Article: Avoiding Design By Committee

Copied from http://www.svpg.com/articles.

One of the big advantages that startups have is that there aren’t many people.

As companies get larger (even a little bit larger), one of the very common consequences is that decisions become group activities. Stakeholders pop up from every direction. The notion of ownership gets diluted down to consensus builder. The objective moves from coming up with something great, to coming up with something that doesn’t get you fired.

And the result very often is that product innovation largely grinds to a halt.

There is no question that in larger companies there really are many stakeholders, and they really must be taken into account, as there is much more riding on your decisions than in a startup. But many companies struggle because they don’t know how to manage the stakeholders yet still make progress and innovate.

In this note I want to spell out the technique that I use to overcome this all too common problem.

But first, the key for every product discovery effort is to identify the three key people – the product manager, the user experience lead, and the product development lead. These are the three minds that must collaborate closely to solve problems in new and useful ways.

The product manager plays the lead role and brings to the table the knowledge of the functionality required, and is responsible for making sure the product has value.

The user experience lead represents the user’s behavior and mental model, and works to ensure the result is something that users can figure out.

And the product development lead brings to the table deep knowledge about what is possible, and is responsible for ensuring that the product that is defined is something that can actually be delivered.

Lots of other people are going to want to join your little party. Once in a while you may decide to include a guest or two, but it is absolutely critical that you keep this team small. You simply won’t innovate in a large group setting. This is not just a brainstorming session. You will be working through literally hundreds of small and large decisions, and your progress will slow to a crawl if you don’t have that small group of smart, empowered people.

It also doesn’t mean that your small group doesn’t have help. You have the resources of the company available to you as you need it. The most common resources are from the user experience extended team: especially prototyping, user research, visual designer, and user testing help. But you may need to go talk to legal about a sensitive issue, or the analytics people about how something is used today, or maybe you will talk to someone in site security about something you are nervous about.

The key is that your core team is empowered. Empowered to represent the stakeholders and to make decisions. But this doesn’t mean that you are given a blank check. You will have to review your decisions with the various stakeholders and make adjustments where necessary.

This is where I need to drill down to explain what I mean.

Each of the three members of your core product discovery team represent many different stakeholders:

The product manager as the overall product owner typically represents the business owner, company executives, sales, marketing, product marketing, legal, finance and customer support.

The user experience lead is very often an interaction designer but depending on the project may come from one of the other design areas, but in any case must represent interaction design, visual design, user research, usability engineering and often content/editorial.

The product development lead is very often from the architecture team or a lead engineer, but again, depending on the project may come from one of the other areas of product development, and must represent architecture, engineering, test automation, site operations, and site security.

For this model to work, the three members of the product discovery team really do need to be entrusted to give their best efforts while keeping in mind the needs of their stakeholders. But in truth it’s not that long of a leash. Your product discovery team still need to be able to show what you have come up with and are proposing before the product is actually built. This is one of the benefits of creating a prototype. You can show this prototype to any or all of their stakeholders so that they can see the reason for the decisions and what exactly is being proposed.

Often there is still some back and forth as stakeholders balance their issues against the potential of the product, but I can only tell you that the nature of the discussion is completely different when stakeholders can see the vision in a clickable prototype versus just talked about in the abstract or in some form of paper spec.

Moving to this model does require a little bit of a leap of faith. Management and stakeholders have to be willing to entrust you to represent their interests instead of being personally involved at the level they may be used to.

But the notion of a small group of talented and motivated people has always been key to coming up with great products. It is the basic ingredients of a startup, and you need to make sure you continue this as your company grows if you want to continue to create products that matter.

Great Products By Design

I should be writing more often... but for today allow me to slack off again by using someone else's thoughts.

This article is from the Silicon Valley Product Group Blog quite some time ago and I don't know who the author was. I posted it here because I 100% believe in what it's advocating and I personally walk the talk. Here's the content of the article:

I do not believe great products happen by accident. In every case, behind every great product I find that there are certain truths. Today I want to share ten such truths. I try to keep these in mind on every product effort:

1. Engineering is important, but user experience design is more important, and usually more difficult

2. Engineers are typically terrible user experience designers; engineers think in terms of implementation models, but users think in terms of conceptual models

3. User Experience design means both interaction design and visual design

4. Functionality (product requirements) and user experience design are inherently intertwined

5. Product ideas must be tested - early and often - on actual target users in order to come up with a good user experience

6. We need to test (validate) usability, desirability and feasibility – before proceeding to engineering

7. We need a high-fidelity prototype, so we can quickly, easily and frequently test ideas on real users with a realistic user experience

8. The high-fidelity prototype is the most effective way to communicate the required user experience with the full product team

9. The job of the product manager is to identify the minimal possible product that meets the objectives and provides the desired user experience – minimizing time to market, user and implementation complexity

10. Once the minimal successful product has been designed and validated, it is not something that can be piecemealed and expect the same results.

To the author of this article - thank you for the inspiration.

