Good business ideas may just happen, but great results take careful development and management planning. An exceptional business plan is significant to orienting yourself towards your goals, cementing the key elements and features of your product, directing your team in accomplishing tasks, and driving business growth. However, traditional business plans simply do not allow modern-day owners, managers, and team members to create achievable or sustainable goals and procedures. Fortunately, business plans have evolved and adapted to the needs of the contemporary business world. With advanced apps such as LeanBoard, developed for Jira and Confluence, leaders are equipped to bring their products to life and drive their teams to success. Try it today in either LeanBoard for Jira or LeanBoard for Confluence for free!

What is the Traditional Business Plan?

The traditional business plan involves sitting down with the management team or other project leaders and drawing up an incredibly detailed framework. It can take hours, days, or weeks to create an effective business plan that considers every single necessary aspect. In the end, leaders have a fixed document from which they can draw in times of misdirection or miscommunication. There are multiple issues with the conventional business plan for the vast majority of modern businesses, namely:

• Blindspots: When you are developing a business plan with a blank document, you simply do not have the framework or template to fill in all the important information. Often, this leads to missing details that are crucial to a clear and actionable vision.
• Fixed: The document is left as-is once it reaches a final copy, leaving little room for changes and updates that may occur during the product development process. Today, business plans must be able to adjust to new information at the drop of a hat.
• Inaccessible: Typically, management shares the business plan amongst themselves but they infrequently involve their whole team in the process or allow them access to the document. In today’s age, savvy owners and managers know leaving developers out of the loop can lead to disaster or failure.

How does LeanBoard make Business Plans Better?

While conventional business plans may have been suitable in the past, state-of-the-art software improves business plans and increases both short-term and long-term success. In particular, with LeanBoard, leaders have the opportunity to bring their whole team together to determine and develop an effective and efficient business plan. LeanBoard confronts the aforementioned issues with old business plans in multiple ways:

• Structure: LeanBoard provides pre-made templates that allow your team to organize key information in distinct, labeled boxes. Rather than beginning with a blank sheet of paper, templates provide adequate direction to get started. Furthermore, the boards can be custom-designed to fit your business’s specific needs. For instance, whereas the traditional system determines long term goals from the beginning, your structure can be broken down into smaller, attainable goals.
• Engagement: Traditional business plans were black and white text, with standard visuals such as charts and graphs. LeanBoard makes it possible to integrate several forms of media, not only increasing visual appeal and engaging team members but actively adding important and vital information to the board. You can add images, video, audio, notes, amongst many other features.
• Live: Rather than taking days or weeks to develop a business plan, a live template in which leaders can continuously reflect, update, remove, or add is ideal for fast-paced, constantly-learning teams. In this way, owners and managers can review and update objectives as necessary throughout development.
• Accessible: Leaders can choose to share any boards with key stakeholders such as team members. In this manner, insights and information can be brought to the table easily from various sources. Moreover, team members have the ability to refer to the business plan at any point in time which allows for greater precision with goals and tasks.

How can I make a Great Business Plan with LeanBoard?

When you use LeanBoard to create a business plan, consider having a meeting with management and key team members while developing your board/s together. The following features are notably advantageous for any business plan:

• Vision: Every business should have a clear vision, indicating where they want to go in the long-run. With LeanBoard, you can use charts or split templates to further break down your vision into values and accessible objectives.
• Competitors: When you research your competitors, their products, and their channels, you gain critical insight into product gaps that you can fill or what precisely about your product will give you a unique advantage. LeanBoard allows you to integrate visual information right into your boards, giving your colleagues useful information along with key notes or documents.
• Customers: If you consider your customers from the beginning, you will have an easier time determining and maintaining a strong vision. You can use LeanBoard to create personas and design user story mapping. In this way, you can focus on user value throughout your business plan and beyond.
• Marketing Strategy: One of the components which can be discovered in your personas and user story mapping is how your target customers will find out about your product and acquire your product. You can add art mockups for posters and magazines, integrate videos that would appeal to your consumer as reference, or include marketing research and strategy guides, amongst many other features.
• Product Planning: Although you may not dive into depth in your business plan, product planning is an imperative part of any successful business plan. You may wish to develop a skeleton of a greater product roadmap or link to another board where you develop a product roadmap.
• Financial Planning: It is important for any business to know their current and anticipated expenses and revenues. You can add checklists of tasks to complete to gain resources or make partnerships in this section as well.

Where can I try LeanBoard?

LeanBoard allows leaders of today to easily prepare for the business success of tomorrow. When you and your team can continuously work together to develop clear goals and strategies, your business plan can constantly adapt and grow along with your business and product. Try LeanBoard for Jira or LeanBoard for Confluence for free today and reap the benefits!