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Exercise: Creating a Measurable and Achievable Goal

Quantifying the Business Need

Exercise: Defining Your User Lifecycle Funnel

The User Lifecycle Math

The Dangers of Starting from the Business Need

Expert Advice from Christina Wodtke

There are a lot of different methods for defining your business need, but there’s only one goal. You need to understand the primary thing about your business that you should improve right now.

Sometimes you don’t need to go out of your way to determine your business needs. They’re sent down to you from on high. The CEO declares that this quarter the company will focus on a specific type of revenue or on cutting costs. The SVP of the department says you have to hit an annual revenue target. Your boss hands you a set of goals for your team.

In those cases, your task is to figure out how you, working on your specific product or in your specific business unit, can contribute to the goal that has already been defined for you.

Of course, if you’re the CEO, or if your company’s only quarterly goal is “survive until next quarter,” your job is a little bigger. You need to decide what your single point of concentration is going to be.

Why? Because having a single, achievable goal will simplify your decision-making process. More on that later.

To determine that goal, we’re going to run an exercise. You’ll find a lot of exercises in this book. You should try to run all of them. More than that, you should run most of them with your team.

First, I want to say an important word about teams. When I describe teams, I use titles like product manager, designer, researcher, and engineer. Those may or may not be the members of your team. Maybe you have a product owner or a project manager or a scrum master or a creative director or a principal scientist or a machinist. That’s great. Include them.

The people who should be running these exercises with you are the people you work with every day to build a product. These are people who are actively involved in making decisions about who your user is and how the product should work for that user.

For some exercises, you’re going to bring in external stakeholders who don’t work on the product every day but who have important input. These might be people from the legal department or from finance. Your company might not even have those departments. Again, use your judgment.

I also assume that you, the person reading this book, are someone who is making a lot of decisions about how the product will work and how the team will work together. You might be a product manager, a designer, an entrepreneur, the head of an innovation team, or dozens of other things.

The titles aren’t important. What’s important is making sure that the people who are making product decisions have all the information they need to build the best product they can.

EXERCISE