Quality is often elusive. While it's often relative and has an air of, "I'll know it when I see it," it can still be defined locally.
In my time as a design leader, establishing a bar for a high level of execution has been a persistent challenge. Continually shipping quality product experiences means that you have to have an unwavering focus on the details. This is never an easy task if you're working to shape high-level product strategy.
When I previously wrote about designers up-skilling in business concepts, the intention was for designers to think about a company as a system. One can better understand the leverage points and the places where efforts can have outsized outcomes if one has a better understanding of the entire system..
At the risk of being too reductive, the best starting point is to think about how a company makes money and how it generates value. Input and output. There is a lot more nuance to it—the nuance is critical to truly understanding a business—but the following concepts are a great foundation from which we can both gain knowledge and begin investigating a new company. As we start to chart the money into the company and the value—which is not always money—out of a company, some patterns start to emerge. These patterns outline what we commonly think of as a business model.
The eight primary elements of a business model
There are a handful of elements that make up a business model. For the purposes of design, I’m going to focus on the most relevant five elements:
Value proposition
Target market
Customer relationships
Revenue streams, and
Cost structure.
Let’s break each one down through the lens of design.
Value Proposition
The purpose of the value proposition is to clearly and succinctly communicate what pain points the business is solving for the customer, what gains the customer will receive, and what the product offering looks like. The value proposition should create clarity and alignment across the business by clearly stating the above. While this should ideally be very simple to communicate across a business, the value proposition (often “value prop”) can get murky for large and complicated businesses that have many business units and diverse venue streams. It may make sense to have a value prop for each business unit or vertical within a business. Generally, the idea is that a value prop is internally facing for business, but could be easily tailored for different external audiences.
The Value Proposition Canvas, created as popularized by Strategizer (see here). It can be viewed as a component of the Business Model Canvas.
High-level leadership should be the ones to set the value proposition for an organization because it touches every part of the business. Rarely is the value prop contained in a single artifact explicitly called a “value proposition,” but instead manifests in things like a company’s mission, vision, or strategic goals. The value prop should be widely circulated and easily understood. If a company lacks a value prop, things are very wrong, but it’s not the designer’s role to establish one. Instead, design leaders should ensure that their company delivers on their value prop.
It can be easy to stray from the original value prop of a company in favor of another enticing opportunity. In that case, it’s up to leadership to either reset the value prop or correct the deviation. Failing to do so results in a company in conflict with itself.
Target Market / Target Customers
The relevance of a defined target market or customer should be immediately apparent for designers: these are the people—or groups of people—that we are designing for. However, one essential point is the frequent disconnect of an intended or aspirational market/customer from the actual market/customer.
Designers are often brought into projects to uncover actionable insights about customers or to identify whether a business is reaching its targets or not. This work can be done in partnership with market research efforts to provide a more comprehensive picture of customers.
Target market and customer models can be particularly fraught with assumptions at every level of a company. And while there may be some element of truth to a coworker or leader’s conception of customers, it can be perilous to take these assumptions at face value. “We know about our customers,” can be a dangerous statement because markets are always in flux and what may have been true in the past may not be true tomorrow.
Designers must also challenge collaborators and business leaders to expand their conceptions of target markets and customers beyond demographics. In almost all cases, the reason why a person chooses a particular product has nothing to do with their income or geographical location. Uncovering the real “why” of a buying decision requires that the team must dig deeper. More useful profiles of markets and customers include additional dimensions such as psychographics and behavioral traits, as well as common needs or pain points. These elements are frequently determining factors for product adoption and engagement. As such, they should not be overlooked, but instead sought out through deep research.
Customer Relationships
This is where things start to get a little squishy. Customer relationships are critical for designers to understand to influence them. A greater understanding of these relationships can identify issues with your sales funnel or uncover opportunities for product growth.
Broadly speaking, a customer relationship is how a business interacts with its customers. This could be how a business acquires new customers, how they make themselves visible to new customers, what types of transactions a business encourages, and what type of cadence or duration those interactions happen in.
