

Understanding this early on can help you avoid unnecessary risks and start with the confidence that your business is set up to succeed.

• 10. Helps you think through your marketing strategy

A business plan is a great way to document your marketing plan. This will ensure that all of your marketing activities are aligned with your overall goals. After all, a business can’t grow without customers and you’ll need a strategy for acquiring those customers. 

Your business plan should include information about your target market, your marketing strategy, and your marketing budget. Detail things like how you plan to attract and retain customers, acquire new leads, how the digital marketing funnel will work, etc. 

Having a documented marketing plan will help you to automate business operations, stay on track and ensure that you’re making the most of your marketing dollars.

• 11. Clarifies your vision and ensures everyone is on the same page

In order to create a successful business, you need a clear vision and a plan for how you’re going to achieve it. This is all detailed with your mission statement, which defines the purpose of your business, and your personnel plan, which outlines the roles and responsibilities of current and future employees. Together, they establish the long-term vision you have in mind and who will need to be involved to get there. 

Additionally, your business plan is a great tool for getting your team in sync. Through consistent plan reviews, you can easily get everyone in your company on the same page and direct your workforce toward tasks that truly move the needle.

• 12. Future-proof your business

A business plan helps you to evaluate your current situation and make realistic projections for the future.

This is an essential step in growing your business, and it’s one that’s often overlooked. When you have a business plan in place, it’s easier to identify opportunities and make informed decisions based on data.

Therefore, it requires you to outline goals, strategies, and tactics to help the organization stay focused on what’s important.

By regularly revisiting your business plan, especially when the global market changes, you’ll be better equipped to handle whatever challenges come your way, and pivot faster.

You’ll also be in a better position to seize opportunities as they arise.

Further Reading: 5 fundamental principles of business planning

• 13. Tracks your progress and measures success

An often overlooked purpose of a business plan is as a tool to define success metrics. A key part of writing your plan involves pulling together a viable financial plan. This includes financial statements such as your profit and loss, cash flow, balance sheet, and sales forecast.

By housing these financial metrics within your business plan, you suddenly have an easy way to relate your strategy to actual performance. You can track progress, measure results, and follow up on how the company is progressing. Without a plan, it’s almost impossible to gauge whether you’re on track or not.  

Additionally, by evaluating your successes and failures, you learn what works and what doesn’t and you can make necessary changes to your plan. In short, having a business plan gives you a framework for measuring your success. It also helps with building up a “lessons learned” knowledge database to avoid costly mistakes in the future.

• 14. Your business plan is an asset if you ever want to sell

Down the road, you might decide that you want to sell your business or position yourself for acquisition. Having a solid business plan is going to help you make the case for a higher valuation. Your business is likely to be worth more to a buyer if it’s easy for them to understand your business model, your target market, and your overall potential to grow and scale. 

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• Writing your business plan

By taking the time to create a business plan, you ensure that your business is heading in the right direction and that you have a roadmap to get there. We hope that this post has shown you just how important and valuable a business plan can be. While it may still seem daunting, the benefits far outweigh the time investment and learning curve for writing one. 

Luckily, you can write a plan in as little as 30 minutes. And there are plenty of excellent planning tools and business plan templates out there if you’re looking for more step-by-step guidance. Whatever it takes, write your plan and you’ll quickly see how useful it can be.

Tim Berry is the founder and chairman of Palo Alto Software , a co-founder of Borland International, and a recognized expert in business planning. He has an MBA from Stanford and degrees with honors from the University of Oregon and the University of Notre Dame. Today, Tim dedicates most of his time to blogging, teaching and evangelizing for business planning.

Table of Contents

• 6. You’ll make big spending decisions with confidence
• 7. You’re more likely to catch critical cash flow challenges early

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Our Net Zero Transition Plan

At a glance.

In October 2020 we set our ambition to become a net zero bank by 2050. Our first Net Zero Transition Plan provides an overview of our approach to net zero and the actions we are taking to help meet our ambition. It sets out:

Our vision and strategic approach – how we intend to use our strengths to make financing, facilitation and investment choices that can have a meaningful impact on decarbonisation in the real economy.

Our approach to sector transitions – we look at the expected transition in key economic sectors and how we intend to use sector pathways to engage with clients on the future of their industries and their financing needs. We also describe our approach to setting and evolving our sectoral financed emissions targets and making progress towards them.

