Three often-overlooked opportunities to boost innovation desirability, viability, and feasibility
The DVF (Desirability-Viability-Feasibility) Framework, and frameworks like it, are tools to focus innovation in ways that are more likely to produce market success. However, most teams using these frameworks impede their effectiveness by failing to collect customer input across all three of the DVF tracks. In this post, I share three things leaders can do to equip their teams for more impactful innovation.
When I helped found an enterprise emerging tech envisioning team at Microsoft, we were organized around something called the DVF Framework.
The DVF Framework is one of many available frameworks that helps product teams target their innovation efforts more effectively. DVF stands for “Desirability-Viability-Feasibility” and structures innovation efforts around these three tracks.
If you lead a team that does innovation, incubation, envisioning, or new product development, adopting an innovation framework like DVF can help you better coordinate work across cross-functional teams. It will also help ensure that whatever you develop is robust enough to stand up to scrutiny from different types of stakeholders, and has a real fighting chance in the market.
For all this value, though, the way most teams implement the DVF framework introduces a major flaw. This flaw deprives your team of the opportunity to course-correct early, effectively cutting off your innovation effort at the knees. This means you’re spending weeks (or months) of R&D effort producing output that’s only marginally better than a single-day group brainstorm.
This flaw also plagues the implementation of many other innovation frameworks, as well as more grass-roots innovation efforts.
In this post I’ll share what this flaw is, and how you can structure your innovation efforts to ensure that every member of your team has what they need to produce robust, groundbreaking product concepts.
What is the DVF Framework?
The Desirability-Viability-Feasibility (DVF) Framework is an innovation framework introduced by IDEO. It characterizes effective innovation as the successful intersection of the following three questions:
Desirability: Will customers actively want to use it?
Viability: Will it generate enough revenue to cover costs and return sufficient profit?
Feasibility: Can you build it with the resources you have available to you?
The idea is that by focusing on all three questions, you’re able to create well-rounded innovations that are more likely to succeed in market. This scopes innovation down to its core requirements, and for a cross-functional team, it allows for clear divisions of ownership across Design (desirability), PM/Business/Marketing (viability), and Engineering (feasibility) functions.
This means, in practice, that each track can more or less independently work toward finding a strategy that will get to a “Yes” on their specific question.
The problem with this approach comes when teams become too siloed and focus on deliverables over learning.
Why customer insights are the missing ingredient
Tech has a tendency to conduct innovation efforts in a way that is secretive and insulated. When I worked in-house before becoming a consultant, I’d see incubation teams literally set apart behind locked doors in offices with frosted glass windows.
Unfortunately, in practice, insulating tech R&D teams is so much the norm that it doesn’t even register as a choice. Designers doing “guerilla research” with real-world humans to assess a concept’s desirability has been going on for decades, and still it’s often viewed as something radical. There are just as many, if not more, designers who view product discovery and validation as nonessential, and who choose to skip it because it isn’t valued by their stakeholders.
This is a known but massive problem in the tech industry, and this same problem plagues the Desirability track of DVF innovation.
The problem is worse for Viability and Feasibility
But if a lack of customer touchpoints is a massive problem for Desirability efforts, it’s an even bigger problem for Viability and Feasibility efforts. While product discovery work to establish innovations’ Desirability is a recognized–but often skipped–best practice, incorporating primary2 customer insights into the Viability and Feasibility tracks is normally not even considered (at least on the teams I’ve witnessed).However, customer input is equally necessary to produce robust Viability and Feasibility strategies as it is for innovation Desirability. You can provide insulated teams with resources to research business models and to build hardware and code. But you can’t provide them with the one thing that matters most: knowing how real people will react to the specific thing they’re building in this time and place.
“You can provide insulated teams with resources to research business models and to build hardware and code. But you can’t provide them with the one thing that matters most: knowing how real people will react to the specific thing they’re building in this time and place.”
This problem of not getting customer input is amplified when you have different disciplines owning each track of your innovation effort because Design, PM, and Engineering are typically incentivized for producing artifacts and code, not for producing insights. So this is not something that most company cultures empower them to want or ask for.
What does customer-insight-enabled innovation look like?
So what’s the alternative? How can you help your team to break free from decades of tech innovation tradition and to incorporate customer insights into all three tracks of their innovation efforts?
Here are three things you can do:
Make insights the deliverable at early stages of innovation. Take a page from the lean startup playbook and make your early milestones learning milestones. Instead of delivering a sketch or prototype, make everyone across all three tracks responsible for sharing hypotheses and the data that supported or refuted them.
Understand how customer insights can look across all three tracks. Product discovery and validation for Desirability efforts needs support and encouragement to ensure it actually happens. Customer research for Viability and Feasibility efforts will look different, and your team will likely need models. Viability customer research can look like “willingness to pay” research, and can guide decisions about pricing, feature bundling, customer segmentation, or even sales channels. Feasibility customer research can look like testing prototypes with users to ensure that not only are they technically possible, they’re also “good enough” to meet real users’ standards. To help you learn more about customer research options across the three tracks, I’ve written an explainer document.
Provide your team with access to humans for research during innovation (or, at least, give them cover for guerilla research). Don’t let recruitment become the barrier that prevents your team from engaging with potential users and customers. The more you do to remove friction, the more likely they will be to do this important work. If you can’t recruit people directly, consider sponsoring field trips, or having days when everyone is expected to “get out of building” and engage with humans beyond the other members of the team.
Transformative effects of customer-insight-enabled innovation
Innovation is hard enough without saddling our teams with decades of outdated tech culture. Teams that incorporate customer insights into all aspects of their innovation process–whether design-, business-, or engineering-focused–will develop groundbreaking ideas faster that are more likely to thrive in the market.
It takes strong leadership to enable your team to get out of their comfort zone and incorporate new customer research practices they are not yet accustomed to. But if you stay the course, the effect is transformative.
On my former envisioning team, incorporating customer insights throughout the entire innovation process changed the team’s identity. Having our own primary sources of data allowed us to become an authoritative voice in the organization. We also produced more–our value to the organization became not only our envisioning deliverables, but also our trove of customer insights that could be repeatedly mined by other teams. And in cases where we had pushback on our ideas, we had hard data to back up our position.
It was only by adding customer insights that we were able to fulfill the potential of the DVF innovation framework we were using.
👋 I’m Dr. Llewyn Paine, and I believe every member of your product team is capable of doing meaningful, actionable customer research. If you’d like to learn about customer research techniques that can make your innovation efforts more effective, you can grab time on my calendar for a 30-minute chat.
--
Footnotes:
I’m referencing the “build-measure-learn” feedback loops of Eric Ries’ Lean Startup here, but similar arguments could be made from the perspective of Agile or user-centered design.
“Primary” here refers to “primary research,” meaning that teams conduct research themselves, rather than using “secondary research” (such as white papers) conducted by others.