Lean Chasm

Lean Chasm unites efficient product development and strategic product marketing.

The Lean part comes from Lean Startup.  It is a popular way organizations can quickly methodically innovate toward success. It provides a short-term strategy to help product development move quickly and decisively toward good market fit.  The term Chasm comes from Geoffrey Moore's book: Crossing the Chasm.  Moore offers high-level, Business to Business (B2B) marketing strategy based on the product adoption curve. It provides a long-term strategy to expand marketshare around a new product. Lean Chasm synchronizes product development and market building.

Lean Chasm is implemented as a set of worksheets in a spreadsheet.  

• The Notes sheet contains some basic information.

• The next five sheets contain a variation of Alexander Osterwalder's Business Model Canvas (BMC) concept.  Each has been annotated with instructions that refer to a single customer segment from Geoffrey Moore's book, Crossing the Chasm.

  1. Innovators (Technology Enthusiasts): They're the first individuals to adopt an innovation. These are people who love technology for its own sake. They often have technical backgrounds and are willing to take risks.

  2. Early Adopters (Visionaries): These are the people who see the potential for an innovation or technology to disrupt markets. They often have a greater degree of opinion leadership than the later adopters, and they're willing to cope with a certain level of uncertainty about the technology.

  3. Beach Head (Early Majority): This is a special case of Early Majority defined by Moore as small, highly focused, realistically reachable, group within the larger Early Majority segment.  Moore's chasm is the leap from Early Adopters (traction, in startup parlance) to Early Majority (revenue growth). The Beach Head segment is where you establish a foothold in a market from which you can pivot into other Early Majority and Late Majority markets.

  4. Early Majority (Pragmatists): This group tends to adopt new technology just before the average member of society and typically interact with their peers about their experiences with the technology. They are looking for productivity improvements for existing operations and are much more risk averse than the early adopters.

  5. Late Majority (Conservatives): They are skeptical about innovation and will only adopt it after it has been tried by the majority. They typically want to see proof that the technology works before they're willing to adopt it.

The Laggards customer segment is not implemented because they represent a small group of potential customers that are unlikely to buy your product.

• The last sheet contains a blank Business Model Canvas that should be copied and used as needed.