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Startup Journey

The Startup Journey is a guided view over Canopy's Capability, Business Process, and Value Stream reference catalogues, built for founders and early EA practitioners at a startup. Instead of browsing three large, flat reference trees, it walks you through 5 startup lifecycle stages — Ideation & Validation, MVP Development, Launch & Product-Market Fit, Growth & Team Building, and Scale/Maturity/Exit — and for each stage surfaces a small, hand-curated subset of Business Capabilities, Business Processes, and Value Streams that matter most at that point, together with a short rationale for why each one matters.

Opening the page​

Click the user icon in the top-right corner of the app, expand Reference Catalogues in the menu (the section is collapsed by default to keep the menu compact), then click Startup Journey. The page is available to anyone with the inventory.view permission — the same permission used by the other three reference-catalogue browsers.

The 5 stages​

Use the stage tabs at the top of the page to move through the journey:

  1. Ideation & Validation — turning a raw idea into a validated concept worth building.
  2. MVP Development — building, protecting, and operating the minimum viable product.
  3. Launch & Product-Market Fit — the sales, marketing, billing, and customer-success motions needed to prove product-market fit.
  4. Growth & Team Building — scaling the team, customer base, and operating capacity.
  5. Scale / Maturity / Exit — the governance, risk, and compliance disciplines a maturing company needs.

Each stage has a short description explaining what it represents for a startup, shown just below the tabs.

What you see per stage​

Every stage shows three sections, matching the three reference catalogues:

  • Business Capabilities
  • Business Processes
  • Value Streams

Each item in a section shows:

  • Its catalogue id and name (resolved live from the same vendored reference-catalogue data the Capability, Process, and Value Stream Catalogue pages use, so it always matches).
  • A description, when the underlying catalogue entry has one.
  • A rationale — a short, specific explanation of why that item matters at this particular stage of a startup's life, curated for the Startup Journey.
  • A green "Already in your workspace" chip when a matching card already exists in your inventory (matched the same way as the other catalogue browsers — by catalogue id first, then by name).

Within each section, a small number of items are marked as the most critical ones for that stage — they show an amber star icon (hover it for an explanation) and sort to the top of the list, so the highest-priority items are always what you see first.

Cards already in your workspace​

An item that's already in your workspace behaves differently from the rest: its checkbox is disabled (it can't be selected — there's nothing to add), and "Select all" skips it automatically. Clicking anywhere on the card opens the existing card in a new browser tab instead of toggling a selection, so you can jump straight to it.

Selecting items and adding them to your workspace​

Tick the checkbox on any item not already in your workspace, or use a section's Select all button to select everything in that section (already-existing items are skipped). Selections persist as you move between stages, so you can pick items across multiple stages before adding them.

Once you have one or more items selected, a sticky bar appears at the bottom of the page with the current selection count and an Add to workspace button. Confirming:

  • Batches your selection by catalogue type and creates the corresponding cards via the same import logic used by the Capability, Process, and Value Stream Catalogue pages — BusinessCapability cards for capabilities, BusinessProcess cards for processes, and BusinessContext cards (subtype Value Stream) for value streams.
  • Skips anything that already exists in your workspace.
  • Auto-creates the same cross-catalogue relations the Value Stream Catalogue's import does (links from a new value-stream stage to existing capability/process cards it references), where those related cards already exist.

This requires the inventory.create permission — without it, the Add to workspace button is disabled with an explanatory tooltip.

Where the curated content comes from​

The stage-to-item mapping is hand-curated by the Canopy team and ships as part of the product, joined at request time against the same bundled Capability / Business Process / Value Stream reference data described in the Value Stream Catalogue guide. It is not a separate download and does not need an internet connection or an admin "fetch update" step — it always reflects whatever reference-catalogue data your Canopy instance currently has.