Holistic Design: Facilitating the Exchange of Value — Part 2
In Part 1, I laid out a background of design that is founded in rational decision making and a brief history of our design industry to this point. I’ve also touched on a spectrum of value, or impact, we can make, with the pinnacle requiring us to borrow from the methods and expertise of behavioral economics in order to make products that improve peoples’ well-being. Thinking of our medium as value helps to broaden the scope of our work and find more opportunities for impact.
Cover photo: New York City Transit Authority Graphic Standards Manual
Business Partners
As we embark on our journey to discover and deliver value, we find that it is almost impossible to achieve anything of significant value without a business component. This may explain why there has been a shift away from agencies. “Businesses exist to create value — value as perceived by the customers in satisfying needs and value for the company by staying profitable.” Jim Kalbach
A healthy, sustainable business creates needed value for customers, who in turn support the business and allow it to continue to discover and deliver more value. As Erika Hall has said, “if you are truly an advocate for humans, you will care about the business. Because only if user needs and business needs are truly, deeply intertwined are you going to be serving humans.”
So, if a business exists to create value, and as designers we now believe our medium is value, everything must run along smoothly, right? Unfortunately, it hasn’t been so simple, in my experience. I have identified 3 key challenges of working with businesses.
Assumptions
Peter Drucker, the father of modern business philosophy said,
“‘What does the customer value?’ may be the most important question. Yet it is the one least often asked. What do customers value? — what satisfies their needs, wants and aspirations — is so complicated that it can only be answered by customers themselves. Leadership should not even try to guess at the answers but should always go to customers in a systematic quest for those answers. What the people in the business think they know about customers and the market is more likely to be wrong than right.”
He goes on to say, ““Only by asking the customer, by watching him, by trying to understand his behavior can one find out who he is, what he does, how he buys, how he uses what he buys, what he expects, what he values, and so on.”
Jim Kalbach, whom I referenced earlier with his eloquent and succinct definition of business, also recognized this challenge. “Despite a clear customer-centric imperative, traditional businesses have largely failed to change how they think about providing value. But they also believe they can create solutions that customers will truly value, without their input.”
“In the tech world, companies are eager to fix things and make progress without first understanding the problem deeply. More attention needs to be paid to the problem, especially through the lens of the people experiencing it.” Indi Young
There are no shortage of quotes from intelligent folks that have recognized this major shortcoming in business. I have seen it myself first hand. I suppose a deep underlying issue of human nature could be to blame. The ancient Greek philosopher Epictetus recognized this human deficiency 3,000 years ago when he said, “It is impossible for an individual to learn what they think they already know.” In the translation I own, Epictetus councils that the key is to “get rid of their presuppositions.”
There have been solutions put forth and various frameworks to help businesses rid themselves of presuppositions. Steve Blank, a serial entrepreneur in the 80’s and 90’s published his process for business success in his 2003 book titled, Four Steps to the Epiphany. He coined the term GOOB, Get Out Of the Building, to promote an outside-in approach to business. “No facts exist inside the building, only opinions,” said Blank. One of Blank’s students, Eric Reis, published his own approach in 2011, that he called The Lean Startup.
Another solution to overcome this challenge that some business leaders have come to adopt is a framework called Jobs To Be Done (JTBD). I will revisit JTBD in more detail later in this discussion.
The Dynamic of Three
Marty Cagan said every product company has two functions: figure out what to build and how to build it. The engineers chime in first and say, “we’ll figure out how to build it!” The business, or product, is naturally left with the first task, “ok, we’ll tell you what to build.” As we’ve established above, businesses (and people) are prone to making poor assumptions.
So when designers join a startup company, where do they go? Business believes they know what to build, and engineering is executing on that plan. “You can help engineering,” is the common assignment.
A new study found that successful startups hired roles outside engineering sooner than those that did not. And designers were a popular choice among these alternative roles.
So designers work on executing a plan that was likely ill conceived to begin with and will almost certainly miss the mark.
All this is compounded by the fact that designers don’t view themselves as they could be, facilitators of value, and not merely arrangers of UI elements on a screen.
Naval Gazing
The last challenge we face is ourselves. Borrowing a term from Paul Adams’ wonderful presentation entitled “The End of Navel Gazing,” we have been caught in self-indulgent and excessive contemplation of ourselves at the expense of a wider view for far too long.
Erika Hall, has had a similarly reprimanding tone when addressing our industry. “I think a lot of people get into design because they really love and enjoy graphic design. I love and enjoy graphic design. But the part of the work that’s visible, that’s tangible, that’s a very unimportant part of the work at this point.”
