Five questions I ask before any digital investment

Every piece of work starts with the same questions. They sound simple. Most organisations can't answer them.

1. What value does this actually create?
2. Who owns the commercial outcome?
3. If this succeeds, how does enterprise value improve?
4. What job is the customer hiring this to do, and what happens five minutes either side?
5. Would we build this with our own money?

First ninety days in any business: customers, commercial model, operating model, incentives. Technology comes later. It is rarely the constraint. And projects should be killed the same way they're funded: against value, not activity.

Over the years this has hardened into a working method with structured, measured risk decisions at each stage: ideation, design, execution, acceleration, scaling. Nothing novel about the stages. What matters is that proposition development becomes consistent, teachable and worth investing in.