Key Activities: what does your business actually do?
Key Activities are the most important actions your business must take to make its model work. Understanding them helps you focus resources and identify where you are and are not adding value.
Key Activities: what does your business actually do?
Key Activities are the most important things a company must do to make its business model work. They produce the value proposition, reach customers, maintain relationships and generate revenue. Get these wrong and nothing else on the canvas matters.
Three categories of key activities
Production Designing, making and delivering a product. Most relevant for manufacturing businesses. Quality, speed and cost are the primary concerns.
Problem solving Coming up with new solutions to individual customer problems. Most relevant for consultancies, professional service firms and hospitals. Knowledge management and continuous learning are critical here.
Platform and network Maintaining and developing a platform that others use. Relevant for marketplaces, social networks and SaaS businesses. The key activities are platform management, service provisioning and growing the network.
How to identify your key activities
For a consulting firm: client diagnosis and workshop facilitation. For a food delivery app: restaurant onboarding, logistics coordination and software development. For a media company: content creation and audience development.
If an activity is not essential to the value proposition, it is not a key activity. Many businesses confuse busy work with value-creating work. We see this constantly. Teams that are very busy but not actually moving the needle.
Key activities vs. key resources
Activities are things you do. Resources are things you have. A software company's key activity is software development. Its key resource is the development team and the codebase. Both matter, but they are different concepts and worth keeping separate on the canvas.
Questions to explore with clients
- What are the activities that, if you stopped doing them, your customers would immediately feel the difference?
- Which activities are you better at than most competitors?
- Which activities consume most of your team's time, and are they all creating value?
- Are there activities you are doing in-house that a partner could do better or cheaper?
- If you had to cut 30% of your operational costs, which activities would you protect and which would you outsource?
- What activities are you currently not doing that you should start?