How Product managers & designers are uniting to provide unparalleled user experiences!

Introduction

Think about a product you recently bought. Now think about the experience you had in buying and using it. Increasingly, it’s becoming impossible to separate products from their experiences. Design is no more a mere ‘pixel-fixing’ job and Product Management- Design interactions are not mere mock-seeking sessions. Today, in many products-focussed organizations such as Flipkart, Apple, Google, FB, designers and PMs do intensive user research to understand customer challenges and develop prototypes re-iteratively. They jointly own key customer metrics like Net Promoter Score / Customer Satisfaction scores, retention, drop-offs, and customer lifetime value. However, here’s the catch. Not only are businesses finding it difficult to test ROI in having integrated design orgs, but also they are questioning the extent of design involvement in the process of product evolution. This paper explores the possibility of that sweet-spot in the PM-Designer partnership where the customer surely wins!

Context

“You’ve got to start with the customer experience and work back towards the technology, not the other way round” — Steve Jobs. This wisdom laid the foundation of Apple & we all know how Apple conquered the world with its spellbinding product designs. Organizations that have focussed on user experiences along with products, have taken the market by storm. According to the Design Management Institute’s Design Value Index, design-driven companies have maintained a significant stock market advantage, outperforming the S&P 500 by an extraordinary 211% over the past 14 years. Designers are shaping products along with PMs like never-before. Does this mean that organizations can hire designers and PMs and start shipping great products? This article explains the existence of design function in traditional and contemporary organizations and the challenges faced thereon. It also attempts to lay down ground rules of PM-Design partnership within organizations that focus on shipping the best user experiences.

The traditional approach

Research has observed two phenomena across organizations globally: First, until recently, organizations in traditional industries did not have an exclusive design function, rather product design competency was integral to Product Management and Engineering. Second, consumer-facing organizations had very low Design: Engineering ratio and Product Managers (PMs) — Designers worked mostly in silos. Here are some statistics around these phenomena — Till the beginning of the last decade, industries like FMCGs, banking, railways, tourism, etc did not have design teams in their organizations. While the benchmark of Design: Engineering ratio in successful design-driven Organizations ranges from 1:6 to 1:8, global software giants had a very low ratio, eg, IBM had 1:72, Atlassian had 1:25. Not only this, even modern product focussed organizations did not have a very encouraging ratio, eg, LinkedIn had 1:11, Dropbox had 1:10 until recently. Here are some highlights from PM-Designer interactions traditionally in organizations with integrated design functions.

Challenges faced in the Traditional Approach

• User research & user interactions: While designers took part in user research which aimed at understanding user pain points, it was PMs who mainly ‘defined’ user experiences and even the workflows. Both PMs and Designers did the UATs. In most occasions, the team expected the designers to make the product ‘functional’. The ‘emotional design’ aspect was seldom stressed upon.
• Design inputs in product development: For the launch of new products, designers were expected to roll out wireframes and mock screens based on inputs given by PMs. For existing products, they worked on some minor UI enhancements only.
• KPI ownership: While PMs owned all customer and business KPIs, designers owned metrics related to functional bugs or workflow impedances.
• Overburdened PMs & overburdened designers: PMs & designers co-owned user research & use case definitions. But on the one hand, PMs solely owned design backlog management and user-facing KPIs thus bearing the full pressure of slippages and underperformance. Designers solely owned sketching, usability testing and even prototyping thus bearing the full pressure of taking functional design calls.

The result of this was suboptimal user experiences. In the design fraternity, the designers felt left out with little say in the product journey as there is an industry-wide misunderstanding that the meaning of user experience is to have a fine user interface only.

The contemporary approach

“Design used to be the seasoning you’d sprinkle on for taste; now it’s the flour you need at the start of the recipe,” says John Maeda, Silicon valley’s top designer & technologist. Top product companies globally are equivocally advocating building world-class user experiences as the secret recipe for their success.

How did organisations know that ‘user experience’ is the key to success? The following are the reasons UXs have become the key to success:

• Moore’s Law’s efficacy is dwindling: This is Moore’s law: “It is the observation that the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit, doubles about every two years.” Its efficacy is dwindling rapidly because most of the users now have enough processing power at their disposal, in-fact more than they need for their daily activities. Users don’t just buy products (or services) because they are faster or have more memory. They buy because of the way these products make them feel.
• Technology has become a commodity: Through open-source software, anyone can make apps. Hence onus now lies on how one feels using the app and does it solve a real-life need or problem for the user.

How did they build the user experiences that would help their products succeed? Here are a few pointers which have helped organizations build great user experiences:

• Understand the worth of providing great user experiences is the primary requisite. In pure metric terms, superior UX not only leads to higher NPS but also leads to better financial performance, by building a loyal customer base (higher retention and more purchase from existing customers)
• Focus on building great designs. Leaders, PMs, engineers, IT, Finance should understand the importance of quality design and allocate a budget for this investment.
• Include designers in decision-making throughout the product journey: Understanding problem statement -> Performing user research -> Building wireframes & mocks -> Reiterative prototyping -> UATs -> Launch and Feedback -> Product Enhancements. The involvement of design from the beginning allows all components of products to work together seamlessly.

With all these in place, is the organization all set to see success? Here are some challenges that Organisations face, both before deciding on a design Org and after building one.

