From Plan to Action: Driving International Growth with the Strategic Solution Canvas
A new tool for crafting and communicating your action plan
A major temptation when working on international growth is to “boil the ocean”. When there is opportunity to drive growth in every direction, focusing on a single problem or initiative can feel overly incremental.
In fact, choosing a narrow, well-scoped problem or initiative is far more likely to lead to success than attempting to move forward on multiple fronts at once.
Internationally-focused teams have limited resources, diverse stakeholder interests, and frequently, limited direct areas of ownership. In this context, coordination of focus, alignment of purpose and a common agreement on successful outcomes is essential.
How do you keep stakeholders and partners aligned and, quite literally, on the same page?
For me, strategic clarity is the key to unlock progress and agreement in organizations. I’ve frequently used the the Business Model Canvas to create a shareable, common artifact that reflects “the plan”.
The original Business Model Canvas was developed by Alex Osterwalder, co-founder of Strategyzer, in 2010. It established a blueprint template for mapping out the strategic plan of a business.
The beauty of the template is in its design. Across 9 categories, it takes a systematic approach to identifying the building blocks of a business strategy. Its strength is in its simplicity - a single page that is easily shared and understood far quicker than a length PowerPoint deck or strategy document.
Drawing inspiration from the original canvas, Pavel Soukenik and I created a variation for localization and international growth teams. This maintains the clarity and simplicity of the original canvas, while focusing on the essential elements needed for successful international growth.
The Strategic Solution Canvas
The Strategic Solution Canvas is designed with 10 building blocks across 4 categories:
Pain point
Solution
Partners and resources
Business case
Each categories builds on the previous and helps construct a cohesive plan that can be socialized with business partners.
How Do I Use the Strategic Solution Canvas?
The canvas is best used as a collaborative tool, as part of a broader planning exercise. Ideally, you will have created your high level international growth strategy and mapped your customer journey
The canvas is best suited for small teams to create together. This will help refine ideas along the way and ensure the final artifact is logical and cohesive. Don’t treat the canvas as your backlog for ideas or repository of multiple themes you intend to focus on. Instead, select one problem or opportunity and create a canvas accordingly. If you have the capacity to work on 2 or 3 problems - say, in a single quarter - then create one canvas for each.
By definition, the canvas is a summary and distillation of a bank of research, insights and ideas. It’s not a short-cut or replacement for doing the background preparation, but is a fantastic tool to test your plan and communicate broadly.
Let’s break down the canvas section-by-section and explore the building blocks:
Pain Point
This section establishes a clear definition of what the problem is and its context for your customer. This firmly places the customer at the center of your plan and avoids ambiguity over what needs to be addressed.
1 - Customer Pain Point
Think about the obstacles, functional problems or risks you may be aware of. This pain point may have been identified directly from customer feedback or when creating your customer journey map. Now, ask yourself:
What is the problem or pain the customer is experiencing?
What is not optimal about it?
How big of a problem is it?
Who experiences this?
Where and when?
How often?
2 - Channel
The Channels helps to scope your eventual solution. Be as specific as possible when thinking about the nature and context of where the problem exists:
What channels (email, website, chat support, etc.) are involved?
If multiple channels, what is the priority?
3 - Stage
When does the customer encounter this problem? At which stage is the problem visible and impactful?
Which stage or stages are impacted by this?
(e.g. awareness/discovery, evaluation, purchase, support/after-sales)
Solution
This is the central “how” of your canvas and integral to determine the resources and support you will need.
4 - Solution
Think through the activities, tools, milestones for this solution. Consider building visuals or use cases that explain the solution in detail.
What is the proposed solution to this problem?
What key activities will you take to address this pain point?
Will tools play a role in fixing the problem?
Do processes need to change?
And if so, how?
If this will be addressed in stages,
what are the key milestones?
Partners and Resources
This section focuses on “who” is involved and required for success. Ensuring completeness here helps corral stakeholders, identify the dependencies and craft the success metrics that will be tracked.
5 - Resources
Are there particular skill sets or resources required for this solution? Thinking about the specific requirements here will help in procurement and resource acquisition.
Who are the internal and external teams/individuals who will work on this?
Include tools or resources.
6 - Success Metrics
It’s important to agree on a common set of KPIs that will be jointly assessed and tracked by partner teams. This helps encourage a culture of partnership and joint ownership. If both parties are signed up to the same metrics, the ultimate success can be shared too.
Which joint KPIs (between you and your partner) will tell you and the company what impact your solution is having?
7 - Partners
Think about the different parts of the company that may play a role in solving this issue. Who can help, who must help? To what extent can the solution be solved with outsourced or temporary help?
Who are the teams or departments most closely associated with this issue?
Who are the key allies or partners you can work with?
Which suppliers can you leverage?
Which key activities do you want them to perform?
Business Case
This section may be the most important of all: the why. It is crucial to be able to connect your plan to the strategic direction of the company. Can you tie it to over-arching business goals or themes? In what way will it impact revenue, profitability, customer satisfaction?
Laying out the details here will set the scene for any financial request you need to make for headcount or contingent resources, or even to request hard commitments from partner teams. The easier you can make it for your senior leaders to see the value, the more likely you’ll get the support.
8 - Business Challenge
Start with framing the customer pain point in the context of a business problem. What is the negative impact on company goals or priorities? Is it causing churn or impeding sign ups?
What company-stated goals and priorities are negatively impacted by this pain point?
If we don’t solve this problem, how does it hurt the business?
9 - Investments
Before making a business case, work to assess the requirements - in time, money and focus - that are required for this plan to be successful.
Does the solution depend on other things?
How much time will it take?
What is the financial investment?
10 - Business Value
Finally, how will this plan deliver positive impact to business metrics and ROI? This is the wrapper that ties together the entire canvas and should be clear, measurable and well understood.
When demonstrating business value, it’s always advisable to use standard vernacular and metrics that are already tracked at the company. If you invent something new, you’ll need to spend time explaining and translating this new metric to a higher-level metric.
What business metrics will this solution improve and how?
What is the rolled-up effect of this improvement?
What ROI in business value does this solution have?
Putting It All Together
When you have created your Strategic Solution Canvas, you now have a simple, single artifact that can be shared with partners to ensure clarity of understanding and focus. It will also be hugely helpful to your own team to avoid misunderstanding of targets and intention.
Here’s an example of a Strategic Solution Canvas fully completed for a sample scenario where a website chatbot is presented in English-only:
The Strategic Localization Playbook - Free Download
This Strategic Solution Canvas is part of the Strategic Localization Playbook we designed for our Strategic Localization course. We have made the playbook available as a free download for the localization community. To access it, download from here: