Tip # 1: Stay focused on your goals.

Keeping your eye on the prize gets you beyond “meeting the numbers.”

It’s easy to get hung up on the numbers that a team needs to meet. While numbers play a big role in metrics, it’s important to look beyond them to the goals driving your efforts and your relevance to the business. For example, if the company is currently focused on cutting out inefficiencies from the organization in order to better compete with more efficient rivals, the team may want to focus on driving either supply chain or product development efficiencies.

At the kickoff of a design project at HP, teams use the D³ Matrix to identify the key goals of the project. This aligns stakeholder expectations and solidifies the strategic intent of the project. Later, it keeps the project both within scope and on.

A few things to keep in mind when aligning on goals:

Setting strategic goals involves getting different groups on the same page.

Usually the success or failure of an innovation-driven effort depends on getting buy-in from other groups within the company. Without proper initial alignment, it’s all too typical for design and innovation projects to wither away or be misconstrued when they are handed off to a go-to-market or manufacturing team. In order to succeed, design and innovation teams need to work towards business goals and targets that everyone else has agreed on. Bringing all stakeholders together early takes time, but will make the development process much smoother, more reliable, and more powerful.

Don’t confuse business goals with metrics.

When setting the business goals for an innovation project, make sure that they address the fundamental issues driving the business, not just the specific metrics the project is trying to hit. Asking a design or innovation team to create breakthrough product experiences highly relevant to a particular market segment is more meaningful than focusing on the need to increase market share by a specific percentage.

Related posts:

1. Five Key Strategies for Making Metrics
2. Design Council’s Lessons from America
3. Five Key Strategies for Managing Change
4. Design Strategies for Technology Adoption
5. Sustaining vs. Disruptive Innovations