Our implementation plan – how we are transforming HSBC, including how we support our clients and customers, embed net zero into our business, and partner for systemic change.

Our first Net Zero Transition Plan is an important milestone in the journey to achieving our net zero ambition.

Ambition to be a net zero bank by 2050, including in our portfolio of financed emissions, set on-balance sheet financed emissions targets to 2030 for key carbon intensive sectors, aim to provide $750 billion – $1 trillion in sustainable finance and investment by 2030.

“As one of the world’s largest international banks, HSBC is well placed to help support and finance the economic transformation required to reach net zero.”

Noel Quinn , Group Chief Executive, HSBC

Our approach to net zero

In 2020 we set an ambition to align our financing portfolio to net zero by 2050 and to achieve net zero in our operations and supply chain by 2030.

Our Net Zero Transition Plan brings together, for the first time, the steps we intend to take to deliver this. We also want to demonstrate how we intend to harness our strengths and capabilities in the areas where we believe we can best support large-scale emissions reductions.

Our motivation to act

• To seize the significant economic opportunity that exists in financing the investment needs of our clients and customers in the transition, while helping them to prosper.
• To help mitigate the rising financial and wider societal risks associated with failing to achieve the required transition across industries and geographies.
• To help shape (not just follow) the understanding, policies, market structures and standards necessary to achieve a just transition while maintaining sound economies.

Our role in the transition

Our starting point in the transition to net zero is one of a heavy financed emissions footprint. We will have a complex transition, with markets and sectors at different starting points and moving at different speeds. However, it also provides us with an opportunity to work with our clients and customers to help make an impact – in both the emissions challenge and the financing challenge.

We want to make financing choices that can lead to a meaningful impact on emissions reduction in the real economy, not just in our portfolio. Achieving this requires engagement with our clients and customers on their transitions to help finance decarbonisation in the sectors and regions with the most change ahead.

As we’ve supported much of the world’s industrial base for more than 155 years, we can play a prominent role in this transition.

We believe we can do this best by promoting change in three key areas that play to our strengths as an organisation and can help deliver a broader impact on decarbonisation in the real economy: transitioning industry, catalysing the new economy, and decarbonising trade and global supply chains.

“We are present in the regions, the markets and the sectors that arguably make the biggest impact in terms of future emissions. We have an opportunity to support them to make the transition and catalyse the new economy, following the science and leveraging our entrepreneurial spirit.”

Celine Herweijer , Group Chief Sustainability Officer, HSBC

Critical to our approach is a recognition that as a bank we cannot do this alone. Our ability to transition relies on decarbonisation in the real economy – both the supply and demand side – happening at the necessary pace.

Our clients and customers, and the industries and markets we serve will need to transition effectively, supported by strong government policies and regulation, and substantially scaled investment. Engagement and collaboration are therefore key to how we respond.

Our net zero principles

Science-based, transparent and accountable, integrating nature, just and inclusive.

Our approach to sector transitions

In our Net Zero Transition Plan, we have set out the key changes that, based on our current understanding, are required for the transition to net zero in key sectors of the global economy.

We expect to regularly review our sector portfolio progress against progress in the real economy, and to iterate and mature our approach to supporting sector transitions over time. As part of this, we expect to continue to review our approach to financed emissions analysis, targets, and portfolio alignment, as well as supporting clients and customers with transition plan engagement, innovating on transition solutions, and working with wider stakeholders to help support systemic change.

Our approach to implementation

To deliver on our ambition to be net zero by 2050 and have a meaningful impact in the real economy, we are setting out our implementation plan to embed net zero across key areas of our business.

Supporting our customers

Embedding net zero into the way we operate, partnering for systemic change.

Embedding net zero across our business covers areas including the products and services we provide, managing risk, using policies to drive change, our governance and incentives, our culture and capabilities and how we measure progress.

Understanding our transition plan

Our initial transition plan provides an overview of the progress we have made to date and what we plan to do next. We know there is still much more to do. We’re focusing our efforts on where we can help drive material and implementable change, and applying learnings as we work to embed net zero across HSBC.

The most significant challenge in developing a transition plan at this early stage is the relative novelty of the process and the uncertainty in many areas we are seeking to address. The only certainty is that these and other developing areas will unfold in ways that we cannot accurately forecast today.

As a result, the ambition and details around implementation in this transition plan will need to evolve over time.