How to innovate faster

I came across this article on Harvard Business Online by Ravi Chhatpar

If they’re to do their job most effectively, designers should be brought into the innovation process at the very earliest stages. Too many companies still make the mistake of keeping business strategy and design activities separate. Typically, marketers conceptualize a new product based on company strategy; the project team gets input from various areas of the company and creates a business case; and senior executives make a final choice from among the possibilities they’re given. Only then does the idea go to the designers.

That sequential method ensures that the product is aligned with strategy, allows the team to create buy-in and build consensus, and gives senior executives an array of options. But it takes a long time, so even if the original concept drew on real-world data about users, the company is inevitably unable to adapt to rapid, unforeseen changes in markets and user preferences.

The solution is to bring in designers at the very beginning of the process, because designers (if they do what they’re supposed to) will put prototypes into circulation and share users’ responses and attitudes with the project team, even as the business case is being developed. That enables the company to nimbly adjust to changes in market opportunities long before the product concept is set in stone.

From concept through development, designers should function in parallel with corporate decision makers, creating prototypes for a number of variations on a product and then testing them with users and, if appropriate, partners. Tracking how customers’ ways of using a product evolve over time also makes it possible for designers to identify desirable new features and, in some cases, create new functionality in conjunction with users.

Planners should concurrently be considering the business implications, asking questions such as “How much would it cost to incorporate this new feature?” and “How should we respond to users’ changing needs?” The team should continually feed new information from user research and prototype analysis into the evolving business strategy. Constraints that emerge, such as price or a decision to offer standard versus premium features, may be used to inform the next prototype, which can then be evaluated through more formal testing. And the cycle repeats.
... You can read the rest of the article here.

Shared this article with my CEO and here's his advice:
It is a good idea to get as many people involved as possible.
However, to do that we first need..
1) A strategic direction and a blue plan so that everyone know where is the direction. Do we have that?
2) We need to hire smart designer who understand the business and can contribute their ideas. No point just get more people in the meeting if their contribution is minimum. How many of such designer we have. Can we get more?
3) We need capable managers who can handle the discussion and involvement of more people. Do we have such capable managers?

I won't tell you my answers...But it is the sort of questions you should be asking yourselves :)

Evolution

Evolution has served mankind well, if you follow Darwin's theory.
It can be applied to organizations as well.

The 3+1 success factors of evolution are:

1. Variation - We need to allow variation to happen, aside from just appreciating differences. It is the variation in genes that have made mankind adapt to the changing world.

2. Inheritance - While we need to embrace variation, it is inheritance that made us who we are today and the reason why mankind is different from other species.

3. Selection - The process that ensures the strong survive and the weak eliminated. Like it or not - the environment, or the customers will enforce this process on businesses. In order to survive, organizations need to have the selection process within itself as well - keeping the strong people, process, product and weeding out the weak ones.

And the last one:
Be there.
What do I mean? Read this article on Forbes to understand more.

The Spirit of Performance

The purpose of an organization is to enable common men to do uncommon things.

Morality, to have any meaning at all, must not be exhortation, sermon, or good intentions. It must be practices. Specifically:

1. The focus of the organization must be on performance. The 1st requirement of the spirit of high performance is high performance standards, for the group as well as each individual.
2. The focus of the organization must be on opportunities rather than on problems.
3. The decisions that affect people - their placement, pay, promotion, demotion and severance - must express the values and beliefs of the organization.
4. Finally, in its people decisions, management must demonstrate that it realizes that integrity is one absolute requirement for any manager, the one quality that he has to bring with him and cannot be expected to acquire later on.

~Peter Drucker, Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices.

Motivators and Hygiene Factors

You might be familiar with Two Factor Theory (also known as Herzberg's Boby Motivation-Hygiene Theory). The theory states that there are certain factors in the workplace that cause job satisfaction, while a separate set of factors cause dissatisfaction.
In other words, the hygiene factors are those that prevent people from leaving your company, while the motivating factors are those that will keep people in your company.

For example, keeping the pantry well stocked with fancy F&B is a hygiene factor, while efforts in personal and professional development are motivating factors.
Both needs to be done, but many would agree that an organization needs to pay significantly more attention to the motivators, towards 80/20. Meeting all the hygiene factors does not mean people will stay in the organization at all.

The same theory can be applied to products. Many times we spend too much time and attention on the hygiene factors, working hard to keep customers "happy". The real question we need to ask when a product function is being developed, is "Is this going to help me sell more products to more customers?"

If the answer is no - then most likely you are only working on the hygiene factors.

Innovation and Risk Taking

I have attended a few symposium on entrepreneurship, when the topic of entrepreneur character or personality is discussed - there are lots of different opinion but one of the popular and common one is the "propensity for risk taking".

Here's what Peter Drucker says:
"I know a good many successful entrepreneurs. Not one of them has a propensity for risk taking. Most successful innovators in real life are colorless figures, and much more likely to spend hours on cash-flow projections than to dash off looking for risks. They are not risk-focused, they are opportunity-focused."