How design 🎨 can improve product management.
Agile, Lean Startup, Design Thinking. Shake. Build. Ship. Repeat… Or try something new.
To manage the software development process, we use Agile. To run the product development process, we use Lean or Design Thinking. By running the product development process, we are also running the design process. Whenever we want it or not. So, what methodology should we use to manage the product development process?
Product Manager’s role and responsibilities are a bit similar to Product Designer’s. Both of them should run prototyping process, usability testing, customer research and this kind of things. Their role also intersects with Project Manager, Business Analyst and Marketer. I believe that efficient product management is only possible through clear operations between different departments.
Distributed collaboration requires even more efforts to make the product development and product strategy process clear, straightforward and predictable. Different firms describe different roles of product management. It depends on the company’s culture, working style, goals, product stage, resources, etc. So, how to manage product teams, design teams or development teams across the world and what operations do we need to manage them successfully day by day?
AGILE
Agile has become the norm in product development, much to the detriment of designers. Vision, exploration, deconstruction, associative thinking, and interruptions were suppressed in favor of working the way developers work.
This subjugation of design to engineering in agile makes sense for engineers, as agile fit their culture. Further, agile methods have led to great outcomes, making it hard to refute their value. And there was the problem: developers and project managers measured success by whether a product shipped on time, and not whether the design satisfied user needs.
I have found these ideas at DesOps handbook. The point here — is how we measure the success or value or impact of design. How we know that our design really works? You can also find more interesting thoughts about design ops at Yury Vetrov article here:
So, if we take a look from this perspective, it turns out that we are all product designers in a certain sense. Even developers or project managers are. No matter what we have in our job descriptions. We are all responsible for the final user experience.
That’s where tribes have appeared. Guided by Design Thinking (not Agile), they run product development processes starting from Research and Discovery stage to Product Launch. From the early beginning in close cross-functional collaboration. You may already know about that. You are lucky if you do as two years ago we didn’t. So, it looks like Agile is not a really good thing to manage design or product development iterations.
LEAN
My product development career started with The Lean Startup book. It changed everything in my life. I had read it in 2016 within 4 hours while flying from Kyiv to Paris to help my client to pitch their idea at VivaTec. We won bronze and 100,000 euros. So, as you can guess, I still really like Lean concept.
Time is running. I have faced the reality. Working with huge enterprises, I have figured out that the Lean Startup approach is possible only when you have an appropriate team, culture, operations, transparent set of decision-making processes. It’s easier to achieve if you represent one of the product companies. Huge enterprises usually have silo issues, tight deadlines, scrum fall (scrum+waterfall) mindset, fixed feature list, time and money.
But the good news is… In the above-mentioned design ops handbook, you can find a very exciting idea:
The combination of the DevOps and Lean Startup methodologies made people see Agile in a new light, and agile product development cycles started to incorporate learning and quality. Speed was no longer the goal, but rather a byproduct of automation. Learning iteratively and learning quickly were brought together.
Sounds quite logical. But, unfortunately, I haven’t met successful tandem of DevOps and Lean Startup in enterprises in real life yet. More or less experimentation culture has only two or three companies we have worked with (sorry, I can’t say their names). Some of them have already succeeded in budgeting. Today, they don’t have to fix the scope of work before they have got a budget for the future experimentation. But they still have a gap within lean-type of contracts with their vendors. And their culture can’t be scaled to work with external team members.
Key takeaways
- Lean startup approach in enterprise is like a unicorn behind your door.
- If we work with the enterprise, to provide product expertise we have to build operations which could be scaled or adopted with no matter what operations our client may have.
- Find a way to help our partner to get a budget.
- Take a look at our contract. Maybe it’s time to redesign it.
- Take a look at our business model. Maybe it’s time to redesign it as well.
DESIGN
There are three types of design activities.
Pre-production design
- Design brief or Parti pris — an early (often the beginning) statement of design goals
- Analysis — analysis of current design goals
- Research — investigating similar design solutions in the field or related topics
- Specification — specifying requirements of a design solution for a product (product design specification) or service.
