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7 Flows Core

Start, grow, and scale your business ventures The official guide

v.1.0

Introduction Purpose of the 7 Flows Core Guide 7 Flows is an end-to-end lightweight framework to help you start, grow, and scale your business ventures. This guide contains the definition and fundamental principles of 7 Flows Core. This definition consists of elements, canvases, and the rules that bind them together.

7 Flows helped leading companies, as well as solo entrepreneurs, start, grow, and scale their business ventures since 2002. Now, it's your turn!

What is 7 Flows Core? 7 Flows Core is a process framework that has been used to grow business ventures since 2002. Rather than a process or technique, it is a framework within which you can employ various methods and tools to develop your business and products. 7 Flows Core makes clear the relative efficacy of your business management and development practices so that you can improve.

7 Flows Principles 7 Flows Core relies on empirical process control theory or empiricism. Empiricism asserts that knowledge comes from experience and making decisions based on what is validated. It employs an iterative, incremental approach to grow your business ventures quickly and meet your customers' needs. !2

Core Elements

7 Flows Core Elements 7 Flows Core consists of seven fundamentals elements and their associated canvases. Each component within the framework serves a particular purpose and is essential to 7 Flows Core success and usage.

INSIGHTS

The rules of 7 Flows Core bind together the elements, and canvases, governing the relationships and interaction between them.

VALUE PROPOSITION

The 7 Flows Core Elements include:

• Insights and feedback collection

DELIVERY

VALIDATION

• Value proposition design

BUSINESS
 MODEL

• Business model generation

• Business assumptions and product validation

• Business priorities definition

• Execution flow visualization

EXECUTION

PRIORITIES

• Delivery pipelines monitoring !4

Insights INSIGHTS

Core principles How much do you know about your customers? Collecting insights and feedback is a critical part of understanding your consumer, and any designing compelling value propositions. To ensure you are getting accurate customer insights, you need to broaden data collection practices and integrate social media, surveys, face to face interviews, observation, and experiments. The 7 Flows Core Insights element helps you keep all this data in one place, organize and sort your customer profiles.

Canvas We highly recommend empathy maps to structure and collect customers' insights and feedback. Much like a user persona, an empathy map can represent a group of users, such as a customer segment. The canvas was created by Dave Gray and is widely used within the Agile community.

Going Further Download your copy of the Empathy Map canvas: http://bit.ly/7f-emap

Learn more on the official Gamestorming website: http://bit.ly/7f-ref-emap !5

Value Proposition VALUE PROPOSITION

Core principles Value proposition design helps you successfully understand the patterns of value creation and organize information about what your customers need in a way that makes patterns of value creation easily visible. It provides your team with a shared language to overcome endless discussions and conduct more strategic conversations. It will allow you to develop big and bold ideas and complement your existing processes that help you start or grow your business venture.

Canvas We recommend the Value Proposition Canvas by Alexander Osterwalder at Strategyzer. It has two sides. The Customer Segment helps you clarify your customer understanding in a context. The Value Proposition helps you describe how you intend to create value for that client. You achieve a fit between both sides when one meets the other.

Going Further Download your copy of the Value Proposition Canvas: http://bit.ly/7f-valueprop

Learn more on Strategyzer blog: http://bit.ly/7f-ref-valueprop

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Business Model BUSINESS
 MODEL

Core principles The starting point for any productive discussion or workshop on business model innovation should be a shared understanding of what a business model is. The team needs a simple concept that everybody understands and that facilitates discussion. It has to be relevant, intuitively understandable, without oversimplifying the complexity of how the business works. It will allow you to easily describe and manipulate business models to create new alternatives.

Canvas The Business Model Canvas by Alexander Osterwalder at Strategyzer is one of the best implementations of this concept. It has been widely applied and tested and is used by many startups and large organizations.

Going Further Download your copy of the Business Model Canvas: http://bit.ly/7f-businessmodel

Learn more on Strategyzer blog: http://bit.ly/7f-ref-businessmodel

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Business Validation VALIDATION

Core principles When you are exploring new ideas, you are usually in a space of maximum uncertainty. You don’t know if your ideas will work. Testing your critical assumptions will help you reduce the risk and uncertainty of your ideas for new and improved value proposition, as well as business models. First, you should decide what to test and then, get started with a step by step approach with cheap experiments before bringing it all together and measuring your progress.

Canvas To help manage the whole testing process, the Strategyzer team has created the Progress Board. It goes perfectly with the Business Model Canvas and Value Proposition Canvas, and will help you track your progress by visualizing all your assumptions, tests, and learnings.

Going Further Download your copy of the Progress Board: http://bit.ly/7f-progress

Clone the Trello Test Lab board and use it as your digital progress board: http://bit.ly/7f-board-testlab

Learn more on Strategyzer blog: http://bit.ly/7f-ref-progress !8

Priorities PRIORITIES

Core principles For any business venture, every team must have a set of clear priorities in place to make it happen. It can be challenging to find the right balance of what’s important, and what each priority will deliver for the business. The right balance is a combination of two critical factors. The first is the pace and sequence of priorities and the second is knowing how to balance the short-term and long-term priorities.

Canvas We encourage you to build a story map to visualize your business priorities. Creating a story map helps you initially understand the interactions between the stakeholders. A story map hung as an information radiator becomes a constant point of discussion about the business you’re starting. When the business is running, it becomes your iteration planning board.

Going Further Download your copy of the Story Map: http://bit.ly/7f-storymap

Learn more on Jeff Patton’s blog: http://bit.ly/7f-ref-storymap !9

Execution EXECUTION

Core principles The third and fifth lean startup principles are about execution and are based on lean thinking and the kanban method. Kanban is about execution and continuous optimization, reducing cycle time, and reacting to immediate feedback. This is exactly what you are looking for once you have come up with a brilliant idea. It is based on the Toyota Production System and the concept of flow. There is a limit on the amount of work in progress. Multitasking is reduced because that diminishes the opportunity to learn and allows mistakes to creep in.

Canvas We recommend to set up a physical a digital Kanban board for all the tasks related to your business.

Going Further Download your copy of the sample Kanban Board: http://bit.ly/7f-kanban

Clone the Trello Kanban Board and start to use it with your team: http://bit.ly/7f-board-kanban

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Delivery DELIVERY

Core principles I may require one or more additional steps until you can deliver your results to your customers. Depending on
 your business and your environment you may need to validate your communication, your product, check compliance, or run security tests. It's a time-consuming process that can also generate extra costs. Monitoring your delivery process is critical in running a successful business venture.

Canvas Setting up a delivery matrix and pipeline can help you optimize your process. A delivery pipeline breaks up your build process into stages. Each step provides increasing validation and readiness.

Going Further Download your copy of the Delivery Matrix: http://bit.ly/7f-deliverymatrix

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Building The Flow

Connecting Elements

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