To understand what business strategies work, business leaders create a variety of objectives, measures, and targets for products and teams.
To evaluate the overall health of a company, these objectives, measures, and targets are set across four categories of health, with each one focusing on a different aspect of the company.
While these aspects can vary from company to company, many approach overall health using four basic perspectives:
- Financial – This is the traditional and cumulative view of company success. It looks at the monetary results of past decisions.
- Customer – This perspective focuses on the people who buy a company’s products and the value provided to them.
- Operational – Efficiency is the focus of this perspective, as well as how smoothly processes and teams are running.
- Learning & growth – This perspective is all about employees. What are the key skills to be developed, the core processes needed to create products and services, and the cultural environment necessary for success?
Designers should understand these four categories because business folks are constantly wondering how any design stuff contributes to one of these. It's literally how they're tracking the health of the company.
Companies with long-term, viable business models prioritize their actions based on these categories. In doing so, they effectively to create value for internal and external stakeholders. In doing so, they also define their company cultures.
As designers become more aware of how these categories relate to the prioritization of these perspectives, we can better evaluate the impacts of our solutions on the business.
We are also better equipped to evaluate the culture of the organization itself.
