Working Backwards and Systematic Inventive Thinking

What each method assumes

Working Backwards starts with the customer and reasons back to the solution. It asks a team to describe a finished experience before anything is built, then to find the capabilities that would make the description true. Taken to its extreme it ignores what the organization currently has.

Systematic Inventive Thinking starts from the product or service in front of you and asks what it could become. It treats constraints as the starting point for new ideas. Taken to its extreme it ignores the customer, at least at the outset.

Both methods are systematic, which means each one follows set steps from a starting position to a selected concept and leaves a documented trail of those steps.

The four elements of Working Backwards

• The five customer questions, answered before any solution is discussed, so the disagreement about who the customer is surfaces in the first hour.
• The PRFAQ: a press release and FAQ written as though the thing has already launched, which forces the end state into words and exposes the assumptions underneath it.
• Two-way doors: separating the decisions that can be reversed from the ones that cannot, so a team can move fast on most of them.
• Customer obsession as the tiebreaker, including inventing on a customer’s behalf when the customer can only describe the solution they already know.

The four elements of Systematic Inventive Thinking

• The closed world principle: the next useful idea is usually inside the product and its immediate surroundings, not outside them.
• Function follows form: change the form first, then ask what the new form is good for. This inverts the ordinary habit of fixing a function and hunting for a shape to deliver it.
• Five patterns of product innovation, abstracted from form changes that recur across large numbers of real inventions, used as lenses on the current state.
• Rating and selection: the team deliberately generates many ideas, then filters them against clearly defined criteria.

The five patterns are taught using the team’s own product.

Choosing between them

Running them together

1. 1
   Frame with the customer questions

   Answer the five customer questions first. The answers frame a challenge with a defined customer and problem.

2. 2
   Generate with the patterns

   Use the SIT patterns on the products, assets and capabilities already in the closed world. Working Backwards does not say how to generate ideas at this step.

   Run facilitated ideation at this step, once the customer and problem are framed.

3. 3
   Test the ideas against the customer answers

   An idea generated from the product still has to answer who wants it and why. Drop the ideas that cannot answer that question before anyone writes a PRFAQ for them.

4. 4
   Write the PRFAQ for what survives

   The written narrative is where an idea grounded in existing resources becomes a proposal a leadership team can decide on.

   Amazon’s leadership principle of frugality supports the same combination. It says that constraints breed resourcefulness.

How this is delivered

We facilitate both methods on one of your own initiatives. We may also use the combination above when a team has an existing product and ambitions that go beyond what the product does today.