Stop Worshipping Canvases & Start Thinking for Yourself

In this week’s Product Agility Podcast, host Ben Maynard takes the mic solo once again, tackling an issue that has taken over the world of Agile and Product Management: our over-reliance on templates and canvases.

From Vision Canvases to Lean Product Discovery Templates, we’ve been sold the dream that structured frameworks make our lives easier. But do they? Or are they actually making us lazy thinkers, stifling creativity, and holding us back from true innovation?

The Trap of the One-Size-Fits-All Mindset

Canvases and templates promise clarity, but they often lead teams to follow a formula rather than think critically. In this episode, Ben explores:

• Why templates feel safe—and how they can be a dangerous crutch.
• The illusion of progress—when filling out a template feels like work, but nothing meaningful gets decided.
• How standardised frameworks kill nuance—forcing unique products and teams into predefined boxes.
• When templates actually work—and how to adapt them to serve you, not control you.

Practical Takeaways:

• Start with the problem, not the template. Before grabbing a canvas, ask: “What are we actually trying to solve?”
• Inspect and adapt. If a template doesn’t quite fit, tweak it—don’t let it dictate your thinking.
• Use templates as a conversation starter, not a final document. It’s the discussions and insights they generate that truly matter.
• Kill the dead templates. If a framework isn't adding value, stop using it. Not all tools deserve a permanent place in your workflow.

🔥 What’s your take? Have templates helped or hindered your work? Do you have a canvas horror story or a surprising success? Tag Ben Maynard on LinkedIn and join the conversation!

Ben's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/benmaynard-sheev/

👉 Follow the podcast and stay updated on new episodes!

Host Bio

Ben is a seasoned expert in product agility coaching, unleashing the potential of people and products. With over a decade of experience, his focus now is product-led growth & agility in organisations of all sizes.

Stay up-to-date with us on our social media📱!

Ben Maynard

🔗 https://www.linkedin.com/in/benmaynard-sheev/

🐦 https://x.com/BenWMaynard

💻 https://sheev.co.uk/

Product Agility Podcast

🔗 https://www.linkedin.com/company/productagilitypod/

💻 https://productagilitypod.co.uk/

🖇️ https://linktr.ee/productagility

Listen & Share On Spotify & iTunes

• Spotify - https://open.spotify.com/show/0lkwAYJzVSuk5zfJ1vIDZq?si=4c691fb12f124a56
• iTunes - https://apple.co/3YvTX8p

Want to come on the podcast?

Want to be a guest or have a guest request? Let us know here https://bit.ly/49osN80