For those with a holistic experience design approach or a background in service design, this has a clear relevance for designers. While customer relationships aren’t often set at the leadership level, relationship goals might be. For example, it may be a company goal to increase the top of a funnel, so it should be important for a designer to understand how the business could do that.
A common organizational desire is to change the quality of a customer relationship to another more advantageous state. For example, current customers may interact with a business in a transactional nature and only when something is needed. This creates opportunities for competitors to step in and fosters very low brand affinity. One could see the value in altering the customer relationship to foster a deeper connection with the business.
There are many ways to achieve a change in a particular customer relationship, which is where design practitioners can come into the equation through concept exploration, discovery activities, or any other applicable method. This is why it’s essential for designers to both understand a business’ customers as well as how they relate to the business.
Revenue streams
I hope that we’re at the point where I don’t have to dig into the importance of knowing how a business makes money. What may be less important is understanding all of the sources of business revenue.
A great example is Google, which you might think of as being in the business of providing software like Gmail, the Android OS, or the Workspace suite. In fact their greatest source of revenue is selling advertising, primarily served to people using their search engine (but also YouTube and in-app ads). In 2023, Google generated 237.85B from ads across their platform, or approximately 77% of their total revenue. Every other product that they make generates significantly less revenue, if any at all. If you were a designer at Google working on a product that serves ads, any design decision that would jeopardize their advertising revenue would be highly scrutinized and weighed against trade-offs.
In the context of design, knowing where the money comes from is critical. You, as a designer, will need to make money for your company. If you’re not working on something that makes money for your company, your job is more at risk. Unfortunately, it’s as simple as that.
The clearer that you can draw a line from the work you do and the value that it generates for the business, the more resilient you will be in your role. If that line is currently a curvy, convoluted, gnarled line, do whatever you can reasonably do to get closer to value by making changes to your role.
Consider what stage your company is in and where your leadership is focused. While reductive and oversimplified, most businesses are primarily working to achieve one of two things: growing revenue or reducing cost.
To grow revenue, a business needs to expand their relationships with existing customers or find new customers. This is an area where designers—with our skills in customer research, ideation, discovery, and validation—are positioned to succeed.
The most secure position for a designer to be is tasked with growing the revenue of an existing product. Your company has established the viability of a product or service but also identified (possibly through design activities) that there is a new opportunity to general additional income. This is a fantastic place to be as it requires minimal new resource investment from the business as well as the low-risk bet of starting with a proven winner.
If, instead, you’re in the position of having a role that is tasked with finding entirely new sources of revenue, you’re likely in a precarious spot. Especially in difficult economic times, leadership tends to cut initiatives like these and lean into optimizing existing revenue streams. While these are arguably short-sighted cuts, they are a sad reality. If this relates to you, do whatever you can to hedge your bets. Go back to basics starting with the value prop, or ensure that you have a fallback if the rug gets pulled out from under you.
Reducing operational cost is not going to be an effective use of designers, though they may be especially good at it. Design is a cost center (more on this later) and spending the money to fix small things is rarely worth the investment of staffing projects with designers. If you find yourself in this situation, know that your role will be in jeopardy soon. Reducing cost centers is often the first move in any period of economic hardship or when a company wants to appear more profitable than it actually is (e.g., before an IPO or acquisition).
Cost structure
Design is—and always will be—a cost center. Cost centers are functions that take business resources (i.e., money) without directly generating revenue. This makes every design role more precarious than it would seem, and why design roles are often on the chopping block with the first round of layoffs. This is painful, and not an easy truth to reckon with. As I mentioned in my other post, I’ve felt this more times than I care to revisit.
Knowing where the business incurs costs is valuable for design work. Any solution should take into account the explicit or implied costs. There will be the cost of an engineer’s time to build, test, and deploy any new code. Potentially there might be some costs to message and market product changes. What about customer support? Triaging any issues that might come up with the changes? Will it impact processes in the physical space such as retail? Are there revenue or legal ramifications to the changes that you’re proposing? There is no scenario where a business operates without costs, but figuring out which costs are acceptable and which are not is the hard work that designers need to do. The importance of these considerations cannot be overstated.
