Another small win for ‘governance as a service’

A business canvas that meets user needs

I’ve over 20 years of experience working in or around governance, and I’ve done plenty of talking about and writing about the concept of ‘governance as a service’.

But for me it’s not some abstract ideal.

It’s more like the combination of a particular mind state/approach (namely, one that is centred on users) and a goal, coupled with continuously working towards that goal.

So I like to share examples (even small ones) of what ‘governance as a service’ can look like in practice, in order to help people to think how they might work towards that goal — even small steps can make a big difference.

“Everything is accomplished bit by bit.” Baudelaire

And in that spirit, here’s another example:

In 2021, I led cross-functional project to improve how we design and develop new products. Following qualitative and quantative user research, we developed new processes and guidance.

Our guidance included recommendations on documentation for ‘bet reviews’ (cross-functional decision points to determine whether or not to progress a bet). The key document we recommended is a single, short overview ‘business canvas’ that explains why customers will love the product and why it makes good business sense. Kind of like a light-weight business case (that most reviled of governance documents). Not an original idea — we’d done our research on different examples out there (eg) — but we looked at our users’ needs and designed our own template.

Now, three years later, following a bet review this month, I got unprompted feedback from multiple people who had not seen or used before the latest iteration of our business canvas, and they were all very positive about it, saying that it was well structured, easy to understand, and helped get to the substantive issues.

This is exceptional praise for this type of governance document, which is more normally seen as a hurdle/overhead/burden/waste of time and comes in for a lot of criticism.

What I probably appreciated most of all in this positive feedback was that it came from people in both of the two major groups of users for this document — the people who have to complete it (ie the bet/product team), and the people who have to review it (ie the people making investment decisions).

Credit to the cross-functional team who worked on the original project.

And credit too to the people who have continued to work to iterate and improve on what we did then, including the business canvas.

[And shout out to Ian Ames and Mark Dalgarno, who read a draft of this post. They are the best.]