Transcript

0:00

Templates, canvases, love them, hate them or just resign to using them? Well, today we're going to get real about the problem with all these bloody canvases and templates we seem to have be consumed by. The hidden traps are good intentions and why they might be and probably are holding us back more than helping us. Welcome to the Product Agility Podcast, the missing link between Agile and product. The purpose of this podcast is to share practical tips, strategies and stories from world class thought leaders and practitioners. Why I hear you ask? Well, I want to increase your knowledge and your motivation to experiment so that together we can create ever more successful products. My name is Ben Maynard and I'm your host. What has driven me for the last decade to bridge the gap between agility and product is a deep rooted belief that people and products evolving together can achieve mutual excellence. Templates, canvases, love them, hate them or just resign to using them. Well, today we're going to get real about the problem with all these bloody canvases and templates. We seem to have been consumed by the hidden traps to good intentions and why they might be and probably are holding us back more than helping us. If you've ever been tempted by one of these wonderful one-size-fits-all canvases or templates and thought, well hold on a minute, how does this make sense What we're trying to do? Why? Why am I even using this? Or maybe does you've tried it and it never seems to work and this episode is for you. We're going to be digging into wider templates and canvases seem so tempting. What are the risks of standardisation when using them, when they are useful and when they're going to kill innovation and maybe even your will to live, and how to make them work for you, not against you. By the end, I hope you might just rethink the way that you use templates and canvases entirely. So stick around, share your thoughts, and if you've got a template Horror Story or a surprising success story about your unexpected. I don't know, win by using a canvas and let us know on LinkedIn. Tag me, Ben Maynard, and we'll have a chat. So let's get into it. What's the appeal of canvases and templates? Why do we use them? OK, so let's start with the big question. Why do we love them so much? Look, they promise efficiency, consistency, and most of all, do you know what I think they promise? They promise ease. They make the complicated, complex things that we have to do in software product development seems so bloody simple. You know, I am absolutely guilty in the past of just blindly using a template because I thought, oh, great, I can just fill in this vision template with these people, and I'm a visionary. I mean, who wouldn't want that? Turns out that, yeah, I came to the conclusion visions were for visionaries, and maybe that's why I couldn't fill in a template. But you know, all this, it just seems so appealing, doesn't it? Even though we don't really get maybe the outcome we thought we're going to get, none of us will have to sit down and reinvent the wheel. I mean, Christ, the amount of time we probably all spend on ChatGPT, getting it to do stuff, which here we don't want to do, we find it easier to get it to cut corners for us. You know, we're lazy, humans are lazy. We want to spend our time doing the valuable stuff, and so we don't want to reinvent the world every time we need to create a road map or a vision or a strategy document or a Sprint plan or a Sprint goal or Christ, you name it. But here's the thing. Does that template or canvas actually make the work easier, or does it sometimes actually just make us lazy thinkers? Think about it. When was the last time you filled out a canvas or a template and really considered if it was the right tool for the job? Are we filling in templates because they genuinely help or just because they exist? You know, I'd like you to think about this women, maybe we can get in a conversation about it. But have you, have you ever used a template or canvas that's completely missed a mark? And what's the template that you rely upon daily? How has it actually been useful? Because I'm not saying that they're all bad. I'm actually going to say any of them are bad. I think that many tools can be crap if the people that are using them don't know how to use them. I'm not saying that they're all bad. I so I want to hear your stories and what templates do you have you have you found really useful? OK, so let's think about this even more. What happens when templates go wrong? What are some of the problems that we see when people just blindly go about filling in a template without doing the hard work that's behind it. So first of all, templates can give you a false sense of progress. We can finish beautifully formatted document, we can get those posters up on the wall, and we can look at the end of the workshop and we can just think to ourselves how much have we achieved? But actually nothing meaningful has been decided. Let's be honest, we've all been there, we've all gone through and read a facilitation guide or pulled a template and we filled it full of all this wonderful stuff and everyone was like, yeah, everyone feels good, Look at all the colourful posters we've produced. But do you know what? Nothing meaningful has been decided. People will probably leave that room and just do what they were always going to do, a fun exercise, but no impact. And this is part of the problem is that templates give us this illusion of progress, but progress is not the completion of the canvas or template. It's making real decisions and taking real action. The template or canvas is just the artifact. In order to make that artifact useful, generally speaking, people need to know their shit or have done their research and got the data beforehand and then make a commitment to doing something with it afterwards. That's real progress, not just having somebody come in or just decide you're going to fill in the template. Because guess what? You can fill in a road map template and you can Chuck it all in there. But unless people agree, unless you've done the research, unless you've got people on board, unless and then that supersedes anything else already exists, you know, it's just not gonna make an impact. The second issue is this holiday of one-size-fits-all in. Not every team, product, or situation is the same, obviously, but templates and canvases often assume that they are. What they can do is flatten out the nuance. They flat line the nuance. They force us to squeeze our context into a structure that might not fit at all. So for example, let's say you have a template for a product road map, but your team is working on something which is actually very exploratory. Maybe you can't plan that out. Maybe you're working in a platform environment and coming a road map. You just can't squeeze it in. Perhaps it's something very, very experimental. A standard road map template forces you to define milestones, goals, measures, deliverables. When