Crucial Success Factors (CSFs)

Technique

Crucial or Critical Success Factors (CSFs) is a technique used in Strategic Planning. We can apply this technique in modified form also to Design Thinking to understand what are the most relevant functions or features that must be delivered that our solution will be successful for our users.

Feel free to adjust the technique described here to your specific needs.

1. Brainstorm and collect functions or features that should be delivered to solve a specific problem
2. Brainstorm how the experience should be for the user when they use your solution. This will open a broader perspective to view the functions or features slightly shifted from user perspective.
3. Identify those functions or features / experiences that must be delivered that the solution will be successfully adopted by the persona

This technique is particularly helpful before you go into a prototyping phase as it helps to define early on focus areas of the prototype.

Facilitation

• Put the persona, target group or main user and the problem statement at the bottom

• The participants brainstorm what features or function the product should deliver for the persona
• Next, the participants should brainstorm how the user experience of the product should be for the persona

In a next step, the participants identify the functions and experiences that will be crucial for the success of the feature:

The last step is optional and depends on your use case. Having identified CSFs is a perfect starting point to reflect how we can quantitatively measure success and failure.