In these scenarios, the best thing a designer can do is to model out various outcomes. If you are unsure of how to make the case to change an experience, start with a list of costs and model those out to a reasonable time horizon. Balance those with any potential net benefit (see previous section). If you’re in a particularly advantageous position, you may be able to leverage data science peers to improve your models. This activity will put you in the ideal place to argue for—or against—the case of taking action.
Wrap-up
I hope that I’ve given you a starting point to start digging into the inner workings of your company. I can appreciate that this info is a lot, even though I’ve only scratched the surface on some of these topics. At this point, I’m trying to lay the groundwork on how to put some of this info into practice. We’ll continue to build on it in subsequent posts.
My challenge to you at this point is to remain curious. If you can dig into some of the gaps in your understanding of the business, so much the better. It will inform your design work on some level and make you a better designer.
I have plans to expand this series and continue to give designers more tools to be fluent in business concepts. If you’ve read this far, I’d be interested in any feedback that you might have. Feel free to drop me a line on Mastodon or LinkedIn.
Postscript: I would like to thank Marc Amos, Eric Bailey, and Joe Martucci for their help in editing this post. They helped me polish my mad ravings into something human-readable.
It’s clear that something is in the air. Every week there are news stories about a tech company laying off 10–15% of their workforce. While the cuts impact the entire business, there is no disputing that product disciplines (UX, Product, and even Engineering to some extent) have been hit particularly hard. On top of it all, companies have been particularly slow to rehire for those roles. While there is some element of a market correction to these layoffs, they largely represent businesses making short-term decisions to improve the optics on balance sheets for investors and shareholders.
Many people are feeling the pain of these layoffs, and let me be very upfront: I don’t think it’s designers’ fault that they have fallen victim to economic circumstances and short-sighted decision-making. Our remit has been clear for many years in that we have been tasked with being the voice of the user and the voice of the customer. We have had the responsibility of figuring out (and often guessing) what our users need, and then designing experiences that meet those needs—as long as those needs align with what product leadership wants. In many situations, this puts designers in a challenging spot of having to advocate for product experiences that users want or need even if they’re not what a business leader has decided is important because we’ve been educated and sold on the line that if companies build things that users want then the money will follow.
If designers bear the fault for anything—myself included—it’s the heady optimism that others would see the value in our point of view if given enough time and convincing. In that regard, the last two years have been a cold shower of a wake-up call. While that optimism isn’t a sin, we have failed to adequately plan for the scenario that many of us find ourselves in.
Dealing with a layoff
I’ve been a designer for more than two decades. In that time, I’ve been laid off 3.5 times (yes, .5. It’s a long story. Buy me a coffee and we’ll talk.). Each time it’s happened, it’s been painful. Only a couple of those times did I see it coming. For anyone that’s been laid off in the past two years: it sucks and I feel you. I hate that you/we are having to go through this and I wish it could be any other way.
While we may not be responsible for being laid off, we are responsible for what comes next. Each time I’ve been through this, I get to the point where I can harness a negative experience into an opportunity. And indeed one of the things that I pride myself on is resiliency.
After I collected myself from the latest layoff, the first thing that I decided to do was start a user experience and leadership consultancy—Ira Cummings Studio. If you’re here reading this, then you might be somewhat familiar with what I’ve been doing, partnering with companies to help them move faster, innovate with less risk, and accelerate product/market fit. It’s been an amazing challenge, with more to say in the coming months.
Another one of the things that I’ve been working on is up-skilling my product and business knowledge. To be honest, I’ve been working on this for several years but I’ve been able to lean in during the past few months. I’ve poured over many resources and accumulated some useful knowledge.
