Define Success

Learning Objectives

After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:

Explain the importance of defining success in challenge framing and scoping.
Describe common methods for evaluating success from business, customer, and societal perspectives.
Describe best practices for goal setting.

Why You Should Define Success

Companies want to stay ahead of their competition, so they invest in different ways to create an advantage. Strategy designers are uniquely positioned to create that advantage. But you need to understand how your projects affect customer value, the business bottom line, and the impact on society. To understand whether or not your work is having the intended impact, you must be able to observe and eventually measure it.

The most common way to evaluate an initiative’s value is by connecting it to what matters most to your company through success metrics, also known as Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). Success metrics give you a quantifiable way to measure your progress and demonstrate how your project is creating an advantage.

But while you’re defining a strategy, there are no metrics to collect yet, because data is always a reflection of past performance, even if it’s in the recent past. Your ideas and solutions haven’t been built yet, so there is no performance data to collect. But you still need a way to evaluate whether or not you’re on track for success.

In this early stage, here’s what you can do.

Connect to goals: Ensure your challenge framing reflects the goals your company wants to achieve and prioritizes work that matters to your organization and your customers. The outcomes you bake into your HMW are a great pointer toward the right ways to measure success.
Break down business goals into implications for design: If you can connect the dots between features and business goals, you’ll know you’re driving the desired impact. For example, if your goal is to drive increased loyalty among existing customers, examine the ways your strategy and the experience you design can enable that. Can you let customers tag their favorite products or share their recent purchases? Can your app become more personalized with each visit? Can you incorporate micro-polling to enable customer feedback after task completion?
Collect feedback that helps you evaluate your work through the lens of business impact: During prototyping, especially once you’re converging on a product or service concept, make sure you’re collecting evidence to shape and confirm that your concept will drive the desired outcomes. Remember, a concept must satisfy customers in order to drive business outcomes. So all the feedback you’re collecting around satisfying customer needs can help you build confidence in your ability to drive business impact. Collect quotes that help you understand why your concept might drive those outcomes, and shape each iteration of your prototype to increase its effectiveness.
Draft your future metrics: Just as your business goals can point to design implications, the features you design can point to success metrics. For example, assuming you define engagement as sessions per month, you could determine whether or not the addition of a notification about a “favorited” product increased the sessions per month across specific segments of users. That’s how you could propose the organization determine whether the favorite button (with notification) was driving engagement.

Common Methods for Evaluating Success

It’s important to consider your project’s impact on your business, your customers, and broader society. Let’s look at some of the most important ways to evaluate success.

Business Success

Strategy projects often come to pass because of a business goal. It’s not the job of the strategy designer to define these high-level goals; they’ll be defined by the business leaders in your organization. Here are some common business goals that drive strategy projects.

Growth targets: Specific increases in number or rate of sales/conversions, visits/checkouts, or users/customers. Adoption is another common type of growth target.
Expansion targets: Either creating new offerings for an existing customer audience or acquiring a new audience. New audiences might be defined by region, demographic, or behavior, and each comes with unique considerations.
Efficiency targets: Ways to make existing business investments work harder. For example, reducing calls to customer service or creating more efficient business processes.
Customer satisfaction targets: Making customers happier, so that they return more frequently and recommend the organization to their friends. Some examples are engagement, loyalty, or improved sentiment.

An important consideration with innovation work is that success rarely happens overnight. New companies take an average of 4–5 years to turn a profit, and new offerings from existing companies can take just as long, depending on the industry and a number of other factors.

Setting realistic targets for adoption and focusing on sentiment metrics early on are some of the best indicators of future success. Set expectations for the need to invest in things like marketing and talent while a new product is designed, built, and introduced to market.

Customer Success

Strategy designers approach solutioning from a desirability lens first. That’s because you can’t be successful if you don’t make a product or service your customers want. As the strategy designer, you’re responsible for keeping the customer’s needs at the center of your work, and measuring customer success is a key method for evaluating your success.

Metrics like net promoter score (NPS), customer retention rate, and lifetime value can be helpful customer success indicators at a high level, but they all take a long time to measure, which means they’re a trailing indicator of success or failure. They also don’t give you any visibility into your project as a stand-alone effort, so they can’t tell you how your work is making an impact.

For nascent strategies or concepts that haven’t launched yet, you should evaluate desirability to gauge customer success, particularly in the ways you’ve defined desirability for your particular project. Job statements, if you created them, are a great starting point, since they offer a clear definition of desired outcomes. If you haven’t created those, look at your HMWs and the customer-centered outcomes they articulate, and translate them to customer definitions of success you can gather feedback on. You can collect a mix of qualitative and quantitative data from prototyping to get a good picture of how you’re doing.

