Business Thinking for Designers

Connect desirability objectives to viability 
objectives
Now that you have your conditional statements for desirability, 
another Strategy Map will help us show the relationships 
between desirability and viability. Begin by isolating one 
conditional statement for desirability and creating a second, 
adjacent column (see below).
Remember those four perspectives of company health? 
Those are the underlying perspectives of viability. Like the 
perspectives we captured for desirability, we have to stack 
rank the perspectives of company health. If you’re working 
at a for-profit company, the order is: Financial, Customer, 

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Create conditions for design maturity
Operational, and Learning & Growth. For a non-profit, Financial 
moves to the bottom.
Figure 4-7: The cause-and-effect model of desirability objectives by 
Ryan Rumsey 
In the viability column, capture the objectives of the product 
you’re working on and align them to the viability perspectives. 
Typically, these objectives come from your product partners 
or team leaders. If you don’t know the strategic objectives 
for your product or service, you can use the Strategy Map 
approach with your product manager to visualize what they 
might be.

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Figure 4-8, 4-9: The cause-and-effect model of desirability and 
viability objectives by Ryan Rumsey
Once you have objectives in both columns, use additional 
arrows to extend your conditional statement into the adjacent 
column by connecting credibility to an objective of viability. As 

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seen below in figure 4-11, you now have a succinct statement 
of why desirability matters for customer adoption and viability.
Figure 4-10: A concise and succinct statement to connect desirability 
to viability by Ryan Rumsey 
Congratulations! You’ve just connected design to business 
and desirability to viability! These conditional statements are 
now the perfect set-up to frame better experiments moving 
forward. These experiments are where our next topic—
measures and metrics—comes into play.

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Pro tip
Prototype your cause-and-effect models with Post-its and 
Sharpies. It’s the easiest (and cheapest) way to get alignment 
for teams and stakeholders.