A new series on business concepts
I’d like to take this opportunity to give back by sharing some of this knowledge, as well as the resources that I’ve gleaned from. To that end, I’m going to kick off a series of posts about business or product terminology that I’ve found helpful in my work. While I may unpack some of these terms from a designer’s point of view, I intend to keep these posts low on jargon. They should be helpful to those getting started in any product discipline or wanting to acquire more tools to be more effective in their work. I hope that this knowledge will help you be more resilient in your careers.
I want to start with posts on business structures, some financial terminology that everybody should know, and then pick apart some common concepts around product development that are particularly ambiguous. I don’t have it all worked out though and I’d like to respond to what people find valuable. What are the most confusing or ambiguous business and product concepts that you’ve struggled with? Reach out to me on Mastodon or here and let me know.
Every year I collect my favorite records of the past year. As tired and clichéd as these lists may be, they're fun for me to do—even if these posts take a hell of a lot of time.
In addition to the tradition of composing this list, I sometimes meander through some thoughts, trying to connect any themes that might pop up about my favorite music in the past 12 months. One thing that strikes me this year is how my music discovery is algorithmic has become. Six out of ten of these releases were discovered through algorithmic recommendation (Spotify and YouTube primarily). Of the remaining four, three are releases of bands that I've found previously, likely through similar means.
Ordinary there's the potential that this might bum me out—I used to find more music talking to people and listening to the radio—but I'm just happy to find music that I like. They don't have to be organic, home-grown, non-GMO recommendations. Part of me wants to go down the cynical path of what opaque algorithms are doing to our collective music tastes, however the old methods of recommendation still work. I still hear about bands from people that I talk to and sometimes I even listen to the radio.
The Finalists
Algiers - Shook I'm such a fan of Algiers. They are an amazing example of a band that has merged disparate sounds into a cohesive and challenging whole. Shook is one of those great albums that takes a band's unique sound and dials it up a few notches. Algiers also really embody a punk/hardcore ethos, supporting other bands and giving them a platform. Finally, the album design—and consistent aesthetic—is right up my alley.
Bully - Lucky For You About 10 years ago there was a trend of garage-ish bands that were actually one person that played all the instruments on an album, and then hired a group of session musicians to tour with. Folks like Jay Reatard, Wavves, and Cloud Nothings typified this ethos and sound. Bully started the other way, beginning as a band and continuing as the solo project of Alicia Bognanno. As with previous releases, these tracks cut out the filler. Though the production is a bit more refined here, each song is genuine, raw, and powerful.
CZARFACE - CZARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE While I'm not huge into hip-hop, I freakin' love CZARFACE. The beats are great and the lyrics are fun with clever rhymes. So many tracks have in-jokes for fans of Marvel and DC comics, but they really leaned into it for this record. A great listen from start to finish.
Private Lives - Hit Record Probably one of the more straight-ahead releases on this list. Private Lives sits squarely in the garage-punk realm. What they lack in innovation, they more than make up in terms of quality and consistency. Great tracks that just make you want to groove.
The Hives - The Death of Randy Fitzsimmons What can I say about The Hives that hasn't been said before? What I will say is that this is no comeback album. It's a return to form.
King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard - PetroDragonic Apocalypse… I have a very strong reaction to a King Gizzard… album: either I love them or I hate them. Sometimes their sound gets noodle-y or prog-y, which completely bores me. This one is just solid stoner metal jams—just the way I like 'em.
Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs - Land of Sleeper Speaking of stoner metal, Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs is my favorite discovery in that genre in a while. You can feel the weight of every single riff and it's hard not to headbang.
Snooper - Super Snõõper This is just a fun record and it shreds. Snooper has two speeds: stopped and super fast. Vocals are fast and frantic without being screechy. And for some reason there's a loose concept about spys. I don't know. Either way this is a ripper.
Stuck - Freak Frequency I'm not sure how I'd classify Stuck, but they'd definitely be post something. Post-rock? Post-hardcore? I don't know but they put out a hell of a record this year. I haven't heard other folks talking about this one but I'm hoping that Stuck gains more momentum soon. They really deserve a bigger fanbase.
