Challenge

How might we build a tool for small teams to align on common goal and vision and start building effective team culture?

Story

Over the past three years I’ve been fascinated how ‘soft-skills’ type of knowledge in groups is transforming ‘hard-skills’ type of results these teams produce time after time. Examples of IDEO, Hyper Island, Valve, Asana and many other team- and culture-oriented companies suggest that team development is crucial in attracting right talent, building awesome products and developing people.

Process

To build team canvas, I invited a friend of mine, human capital expert, to co-create a toolkit for aligning and developing teams.

Using lean startup process, we developed, tested and validated product in short iterations.

Learning Design and Testing

Team Canvas has been iteratively tested with various teams (on average, 2 to 5 people). Over the period of four months, we went through six iterations of Team Canvas, each tested with multiple teams (remote and on-site).

The big part of search was paying customers, which proved to be hard in the initial target audience (early stage startups and accelerators). In the end, we shifted more towards facilitators, consultants and educators as our primary audience.

Interaction Design

Iteratively building assets for Team Canvas website (Sketch).

Development

Building basic website using Twitter Bootstrap.

Making sure the website is mobile-friendly, so facilitators can use how-to guide from their phone.

Marketing

Beyond creating Twitter account, Facebook page, basic landing page optimization, I spent some time figuring out right wording using Usability Hub’s Five Second Test. Another part of rolling out was connecting to various online collaboration platforms, such as Mural.ly, Creatlr and Blank Canvas.

Results

The Team Canvas had more than 12 000 downloads, and is available in 3 languages.

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Link: theteamcanvas.com