For example, if the project is about loyalty, you might collect quotes from customers about their likelihood of integrating the product with existing habits or workflows. If it’s about engagement or adoption, look for signals in prototyping that people were enthusiastic about using the product. Depending on how much or little time spent prototyping, you might only have data or signals at the level of validating your user needs.

Create metrics for post-launch based on what you've designed as well. Loyalty might be return usage, engagement might be time spent with the product per visit, and that sort of thing.

Societal Success

We know that products and services have ripple effects through families, communities, and society, even if they were designed for individual use. In order to build enduring advantages for your organization, it’s important to keep that societal impact in mind as you create new strategies, products, and services. In 2019, over 180 CEOs pledged to lead their companies to benefit all stakeholders—customers, employees, suppliers, communities, and shareholders. This is a form of stakeholder capitalism, and a trend we’re happy to see.

By focusing on environment, societal, and governance (ESG) metrics, companies can ensure long-term value by taking into account the needs of society at large as well as their stakeholders. Being aware of these metrics helps strategy designers integrate them as goals to design toward, just like business and customer success goals. Let’s take a look at some common ESG metrics.

Planet

Climate change
Nature loss
Fresh water availability

People

Dignity and equality
Health and wellbeing
Skills for the future

Prosperity

Employment and wealth generation
Innovation for better products and services
Community and social vitality

For more information on values-based design, check out the Values-Driven Design, Sustainable Design, and Ethics By Design modules. Links available in the Resources section below.

Best Practices for Goal Setting

One of the best ways to develop attainable goals is the SMARTE framework. SMARTE stands for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Time-bound, and Ethical. It’s the Salesforce take on the popular SMART framework. Designers can use the SMARTE framework to define intent, generate ideation prompts, and critique work. The SMARTE framework can help ensure the vision you’re delivering hits your goals.

And when it comes to ethics and accountability, everyone shares the responsibility to object if they see a business goal that could potentially cause harm, or a goal so aggressive that any design solution that achieves it would likely cause harm, either to customers or broader society.

For example, many companies set goals around growing user engagement. That makes sense—the more customers engage with companies, the more likely they are to buy. But we’ve seen digital products that encourage constant engagement, which can lead to unhealthy behaviors and even addiction.

In another example, companies have used manipulative design—interfaces that trick users into doing things they wouldn’t choose to do if they understood their options or the implications—to trigger behaviors they were monetizing or to artificially inflate their metrics so they could hit aggressive goals. This damages trust between organizations and customers, hurts the brand’s reputation, and represents short-sightedness in business success. It’s just not a great way to do business.

In the past it might have been believable that companies could be unintentional in triggering harmful effects, but now we know better. We have plenty of examples to point to where aggressive goals have led to undesirable outcomes, and we have harm frameworks to help us scrutinize both our goals and our ideas through an ethical lens.

Strategy designers are in a unique position to push back on goals, help companies navigate ethical questions, and modify or kill ideas that could potentially cause harm. These conversations can be difficult to have, but they are needed to protect both customers and long-term business health. As you shape your project goals, make sure to keep ethics top of mind.

Success for Cloud Kicks

In the Cloud Kicks challenge framing and scoping process, the strategy designer set expectations for what good looks like. They created a Project Brief, which reflected several conversations with the executive sponsor, stakeholders, and other thought partners, and listed goals, outcomes, and deliverables.

Their final challenge statement was: “How might we turn customers into fans amidst supply chain disruption?”

The key business outcome for this project was efficiency, as measured by reduced number of calls and emails to customer service. It was up to the project team to make clear how they would turn customers into fans—and how they would measure customer success.

To ensure the project aligned with company values of both sustainability and diversity, the project included:

One research session to collect sustainability requirements, inviting the sustainability team to join ideation sessions and concept reviews to provide feedback on both the strategy and execution from a sustainability perspective.
A commitment to having an extended team with 60% of members representing typically marginalized groups and a commitment to diversity when recruiting customers for research, co-creation, and prototype feedback sessions.

Solving a strategic design challenge is a step-by-step process. By framing and scoping the challenge, creating effective How Might We statements, assembling a diverse project team, setting SMARTE goals, and defining your success clearly, you have a solid foundation to solving the challenge. Now it’s time to kick off the project and begin research, which we cover in the next module.

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