Jeff Rosenstock - HELLMODE I think I discovered this album around the same time most people did, though I'll honestly say that I dismissed it at first. I had pegged Jeff as a sort of singer/songwriter type more associated with his ska roots, which is clearly not the case for this record. This is the first albums of his that I've listened to and it's catchy as hell (pun intended).
Best Album That I Bought This Year That Didn't Come Out This Year
Perrenial's In The Midnight Hour is such a standout for me from the past year. It seems like they are no longer active, and I'm really bummed. While not old—it came out in 2022—I missed the initial release of this album. Each track is just a frantic, all-out breakdown. It's loud and noisy without being a mess. They're tight with each start and stop being crisp. With interesting lyrics and nice variety between songs, it's a fantastic listen.
Playlist of the Year
I pulled together some of the stand-out tracks from each of the albums above. Here's a YouTube playlist with each one:
Postscript: As with last year, I linked to the appropriate Bandcamp pages for these releases where I could. Not all artists are on Bandcamp, which means you can probably find them in the usual popular music places. Bandcamp is going through a bit thing now, with the recent sale to a private equity firm and massive layoffs, but it's still the best way to directly support artists directly. If you like any of these records, I would encourage you to purchase them to directly support the artists.
I was going to start this list out with my usual musings on the state of the music industry or quality of releases this year. I'll spare you that this time around dear reader, as there have just been too many delays with getting this post out the door. I'll just say that I thoroughly enjoyed a lot of albums that came out this year and it was quite agonizing to narrow the list down to 10. So without further delay, here's my list of my favorite albums that came out last year:
The Black Keys - Dropout Boogie | These guys haven’t needed an intro for a while now. Dropout Boogie feels like a bit of a throwback of an album to me—sort of like the music they were making about a decade ago. There’s no standout hit like “Lonely Boy” but really just super solid.
The Chats - GET FUCKED | Straight-ahead punk rock played by a bunch of rowdy Aussies. Just great stuff that completely rips.
IRONFLAME - Where Madness Dwells | When I listen to metal, I listen to a certain kind of metal. IRONFLAME is exactly that kind of metal. The riffs are so thick and weighty that they must be played with long shoulder-length hair. I mean look at that album cover! Frazetta would’ve been proud.
Jack White - FEAR OF THE DAWN | Jack White also doesn’t need an intro either, so I’ll just say that I like this album quite a bit more than the past 2-3 albums that he’s put out. Great listen.
Marlowe - Marlowe 3 | With each release, it seems like the dudes in Marlowe really just crank up the groove dial a couple notches. In this one, the hooks really stack up and never slow down.
Osees - A Foul Form | It’s hard to pin this band down. They can hardly settle on a name, say nothing of a musical style. With each outting, you really need to reset and figure out what’s up. This one falls somewhere on the scale of noise punk and weirdo art punk. If that’s your kind of thing, this is the record for you.
Viagra Boys - Cave World | I have a soft spot for punks from Sweden. Whether it’s The Refused, Randy or these guys, there’s an intelligence and deep-seated need to go against the grain that seems be shared by all the great Swedish Punks that just works for me. Cave World works in a way that I feel their previous release, Welfare Jazz, didn’t quite manage. Maybe it’s because they’re pushing against the edge of the punk formula a bit more, but whatever the case it’s good stuff.
Wet Leg - Wet Leg | Wow, Wet Leg really blew up this year, huh? I heard Chaise Longue on some random playlist and I was hooked. Can’t wait to see what they do next.
Best Album That I Bought This Year That Came Out a While Ago
OK, so I'm still workshopping the title of this category, but this is one that I've been thinking about for a long time. So much music comes out every year. It's impossible to keep track of it all. Inevitably I stumble on an older release (though not always that old) that really catches me. This year it was Cashmere by Swet Shop Boys. Through and through, it's such a catchy album filled with bangers. Once you get past the hooks, there's the rhymes and lyrics confronting Islamiphobia and the racism that underpins life for immigrants. Definitely check it out.