Rather than wait for these areas to become clear we have chosen to lay out and pursue the plans we have today, based on currently available data, infrastructure, resources, technologies and standards.

Our transition plan will form the basis of further work on our journey to net zero over time, and we expect to review and update it periodically.

Downloads and further resources

Net zero transition plan.

Further reading

• Our climate strategy
• Financing net zero
• Tracking the emissions we finance
• ESG reporting centre
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The International Monetary Fund board on Thursday approved a review for Argentina that allowed for the disbursement of $800 million, the IMF said in a statement.

Economy | $1.6 billion Oakland hospital project gains…

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Economy | unanimous supreme court preserves access to widely used abortion medication, subscriber only, economy | $1.6 billion oakland hospital project gains milestone with key jobs deal, project will add new hospital and revamp medical campus.

The Building and Construction Trades Council of Alameda County, a major East Bay labor organization, and the general contractor for the project — Rudolph and Sletten, a big-time construction firm — crafted a jobs deal for the project. Overaa Construction, the general contractor for a series of site improvements on the campus, also signed the labor agreement.

The $1.6 billion development would create a landmark, state-of-the-art hospital and trauma center for children on the medical center campus at 747 52nd St. in Oakland.

“The new hospital project is our covenant to the community to take care of all kids regardless of their socioeconomic level,” Dr. Nicholas Holmes, president of UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospitals, said in an interview with this news organization about the project. “This is to provide the best possible care for children through the region.”

The deal assures priority will be given to hiring of local workers for what would be a years-long project that’s slated to be completed in 2030.

“This project is a huge investment in our community that will include union workers from the ground up,” said Andreas Cluver, secretary-treasurer for the Building and Construction Trades Council of Alameda County. “We’re making sure that local residents have access to these jobs, whether they are new to construction or masters in their trade.”

The massive development is expected to double the size of the emergency department, add a new diagnostic imaging suite and increase room sizes as part of a wide-ranging modernization, upgrade and expansion.

“We have outgrown the size of the existing facility,” Dr. Holmes said. “The real driver of this is to meet the needs of the community.”

The workforce agreements set a 30% local hiring goal for both contractors and subcontractors, which UCSF Health described as its commitment to supporting the local economy.

The new and expanded hospital complex will help ensure that children in the East Bay and other areas can be sure to receive top-notch medical and trauma care.

“This will help with patient flow,” Dr. Holmes said. “As a safety net hospital, we want to be sure there are no deterrents to a child receiving medical care and to ensure no child is turned away.”

The project also will add dedicated mental health inpatient beds to address what UCSF Health officials believe is a pressing and unmet need for adolescent mental health care and services.

The five-year construction endeavor is expected to require the hiring of about 400 workers a year until the project is completed in 2030 when the new hospital will open.

This summer, UCSF Health will seek approval from the UC Regents for the hospital project and campus revamp.

“The construction and building trades are the backbone of Oakland,” Oakland Mayor Sheng Thao said. “This project will bring well-paid jobs for union construction workers, job training for apprentices, and new careers for veterans.”

Plus, once the hospital is open, it’s likely that additional hospital staff, including nurses, will need to be hired to work in the new medical center.

“This project is not only for the physical and mental well-being of our community, it also is for the economic vitality of Oakland itself,” Dr. Holmes said. “We will increase the staff accordingly, as mandated by nurse-patient ratios.”

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Lean Business Planning

Get what you want from your business.

Why a Lean Business Plan and Lean Business Planning

So we’ve seen in the previous section that using the term lean in business means focusing on what adds value and avoiding waste. It’s also about taking small steps and evaluating results often.

Why Lean Planning? What are the Benefits?

Who cares about planning? Who cares about business plans, lean or otherwise? Planning isn’t the point; the point is to get what you want from your business, to work smarter, not harder. It’s about better business. Get what you want out of your business.

“However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results.” — Winston Churchill Tweet

Strategy is focus. Don’t do everything – you can’t – but do the most important things. Don’t try to please everybody – you can’t – so please the people who matter most, depending on what you want from the business.

Develop and execute tactics to make strategy real. Make sure what you’re doing matches what you think is most important. Figure out optimal pricing, channels marketing, and product (or service) developments.

Make sure you are actually executing your tactics by boiling them down to specific milestones and performance measurements. Track results and compare them to expectations. Develop accountability.

Manage your money. Figure out what you expect to sell, use that to figure out what to spend, and make sure you never run out of cash.

