Early in my career, I created web-based solutions for businesses. It was not uncommon for someone to approach with their great new idea, it usually began: Like e-bay but for… I see a similar trend these days, especially when looking at crowdfunding investments, this time: Like uber but for…

The comparison with uber or e-bay is to create a shared understanding. There is an assumption that the traits which they admire in the referenced business are obvious to others. The problem is that the traits they consider relevant and what you or I may consider relevant are not always the same. Everyone brings different interpretations and assumptions into a conversation.

A Goal Tree can be used to help everyone have a common frame of reference when discussing and objective. Making individual elements explicit can reduce any disconnect.

My amazing business idea

As an illustration, I’d like to introduce you to my business idea. It’s like uber but for books. I know what you’re thinking – “Bud, you just invented libraries”. Don’t make your mind up too soon; if we examine the key factors of my idea we will have a unified view of the opportunity.

Reading the conditions

The way to read the connections is straight forward. A higher item is prefixed with “In order to” and the connected lower items follow, prefixed with “we need to have”. In full: In order to have [the item], we need to have [the condition] and [the other condition].

We can also read the tree from the bottom up: We need [the condition] so that we can have [the item above].

We can adjust the exact wording to make the statement grammatically correct: In order for books to be returned to their owner at the end of the lending period, we need there to be penalties for not returning a book on time.

The Critical Factors

There are only three essential elements which enable the idea:

• Borrowers requesting books
• Lenders offering to lend books
• Borrowers and Lenders being matched

These are the Critical Success Factors. This makes the conditions which drive the success of the goal clear. These essentials do not specify a solution, we have the freedom to find ways to achieve the stated conditions as we explore building our company and customer base.

The Necessary Conditions

It is helpful to understand these critical factors in more detail. We outline the necessary conditions to support these critical items. The necessary conditions do not have to specify how to achieve those factors, but they do elaborate on the intent behind them.

In order to allow both the requests and the offering of books, we need a “website or app”. This is our method of linking people together. We don’t know which is most appropriate, so this is somewhat flexible. The idea of a central site or app does show an element of our intended implementation.

We add additional conditions to support the higher conditions. We need “lenders to be rewarded” and “books returned to their owners” to ensure that “people are willing to become lenders”. These connections make the assumptions we have about how these elements will work clearer to others.

Clarity of purpose

Using a goal tree we can ensure we prioritise what is important. This is especially helpful in team settings. When I get my Series B funding and start recruiting an amazing team to build my idea, we can review our roadmap and plans together compared with the goal tree to check if they align. If we want to replace our simplistic method of matching users together with a sophisticated AI, but haven’t built any mechanism to reward lenders, we may want to reassess our priorities. We can agree to leave the funding of the website or app until later, choosing instead to focus on functionality to aid returning of books.

Perhaps I’m not the first to come up with such an idea and won’t be heading for early retirement any time soon. The goal tree does, however, show the key elements of the idea, and what will make it successful. This is invaluable in making what’s important explicit, and can even highlight something which hasn’t been considered.

Goal trees are simple but effective. If we have a set of problems we want to solve as a team, we can evaluate which of the goal tree conditions they relate to. If we can’t identify one, then it is likely that solving that particular problem will not take us further towards our goal.

Next time we will look at a set of problems we are sure we need to solve and see how to find root causes.