- Problem-solving — conceptualizing and documenting design solutions
- Validation — validation design solutions
Design during production
- Development — continuation, and improvement of a designed solution
- Testing — testing of a designed solution
Post-production design feedback for future designs
- Implementation — introducing the designed solution into the environment
- Evaluation and conclusion — summary of process and results, including constructive criticism and suggestions for future improvements.
I’m sure you heard about the Design Thinking approach. Thanks to IDEO company, d.school, google, and ac4d, every product company uses it. But if you delve into it, you will realize that there is a 10 different models of Design Thinking are exists. If you dig deeper, you will find out that Design Thinking is not a silver bullet (although, in a certain sense it really is). There are at least four more approaches that could guide you through the design process. I highly recommend reading an article of Masaki Iwabuchi
If you are running a product, you are following more or less at least one of them. Based on the market, the charisma of founder, or stakeholders role, the design approach that you are following, form the culture and consider the rules of the game.
Value of design for business.
Whatever, the potential for design-driven growth is enormous in both product- and service-based sectors. Companies that put design at the very core of their brand are design-led. They weave design principles into everything they do: from research and strategy to creating content. Design principles can increase the Speed To Market, enlarge Internal Capability Development, expand the Market Reach, amplify Engagement and Loyalty and help to conduct Visionary Transformation.
Based on Design Management Institute’s 10 years research, “design-centric”companies show a 211% return over the S&P 500. This marks the third year in a row we have seen such results in excess of 200% over the S&P.
Here you can find 15 more reasons to put design into the core of your business.
Key takeaway
- Design is the core of the modern business.
- There are a lot of options to start. Design Thinking is not the only way to start a new project. We should chodde design approach based on design horizon.
- We should use various design approaches and methodologies appropriate one or combine multiple approaches according to the project’s situation and product phase.
EPILOGUE:
Two years, Nullgravity has been providing product development expertise for enterprises. We are one of those firms that has put “the distributed product development” on our flag. We have risen it and started waving it with a holy proud. We used to close work with product teams of big enterprises. Product line of mobile apps with ~1–5 Mn monthly users for such companies as Beeline, Leroy Merlin, Visa. And, based on our experience, a lot of different companies whenever enterprises or small firms continue to make the same mistakes. And we weren’t an exception.
We are in the constant process of continuous building and improving our Des Ops, Product Ops, Mark Ops, and other types of Ops. We are in the permanent search of a better path to ensure the cross-functional team (product managers, project managers, customer support, sales, developers and designers) are able to perform under the best possible circumstances.
But I’m ready to share a couple of my findings that help me manage all these complicated things.
- Here is a short-list of questions we use to efficiently complement the working style, design approaches, goals, or restrictions of our partner. Some questions have been taken from the questionnaire for state of product management that Pavel Pedenko and Yaroslav Stepanenko have presented recently.
- How do you describe the role of a product manager or product team?
- How do you run the decision-making process inside of your organization?
- What is more important for the backlog prioritization: Vision, Customer feedback, or sales rep’s?
- How do you measure the effectiveness of your actions?
- How do you estimate potential impact of a feature?
- How do you measure success of your product?
- What role is this stream playing in terms of Product Portfolio? - Design Sprints.
We took Google Design Sprint, Research Sprint, and classical Design Thinking approach and made a constructor. Every time we start a new project, we plan an individual sprint. We name it GRAVITY SPRINT. Each project has different inputs, business needs, and design horizon. So, optionally, we can add to the GRAVITY SPRINT Venture Design or Revenue Model blocks.
GRAVITY SPRINT allows us to build the first concepts in two- five weeks and find the proof of concept in the next 5–13 weeks. It will include validation of all primary hypotheses and finding the solution which is necessary for delivering value. But the most important it enables us to make a clear vision of what we build, why and when. It also empowers us to take all the assumptions in the scope of work from the very beginning.
If you are interested in this topic, here you can find a list of links you may want to dive into:
If you have any questions or thoughts, feel free to share it
My telegram: @Hlib_H
Telegram channel: https://t.me/Product_backpac k