you're still in the phase of let's just figure this shit out, let's just go and try some stuff. So instead of supporting flexibility, it locks you into a plan that may not even make sense yet. And this is part of the part of the challenge is that many people then use things like road map templates in organizations where the mindset's just about feet to factory delivery output. Guests get as much out as possible and they're going to look at your lovely road map. And that's going to see a project plan, I swear to it, in most organisations. But they haven't made that shift from that kind of the tech kind of mindset to the product mindset. Rd. maps are just another project plan. You might as well put a Microsoft project. You might just give it up and just use Microsoft Project do that people will be happier, you'll probably be a bit more robust and you'll probably get rewarded much more quickly. I mean if you're just trying to use a road map template, another thing there, it's around vision templates. You can fill those in, you can get people on board, but then what you find is that everyone's in the focus, Everyone's a target. Instead of talking about the solutions that that you're going to be creating, actually tying back to some real needs and what's for need? What customer user needs are we serving? Everyone just comes up with the solutions. Then what you put in the solutions box, more solutions, maybe this one-size-fits-all. It doesn't work. It doesn't work for a number of reasons, and I'm not saying that it doesn't ever work. I don't want to do an absolute, but many people blindly fill them in. If you've got a room full of people and they don't understand the needs, if you've got a room full of people and they don't really understand how a road map could work as a communication tool, then don't fill some of it in. Miss some bits out. Make it useful for them. Figure out what they need to go and learn what you need to go and learn and where the organization is and help the organization. Maybe turn some of those mindsets around, but don't just blindly fill it in thinking that it's if we just fit in, everything will be fine. Sometimes Do you know what? It just won't fit. So, have you ever? I'd like me to hack a template to find a way to make it work. Maybe because you're seeing a team's being misled by this kind of template thinking. Yeah. And maybe they thought they were misled because if we just filled in, they'd have a solid plan and they really didn't. Then we all have to hack templates. We all have to inspect and adapt. So we need to find ways to not just blindly skip over parts of it, but actually ask ourselves the questions. Are we capable of filling this thing in right now? Do we really have the information? Do you really have the mindset to fill this in and then do something with it afterwards? What really has inspired me a lot around this was a book called Playing to Win, which had this wonderful section about template strategies and how people feel that a strategy can just be a template that you fill in. And they just go and lit so many little light bulbs like fairy lights in my brain because I thought, Jesus, that's it. No, I think that's when people and I have totally guilty of us and spend so much time thinking if we just fill in the template, then we've got a strategy. For example, of a lean strategy canvas. Brilliant, love it. But if you haven't got a strategy before you start filling it in, you've got to do the hard yards to do the analysis and get the data and get people on board and actually understand perhaps what a strategy really is. And I think this proliferation, this abundance of different canvases and templates and people just thinking if we just fill that in, then we've done it, is just so fucking wrong. A lot of this stuff is hard and difficult. And if you haven't got people in the room who know this stuff inside and out, let's take strategy for example. You haven't got people in the room who really understand what strategy can be and how it can be communicated and the things that do make it useful and how it doesn't. They should enable you to say no to stuff. Then you go and fit in the strategy canvas. Without that knowledge in the room, it's going to be crap. Probably. No, definitely it'll be crap if you've got people in a room that have that or you've got done the hard yarns performer to get the right seeds, to get the right idea to challenge people, to educate people. But now actually, you know what? The one-size-fits-all templates and can be really, really, really useful because it's going to structure your conversation. But if you haven't done that hard work beforehand, you're just going to fill it in for sake of film in and it's going to be pretty crap. So leading on salad, when do templates actually work? All right, And is it going to be fair? You know, templates and canvases, as I just alluded to there, they're not the always the bad guys. Sometimes they do save us from a bit of chaos. So they spend a bit more time talking about when they actually do work. So I think good templates and good canvases equal clarity and guidance, not so much the constraints. A great canvas doesn't box you in. It should guide you. It highlights the important things to think about without dictating how you must structure your work. So for example, lean business model canvas forces you to clarify key ideas. It doesn't lock you into rigid assumptions. If a lean product canvas is another great example, this will help you understand what are the key things that maybe you need to consider when you're doing some product discovery. Whoever uses, what are the jobs to be done, what are the outcomes, what the behaviours you need to see, These are things to guide everybody's thought processes to enable them. And everyone in the room and outside the room, everyone's going to have an interact with what it's produced to really understand what it is we're focusing on and to put a level of rigour right into what we're doing so it facilitates the conversation. It isn't just about the output. You know, if you think of a retrospective template to help teams reflect, but it doesn't save them exactly how they should feel or what they should do next. And it's just a case of filling it in and you're just kind of in love with the visuals and the cute theme of it or whatever it might be. But then it like gets in the way of people connecting to the real meaning of it, you know, crossing with retrospectives. There's no point in having a retrospective unless a team has a goal or knows how they're going to improve, then no template's going to save you from that. So hopefully you can begin to see the difference here. Like good templates provide you a scaffolding, not a straitjacket. So what's the best template I've ever used? Well, I think the template I've used more than any other is Roman Pictures Product Vision template, but I've had a hit or miss relationship with that over the years, and that's down to my skills rather than infinite. Roman's