Key Activities: What Goes in This Business Model Canvas Block

What the Key Activities block means

The Key Activities block lists the 3-5 most important things a company must do to create and deliver its value proposition and make the business model work.

Note the word “do.” This block is about actions, not assets. It answers a deceptively simple question: of everything your company does in a week, which few activities actually create the value your customers pay for?

Key Activities sits in the infrastructure zone, the left side of the canvas. Where the right side describes the value you promise customers, the left side describes the machinery that delivers on that promise. This block is the operational heart of that machinery: the work that must happen, repeatedly and exceptionally well, for the model to function.

The block also carries a hidden second question: what must we do exceptionally well in-house, versus what could a partner do for us? Anything that merely needs to get done, rather than done better than anyone else, is a candidate for the Key Partnerships block instead.

What goes in it

Write 3-5 activities, each one a specific verb phrase. Osterwalder groups key activities into three categories, and knowing which category dominates your model tells you a lot about what kind of company you are building.

Production activities. Designing, making, and delivering a product. These dominate manufacturing models: product development, supply chain management, quality control, fulfillment. If your value proposition is a physical or digital product, at least one production activity belongs here.

Problem-solving activities. Knowledge work applied to individual customer problems. These dominate consultancies, agencies, law firms, and hospitals: diagnosing client situations, designing solutions, training, and continuous knowledge management. The output is customized, so the activity is the expertise in motion.

Platform and network activities. Managing a platform that connects parties: service provisioning, matchmaking between supply and demand, platform promotion, and rule setting. These dominate marketplaces and software platforms, where the product is the functioning network itself.

Most real companies mix categories. A SaaS company does production (building software) and platform work (managing integrations and uptime). The discipline is in keeping the total list short: 3-5 entries that genuinely make or break the model.

The guiding questions professionals ask

Consultants filling this block work through a consistent set of questions:

• What key activities do our value propositions require? What about our channels, customer relationships, and revenue streams?
• What must we do exceptionally well that competitors cannot easily match?
• If everything is key, nothing is. Which 3-5 activities genuinely make or break the model?
• Which activities create value, and which merely keep the lights on? Only the former belong in this block.
• Which of these activities should we stop doing ourselves and hand to a partner?

The last two questions do the real filtering. Payroll keeps the lights on. It does not belong on the canvas. And an activity you perform at industry-average quality, with no strategic reason to own it, probably belongs in Key Partnerships instead.

Three concrete examples

Uber: platform activities at planetary scale

Uber is the textbook platform-activity company. It owns almost no cars, yet it coordinated roughly 3.8 billion trips in Q4 2025 across 202 million monthly consumers and 9.7 million drivers and couriers. Its key activities are what make that possible:

• Real-time marketplace balancing. Continuously tuning prices and incentives on both sides so a rider request meets a nearby driver within minutes, city by city, hour by hour.
• Incentive engineering. Deciding where subsidy dollars (driver bonuses, rider promos) buy durable liquidity, and where the flywheel now runs unsubsidized. Cutting these subsidies once networks matured is what unlocked Uber’s first operating profit in 2023.
• Trust and safety operations. Background checks, insurance, fraud prevention. A single high-profile failure can trigger a city ban, so safety is existential, not cosmetic.
• Regulatory and public-affairs management. Negotiating driver classification, airport access, and caps in thousands of jurisdictions is a core competency for Uber, not overhead. For most companies, legal work would never appear in this block. For Uber, it makes or breaks market access.

Notice what is absent: driving. The activity that customers experience most directly is performed entirely by partners. That is the block doing its job, separating what Uber must do from what others do for it. The full breakdown is in our Uber business model canvas example.

A specialty coffee roaster: production activities

A regional roaster selling to cafes and direct-to-consumer subscribers would list: sourcing and cupping green beans from specific farms, roasting and quality-control profiling, and managing weekly fulfillment so coffee ships within days of roasting. Freshness is the value proposition, so the roast-to-ship cycle is a key activity, not a warehouse detail. Marketing matters, but if the roaster’s channel is wholesale plus subscriptions, “building wholesale relationships” earns a spot before “posting on social media” does.

A boutique data consultancy: problem-solving activities

A ten-person firm helping mid-market retailers use their sales data would list: diagnosing each client’s data infrastructure, designing and building custom dashboards and models, and codifying what it learns into reusable playbooks. That last one is easy to miss and strategically vital: knowledge management is what lets a problem-solving firm improve margins over time instead of reinventing every engagement from zero.

Common mistakes (and the fix for each)

Mistake 1: Listing routine operations. Accounting, HR, answering emails. These are necessary, but they are not key. Every company on earth does them, so they explain nothing about why your model works. Fix: Apply the make-or-break test. If a competitor could match this activity by hiring a generic provider, it is operations, not strategy. Cut it.

Mistake 2: Confusing activities with resources. “Our engineering team” is a resource. “Continuous ML model development” is an activity. Teams blur these two blocks constantly, and the result is a canvas that lists the same things twice. Fix: Use the noun-verb test. Assets you must have go in Key Resources. Things you must do go here. If your entry has no verb, move it or rewrite it.

Mistake 3: Activities disconnected from the value proposition. The value proposition promises same-day delivery, but logistics appears nowhere in Key Activities. Reviewers check for exactly this internal-consistency failure, and it is one of the fastest ways to lose credibility with an investor reading your canvas. Fix: For each promise in your Value Propositions block, ask “what activity delivers this?” and confirm it appears here. If you cannot draw the arrow, one of the two blocks is wrong.

How this block connects to the rest of the canvas

No block on the left side stands alone, and Key Activities has arrows running in every direction:

• Value Propositions drive it. Every key activity should exist to create or deliver something on the right side of the canvas. If you cannot trace an activity to a value proposition, channel, relationship, or revenue stream, delete it.
• Key Resources enable it. Activities consume resources: platform management requires engineers and data, production requires facilities and supply chains. The two blocks should read as a matched pair.
• Key Partnerships is its mirror. The activities you deliberately do not perform in-house show up there. Uber’s canvas makes the split explicit: it does matchmaking and safety, while drivers, insurers, and autonomous-vehicle developers do the rest.
• Cost Structure prices it. Every major cost should trace back to a key activity, resource, or partnership. Uber’s R&D and platform operations are largely fixed costs that amortize over 40 million-plus daily trips, which is why its key activity of marketplace balancing scales so profitably.

Filling blocks in isolation is the most cited whole-canvas mistake. A canvas is a system, not nine independent lists, and Key Activities is where the system’s feasibility gets tested.

Where it appears in the fill order

Key Activities is block 7 of 9 in the recommended sequence: Customer Segments, Value Propositions, Channels, Customer Relationships, Revenue Streams, Key Resources, Key Activities, Key Partnerships, Cost Structure.

The logic of arriving this late is deliberate. You design operations to deliver the value, not the reverse. By block 7 you know who the customer is, what you promised them, and how revenue arrives, so the question “what must we do exceptionally well?” finally has enough context to be answered honestly. Starting on the left (“we have a factory, what can we sell?”) is the classic anti-pattern: designing the engine before deciding where to drive.

Coming immediately after Key Resources also sets up a useful check: for every asset you listed, ask what you actually do with it. And Key Activities feeds directly into block 8, because deciding what you must do yourself simultaneously decides what a partner should do instead.

If you are working through the canvas now, our step-by-step guide to filling in a business model canvas walks all nine blocks in this order, and the free business model canvas template gives you a printable and editable canvas to work on. For deeper worked examples, the Complete Business Model Toolkit includes ten real-company canvases with every block, including this one, filled in and annotated.