Chapter 10. Parting Thoughts
IN MID-2016, AS WE put the finishing touches on this book, the field of design finds itself at an inflection point. The spread of software has driven the spread of design, but as companies embrace design, they realize it contains so much more potential than just making software easier to use. The challenge for designers is to embrace this window of opportunity, and to establish themselves as core to business.
We know that the models and frameworks proposed in this book are not achievable overnight. They are meant to serve as milestones, north stars, and guidelines for those embarking on the journey of making their design teams as effective as they can be. Because every organization is different, so are the paths they’ll need to take.
Managing such change will be difficult, and will often not feel worth it. It is easier to maintain the status quo, even if that means design doesn’t realize its potential. But don’t give up! If old-guard companies like IBM (IBM! “Big Blue!”), SAP, and GE invest in design and invite it into the C-suite, then it’s hard to understand why this couldn’t happen anywhere. There is greater promise for design now than at any time in its history, and dedicated leaders are needed to turn that promise into reality.
The Untapped Opportunity for Design
Key to this promise is a curious and underappreciated by-product of the “designer/developer ratio” discussed in Chapter 6, a tool used to ensure an appropriate balance between these roles. In companies that seriously invest in design, that ratio is around 1:5 to 1:10. This means that the work of 40 designers, who could fit inside a large conference room, requires 200–400 engineers, who would need a movie theater to hold them; 40 is literally a manageable number—that many people can be successfully engaged in a facilitated conversation or workshop, where every voice is heard. That’s not true of 400, or even 200—that number of people is simply too big to directly manage.
A brief story Peter was told: when a San Francisco fast-growth tech company moved to new headquarters, their team of 40 designers was placed in one room, a large studio space. An unintended consequence of this placement is that the CEO could go to this single room, look around at the work posted on walls and emanating from people’s screens, and see what was happening across his entire company. The lens of design activity enables a perspective that no other function provides.
This story inspired Peter when he was at Groupon. The team was distributed, so no one room could serve this function. So, once a month, he gathered work from across the entire design team, and shared it out to product, marketing, engineering, and executive leadership. In roughly a single hour, he could present the entire breadth of Groupon’s activity as seen through the lens of his team. After the first session, the CEO told him that it was already the most important meeting at the company. This is because nowhere else could you see such a broad scope in such a manageable fashion.
What these stories point out is that design can be a function with great leverage, where a relatively small number of people can have an outsized impact. However, most design teams are not ready to take advantage. This gets at the crux of why we’ve written this book—in order for design to capitalize on this remarkable opportunity, it needs to get its organizational act together. Creativity and talent are insufficient. Business savvy, strong leadership, and operational effectiveness must be brought to bear as well.
Designers need to throw off their self-imposed mental shackles of being a service function to other parts of the company. With confidence, evidence, and commitment, design teams will realize they have as much influence and authority as anyone. Maybe even more, as they are situated throughout the development lifecycle—research to uncover customer needs and desires, strategy and definition to articulate what should be built, and execution to turn those ideas into concrete offerings.
Keep Design Weird
As design increasingly moves in-house, designers find themselves in environments unintentionally hostile to good design practice. A measure of a design team, and its leadership, is how they navigate this.
Many design teams find themselves at one of two poles. We’ve seen a number of teams, whose leadership comes from design agencies, try to protect design by insulating themselves from the rest of the organization. Essentially, these teams try to re-create the studio model when moving in-house, but in doing so inhibit connection with the rest of the company. This may lead to great design work in the abstract, but it also ultimately leads to ineffectiveness, as without those connections, the work of the design team is not realized through the product or service.
The other pole is one of total integration. Product design molds itself to existing product development processes, usually some flavor of Agile. “The Business” drives key decision making around goals, objectives, and requirements, and the designers do their work within constraints established by others. This integration improves design’s day-to-day effectiveness, but leads to subpar work. Design is a different kind of activity than engineering, and what works for technical development is not ideal for great design. By behaving as “team players,” design becomes overly accommodating, and loses what makes it interesting in the first place.
And what makes design interesting is that, within corporate and enterprise contexts, it is weird. It can be soft, empathetic, touchy-feely, and expressive. People that have grown accustomed to hard, reductive, and dispassionate modes of operating may find such approaches disconcerting and off-putting. Instead of trying to conform in order to fit in, designers must respectfully maintain their distinct vantage. In Chapter 3, we discussed the importance of diverse perspectives when tackling problems, and what’s true for design specifically is even truer for the organization as a whole.
The challenge for in-house teams is to figure out how to maintain that valuable creative spark while working in a way that still supports delivery.
Beyond Features and into a World of Experience
There exists a pattern in the evolution of technical product categories. Consider the Internet-connected smartphone. Among the first was the Nokia 9000 Communicator, released in 1996. It was ugly, underpowered, and difficult to use, but it proves historic as an early mobile device that connected to the Internet. This is the technology phase in evolution, where the mere ability to do something new is what is interesting.
As technology improved, there erupted a myriad of smartphones, from companies including Palm, BlackBerry, Microsoft, and Nokia. The devices competed on capabilities, such as handwriting support, cameras, speed of connectivity, battery life, and integration with other technologies and operating systems. This is the features phase, typically where marketing takes over, requiring more and more stuff added to the product so that more bullet points and checkmarks can be included on the box and in product reviews. The assumption is that the most feature-rich product is the best. However, these products are so bloated with capabilities that they are difficult to use, and people take advantage of only a small percentage of the features.
And then, in 2007, Apple entered the smartphone market with the iPhone. From a features standpoint, the iPhone did not measure up—it had barely a day of battery life, the EDGE network was slower than 3G, and there was no physical keyboard or stylus. Where iPhone excelled, though, was its thoughtfulness, integration, and ease of use, all in a handsome package.
This is the experience phase, where success is due not to how many capabilities are crammed into a product, but from the gestalt derived as a whole. Another recent example is collaborative chat software. When Slack launched, it had far fewer features than its powerful and more established rivals, but succeeded because it was far more straightforward to set up and use, and exhibited a delightful personality.
In Chapter 4, we introduced the Centralized Partnership, and depicted how a design team interfaces with product management and engineering (Figure 10-1).
And while we firmly believe the Centralized Partnership is superior to either full centralization, or embedded and decentralized design, this diagram depicts a key drawback. The Centralized Partnership still conforms to the “features” world. Product teams have been constructed to support ideal engineering team sizes (around 5–8 engineers), and therefore, have narrow purviews.
This diagram shows a team of six designers. That is the same number of designers Peter and Kristin led on an ecommerce project for Adaptive Path (his last project for the company). That team was not constrained by an existing set of features. Instead, drawing on user research, the team was encouraged to reconsider the entire online shopping experience. And that team of six designers not only delivered on Search and Browse, Product Page, Reviews, and Checkout, but also Gifting, Sharing, Wishlists, Merchandising, Social, Video Messaging, In-Store Pickup, and a comprehensive style guide as well. When approaching problems from an experience point of view, designers tackle not only the obvious tentpole features, but all the smaller, more nuanced elements that turn something from being a collection of functions into a coordinated whole.
This approach proves radical because it’s not optimized for engineering delivery (and, as anyone working in technical product development knows, everything is optimized for engineering productivity). But because the experience mindset proves transformative in the value being delivered, with greater success realized when moving beyond the constraints of features, then supporting an ideal design team size must be seriously considerated. The challenge is figuring out how to operationalize this so that the design work coordinates with engineering. We (the authors) don’t have a specific answer for this. So we leave it as a provocation to the reader, look forward to hearing how others have made this work, and will include those successes in a second edition!