That about puts a wrap on it. There are already some albums coming out this year that I've been enjoying, so I'm looking forward to what the rest of the year brings.
Post-script: I linked to the artist's Bandcamp page whenever possible above. If you like any of these albums, I highly suggest supporting the the artist via Bandcamp.
This past week I had the distinct privilege of speaking at the UXPA Boston 2022 conference. Each year the conference brings together UX professionals from across the region and country to discuss important topics.
While I had attended several times before, however this was my first time speaking. My talk, "Building Your Platform as a UX Leader" focused on the challenges that you need to navigate as a leader that you have no framework to work through. I shared my experiences (i.e., failures) as a new UX leader, and how I worked with a coach to develop my personal leadership platform. I hope that others were able to take away the value of self-discovery as a leader, and how to go about it.
If you were able to attend or not, here are my slides in PDF format.
I owe a huge debt to Lisa deBettencourt and Catherine Winfield, both exceptional leaders in their own rights. They each provided me with unique models of leadership and helped me to figure out how I wanted to lead. To top it off, they are both wonderful people.
The display typeface that I used throughout the presentation is Segment A Type, with Work Sans as the text face.
I tend to keep my eyes open for interesting finds that inspire me in some way when I'm traveling. I'm never looking for material for a specific project, just for visuals that strike a chord. Here are a few of my favorites from a recent trip to the White Mountains region in New Hampshire.
Let's establish up front that there were some incredibly strong releases this year. It was a challenging task to narrow this list down to just 10 albums. In fact, this list hovered at 11 selections for a couple weeks before I finally made a decision—but it was sooo close.
The sounds that were clicking for me this year definitely fit squarely in the post-punk, post-hardcore mold. Whether it was artists that have been around for a while that have continued to evolve their sound (Quicksand, Psychic Graveyard, DFA 1979), or newcomers that are rediscovering and mining the past for gold (Old Moon, Snapped Ankles, NOV3L). Their releases felt both nostalgic and fresh, often a tough line to walk. I can't help but think about how large bands like Public Image Limite, Delta 5, and The Slits loom over many of these artists.
While not necessarily my most adventurous year of listening, I quite enjoyed the stoner metal riffs from Spelljammer (points for old-school D ’n’ D reference). Similarly Ty Segall's Harmonizer delivered satisfying heavy tunes that recall some of his earlier releases or his work with Fuzz.
If there's a singular theme that ties a lot of these releases together, it might be nostalgia. Always a source of some comfort, it's hard not to feel a connection to music that relates to an earlier time—in my life or just to a previous era. And lets face it, it's been a difficult few years. Maybe that's why artists, and myself as a listener, are drawn to some of these sounds of times past. While some might look at nostalgia as a crutch or weakness, I feel that there is so much to be gained from looking backwards. Whether it's sharing long-defunct bands with a new audience or having a sort of conversation with our predecessors, it all helps to keep the world of music interesting.
Aside: I've linked to the artists' releases on Bandcamp where I could. Please consider listening to tracks there, and if you like them, purchasing them on Bandcamp. The artists get a massively larger cut that way, rather than streaming services.
I really couldn't restrict myself to ten releases this year. There was just too much quality, so here's my list of other albums that may have come out this year and that I loved, but didn't quite make the cut. Many of them were solid in their own right, but just not quite different enough to stand out. Or—as is the case with the IDLES release—I just didn't have enought time to listen to them yet. I've even included a few from 2020 that I didn't have a chance to listen to until 2021.
Black Keys - Delta Kream
Royal Blood - Typhoons
Sleater-Kinney - Path of Wellness
Here Lies Man - Ritual Divination
CZARFACE & MF Doom - Super What?
IDLES - Crawler
Automatic - Signal
Cloud Nothings - The Black Hole Understands
Fuzz - III
Mother's Cake - Cyberfunk!
Shopping - Why Choose
Sweeping Promises - Hunder for a Way Out
Final Thoughts
Did you enjoy any of these releases as well? Any stand-outs that I missed? Definitely drop me a line. I'm always up for talking about great music.
