Five Things to Know when Adopting New Design Processes

Christopher Astefanous
Nov 5 · 4 min read

My recent trip to the Innovation Roundtable workshop on Design Thinking, Agile, and Lean helped me synthesize a few key points on product design and evolving product realization for a large company.

It can be so easy for a design team to get into trouble, right? Just think of typical dangers : group think, ill defined requirements, untested assumptions, design defects, or chasing perfect in place of good enough. There are companies that regularly release successful products, but as I was reassured from the wider Fortune 500 audience in attendance at this conference, there is no one design process to rule them all. It sounds simple, but the process must meet the team where they are at and cater to the unique market, product, and financial situation of the business.

The analogy I have been working with, a simple variation of “every journey begins with one step”, is that product design is a dangerous journey with a worthy destination. Every time we take that trip there are known and unknown risks. Every time the travelling companions are different and what they bring with them is unique. And the travel, good & bad, is all worth it when you reach a worthy destination.

The surprising thing to me has always been that teams that come through a successful project are able to put their finger on one or two problems that “if we just do <this> next time it will be so much better”. If we just keep getting a little better every time then shouldn’t we all be great by now?

Post-project lessons learned are not far from glacial growth — nearly static and never transformative enough to make that major difference in the next project’s execution. I think that is because they come at the end and unless its the exact same group of people starting up on the next project then the information isn’t transferred well. I see agile, lean, and design thinking as processes for adaptive process improvement that can be (and should be) applied in the midst of project execution. A project closure review is still important, but not nearly as important as starting good with a clear idea of how your going to run the project and create a design success feedback loop within the team.

The conference offered excellent perspectives from product design leaders from Johnson & Johnson, Walmart, GE Healthcare, and Adobe. The part I enjoyed the most was that there were round-table discussions on several crowd sourced topics decided via app in the midst of the conference. There’s a lot more I took away from the conference than five new ideas, but as it pertains to design processes these are ideas I felt worth sharing:

(1) The frameworks themselves are evolving.

This means we should all feel free to ‘do it wrong’ or change it when it doesn’t feel right. However, as anyone embarks on this kind of design process journey it is important to understand the roots of the process and why general consensus follows one way versus another. In other words, don’t change it just because it isn’t well understood.

(2) You don’t need to call it design thinking, agile, or lean to go do it.

New ways of product design can be easily rolled out by using well accepted frameworks in slightly different ways. A simple example is using a waterfall schedule (Gantt Chart) to plan a project but then break it down into a sprints with measurable outcomes; or developing a process map for the first hardware sub-assembly development item and looking to lean the process during the design.

(3) Leadership is key.

Everyone can feel like they need to change or grow, and if the team doesn’t get the direction or empowerment to go try something new (i.e., take a risk) then nothing will happen. Some of the best stories of success I heard involved a rapid switch of how things were done. There was a vision that “we will not be stagnant anymore” and the CEO/VPs brought in facilitators, got the team to understand the why, and started new processes/process improvement together on multiple pilot projects.

(4) Don’t Give Up.

Improving product realization processes requires a constant force, not a discontinuous impulse, to achieve results. Revisit why you want and are committed to change. Once the energy around a new thing dies down people will start to return to old habits instead of owning the new process. It takes patience, commitment, and a regular self-assessment to get better and use new design processes even if they improved things. John C. Maxwell, author of Leader Shift, writes about a 25–50–25 principle of change. Whenever change happens : 25% of the people will embrace it, 50% of the people will be undecided, and 25% of the people will be against it. Change requires shifting the mindset of that 50%.

(5) Budget planning is different.

Rapid change does not allow a static budget. It seems that there are two types of budgeting strategies that seem to work : (a) High level controlled budgets with incremental authorizations — the team periodically goes back to business leaders who decide to keep going or end it based on the evolving business case (design to cost, market share predictions, competitor positioning, etc.); or (b) a fixed budget with a quantifiable target (threshold and objective goals) where the team leader(s) internally break down the project into small chunks and feed the team greater budgets based on project based decision making (feature completeness/success, customer feedback, resource availability, etc.)

Christopher Astefanous

Written by

Technology Leader at GE Aviation. Growth fanatic. Game and Future enthusiast.

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