Challenges with the contemporary approach

Great user experiences pave way for great products and hence great organizations. But organizations face a series of challenges before & after setting up a design org while striving to become truly design-driven -

Challenges faced when organizations have design Orgs

1. How do you measure the success of a design org? — What are the KPIs of a good design? The value of design is difficult to define. Design is hard to isolate as a function and the design function operates differently by industry. That makes benchmarking to standardized measurement metrics difficult. Design Management Institute (DMI) has come up with a framework of the ‘Design value system’ to test design efficacy, but it is still in its nascent stage.
2. How much should you invest in design org? — As it is difficult to measure the success of a design-driven org, it makes it difficult for the organizations to determine how much should they invest in building one.
3. Are there enough designers in the market? — This is a classic demand-supply issue. Suddenly, as consumer-facing organizations realize that better user experiences can drive monetary advantages and a loyal customer base, the bandwagon of hiring designers has set itself in motion. However, the market is not even ready to satisfy all the demand. Alex Schleifer, VP design Airbnb says, a good thumb rule of Designer: Engineering ratio in a design-driven organization varies from 1:6 to 1:8.

Challenges faced after setting up a Design Org

1. Design Org structure and designer career path: Organisations grapple with:

• Should design roll up into Product or Engg or Marketing or company execs as an independent org?
• As designers are individual contributors, what roles do they transition into as they move up the ladder?

2. PM-Designer interactions: There is lack of clarity in:

• What is the overlap in PM-Design partnership in the journey of product evolution. Where are the boundaries of each of these roles.

The following is a list of a few ground rules of PM:designer partnership in product journey. This list is based on my observations, learnings and experience of PM-design interactions at Flipkart, which have helped us create great user experiences.

The PM:Designer partnership for building best user experiences

PMs and designers are equal stakeholders in building the right experiences. Organizations should define each role well and acknowledge the overlap too.

Individual areas of work vs areas of overlap

1. Individual areas of expertise — PMs: Defining problem statement, doing product/market fit analyses, customer discovery, building product roadmap, laying down MVP requirements, data analyses pre-release (ABs) and post-release (beta and final release), aligning cross-functional teams are a few examples.
   Designers: User modeling, Journey mapping, Visual design, Interaction design.
2. Areas of overlap — PM-Design co-owned tasks: User research, Use case definition, UI sketching, Usability testing, Prototyping, Backlog management and co-owned KPI monitoring.

Few Ground rules of PM-Designer interactions

The following rules that have ensured smooth co-existence of each of these disciplines and great user experiences has then been an obvious outcome.

1. Partners in the journey — PMs should collaborate with design, right from the beginning of the journey of product evolution. This minimizes risk by validating ideas at each step.
2. Biggest advocates of user empathy — PMs and designers together should plot-out customer decision journeys to understand exactly what motivates people, what bothers them and where are the opportunities of providing delightful experiences.
3. Understand constraints and limitations — PMs and designers should understand and acknowledge practical constraints like time limitations, business call-outs, technical capabilities, bandwidth availability, etc on each other’s end and accordingly take decisions.The user experience should never suffer because of internal tussle?
4. Co-own customer metrics — PMs and designers should jointly own the customer-facing metrics like NPS/CSAT scores, retention, and drop-off numbers and customer lifetime value.
5. Constantly improvise — Product evolution is an ongoing activity hence design has to be hyper iterative. There is no end to providing a better user experience as users desire change. PMs and designers thus have to improvise on product design constantly to meet expectations.

The genuine collaboration of PMs: Designers in the product journey has been and will be the key to shipping some of the most valuable user experiences the world has ever seen.

Citations:

1. Maeda John, Annual design report 2019 https://designintech.report/
2. Maeda John, “In reality design is not that important” https://www.fastcompany.com/90320120/john-maeda-in-reality-design-is-not-that-important
3. McKinsey article Sep’15, “Building a design driven culture” https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/marketing-and-sales/our-insights/building-a-design-driven-culture
4. McKinsey article Sep’15, “Making design a business priority” https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/operations/our-insights/making-design-a-business-priority
5. McKinsey article Oct’15, “Good design is good business” https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/organization/our-insights/good-design-is-good-business
6. DMI article, “The value of design” https://www.dmi.org/page/DesignValue/The-Value-of-Design-.htm
7. Maeda John article, “ The 6 design trends John Maeda predicted in his state of the union” https://www.figma.com/blog/the-6-design-trends-john-maeda-predicted-in-his-state-of-the-union/
8. Product design, wiki
9. Moore’s law, wiki
10. Careerfoundry, quotations for designers, https://careerfoundry.com/en/blog/ux-design/15-inspirational-ux-design-quotes-that-every-designer-should-read/
11. Spool Jared, podcast, “user experience design” https://www.thisisproductmanagement.com/episodes/user-experience-design/
12. Schleifer Alex, article, “defining product design: a dispatch from Airbnb’s design chief” https://firstround.com/review/defining-product-design-a-dispatch-from-airbnbs-design-chief/
13. Aronowitz Kate, article, “Designers finally have a seat at the table now what ?” https://www.fastcompany.com/90156186/designers-finally-have-a-seat-at-the-table-now-what
14. Techcrunch article, 2017, https://techcrunch.com/2017/05/31/here-are-some-reasons-behind-techs-design-shortage/