A team wants more business travelers, but a new booking feature may not address what keeps them away. A Pirate Canvas starts with a broader question—what is difficult about business travel?—and examines the surrounding ecosystem before choosing deliverables. It extends Pirate Metrics beyond an existing product or sales pipeline to expose growth bottlenecks, market gaps, and assumptions worth testing. section 4.4 section 4.4.2 section 4.4.3
Work across the canvas rather than jumping to a solution:
- Draw five columns, one for each Pirate Metric. Discuss what is going wrong in each area; use the five whys to probe root causes. Record the important impediments and how progress could be measured. section 4.4.3
- Turn pain points into measurable goals. For each metric, identify the actors, desired impacts, and possible deliverables. Keep the most valuable deliverables rather than every idea the discussion produces. section 4.4.4
- Use the resulting Epic Landscape to see high-level deliverables alongside the bottlenecks they are intended to remove. Test important assumptions about whether proposed products or services will have the expected market impact. section 4.4.4 section 4.4.2
Business-travel growth
An airline seeking more business customers could ask what is difficult about business travel, not merely what feature to add to its website. In the Acquisition column, low interest from business travelers becomes a measurable site-visit goal. In Activation, the team examines why travelers cannot do business while flying. These are different bottlenecks and may call for different responses. section 4.4.3 section 4.4.4
Figure 4.18 A completed Pirate Canvas shows an Epic Landscape, high-level deliverables in the context of the bottlenecks they aim to eliminate.
The completed canvas places an Epic Landscape in the context of the bottlenecks its deliverables aim to eliminate. section 4.4.4
