Welcome to BA Tarot.com
Business Analysis Elicitation CardsBA Tarot is a deck of cards that are based on a structured framework to form a creative toolkit for business analysis, product ownership, and personal growth.
Each deck of cards are organised through six suits — Covering:
The Organisation or organisation of self,
Knowledge and learning,
Resources and their protection,
Conduct (activities and actions),
Strategy,
and Winning (competitive advantage)
The cards also have key words on the reverse like trust, priorities, empathy, resilience, and value
to spark better questions, uncover blind spots, and guide clearer decisions.
Business Analysis Tarot Cards
Check out the NEW versions of the cards are available: BA Tarot V4.0, Product Tarot and Personal Tarot
What is all this about Tarot Cards?
Imagine you are in front of a client and you are trying to understand how the organisation is structured, what its strategy is and how you can help deliver an amazing solution? Where do you start? Do you dive into the detail, perhaps missing some core components? Does the client even know what their strategy or business situation is?
In your bag you have a deck of cards that helps you to elicit some of the details, with prompts to remind you (and the client) all the aspects of an organisation that need to be considered during Business Analysis Projects. Each card represents an essential aspect of the organisation and on the reverse are considerations that you can use as discussion points. That is the value of the BA Tarot Cards. Imagine how useful a deck of 42 cards that have 6 business considerations on the back of each one. That is 234 considerations that can be used to help elicit ideas, knowledge and information.
That is how the BA Tarot cards work, they act as a system for you to structurally investigate the business, its rules and enable you to pose questions to the user to help you investigate deeper. All presented in a handy protective bag combined with different techniques that you can use. – you can even create your own techniques!
NEW ! Now there are three sets of cards
A new way to think about organisations, products, and people.
The idea for BA Tarot began in an unusual place — the NATO six warfighting functions. In the military, functions like movement, protection, intelligence, sustainment, fires, and command provide clarity in the fog of war. I re-imagined these for business, creating six domains that reflect the forces shaping any organisation: see origins page
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Organisation – structure, governance, and context (Command)
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Knowledge – data, feedback, insight, gaps and assumptions (Intelligence)
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Resources – finance, time, skills, tangible and intangible assets (Protection)
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Conduct – promises, consistency, motivation, methods, communication (Sustainment & Logistics)
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Strategy – priorities, scope, time, tactics, change (Movement & Manoeuvre)
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Winning – outcomes, measurement, sustainability, motivation, mastery (Fires or Firepower)
Each card carries prompts on the reverse — short trigger words like trust, priorities, resilience, feedback, opportunity — designed to spark structured conversations, surface blind spots, and unlock clarity. As I used the cards I realised that although focussed on the business, with some slight adaptation the cards could be used for other purposes. Whilst acting as a product owner in a project I adapted the cards to have a more product focus rather than business and then I further adapted the cards to look at an individual – to help me with mentoring and enable mentees achieve their goals.
From Organisations → Products → People
So over time, the framework evolved into two new decks:
Product Tarot (for Product Owners) and Personal Tarot (for individuals and mentors)
Here, the suits are tuned for product value:
Vision – Product purpose, context, ownership, focus
Knowledge – User needs, research, product insight, bias & assumptions
Resources – Product budget, constraints, assets, stakeholder demands
Experience – behaviour, promise, assurance, the “why” behind delivery
Strategy – Product roadmap approaches, time, scope, priorities
Winning – Product specific metrics, sustainability, user motivation, techniques or automation
Prompts on the reverse include terms like personas, backlog, ROI, empathy, trust, value, adoption — helping Product Owners balance customer, business, and technology perspectives. Product page here
Personal Tarot (for mentoring and coaching)
The same six suits shift to guide personal growth too: I am a big fan of mentoring and have supported and run mentoring programs so it was a natural progression to consider the individual. Personal page here :
Essence – Personal values, identity, purpose
Knowledge – Individual learning, networks, reflection, blind spots
Resources – Money, skills, relationships, resilience
Behaviour – Individuals habits, promises, authenticity, communication
Cunning – Personal priorities, time and planning, opportunity, tactics
Winning – Personal goals, progress measurement, sustainability, personal motivation
Trigger words on the reverse such as self-belief, learning paths, resilience, balance, mastery invite reflection on your own journey.
How You Can Use the Cards
Business Analysts / Leaders – Use the BA Tarot in workshops, discovery sessions, or retrospectives to check alignment, explore risks, and uncover blind spots.
Product Owners / Teams – Use the Product Tarot for backlog refinement, roadmap planning, discovery sprints, and retrospectives — keeping value as the guiding star.
Individuals / Mentors – Use the Mentor Tarot for coaching, reflection, and self-development — as prompts for goal setting, self-awareness, and navigating change.
Whether you’re analysing an organisation, shaping a product, or mentoring yourself or others, the Tarot decks give you a structured but creative way to ask better questions — and find better answers.
Each suit Hearts, Circles, Triangles, Spades, Diamonds and Clubs have six corresponding cards:
The Castle, which denotes foundation.
The King, which denotes ambition & authority. (or at least the impression of it)
The Queen, which denotes insightful or relational aspect.
The Joker, which denotes the actor or the wildcard or unforeseen variable.
The Knight, which denotes the doer or method/movement.
The Sage, which denotes the thinker or the strategic perspective.
As well as the suits and their respective cards there are some additional cards to represent overarching questions that I often use to extract requirements detail.
6 W’s Cards: These cards are always useful when investigating actions, activities and user stories. They have been a standard way of formulating or analysing rhetorical questions since antiquity dating back to Cicero in 43BC. Once you have Identified the activity, asking who, what why etc. will provide further clarity. The Final three cards, what I call “The Holy Trinity” are considerations that need to be remembered across the entire project or organisation. These cards should always be visible to remind you of the primary goals. “Value to the Customer”, “Value to the organisation” and “value through change” (usually the IT system in BA terms).
There are some instructions and techniques Here but the Analyst is free to use the cards as they see fit. I hope to expand on these methodologies as we find more applications. Often I simply lay down the aces in a circle and work through the cards with the subject to get their perspective on the business or their views on a particular issue. Inappropriate cards are easily dismissed resulting in a focussed set of issues.
New Cards in the V4, Product and Personal cards include: Backlog for BA and PO, The Journey, and The solution for Personal and Product cards.
Getting hold of a set:
The site is now for information only at present (I am working on getting someone to distribute them) .
The shop has been closed due to continuous attempts to hack it (and my lack of time to manage the security.) If you want a deck contact me and I will be able to discuss getting you a copy.