The Working Backwards questions

What Working Backwards is

The Working Backwards process is a mechanism designed to help people create innovations that focus on customers, and to support investment decisions based on evidence, a vision, and thorough discussion. It runs in four stages.

1. 1
   The Working Backwards questions

   Be clear and aligned about the customer you are solving for and the problem or opportunity you focus on.

2. 2
   The PRFAQ document

   Articulate your vision for a solution in customer-centric, clear language, and get input from stakeholders.

3. 3
   Quick experiments

   Design experiments to test your assumptions and get evidence that supports or challenges your vision.

4. 4
   Build and iterate

   Release a Minimum Loveable Product quickly and iterate, holding focus on customer needs.

The five questions

1. 1
   Who is the customer?

   Be specific. Identify the customer who represents most prominently the biggest problem you want to solve. The more focused you are, the more unique and delightful the solution will be.

   Examples: a resident with young children who manages the family's affairs; a CIO of a large enterprise in a traditional industry managing hundreds of business applications; a technical graduate with no work experience in the field they studied.

2. 2
   What is the customer problem or opportunity?

   What are they frustrated with today? What opportunity are they missing?

   Examples: family members struggle with different multi-step login methods across banks, public services, healthcare and education providers; CIOs lack up-to-date information about the status of critical applications; graduates cannot get a chance to build and demonstrate their skills and start a career.

3. 3
   What is the most important customer benefit?

   Consider their priorities. What is the one thing they care about most? Think in values rather than features: speed, quality, cost, reliability, simplicity, visibility.

   Examples: simplicity (would you prioritize speed or security?); control; access (would you prioritize visibility or exposure?).

4. 4
   How do you know what customers need or want?

   What evidence do you have, and how good is it? This question separates the teams that have talked to customers from the teams that have discussed customers.

5. 5
   What does the customer experience look like?

   Describe the experience end to end, as the customer moves through it, before describing the thing you would build.

The Today Statement

The answers are then compressed into one sentence. If the sentence does not hold together, the answers do not either.

Today [customers]
have to [customer problem]
when [situation when the problem occurs].
[Customers] need [most important benefit].

Where teams get stuck

Question one is where the process earns its keep. Ask an experienced team who their customer is and you will get several different answers around the same table, and the disagreement is the useful output. The second common failure is retrofitting: the team already has a solution in mind and works the customer answer backwards to justify it. The evidence question is the check on both.

How we run it

We facilitate this as PRFAQ workshops, innovation sprints, and multi-month programs that train your own people to run it.