5. Connecting desirability objectives to viability with Strategy Maps

In my last post, I shared four issues that non-startup teams struggle with when using OKRs. By far, the biggest issue I've experienced is what I'll call The Desirability Gap.

When teams are discussing quality, everyone has an idea or opinion of what that means. It's totally healthy and valid for colleagues to share their thoughts and beliefs. But, when teams are trying to track and measure quality, WAY too much emphasis is placed on metrics that are in service to the company, not the customer. Most of the objectives and measures teams use to measure success don't tell the story of why a customer is satisfied, why they continue to engage, if engagement is healthy for the customer, if the product is meeting accessibility needs, etc.

We also know that information exists though! It exists in research, in reports, inside design teams, in the heads of subject matter experts… it exists in lots of places. It exists in the preferred languages of those who have it. In order to be heard, it needs to exist in the love languages our colleagues receive.

POKRs is a new way to talk about desirability in a language our colleagues can understand.

What is desirable?

This is one of the first questions I ask when I work with a company, consult with teams, or mentor leaders.

I have yet to ask this question and get the same answer twice. Within an organization, this lack of consistency puts designers, researchers, content friends, and teams into difficult situations. Business partners expect to get the same answer to this question from every designer in a company. Why? Because designers are ambassadors of desirability for their organization.

Time and time again, I see designers and researchers on the same team or in the same organization give different interpretations of what makes their product or service desirable. This confuses business partners and makes them believe desirability is subjective—and therefore unworthy of trust in decision-making.

How do we fix this situation? In my experience, the tools we use to conduct our analysis and develop insights are too complex to share with business partners. If you find yourself explaining what you do over and over again, that's a big red flag that you need to adjust your communication style. Journey Maps, Service Blueprints, and research reports are incredibly powerful and useful, but they don’t directly show our colleagues how improving an experience leads to objectives and goals for adoption.

When it comes to talking about desirability, there is often a major communication gap. Product teams, stakeholders, and executive leadership struggle to connect the dots between desirability and viability. Strategy Maps are the bridge we need.

What are Strategy Maps?

Strategy Maps are one of my favorite business visualizations. Simple in structure, a Strategy Map shows the relationships between organizational objectives through underlying quality perspectives.

Strategy Maps were originally popularized in the 1990s as part of a strategic management framework called The Balanced Scorecard. Now they’re a popular tool for describing and visualizing business strategies at companies large and small.

While traditional Strategy Maps connect objectives of company health, we can use the same structure to talk about desirability. Desirability Strategy Maps create a clear viewpoint on how separate perspectives of desirability influence product success.

Strategy Maps are also the visual representation of POKRs.

Desirability Strategy Maps

In order to keep things simple for my business partners, I use only four desirability perspectives. Doing so allows me to align objectives related to accessibility, trust, usability, task success, friction, positive impact, etc. to objectives business partners care about; adoption, retention, revenue, satisfaction, etc.

While I'll later share how to develop your own desirability perspectives, I'd like to share the four perspectives that have worked well for me over the years.

These perspectives, in order of understanding their meaning are:

Detectability: What are the things that must be detectable to a user?
Usability: Once a user is able to detect a thing, what are the things that must be usable for them?
Impact: When things are more usable, what kind of impact does the user need to feel?
Credibility: When users feel that impact, what are the things that need to be credible for them in order to adopt the product, service, feature, etc.?

These perspectives, in order of importance are reversed:

Credibility
Impact
Usability
Detectability

If you want your organization to prioritize factors like ethics or accessibility, you need to first emphasize the perspectives they belong to. I place credibility above all others because, ultimately, factors like trust, accuracy, and good intentions matter more than usability. If a customer doesn’t believe your product or service is credible, they’ll quickly take their business elsewhere.

This setup gives design teams an initial outlook on what desirability is: a detectable, usable, impactful, and credible experience that leads to adoption.

Desirability Objectives

A common dilemma designers and researchers face is when a colleague who has not participated in the research has their own idea of what to do. When this happens, your other colleagues do what’s natural: they base their own guess on their past experiences or prior knowledge. This is problematic because it leads to inaccurate conclusions across the board and difficult political situations.

One common approach to working through this dilemma is to expose colleagues to users. But we shouldn't just rely on them showing up. Another helpful approach is to show your logical reasoning. This approach involves two steps:

Create desirability objectives
Connect those objectives with conditional statements

Create desirability objectives

After we have our four desirability perspectives, it’s time to capture two to three strategic objectives for each. These objectives are where you clearly associate values like the environment, trust, society, ethics, diversity, or inclusion with the importance of usability, functionality, or aesthetics. Objectives are likely familiar to you too. The easiest way to express an objective is with a phrase that combines a verb and a specific noun. For example, “improve trust,” “increase inclusion,” or “reduce errors.”

Connect those objectives with conditional statements

Conditional statements are formed by connecting two separate statements. The first provides a hypothesis and the second, a conclusion. If you’ve ever developed an app or written code, you’re familiar with “if/then” and “if/else.” These are examples of conditional statements.

Conditional statements create a cause-and-effect model in which being successful with one statement promotes the success of the other. This is where the beauty of visual diagramming comes into place. Rather than trying to write out these statements, Strategy Maps hlep you illustrate this relationship using arrows.

Once we’ve captured a few desirability objectives, we can use the Strategy Map structure and arrows to align each to the specific perspective with a simple chart like the one here. As you add objectives, a more refined model of desirability emerges.

As you build out your model, you have clear statements of your reasoning of why focusing on important things like accessibility are vital to important things like adoption:

Increase accessibility -> reduced errors -> decreased friction -> increased credibility -> increased adoption

Learn to talk about design differently to make things–influence, impact, value–happen.

Now is the part that is totally self-serving. Yep, I'm going there.

The approach you see above is one that over 500 of your peers are already implementing at their companies. They are maturing the conversations about design and research, showing their impact to the bottom line, and increasing their influence because they're talking about design differently.

You can join them. The next cohort Strategic Design Leadership is now open for registration. I'd love to see you there.

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