Lean business planning isn’t about planning. It’s about business. And getting things done. Run your business to make your life better. Don’t run your life to make your business better.

It Starts with a Lean Business Plan

Lean business planning adopts the ideas of small steps, constant tracking, and frequent course corrections to planning. It includes only what adds value, without waste. It starts with a core business plan for internal use only, just big enough for optimizing the business. A lean business plan has four essential parts:

• A strategy summary  is a bare-bones description of strategy for management use only.
• Describe your tactics in a bare-bones description, for management only. Tactics include pricing, distribution, product or service development, financing, and so forth.
• Do the essential forecasts including sales forecast, costs, expense budget, and cash flow.
• Set execution specifics including review schedule, milestones, task assignments, assumptions, and metrics.

This lean plan is clearly not the “elaborate business plan” that lean startup experts reject. Unlike the elaborate plan, the lean plan doesn’t include carefully worded summaries or detailed business information for outsiders. It is not even a document. It’s a collection of lists, tables, and bullet points.

Keep it Live. Use it Well.

Just like lean manufacturing and lean startups, lean business planning is a process of continuous improvement. It takes small steps, analyzes results, and makes corrections. I’ve revised the classic PDCA cycle to make a lean planning version that I now call PRRR, for plan-run-review-revise. So lean business planning is more than just the lean plan itself. It’s the plan plus  regular review and revisions . It’s never finished. Every latest version will need revision within a few weeks.

Add More Only as Needed

As much as the lean startup experts complain about what they call the elaborate business plan, real businesses, in the real world, do occasionally need to present a business plan to outsiders. They have what I call business plan events , when a business plan is required.

But times have changed. You still don’t need the big plan. Do your lean plan and keep it up to date with regular review and revisions. And when somebody asks for a traditional business plan (if they do), then add the extra ingredients you need. That might be a market analysis, maybe an exit strategy, maybe a detailed description of product or marketing plan. Do them as summaries, presentations, or appendices.

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Hitachi and Microsoft enter milestone agreement to accelerate business and social innovation with generative AI

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• Three-year, projected multibillion-dollar strategic partnership will focus on creating innovative industry solutions that deliver transformative outcomes for businesses and society
• Hitachi Group will embed the Microsoft cloud, Azure Open AI Service, Dynamics 365, Copilot for Microsoft 365 and GitHub Copilot into its Lumada Solutions to accelerate growth of the Lumada business, and improve productivity for its 270,000 employees
• Hitachi will train more than 50,000 “GenAI Professionals” on advanced AI skills. As part of the partnership, Hitachi will incorporate training provided by Microsoft into Hitachi’s training

Redmond, Wash., June 3/Tokyo, June 4, 2024 – Hitachi Ltd. (TSE:6501) and Microsoft Corp. announced a projected multibillion-dollar collaboration over the next three years that will accelerate social innovation with generative AI. Through this strategic alliance, Hitachi will propel growth of the Lumada business, with a planned revenue of 2.65 trillion yen (18.9 billion USD) *1 in FY2024, and will promote operational efficiency and productivity improvements for Hitachi Group’s 270,000 employees.

“Hitachi has been driving transformation by applying AI across the Hitachi Group to improve productivity and will invest 300 billion yen（2.1 billion USD) *1 in GenAI to capture new growth opportunities in FY2024. Hitachi and Microsoft have already been working on a variety of co-creation projects including the development of next-generation digital solutions for the manufacturing and logistics fields *2 and the development of a field-extended metaverse that runs on Microsoft Teams,” said Keiji Kojima, president and CEO of Hitachi. “Under this new agreement, we are excited to further accelerate social innovation by expanding our efforts to social infrastructure areas such as energy and mobility, and by applying generative AI, to improve the productivity of frontline workers, which will become even more important in the future. By combining our capabilities, we can help solve the issues faced by our customers and society, and contribute to a more sustainable future.”

“We are entering a new era of AI with the promise to deliver transformative business outcomes across every role and industry,” said Satya Nadella, chairman and CEO, Microsoft. “Our expanded partnership with Hitachi will bring together the power of the Microsoft Cloud — including Microsoft Copilot — with Hitachi’s industry expertise to improve the productivity of 270,000 Hitachi employees and help address customers’ biggest challenges, including sustainability.”

