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. Focusing on one specific customer helps you design a more unique and delightful solution.

   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 terms of the value they get, such as speed, quality, cost, reliability, simplicity or 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?

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 team then combines its answers into one sentence using the template below.

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

Where teams get stuck

The first question, who the customer is, is critical. When you ask an experienced team who their customer is, you will often hear several different answers. The second common problem is retrofitting, where the team already has a solution in mind and works backwards from it to a customer who would justify it. The fourth question, about evidence, forces the team to admit what it knows about the customer and what this knowledge is based on.

How we run it

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