I was recently asked in an interview if I felt that my previous company was "Design-centric." Without a moment's hesitation, I answered "Not at all," which wasn't a knock against the company. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that if your company is Design-centric, you're focusing on the wrong thing.
That may seem like a strange thing for a designer to say, but I genuinely believe it. This may not be the position that I've always held, it is a position that I've arrived at after spending a significant amount of time working on software in the context of a biotech company. Design just isn't the most important thing to orient a company around. Ultimately, it's not what any company's customers are buying.
This is a good time to pause and break down what "Design-centric" means. It's likely one of those terms that will elicit different definitions from different people, but in my experience, it means that a company and its priorities are configured in such a way as to allow designers to determine how they work and that there are certain accommodations to the importance of design work. Some might argue that this means doing things like user or customer research as part of the process. I certainly grant that this is an important activity to engage in, but the words are important. It's "Design" and Designers at the center that I take issue with. Designers aren't the only ones able to gather customer feedback (e.g., go talk to the sales team), so why wouldn't you want a "Market research-centric" company? That might make sense in an agency context, though I'd suggest that it would be severely limiting for any organization.
Another term that I've been hearing a lot—particularly from product folks and CEOs—is "Product-centric" or "Product-lead" company. I'll be honest and say that I wasn't quite sure what that term meant when I first heard it. It seemed like a code for a certain type of company. From what I can gather, these terms generally mean a company with software product(s) at the core of the company. In this way, the product(s) themselves drive company strategy and direction. Experiences outside the confines of this product are generally looked at as secondary or ancillary.
You don't need to be clairvoyant to see where I'm going with this: why should the Product be at the center? What happens if the Product no longer serves the people that it was created for? What if the people that the Product is created for have significant context outside the confines of the interface and don't share that same viewpoint? If just making more of the Product is the end-all, be-all, then what gets people up in the morning? In many ways, this sounds a bit like the tail wagging the dog and if we've learned anything as designers, it's that you can't lead with the solution.
Keeping people at the center
I'd put forward another model. One where the company, its products, services, and structures are oriented around the humans that you're creating for and how you're solving problems for them. I've seen this orientation as a strong driver for innovation and experimentation. I've seen this act as a built-in North Star for a company that can remain consistent despite individual product or feature failures. Markets and attitudes may change, but staying rooted in people's problems and your organization's unique value proposition to solve those problems creates a more durable approach that will weather those changes.
In this context, Design as a function and designers can deliver unique value. We are experts in understanding our customers (those humans whose problems we're solving), and modeling different possible ways to meet their needs. It also positions designers as true partners across the organization and changes the conversation. We no longer have to say things like, "We are Designers, so we need to be a part of this process so we can do Designer-y things," and instead say, "We can help you understand our customers and what they need. We can also help you figure out what we can build to better meet those needs." Lastly, it creates natural connections to other functions that have close customer interactions, such as Sales and Customer Support.
There is the potential for this approach to go sideways, and I've definitely seen it. Chief among the pitfalls are Shiny Object Syndrome, where leaders will shift priorities to new opportunities to deliver value to customers before giving other channels a reasonable chance to succeed. After all, software isn't easy and sometimes it takes time to truly deliver value in a way that resonates with customers, not to mention the contextual whiplash that may occur to teams across the organization. A human-centric structure may also lead to an organization that has competing priorities within the same channel of execution. As with many issues, the way through some of these challenges is through strong leadership and ruthless prioritization. If the teams are able to stay focused on the human impact and have access to the context of strong leadership, the benefits outweigh potential issues.
I hope that this is something that you'll consider as you're designing the structure of your team, group, or company. That you think about your organization, how it determines its focus, and whether it's driven by a function, a solution, or the people that it serves.
What do you think? Do I have it totally wrong? Did I miss something big? I'd love to hear from you, so drop me a line on Twitter or LinkedIn and let's continue the conversation.
