Criteria: Product Concept

The Decision Network pattern within the Decision Driven® Strategy web service includes 2 kinds of data:

• Decisions - a Thinking Breakdown Structure comprised of 200+ decisions arranged into a model that represents the strongest decision-to-decision relationships (typical cross-constraints)
• Criteria - Approx. 10 factors to consider for each decision; the parameters that express the stakeholders’ values and priorities

Although all decisions can be attacked using common methods, all decisions are not created equal:

• Some are vital to success and justify more evaluation effort and rigor.
• Some are more complex in the number of criteria that are relevant.  
• Some “expect” alternatives that are multi-dimensional, i.e. that can be described as unique by a combination of parts or characteristics

From my experience, the Product Concept decision is one of the more vital and complex choices faced by a business.  Not surprisingly, our criteria pattern for this decision has a larger-than-average number of factors to consider (18 at last count):

I’ve included 3 placeholders in the criteria pattern for performance parameters.  These will be unique to the specific decision at hand and likely be driven as derived requirements from the Value Proposition decisions for the market segments that this product serves.  Some products may call for 5 or even 10 such performance factors, but before you add a criterion, make sure that it expresses an important “end-to-end” result that the user expects from the product, not an “internal” metric or feature.