The fact of the matter is that interaction design, and UI design are relatively low value solutions in this new environment in which we find ourselves. (See hierarchy of value section in Part 1) Consistent cycles of existential crisis are not helping either. There are some clamoring to get “a seat at the table,” which presumably means an opportunity to help the business discover value but often is not really what we do when presented the opportunity. I concur with Erika Hall again that I believe many of us don’t really want a seat at the table. “So often, they don’t mean, ‘I want design to be engaging at this deep level.’ What they mean is, ‘I want business and engineering to listen to my ideas and tell me I’m smart.’”
If you’re unsatisfied with your work as a designer, you must first accept your share in the blame. Secondly, you’ll want to shift your position from within the secondary function of business, execution, and migrate upstream toward the position where value decisions are made. By distilling the customer value you’ve uncovered you can demonstrate your own value as a designer. If done tactfully, you can even help the business overcome the number one challenge of running with poorly formed assumptions.
Considerations
Jobs To Be Done Case Study
I believe JTBD, as outlined in Jim Kalbach’s book, The JTBD Playbook, can be used to help the business implement a “systematic quest” to discover value. Like GOOB by Steve Blank, JTBD helps shift the focus of the company to an outside-in perspective. It also provides a common language and unit of analysis that can be shared across the organization.
At its core, the concept of JTBD is straightforward: focus on people’s objectives independent of the means used to accomplish them. Through this lens, JTBD offers a structured way of understanding customer needs, helping to predict better how customers might act in the future. The framework provides a common unit of analysis for teams to focus on — the job to be done — and then offers a shared language for the whole team to understand value as perceived from the customer perspective. Jim Kalbach
Bob Moesta, one of the pioneers of JTBD likes to teach his students that “context creates value.” After personally attending one of his Master Classes, I prefer to modify that slightly and say that context reveals value. Oftentimes, value is uncovered through interviews rather than created.
Bob was involved in perhaps the most famous case study of JTBD. The job of the milkshake was made popular by Clayton Christensen who coined the term. Christensen, working with Moesta and other colleagues discovered that a large group of customers were “hiring” milkshakes for their commute to work. With this newly discovered market of underserved customers, there was a tremendous opportunity to increase the sales of milkshakes and thereby satisfy more customers. What came of the now famous discovery? Nothing. Christensen explains in his book Competing Against Luck:
“When processes are not aligned with a compelling customer job, optimizing the process means getting better and better at doing the wrong thing. There’s a reason that the fast-food company didn’t implement the changes that Moesta and his colleagues recommended to boost milk shake sales. It may have been a great idea, but the organization’s “immune system” rejected it out of hand. Local managers deemed the required changes in their routine processes and resource allocations too difficult to implement and the idea died a quiet death. Many smart companies unwittingly undermine their own great ideas with hidebound processes.”
Intercom, Basecamp, and Casper are all exemplary case studies of businesses that adopted the JTBD framework to great success. But while the case studies focus on the details of the framework, they seem to gloss over an important detail: in each example, massive organizational changes were implemented to facilitate the newly uncovered value to each company’s customers. Intercom confessed to changing their business “a lot.” Another example from Moesta’s book, Demand-side Sales, SNHU changed their entire admissions department.
Whatever method you or your organization chooses to aid in the discovery of customer value, will not stand a fighting chance unless the organization is able and willing to adapt itself to deliver the newfound value.
The Business Model is the New Grid
All this to say that the challenge of influencing systemic change within an organization still remains. “Everything is a system” and can therefore be designed, according to Don Norman, co-founder of the Nielsen Norman Group.
Jared Spool, UX veteran and thought leader has declared in the past that “Great business models are designed.” Just a week before the writing of this essay, Spool tweeted:
Your organization is perfectly optimized to produce the user experience it currently delivers. If you want to improve the user experience, you’ll need to change the optimizations of your organization. This is the core of UX strategy.
Perhaps no one articulated this concept with greater aplomb than Erika Hall when she declared that “the business model is the new grid,” on an episode of the Finding Our Way podcast with Peter Merholz and Jesse James Garrett. All of whom have made substantial contributions to the field of design. It was difficult to not quote the majority of Hall’s message here, I encourage everyone to read/listen to the episode when you get the chance.
“The grid is not what constrains your work [as designers]. It’s the underlying exchange of value.”
I’m saying that your work as a designer is bounded and constrained by [the business model]. And you cannot transcend that. If you’re working for a good company with a good business model and you’re contributing to that, that’s great. But if you’re not, then I don’t care how much you go out there, and learn about people and empathize with people. That work is ultimately going to be used in support of that business model. And there’s nothing you can do about that from the inside.
If the business is functioning according to the metrics it has set for itself, you can’t change that, because what a lot of organizations are doing is shareholder-centered design. And if the shareholders are happy, that’s the only metric that matters in a business.
