Sophisticated Beauty
Why Smart Design is Important and how to achieve it
Why should you care?
Cause a lot of startups (with limited funds) waste their time in development of an improperly specced product that fails in the market.
My previous article talked about how to hack your startup idea and so I thought a good next article before we dive into MVP’ing the shit out of your product, is to talk about smart product planning to reduce product performance failing.
Some starting entrepreneurs are not always technical and that is okay. It’s hard to learn how to code and it is also hard to learn what is good design or even how to design but what we can all agree on is that: coding and design are necessary to build any app or website. coding and design are necessary to build any app or website. (yes I wrote it twice) But what comes before the design and the coding is a good blueprint plan. Yeh, I am bias because I am the “blueprint architect product person” that helps define how a product will look like and function. I truely believe in helping entrepreneurs bring their ideas to life with the work I do.
Smart Design document comes before UX and it comes before creating graphics and coding. It contains “ugly as hell” sketches that allow product managers to produce and convey an idea for a product. From high level requirements to the detailed ones. Why is it ugly? Well, cause it doesn’t matter how good it looks, what matters are the details and functions of your product, purpose, calls to action, is it feasible coding wise, monetization wise and a bit of UXability as well (although It is best left to the UX experts to catch all interactions to the tee).
Some designers are also UX’rs but some of them are not Product Managers (blueprint makers), most of the time they are artists — they are excellent in what they do but their job involves a deeper level of accuracy along with an attachment to colours, beauty, pixel perfect high fidelity designs and perfect UXability. Product managers will put together the big picture blueprint spec doc for the team to be able to digest and provide their deliverables for the project.
Smart design is not on the emphasis on the design but on the smart.
It includes a visual illustration of the requirements they elicit from customers; From wireframes to design sketches. It is a visual illustration of epics and user stories to help bring to life a product idea. It’s smart cause it can catch many pitfalls that usually occur when development starts as it is not only a tool to explain to the customer what product he/she will get but it also explains to the developers what needs to be built.
A good development team will poke holes in your smart design document faster and before sprint planning starts (the planning on what features developers decide to build first).
You see, Product Managers care about getting shit done. Some of us come with project management experience and so we really care about achieving deadlines, making the customer happy etc.
But what makes a blueprint architect/Product Manager a fundamental asset to any organization?
From the small startup to the big corporation- we get the vision from our customer’s head and translate that into reality. The end result is Smart Design- a blueprint design document to create a product that is: feasible, sellable, functional and looks amazing (in the end).
So essentially working with a good Product Manager Blueprint Architect is like working with a part dev, part UX, part designer, Project Manager kind of a person that can give the customer insights into all levels of their product and show them their product future, their vision coming to life.
Interviewing customers and visualizing what is in their head RESULTS in a functional sketch and a blueprint plan, done right also known as specification document and product roadmap documents.
For those that are not in the industry but care about Smart Design, I’ll try to give you an example to further explain.
Working with a Startup that created a marktplace to exchange waste food, they spent hundred of thousand of dollars on development and had very little spent on design or product planning. In fact their ex- tech partner WAS the designer and the developer. This thought on its own made me cringe as most developers (the good ones) might be full stack geniuses but they are not always artists. As are good designers are not always engineers. People that specialize in their field, tend to stick to one thing and become experts. THAT ex-tech partner led the company to not only bad or no usability kind of a product but also technically it seems to have gotten itself into trouble- that marketplace website looked like someone spit out an AirBnb for food exchange and it was a mess.
Why?
Cause that startup CEO thought the right decision was to take a tech partner AND paid them a salary (fooled by the false Canadian government programs, see previous article) and so they spent a year trying to build the marketplace and in the end their investors said no more delays and excuses, they wanted a product done right.
That was the point where they met me and together we came up with the blueprint plan- we started from the purpose of the marketplace, who is it for, what is the user journey, how are they going to make money from the marketplace, what is feasible in building it and in what technology , in what timeframe, what are some good UX principles that must be followed. Then we took these ugly sketches and specification and created the actual designs. They were Smart Designs as they allowed that marketplace to be built with feasible features , high UXability, supporting product monetization, choosing the right technology and making it all based on the CEO’s vision.
Implementing the project based on the Smart Design plan, they were able to build and go to market within 4 months and 1/10 of the original cost.
#JustDoIt #DoitRight #ConsiderHiringaProductNinja before and during your project, #doSmartDesign #Positionyourproducttosuccess
#YourIdeaIsBrilliantLetUsShowYouHow
