Business Plans Are Dead; Long Live Business Plans

I've found it useful to have a very lightweight version of a business plan in a wiki. The purpose is to help get the team on the same page - at least in the onset - and to keep track of some of the conclusions we've made from our research.

By "lightweight," I mean including a pitch statement (business summary), the core problem statement we're trying to solve, a bulleted list of types of competitors (direct & indirect), some info on the target audience (sometimes as personas), some market size & financial info, etc. It all fits onto one page and is easy to scan.

The wiki also means the plan can be changed anytime - as it often is & should be. We're constantly tweaking our story, our audience, our competitor mix, etc, as we go through the customer discovery process.

This document is somewhat close to Marty Cagan's Product Opportunity Assessment, though we've paired it down over time to the info that we found to be most useful. I don't know if our approach would work for others, but we've found it pretty handy so far.