Feasibility, desirability and viability scorecard

The feasibility, desirability and viability scorecard turns a long list of ideas into a ranked one. Each idea gets a score, typically 1 to 5, against three questions: do people want it (desirability), can we build it (feasibility), and can the business sustain it (viability). The three scores are added up and the highest totals rise to the top.

The three lenses come from IDEO’s design approach, where a good idea sits where all three overlap. The scorecard is the spreadsheet version of that overlap.

Why three lenses beat two

An impact-effort matrix folds everything into value and cost. The scorecard keeps the reasons apart, so you can see that an idea is loved by users and cheap to build but has no revenue model, which is a different problem from one that is hard to build.

Common mistakes

Scoring alone. A designer scores desirability confidently and guesses the rest, so the numbers just echo their taste. Put design, engineering and the business owner in the same room, and let each lens be argued by the person who owns it.

Trusting the total too much. A sum hides a zero: an idea scoring 5, 5 and 1 totals the same as one scoring 4, 4 and 3, yet the first may be undeliverable. Read the lowest score before the total, and treat any 1 as a question to answer, not a number to average away.