Why “boring” optimization jobs can actually be quite wonderful

…and why allowing the people you work with to reach aha-moments at their own pace will unlock the potential to drive change through even the most basic design assignment.

When the people and companies we work with come to us and want to optimize a sales flow, or an overview page, we almost get offended. Have they not read about design thinking, service design or designing customer journeys? Do they not understand that they need to understand the whole journey of the customer and that there’s no such thing as “just optimizing a flow?”… Well, the short answer is no — that’s why they’ve come to us! They have identified a challenge and been told to find someone who can help them fix the issue — to fix the obvious.

As a strategic design company, we pride ourselves on looking beyond the obvious challenge and through our work propose a new mindset, a new approach to work with design — so to us, optimizing a flow will lead us to think about other important touchpoints, because we take our point of departure in human insights.

However, this can be far away from how people outside our “design bubble” think and operate, which means that they are not ready for our interpretation of how we would go about that optimization job. It simply just doesn’t make sense to them.

The positive impact of making a discovery on your own

We always get excited when we get a new challenge, because we immediately see potential beyond “we need to optimize this flow,” and we want to share that potential. In the dating world we would be the ones who come on too strong. This is a good thing though, don’t get me wrong — if we didn’t, we wouldn’t be doing our job.

The only “problem” is, not everyone is ready for that. Even though people are intrigued, it can be overwhelming, because they were expecting a simple solution to a simple task. They have a challenge and they asked for help to solve that specific challenge, not to change their business.

We need to honor exactly that and start small. We shouldn’t forget about the potential we see, but we do not necessarily need to share it right away. I was at a talk with Evelyn Huang from Capital One, and she talked about how working with change means that you need to “teach tiny habits”, and I think there is a lot of truth to this. We need to start small, allowing clients to come along for the ride before we roll out the big guns.

Shifting the focus from organization to product

So, what happens when we start to redesign that one optimization flow?

Taking part in creating an experience from a customer perspective often leads to a realization that you should be organized differently to meet customer demands, and just like that the first seed is planted.

The great thing about creating change through products and services is that it is tangible in a way that organizational change management is not.

The great thing about creating change through products and services is that it is tangible in a way that organizational change management is not. Products and services are focused on a physical outcome that will require the company to do things in new ways, because it is the product and thereby the customer that dictates how the company should work, instead of the (traditional) other way around.

With a product or a service you make a promise, which is way harder to put back on a shelf and forget about than internal projects. Together we help them design for what they aspire to be without even thinking about it, because we change focus and talk about products and services for people, instead of focusing on what the business needs to accomplish (which more often than not is an overwhelming discussion for most…).

We should start where the client starts

So what am I getting at? I think we should be better at starting where the client is. This is in no way rocket science, however we need to remind ourselves that the optimization job as a potential catalyst, leading to the project we really want to do in the long run.

We should embrace the opportunity to teach through our approach, and enable the people we work for to come to the conclusions at their own pace instead of trying to make them imagine it before they understand it.