Driver Trees for Business-Customer Alignment

If you’re struggling to show how your design choices contribute to business success, you’re not the only one.

A Driver Tree can help bridge that ‘design impact’ gap. It’s a visual guide that offers the strategic clarity you need to understand the impact of your efforts.

We’ll explore how driver trees bring data into design by using examples from common business metrics.

Outcome Metric

• This is the overarching business goal (“outcome”) at the top of the tree, such as increased revenue, retention, or market share.

• Customer Perspective: To get a complete picture, include a customer outcome next to the business outcome, like how valuable customers find the product or their success in using it.

Driver Metrics

• These are the measurable factors that build upon each other, ultimately influencing the outcome metric. Driver metrics can be anything from user engagement to financial performance, and are organized in a way that shows how they influence the outcome metric.

• Customer Perspective: Make sure the tree also shows what users think, say, and do (e.g. user behavior and attitudinal metrics), to ensure a balanced, user-centric point of view.

Understanding the key drivers is crucial for making informed decisions about business strategy, product strategy, and tactics.

• Strategic Clarity: Driver Trees provide a clear understanding of the relationships between different metrics, enabling more focused, impactful strategic planning.

• Prioritization: Driver Trees help you prioritize initiatives and features based on their potential impact to outcome and driver metrics, and should be aligned with top evidence-based problems.

• Alignment: Driver Trees can foster stronger alignment between different teams and stakeholders by providing a shared understanding of influential factors on goals and how to achieve them.

For designers, Driver Trees offer a powerful way to demonstrate the value of their work and become strategic partners.

• Strategic Alignment: Direct design efforts to align with overall business objectives.

• Improved Communication: Communicate the impact of design decisions in the language of business, using metrics and data.

• Customer-Focused Prioritization: Use data to prioritize design initiatives that directly impact customer-centric driver metrics.

• Data-Driven Design: Reinforce design decisions with data that shows a causal or correlational link to driver metrics. This allows designers to move away from subjective opinions, and towards measurable results.

• Define the Outcome Metric: Start by clearly defining the business goal (outcome metric). Pair a key customer outcome metric with it.

• Identify Driver Metrics: Gather insights from product managers, marketers, analytics, engineers, data science, and other functions to identify relevant driver metrics and their relationship.

• Build the Tree: Map the relationships between the outcome metric and the driver metrics.

• Validate the Tree: Test your assumptions and refine the tree based on real-world data. Get feedback from subject matter experts and stakeholders.

Driver Trees can help you manage Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) and present user research findings to reinforce and prioritize top customer problems worth addressing.

Integrating OKRs

Use a Driver Tree to identify areas for improvement and formulate or refine Objectives and Key Results (OKRs).Objectives can be placed directly into the tree next to the branch(es) they are directly tied to with key metrics the team cares about. 

Start building your own Driver Tree and evolve your design efforts from reactive to strategic. By visualizing the impact of your work, you’ll not only create better designs but also become a more influential voice in your organization.

Remember, the examples provided are directional and show general relationship between standard metrics. Make sure to configure your tree to the specific business model and needs of your product with key stakeholders consulted along the way.

Whether you try a Drivers Tree approach in your next project or just have insightful feedback about the information included in this article, I’d love to hear your feedback!