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I love funnels and algorithms, and you should too. Building a product without a fundamental understanding of the business need behind it is like driving a car blindfolded.

Unfortunately, there are some very common problems that can be caused when we start with the business need, and I know there are a few designers out there who have been yelling, “but what about the users????” for several pages. Since we just spent most of the chapter talking about how important it is to start with the business need, I want to address some of the problems with that strategy as well.

Don’t worry. Just because we’re starting with the business need does not mean that we’re ending there.

We start by identifying what the business needs to be successful, because if the business isn’t successful, eventually that ruins things for everybody. The startup dead pool is littered with companies that had wonderful user experiences but couldn’t make enough money to survive.

But identifying a business need doesn’t mean that we ignore user needs. In fact, the next few chapters are all about identifying the user need. Remember, we make better products when we find ways to improve things for our business by improving things for our customers. It’s wonderful to make our customers happy, but customers should be happy to pay for great products.

When you identify a friction point in your funnel, your next move is to understand why users are falling out and to find a way to improve things for them at that step. You use the funnel to identify the business need, but that’s not the end of the story. In fact, it’s only the end of Chapter 1.

EXPERT ADVICE from Christina Wodtke

Christina Wodtke is an author, speaker, teacher, and product expert. She has been a general manager, a design executive, and a startup CEO. She spends a lot of her time teaching business to designers at the California College of the Arts, design thinking to entrepreneurs in public workshops and at Stanford Continuing Studies, and OKRs to everybody who needs a better way to measure their team’s performance.

Her book, Radical Focus, Achieving Your Most Important Goals with Objectives and Key Results, is a business book in the form of a fable about a struggling startup. It’s also a really fun, quick read. It introduces readers to a technique called OKRs to set business goals in a way that’s measurable and actionable.

“OKR” is short for Objectives and Key Results. It’s a system invented at Intel for setting and managing goals that’s been used in companies like Google, LinkedIn, and Twitter. Unfortunately, as with any deceptively simple framework, OKRs are often used poorly. Christina shared a few tips and an exercise to help you learn to use them better.

Christina explained that companies fail to reach their goals for five reasons:

• They haven’t prioritized the goals.

• They haven’t communicated the goals obsessively and comprehensively.

• They don’t have a plan to reach the goal.

• They haven’t made time for what matters.

• They give up, rather than iterate.

OKRs give companies a framework for picking and prioritizing their goals, communicating them in a way that makes things concrete for every member of the team, creating a plan for each individual, and providing a way to effectively measure real progress. It’s not easy, but neither is reaching your goals with no plan and no way of measuring how well you’re doing.

EXERCISE