Lean Business Scorecard: Desirability
By: Robin Wong
Tags: Design, Desirability, Business, Lean Startup

Almost every Design, Product and Startup-focused book in existence starts by setting out the importance of focusing on the needs of customers first and foremost, so why, if there is so much material out there that explains that businesses fail for this reason, do people get this consistently wrong?

There are 2 reasons for this.

Our lack of awareness of subconscious biases, and

and Our lack of mitigating strategies to outsmart them

Falling victim to biases

The first reason that we fail to truly understand and address our customer’s needs is that most of us love to jump straight to solutions when confronted with a challenge.

We go around spending all day dreaming up solutions.

We obsess over them.

It’s known as Solution Bias.

It means we risk not understanding our customers or their problems and start coming up with solutions based largely on assumptions.

The second reason we struggle to find Product-Market fit is that once we get an idea of a solution into our heads, we then have a tendency to seek out information that supports our ideas and we tend to avoid or reinterpret information that could contradict what we think.

We fall victim to something called Confirmation Bias.

Solution Bias and Confirmation Bias are very dangerous when combined.

Together, they are powerful subconscious forces that shape our behaviours and stop us from seeking out evidence that would actually be useful to build a business.

It’s these two biases that give people a false sense of confidence in their ideas and cause them to waste money chasing ideas no key wants or needs.

Many ‘Stealth’ Startups — even those with millions in funding and billion-dollar valuations — have fallen victim to this way of thinking.

Months and sometimes years are spent without any form of customer testing. Then, when the “big reveal” takes place, they are met with a lukewarm “so what?”.

By obsessing over the solution rather than the problem, you end up ignoring evidence that could contradict your assumption and you lose sight of your customers, what they are trying to achieve and the biggest challenges they face.

The Desirability section is therefore the most important and biggest part of the entire Lean Business Scorecard — use it as a reliable and repeatable strategy to hack your hardwired biases and help yourself first obsess over the problem before setting out the value your solution offers.

Obsessing over the Problem

Instead of falling in love with the Solution, we should always start by falling in love with every aspect of the Problem and looking for evidence that we are solving the right problem or challenge for our target audience.

Once we’ve cracked the problem, it’s only then we examine the solution for signs that it has achieved Product-Market Fit.

A solution can only achieve a market fit if the problem it solves truly needs addressing

Let’s look at the Problem section of the Lean Business Scorecard

This part of the Desirability scorecard has 3 sections.

The Problem Section of the Desirability Scorecard

Problem Overview

In this section of the Scorecard, I’m looking to understand

Who your target audience is

is What their job to be done is, and

is, and The challenge or problem that is getting in their way

Your target audience are the group of people who will be paying you something of value in return for the value your product or service provides to them.

For example, in the case of a company like Airbnb, it’s people with homes and apartments to rent out AND people who want to travel away from home.

Their job to be done — an idea coined by the late Clayton Christensen — is what they are trying to accomplish. Note that it is rarely, if ever, your customer’s job to be done to use your product and service.

Instead, your customer buys or ‘hires’ your product or service to help them get their job to be done completed successfully.

For Airbnb, people with homes and apartments like to get away and travel to different places, both for work and pleasure. The job to be done is not to ‘use Airbnb’ but to to ‘get short term rental income’ whilst they ‘get away to a different city or country’.

Their current challenge is something that gets in the way of their job to be done. It could be something that confuses or frustrates them. It could be something they are completely unaware of. In our Airbnb example, people who travel away from home often only have the option of an expensive hotel to stay in that offers a homogenous experience with little connection to the local culture. They yearn for more.

Business ideas that lack Product-Market fit usually do so because they lack a Market of people with a common Job to be done that also have a big enough problem or challenge in their way.

To bring these ideas to life and learn how to use the Problem section of the Scorecard, let’s do a teardown of one of Airbnb’s earliest pitch decks (or at least a reproduction of one) to see how much evidence they had in 2008.

Problem Teardown

Take a moment to scan through the slides below (and please ignore the competitive advantages section, it’s a reproduction after all).