Value goals, named.
Also called: Innovation compass · Outcome goals · 3-Lens framework · Strategic value definition
What value means for the users, the business, and the team, written down as outcomes, not features, before any design or build decisions.
Three to five outcomes, named on one page, that the product must deliver. The 3-Lens framework defines value from the user, business and team sides. Skip it and the team optimises for whichever lens shouts loudest. The reference every later stage is checked against.
What value goals are
Value goals are the outcomes the product must deliver, not the features it will ship with. “A connected kitchen device” is not a value goal. “A serious home baker gets a reliable overnight prove every time, without thinking about it” is. The first names a thing; the second names a result.
Once written, value goals act as the team’s decision filter. When two designs are on the table and nobody can pick, the one that delivers more on the value goals wins. When a feature is proposed mid-build, it gets held against the value goals and either earns its place or doesn’t. The goals don’t make decisions for you; they make decisions auditable.
Why this gets skipped
- “It’s obvious.” In my experience the goals always feel obvious, right up until two people on the team write them down separately and produce two different documents.
- Features are easier to argue about. “Should it have an app?” is a more concrete debate than “what does success actually look like?”. Teams default to the concrete debate even though the abstract one is the parent.
- The goals feel premature. They feel like Stage 04 Evaluate work. They aren’t. Stage 04 measures against the goals; Stage 02 sets them.
The 3-Lens framework
Three angles, three different answers. Run the idea through each in turn. The intersection is where the product earns its place.
Value to the user. What does the user get that they can’t get without it? Not “more convenient” (vague), but “holds the dough at 26°C overnight so the prove never fails” (specific, observable). If the user can’t describe the value in plain language, the product won’t survive its first year of buying decisions.
Value to the business. Why is this idea worth resourcing? It could be revenue (sells at £149 on a £38–55 bill of materials), strategic (opens a new audience), defensive (closes a competitor’s gap), or learning (a wedge into a market the team plans to expand into). One of these has to be true. Vague “growth” is not a value goal.
Value to the team. The lens most often missed. What does the team get out of building this? New capability, market position, IP, internal momentum. If the team will burn out, learn nothing, and gain nothing organisationally, the project is a tax on energy even when it succeeds commercially. Name what the team gets.
Three to five goals total across the three lenses, written in plain English, fits on one page. More than five and nobody remembers them mid-decision; fewer than three and one lens is being silenced. Here is what that page looked like for the proofing box we ran through the framework, so you can see the shape of a good answer rather than a generic template.
Four goals, three lenses, one page. Notice none of them mentions a feature. They name results the whole team can hold a design decision against.
Common failure modes
The same idea, framed two ways. The weak versions feel safe but resolve nothing. The strong versions force the next round of decisions.
- “Make a great proofing box.”
- “Build a connected kitchen device.”
- “Grow the bakeware range.”
- “Help home bakers.”
- User: Holds a reliable overnight prove at 26°C ±0.5°C without the baker thinking about it.
- User: Binned cold-kitchen bakes drop to near zero across a UK winter.
- Business: Proves the £149 no-app price band holds a 30%+ margin.
- Team: Wins a first ceramic-tooling relationship in Stoke-on-Trent.
Each weak goal is unfalsifiable: any product can claim to satisfy it, so none of them helps the team choose between two options. Each strong goal is observable, attributable, and tells the team how to decide.
How it fits the bigger picture
Identify Your Value Goals is activity 02.10.01 in the framework, the first activity of Stage 02 Discover. It builds directly on the idea statement (01.02) and feeds into customer persona (02.10.03), market context enquiry (02.10.04), and ultimately Stage 04 Evaluate, which measures the idea against these goals.
What it can do
It gives the team a written compass. Decisions in Stage 03 Innovate, Stage 04 Evaluate, and Stage 05 Define can all be checked against this single page. When a stakeholder asks “why didn’t we add the app?”, the answer is already on the page: the user lens never named an app, and the cost would breach the business lens’s price band.
What it can’t do
It can’t test whether the goals are right. That is what Stage 02 Discover’s research activities (customer persona, market context enquiry, interview stakeholders) and Stage 04 Evaluate’s commercial assessment do. The goals here are working hypotheses about value; later stages either confirm or replace them.
See the full 10-stage process →
Try it yourself
Take your idea statement from 01.02. Spend 30 minutes drafting three to five value goals across the three lenses (User, Business, Team). One sentence each. No features, no buzzwords. Read each one back and ask: “if we delivered this tomorrow, who would care, and why?” If the answer is “nobody specific” or “everyone, vaguely”, rewrite it. Then dot-vote the top three with anyone else who will build it.
Or run the guided version. The Free Sprint asks for value framing as part of Q4 (What would solving it be worth?), which is a starter version of this activity. Start the Free Sprint →
Your value-goals checklist
Project notes: three lenses on the proofing box
▸ From the notebook · optional reading
Running the 3-Lens framework with Dan and Anna Hartley in Stockport, and the goal that killed an entire feature line in week 4.
3 min read · click to open
The opportunity statement and idea statement were both tight, and Dan was keen to start CAD on the ceramic shell. We pushed back: “Three lenses first. Half an hour. No CAD until the value goals are written.” They humoured us.
What ended up on the page
User goal 1. A serious home baker holds a reliable overnight prove at 26°C, give or take half a degree, through a Stockport winter where the kitchen swings between 14°C and 19°C, without thinking about it.
User goal 2. The binned loaf, roughly £4 of flour and a wasted twelve hours, stops being a regular event.
Business goal 1. Validate the £149 no-app price band at a target 30%+ gross margin on a £38–55 bill of materials.
Team goal. Build a first ceramic-tooling relationship in Stoke-on-Trent and learn the economics of low-voltage heater control.
Where the goals earned their keep
Week 4 of design, Anna came back from a kitchen show excited: “I’ve seen a neat companion app. Push alert when the prove is ready, a temperature graph on your phone, maybe £6 of extra parts and some firmware.” Six months earlier this would have been a half-day argument. With the value goals on the page, the answer was already written.
User goal 1. “Without thinking about it” was the explicit promise. An app asks the baker to pair, charge and check a phone. Net negative.
Business goal 1. App firmware and the support burden blow a bootstrapped budget, and the £149 no-app price band was the very thing we set out to test. Net negative.
Team goal. No new ceramic or heater-control learning in it. Net neutral.
Decision: skip the app. Conversation closed in seven minutes. I asked Dan to drop it in a dated V2 backlog rather than the bin, so it stopped feeling like a loss. The same framework killed a second temperature preset a month later, in about two minutes.
What the framework cost vs saved
- Cost. 30 minutes in week 1 of Discover. One side of paper.
- Saved. An estimated 6 hours of design discussion across the project, two iterations of firmware that never had to exist, and a price band that stayed intact all the way to launch.
Multiply that across every project that runs through the framework, and the maths on writing the goals down first is not close.
— Discover stage, project notes, 2026
— Next in Discover → Understand industry