Business Thinking for Designers

What is a scorecard?
You’re probably familiar with scorecards as a concept. In the 
sports world, scorecards keep official records of play-by-play 
action with a tally of hits, catches, runs, outs, passes, fumbles, 
goals, etc. What you may not know is scorecards are common 
in the business world as well. 
One of the most popular business concepts over the last 30 
years has been The Balanced Scorecard. Developed in the 
early 1990s, The Balanced Scorecard was popularized by 
Robert S. Kaplan and David P. Norton in their book of the same 
name. The concept itself is billed as a semi-standard report 
that can be used to track and monitor execution activities 
across a variety of products or services. 
Many management teams across industries use scorecards to 
monitor and track both financial and non-financial objectives 
and key results. But unlike game scorecards, organizational 
scorecards are not meant to actually keep score, but rather to 
identify gaps and deficiencies that need priority attention. If 
you’ve ever been in a meeting with senior leaders or executives 

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and they’re using an excel sheet or dashboard with a bunch of 
red, yellow, and green, that’s a scorecard! 
Figure 6-2: Example scorecard by Greenooo [CC BY-SA (https://
creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)]
Ultimately, it’s the information inside a scorecard that’s 
important. And this is where you’ll embed rubrics and rating 

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scales to regularly update your product managers, engineers, 
and executives. 
Figure 6-3: The UX Scorecard by Atlassian is a great resource for 
maturing your approach to app improvements.
While ratings and rubrics really help with improving the quality 
of products, business leaders can struggle to connect small 
product improvements to the overall business. That’s because 
the pace of the organization is different than the pace of a 
product. 
Improvements to products are frequently released in weekly 
or monthly cycles, while the strategic reviews, project funding, 
or financial reporting of a company is often done in quarterly, 

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bi-annual, or annual cycles. At the product level, improvements 
may show up quickly through testing, but longer term effects 
of those improvements may take months or more to show up 
at the organizational or business level.
Pro tip
Scorecards take time to develop and mature. To gain buy-in for 
introducing them, I recommend using analytical storytelling to 
present the risks and opportunities of having scorecards (or 
not) to track improvements.