Understanding Decision Criteria

How to make progress on your project in Productable

Productable enables organizations to develop innovative ideas toward desired outcomes at scale. One of the ways Productable does this is by allowing leaders to communicate to project members what data they need to provide at each step of the innovation journey to receive additional funding and support. Those data milestones are called Decision Criteria.

Within each stage of project maturity, there are typically between three and seven Decision Criteria that project members need to meet. Decision Criteria give project members a clear roadmap for understanding what information leadership needs to confidently advance ideas to the next stage.

How should leaders establish solid Decision Criteria?

First, consider what is important in each maturity stage. If you are responsible for finding ideas that solve a big problem and have few reliable or cost-efficient alternative solutions, your Decision Criteria will be far different than they would be if you were responsible for scaling innovations with an existing track record of success and impact.

A good rule of thumb is that stages of maturity typically follow this pathway, common in startups:

Stage 1: Problem Validation – Is there a pressing and harmful problem worth solving?

Stage 2: Concept Robustness – Can this solution be built, do people want it, and how is it better than existing alternative solutions?‍

Stage 3: Prototype Validation – Now that there is a working prototype, is it clear that this solution might actually work and deliver the desired return on investment?

Stage 4: Pilot Success – How is the innovation delivering value for the pilot users? Does the return on investment outweigh the costs to build and maintain the innovation, justifying a broader deployment?‍

Stage 5: Sustainable Scale – The innovation has made it! Now let’s ensure it can operate sustainably to deliver value to users. At this stage, you can also consider new pathways for impact.

Regardless of the maturity stage, decide on three to seven primary Decision Criteria for each stage. The criteria should explicitly state what information you need from your project leads.

For Example:

 ⭐️ Good - “How much time, labor, resources, and energy is wasted as a result of this problem? Be specific.”

🚫 Needs Improvement - “A problem exists.”

How should Project Members achieve the predetermined criteria?

Project members' top priority in Productable is to provide strong, quantitative data that meets the Decision Criteria in each stage. This gives leadership the most necessary information to confidently progress ideas to more advanced stages, which typically comes with more funding and support. Here are a few tips to get started.

1. Focus only on the questions. 

It’s easy for project members to get distracted by all their findings, but we recommend focusing on the Decision Criteria questions. It often isn't that complicated, especially when you're just getting started with your idea.‍

2. Use as much quantitative data as possible.

Project Members should research and provide quantitative data that effectively argues how the Decision Criteria are met. If you do this, your project is more likely to advance to the next stage, faster.

For Example: 

 ⭐️ Good - “1 in 7 Airmen experienced this problem over the last two years. In a 700,000 person organization, that means roughly 98,000 people!”

 🚫 Needs Improvement - “This problem is pervasive across the organization. Many people have experienced it.”

3. Use educational exercises and frameworks.

Complete an exercise to help find the data that is relevant to the Decision Criteria. For example, a Problem Statement Canvas helps you define the problem you are trying to solve. In Productable, these are called Blueprints.