Data Product Toolkit®version 2.0

5 min readSep 28, 2022

Design Data Product under 60 minutes. Data Product Toolkit™ is intended for business purposes. It has been built to enable fast Data Product development. The toolkit is based on experiences gained from over 200 data product cases.

Why would I need it?

Ask yourself, do you want to sell barrels of oil or gasoline? Which is more usable and valuable for the consumers? Which has bigger profit? If you don’t like the oil comparison (for a good reason), how about milk products then? Raw milk or Swiss cheese? Which is more profitable? Or which carries more value for consumer, wood or timber? And if you build a custom made furniture from wood, the value is even bigger. The point is that unrefined rawmaterial has lower value than refined product.

Data is no different. You need to productize and refine it before sales.

It does not matter if you use your data only internally to refine other services. You need to package data to make it reusable across your oganization. The later you decide to productize data, the more costly it will be. With productized data you can gain results faster due to speed of reuse capability. But internal use is just one layer. What about ecosystem and public layers?

From the provider firm’s point of view, we can say that you need to productize data for internal use to gain maximum speed, you need to productiz and servitize data to maximize partner network value and you need to servitize data to maximize sales and customer value.

Is it for us?

Typical users are companies which collect large amount of data from surrounding environment, customers, products, events and devices to enable data driven decision making and improvements as well as innovation.

Data product toolkit® version 2.0

Data Product Toolkit® version 2.0 consists of five canvases:

Data Product Value Propositions
Data Product Canvas.
Data Product Lifecycle canvas
Data Asset Evaluation canvas
Data Commodity Mapping Canvas

Canvases are available as Miro boards, which can be filled in cooperatively online in a workshop. Canvases are available as PDF files too.

1. DATA PRODUCT VALUE PROPOSITIONS

Data Product must be built for purpose! Canvas focuses on customer and their needs. This canvas helps you to ensure product-market fit and identify customer’s pains and gains as well as pain relievers.

See the introduction of the Data Product Value Proposition canvas from the below video.

2. DATA ASSET EVALUATION CANVAS

Typically customer problem is known and a solution as a data product is built to remove the customer’s problem. What if the problems are not known and we still want to proceed? Then one option is to use “Data Asset Driven Product Exploration” approach.

It starts from evaluating your data assets first instead of jumping to filling in the data product value proposition canvas. In this approach we start from data and travel towards finding the customer problem and our first set of data products.

See the introduction of the Data Asset Evaluation canvas from the below video.

3. DATA PRODUCT DEVELOPMENT CYCLE

Every digital product has a development cycle and it has to be tied to business and data strategy. It has to be managed and support iterative development with clear process. Data Product development cycle canvas offers ready-made model to manage data product development from emerging customer needs to product sunset. Canvas has adapted successful lean design driven development model to minimize waste.

4. DATA PRODUCT CANVAS

Canvas focuses on collecting product details in one spot. It is your product design template that you iterate until your team agrees that all aspects have been taken into account. Filled canvas helps you to communicate product purpose to business management, how to market it, estimate costs and how it is monetized.

See the introduction of the Data Product canvas (version 1, can be applied to version 2 as well) from the below video.

5. DATA COMMODITY MAPPING CANVAS

Canvas helps you to evaluate approriate moment to enter markets and order in which to develop your service candidates. Evaluation is based on two axis: market pull and implementation push.

Before jumping to this, create multiple candidate products with Data Product Canvas and then use this canvas to define the relevance of each candidate product.

Data Product Toolkit® training material

During 2021–2022 we have published 50 online learning material containing detailed video format instructions how to use canvases efficiently, what to take into account and how to implement your data strategy.

50 Data Economy updates available for you for free

SaaS version coming — get in touch!

We have helped over 200 data products to see the world and worked with dozens of companies. Read more about the toolkit. The SaaS version of the toolkit is in the development.