What design education misses

In my extensive design education at the University of Sydney — we were taught the ins-and-outs of the design thinking model. The 6 step process famously coined by Stanford d.school became our go-to mental model when approaching any problem. Does your organization need to find a new opportunity area to innovate? Bingo! Talk to your user and find what they need. Is your company losing drastic amounts of revenue due to a dwindling user base? Talk to your user and find out why they’re leaving.

The model sounds perfect in theory — surely, customer-centricity has been the driving force leading companies like Amazon and IKEA to success. However, working in design across many types of organizations has taught me otherwise.

Why is the design thinking model not as perfect as it seems? There are a number of reasons.

1. Realistically, the products that go-to-market rarely go to market on the simplistic notion that users need it. Rather, they go-to-market to meet and address an economic opportunity area — solving a need or want users are willing to pay for. (And largely, because the person creating the product believes that it is solving a major problem, which has a lot of potential for bias, but we’ll get to that later.)
2. It fails to cater for — or even acknowledge — the political nature of most organizations. How can one define what a good idea construes of? What differentiates a good idea from a bad idea? Who defines what a good idea is? What is the measure of “good”? Most importantly, is the definition of a “good vision” for the product even clear? Is there alignment across the organization on that vision?
3. A lot of the time, a lot of users are quite frankly, unbothered. The design thinking model operates on the notion that users know exactly what they want, and are willing to voice it. Out of the many tens of apps on your phone right now — which ones do you actively have feedback for? Certainly, an excellent user interface and excellent user experience stand out — but for the other tens of apps that you use once in a month, do you truly have an opinion on how it can be improved? In my personal experience, there would be several times I would arduously arrange interviews with existing customers to understand how to improve our product, only to be met with two sorts of extreme responses — either something like “It’s good already.” despite repeated probing, or unconstructive feedback which would ambiguously link to impact, such as “change the color of the app to pink.”
4. Designers often do not speak the language of pragmatism. This is something I have repeatedly seen over the years, and also something that admittedly varies greatly across organizations. Some organizations sell a “visionary” design which does not require pragmatism, but for many other organizations, the absence of pragmatism hinders the impact that designers can create.

With all of these insights, what is the best way for designers to truly create impact at their organizations? The answer, lies in product management.

Product managers possess a number of skills that enable them to be amongst the most impactful people at tech companies.

1. The ability to quantify — Quantification not only allows product leadership to be able to make decisions quickly, but also, be able to assess different options and pathways easily and effectively.
2. The ability to manage many different coordinating parts — Any successful product team has a number of different types of people working together including: front end developers, back end developers, data scientists, designers, leadership, and at times, agile scrum masters. The product manager needs to carefully balance the different visions of these team members to successful
3. The ability to be big-pictured — “view the forest instead of the trees.”

How can designers understand these principles, and integrate these skillsets into their work in order to be impactful? That will be covered an upcoming Medium article, to be published soon.