Business strategy frameworkfor founders and teams
The Sunflower Model starts with the capabilities underneath your products. From that centre, a team generates product, service, and market petals; scores them against shared criteria; and tests the strongest hypothesis with customers.
Scroll to build the metaphor from its taproots upward. The matrix produces a prioritized hypothesis, not a final answer. The Walkabout is what tests it.
01 · The taproots
The public ebook calls irreducible competencies the taproots: essential capabilities that cannot be usefully broken down further. Find them by listing candidate competencies, repeatedly asking why they matter, and checking what sits beneath the products you sell.
What more fundamental capability generated this?
Irreducibles can be plural. The later ontology says strong companies often depend on mutually reinforcing competency constellations, not one isolated capability.
02 · The stem
The current official site calls the stem the infrastructure and value proposition that support the flower. The public ebook instead calls it the external driving forces—technology, regulation, and market shifts—that can support or hinder a petal.
What supports this petal, and what external force could weaken it?
Neither source calls the stem Leverage. Leverage is a criterion: whether a capability can transfer across products, services, or markets.
03 · The centre
The centre holds the team's core competencies: distinctive, hard-won capabilities beneath its products. The public ebook tests a core competency three ways—difficulty of imitation, leverage across products or markets, and measurable customer value.
What do we do better than others, underneath what we sell?
The later ontology calls a reusable, irreducible, generative capability a Competency Prime, and calls reinforcing groups of primes competency constellations.
04 · The petals
Petals are the products, services, markets, and other offerings generated from the core. Teams first generate possibilities, then use a shared criteria matrix to rank them. A high-ranking petal is still only a hypothesis until customers test it.
Where else could these competencies solve a customer problem?
Filled and outlined petals are this site's illustration convention for pursued and unchosen options; the supplied sources do not prescribe that visual encoding.
The source-backed process starts with core competencies, generates petals from them, ranks those petals with a team-built criteria matrix, and tests the strongest hypothesis through direct customer conversations. The self-check below only screens possible competencies against the public ebook's three criteria.
The objects
Start hereno company documents needed
This is a screening exercise, not a diagnosis. Name up to three candidate competencies, then test each for difficulty of imitation, leverage across offerings, and measurable customer value. A positive result is a reason to investigate further—not a Competency Prime verdict.
Not screenedName it and answer all three source-backed questions.
Not screenedName it and answer all three source-backed questions.
Not screenedName it and answer all three source-backed questions.
Nothing screened yet. Complete at least one candidate.
Your candidates and screening results travel with the request. They remain hypotheses until deeper work tests them.
Four stages grounded in the public ebook and current official model.
01
List the capabilities you believe sit beneath your products, then keep asking what more fundamental capability generated each one. Test the candidates for difficulty of imitation, leverage across products or markets, measurable customer value, and proof in the company's history.
02
Generate products, services, markets, and other opportunities that meaningfully use the core. Start broadly, but reject ideas that require the company to abandon the capabilities it actually possesses.
03
The whole team contributes criteria and scores every petal against them. Large differences are discussed, scores may be revised, and the totals force-rank the options. The winner is a prioritized hypothesis—not a conclusion.
04
Agree on consistent questions, speak directly with prospective customers and ecosystem players, and listen rather than sell. Use what the team learns to revise the criteria, rescore the matrix, confirm the petal, or abandon it.
Unresolved, on purpose
UVL consistently begins with Uniqueness and Value. The supplied materials disagree on the final axis, and they apply the evaluator to different objects. No supplied source reconciles either difference.
Reading A
Uniqueness Value Leverage
Rob’s February 2026 explanation and May ontology use Leverage for competency primes: the ability to transfer, scale, replicate, automate, and generate adjacent offerings. The current official site also uses Leverage, Uniqueness, and Value as baseline criteria for product ideas.
Reading B
Uniqueness Value Longevity
The August 2026 stock-selection prompt uses Longevity when evaluating a Competency Prime. It does not define Longevity or explain the change from Leverage.
Until Rob resolves the terminology, this page does not combine the two, invent a definition for Longevity, or claim one universal UVL score. Any future analysis must name which source, axis definition, and object it uses.
Four guardrails stated directly in the supplied materials.
Products and services are expressions of capability. The process keeps drilling until it reaches the hard-won skills, systems, knowledge, or relationships underneath them.
A high matrix score only prioritizes a hypothesis. The supplied materials repeatedly reserve validation for the Walkabout and the customer evidence it produces.
Team members score individually, then discuss meaningful differences. The disagreement is useful because it surfaces information, assumptions, and missing criteria.
The Walkabout is direct, structured contact with customers and ecosystem participants. Its purpose is to listen and learn—not to pitch, sell, or borrow certainty from internal analysis.
Bring the capabilities your team believes it has, the products and services those capabilities support, and the history that might prove them. The work is to drill toward irreducibles, generate petals, build a shared criteria matrix, and plan the direct customer conversations needed to test its leading hypothesis.
Use the form to ask about format, scope, and what your team should prepare.
Not ready for that? Screen possible competencies or read the four stages first.