Hitachi’s business transformation:

Hitachi Rail is leveraging GenAI for predictive maintenance, enhancing equipment monitoring and refining forecast accuracy. This proactive approach prevents breakdowns, increases service quality, reduces operating expenses and augments safety. For example, a cloud-based platform on Microsoft Azure was used to streamline data visualization and analysis, empowered by AI to furnish data-driven insights to digitally monitor rail infrastructure. These insights were translated into actionable steps for Network Rail , enhancing decision-making for predictive maintenance of overhead lines.

Develop innovative digital solutions

Hitachi is enhancing its Lumada solutions by incorporating the capability of generative AI. As part of the initiative, Hitachi has already started to use Microsoft’s Generative AI for JP1 Cloud Services, a SaaS version of JP1, its integrated operations management software with approximately 20,000 customers. This will accelerate response times to address failures, and enable improved operational efficiencies for IT departments, financial and public institutions. In an internal verification test conducted earlier, Hitachi confirmed that the time required for the operator to make an initial response to an alert was reduced to approximately two-thirds by using generated AI to respond to the alert and displaying the source of the citation, such as a manual, that provided the basis for the response.

In addition to this, Hitachi and Microsoft will also support the energy transition with improved access to and strengthening of digital solutions for asset performance management, energy trading, and risk management to reduce downtime and increase profitability. Increased computing power and cloud infrastructure are both critical to scaling these applications. Hitachi Energy’s Enterprise Software Solutions technology and its partnership with Microsoft are key to optimizing the energy network, from generation, through transmission and distribution, and ultimately in delivering reliable and sustainable energy to customers.

Joint projects to promote sustainable growth

Multiple Hitachi Group Companies including GlobalLogic, Hitachi Digital Services and Hitachi Solutions, deliver a wide range of digital engineering, IT and managed services, and application services for the cloud. Additional development efforts through this partnership will focus on enhancing this broad range of services with the aim of sustainable innovation with Microsoft.

As the impact of CO2 emissions from AI on the global environment increases, Hitachi and Microsoft will work toward zero carbon, starting with a data center project in Europe, to reduce environmental impact.

Strengthen digital skilling and talent development

Hitachi will train more than 50,000 GenAI Professionals. As part of the partnership, Hitachi will incorporate training to acquire advanced software development skills using GitHub Copilot and Azure OpenAI Service into the program to develop GenAI Professionals, talents who support customers’ transformation using AI.

*1 Forecast as of April 26, 2024, calculated at 140 yen to the U.S. dollar.

*2 Hitachi News Release (June 26, 2020) “Hitachi and Microsoft form a strategic alliance to advance next-generation digital solutions for manufacturing and logistics across Southeast Asia, North America and Japan” https://www.hitachi.com/New/cnews/month/2020/06/200626.html

*3 Hitachi News Release (May 15, 2023) “Hitachi Establishes New ‘Generative AI Center’ to Accelerate Value Creation and Improve Productivity in the Lumada business by promoting the use of Generative AI” https://www.hitachi.com/New/cnews/month/2023/05/230515.html

*4 Hitachi News Release (May 21, 2024) “Hitachi to Accelerate System Development Transformation With Generative AI” https://www.hitachi.com/New/cnews/month/2024/05/240521.html

About Hitachi, Ltd.

Hitachi drives Social Innovation Business, creating a sustainable society through the use of data and technology. We solve customers’ and society’s challenges with Lumada solutions leveraging IT, OT (Operational Technology) and products. Hitachi operates under the 3 business sectors of “Digital Systems & Services” – supporting our customers’ digital transformation; “Green Energy & Mobility” – contributing to a decarbonized society through energy and railway systems, and “Connective Industries” – connecting products through digital technology to provide solutions in various industries. Driven by Digital, Green, and Innovation, we aim for growth through co-creation with our customers. The company’s revenues as 3 sectors for fiscal year 2023 (ended March 31, 2024) totaled 8,564.3 billion yen, with 573 consolidated subsidiaries and approximately 270,000 employees worldwide. For more information on Hitachi, please visit the company’s website at https://www.hitachi.com.

About Microsoft

Microsoft (Nasdaq “MSFT” @microsoft) creates platforms and tools powered by AI to deliver innovative solutions that meet the evolving needs of our customers. The technology company is committed to making AI available broadly and doing so responsibly, with a mission to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more.

Media Contacts

Microsoft Media Relations, WE Communications for Microsoft, (425) 638-7777, [email protected]

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