done. Roman's a legend given a huge amount to community, but I was definitely lacking some skill, was there? I say that Lean product discovery canvas is a great one for those facilitated conversations. And I think the Lean strategy canvas, again, because it's just a, an echo really of playing to win. I think they're very, very useful ways to structure conversations and they're currently my go TOS. Have I adapted them to make them work for me? No. But do I adapt the way that I have the conversations? Do I pause? Do we stop? Do we make sure we go off and do the research? Absolutely. So whilst I may adapt template sometimes, I also adapt how I facilitate it. I adapt the conversations, I adapt the activities we're going to be doing. And I make sure that before we even get in the room, I've done the hard work. So we have good ideas and good data and good information to then lead us through those structural conversations. And this for me then is the key to how we make templates work for us. So we're not going to throw templates and canvases out the window entirely. That would be wrong. It would be silly and naive and maybe a little bit too. What's the word I'm looking for here? A bit explosive, a bit extreme. So how are we going to, what are we going to do? How are we going to make them work for us? I think first of all, start with the problem, not the template, OK, not the canvas. So if you're looking at a template or canvas and then you're saying, oh, OK, I can see if this could be useful for us. Spend some time to tune into what is the real problem you're trying to solve. Why does this mean so much to me? What do I think this will do to help us? And then just spend some time, reflect, figure that out for you. Why do you feel so enamoured towards it? Is it because it seems like a really easy way to solve the problem? Because if you think it's just a really easy way to solve the problem and you're going to force your situation into it. So what I'm encouraging you to do is take a moment to think what's the problem you you are looking to solve by using it. Then decide how and if that template will help or if you need to tweak it, what type of activities you can then wrap up into certain parts of it. I would say customize your approach. Customize the template if needed, relentlessly. If it feels rigid and it isn't working for you, edit it. If it isn't working for you, I don't think the authors would ask you to just. Karen, is it because it wasn't working? You know, make it look different. Take a bit out, tweak a bit. You know, it's not a, it's a tool, it's not a rule book. It's not he's a scaffolding. It's not a straitjacket. But this does come of a caveat. And anyone that know me for any period of time will know that I dislike it when people throw stuff out before I've actually tried to understand it. So as you're going through and you maybe want to change the way it looks are great. You know, you want to break it down and change some of the exercises you're going to be using to kind of maybe go through that structure conversation. Great. But when it comes to then like tweaking and changing this kind of one-size-fits-all, Just spend a bit of time understanding what needs to be done before filling in that box. What's the output of it? And if you're really unsure about it and you think this doesn't fit, I can almost guarantee you if you contact the author, the creator of that, I'm pretty certainly have a conversation with you. They're all great humans and they've all tried to help the world and what the last thing they want is for their canvases and their templates to be misused. So reach out to them and have the conversation with them to see just what you can learn and say them anything like using templates. Use them as a conversation starter, not a final document. A good canvas and template sparks discussion. It shouldn't just be filled in and forgotten. Also, once you have filled it in and you don't want to be forgotten, maybe it needs to evolve. Maybe you need to find a standard way to communicate the information within there and take it all through the journey that you went on to create that information, but in a more standard format for your organization so it's easier for people to tune in and engage with. There's nothing wrong with that. You know, I've spent a lot of time recently looking at canvases and figuring out how can I make these easier communicable in an organization so that people aren't looking at and seeing the template or the canvas and actually seeing the great content that's in there. So we can talk about that. And there is nothing wrong with creating a a slide or two in that company's standard format just to help portray the information in the way which is easier people for people to consume. I would never start with that. Because if you show people a slide and it's here in the boxes you need to fill in, oh great, it's a template, I'll just fill this in. Never isn't that's not the point. Like what I'm saying is we put the hard work in and then we represent that in the way which is easy to consume. Say whilst yeah, you don't want to fill in the canvas or template and it just be totally forgotten, it doesn't mean it can't evolve into something which is easier for people to consume. But if it doesn't mean anything, then kill dead templates. If a template isn't helping a canvas isn't helping, stop using it. Not all tools need to be permanent, and of course, we always need to inspect and adapt. So this was yet another episode of me talking to you one-on-one, and we've covered a lot. But for me, here are the key takeaways. Templates should work for you, not the other way around. They can be really powerful tools, but only if used with intent. If they are stifling thinking so there's instead of sparking insights, ditch it. Or modify the conversation, the activity, the thing you're doing to create that part of that canvas on template. And most importantly, don't mistake fitting in the template but actually making progress. Now I really want to hear from you. What's your experience with templates and canvases? Do you love them? Do you hate them? Do you think what I've said is a load of BS? Have you got a template Horror Story or an unexpected success story that you can share with us? I want to hear your thoughts on LinkedIn. Like, RIP me the shreds. I love a good conversation. So tag me, Ben Maynard, and let's have the conversation and start this the the discussion because the best insights come from real experiences, not me just blabbering out on a podcast, not just fitting in another formal commercial template. And if you've enjoyed this episode, make sure that you follow me in the podcast on LinkedIn, because then there'll be lots of other fellow agile folks on there that maybe you might learn something from too. So that is it for today, until next time when we will hopefully have any guests coming on. But I'll keep that a secret as to who that might be. Keep challenging the status quo. Don't let a bad canvas hold your back.