Erika Hall does offer some advice on how to influence the business. She admits that it’s a large shift to the design mindset and that pride is the main obstacle we face. She advises taking the research methods we use on customers externally, and turning them on our organizations internally. We must first seek to understand what stakeholders value by listening to them. Then we can help align values between customer, stakeholder and the business.
The business model can be designed. And I think this is the most important work for designers, ’cause designing business models is within the skill set of any good designer. To really understand what everybody needs, how to reconcile and balance those needs, and how to create a system that creates a flow of value among all the different parties.
Conclusion
There are two tides of value for every designer to consider. The tremendously important work of discovering what customers value is outside-in. The organizational change needed to deliver the newfound value happens inside-out. To do this we will need to turn our skillsets internally on our organizations to understand what our stakeholders value and propose alternative solutions that will be a win-win for the customer and the business. To borrow a term from Marty Cagan, we need to become missionaries, not mercenaries. Mercenaries do what they’re told to do — they do what the organization has been programmed to do. Missionaries evangelize for a different, better way. Part of a missionary’s responsibility is to tirelessly share this message. One of the challenges I’ve found is called the curse of knowledge effect. This is a cognitive bias that everyone else in the organization knows what everyone else in the organization knows. It has been difficult but I’ve found that by patiently delivering the message at every opportunity, at the risk of repeating myself to the same audience, has shown promises of saturating my organization with the learnings I’ve found as a UX researcher. Perhaps the mere-exposure effect can help explain why this can be successful. It is a psychological phenomenon that people develop a preference for something from sheer exposure to it because it has become familiar to them over time. Advertisers have used this tactic to great affect over the years.
We are responsible for designing some of the most valuable, yet challenging products that have been produced in the history of design. As designers, our medium is value and we face challenges on two fronts: discovering what the end-user values and influencing the levers of business to facilitate a sustainable exchange of value. The first requires an outside-in approach to understanding what the customer truly values. The second involves turning our skills internally to influence organizational shifts that maximize the distribution of value.
[20-The business model is the new grid, and other mindbombs (ft. Erika Hall)](https://findingourway.design/2020/10/27/20-the-business-model-is-the-new-grid-and-other-mindbombs-ft-erika-hall/)
[The Jobs to be Done Playbook by Jim Kalbach](https://rosenfeldmedia.com/books/jobs-to-be-done-book/)
[Demand-Side Sales 101: Stop Selling and Help Your Customers Make Progress](https://lioncrest.com/books/demand-side-sales-101-stop-selling-and-help-your-customers-make-progress/)
[Systems Thinking: A Product Is More Than the Product](https://jnd.org/systems_thinking_a_product_is_more_than_the_product/)
[The Five Most Important Questions You Will Ever Ask About Your Organization](https://www.drucker.institute/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/Reading_Drucker-on-What-the-Customer-Values.pdf)
[Jared Spool on Twitter: “Your organization is perfectly optimized to produce the user experiences it currently delivers.If you want to improve the user experiences, you’ll need to change the optimizations of your organization.This is the core of a UX strategy. / Twitter”](https://twitter.com/jmspool/status/1424487424219025411?s=20)
[Indi Young on Twitter: “In the tech world, companies are eager to fix things and make progress without first understanding the problem deeply. More attention needs to be paid to the problem, especially through the lens of the people experiencing it. / Twitter”](https://twitter.com/indiyoung/status/1350582609064194048?s=20)
[Discourses and Selected Writings by Epictetus: 9780140449464 | PenguinRandomHouse.com: Books](https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/304102/discourses-and-selected-writings-by-epictetus/)
[UX Strategy Means Business](https://www.uie.com/wp-assets/transcripts/ux_strategy_means_business.html)
[#191 Beyond The UX Tipping Point with Jared Spool]([https://youtu.be/PH3QK82sjvE](https://youtu.be/PH3QK82sjvE))
[INSPIRED: How to Create Tech Products Customers Love, 2nd Edition](https://www.wiley.com/en-us/INSPIRED%3A+How+to+Create+Tech+Products+Customers+Love%2C+2nd+Edition-p-9781119387503)
[The Four Steps to the Epiphany: Successful Strategies for Products that Win](https://www.wiley.com/en-us/The+Four+Steps+to+the+Epiphany%3A+Successful+Strategies+for+Products+that+Win-p-9781119690351)
[Who are Unicorn’s Hiring First?](https://angel.co/blog/examining-10-000-job-posts-to-uncover-who-high-performing-startups-hire)
[The End of Navel Gazing by Paul Adams](https://www.intercom.com/blog/the-end-of-navel-gazing/)
