Design Upstream: Advancing Strategic Design Without Going Against the Current

Design Upstream Advancing Strategic Design Without Going Against the Current

Chris Avore / @erova / August 7, 2015

Today’s Agenda

• The current state: design in the organization

• How to enable culture change

• What you can do tomorrow

3 bullet bio

• Grown, lead a 25 person product design & research team at Nasdaq

• We design mobile & desktop products for corporate customers

• I’m primarily responsible for product strategy, new design opportunities throughout the organization

people are

thinking talking writing

about culture

“Type a quote here.”

The Defining Elements of a Winning Culture

There’s No Such Thing as a Culture Turnaround

A Winning Culture Keeps Score

How to Engender a Performance Culture

why now?

Business needs to • reduce costs

• improve quality of products & services

• identify new opportunities for growth

• increase productivity

meanwhile…

Businesses are suffering from:• Incremental or little innovation

• losing market share to new ideas, competitors

• finding fundamental problems too late

• narrow job descriptions that confine talent

• cultures of hoarding vs sharing

It used to be that when we said we were going to be design-driven, the engineers said, “Well, here’s the technology constraints.” !

The product manager said, “Well, here’s the thing we have to solve,” and then gave it to the designers and said…

http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-03-20/intuit-how-design-drove-its-turnaroundhttp://www.bloomberg.com/bw/articles/2014-03-20/intuit-how-design-drove-its-turnaround

Make it pretty before it ships

http://www.bloomberg.com/bw/articles/2014-03-20/intuit-how-design-drove-its-turnaround

Make the logo bigger!

Make it pop!This doesn’t look like Apple

Less whitespace plz kthx

is this above the fold?

deliver the planned thing

deliver the right thing>

Design averse culture leads to…• low morale

• distrust among departments, teams

• design team perceived as decorators, not deciders

• loss of credibility in good design

• high turnover

A respectful, multi-team collaborative working environment where designers are empowered to effectively solve business problems via exploration, iteration, and validation.

Solve better problems

Design better products

Right people

Right room

Right questions

If they want you to cook the dinner, at least they ought to let you shop for some of the groceries.

“

https://www.forrester.com/Modernizing+User+Experience+In+Your+Firm/-/E-WEB18803

“What barriers prevent UX from having a greater impact?”

LACK OF LEADERSHIP 11%

OVERALL FIRM CULTURE 9%

https://www.forrester.com/Modernizing+User+Experience+In+Your+Firm/-/E-WEB18803

• Overall firm culture

• Lack of leadership

• Partial implementation

• Lack of understanding

• Silos and politics

• Resource contraints

} Perception

problem

• Overall firm culture

• Lack of leadership

• Partial implementation

• Lack of understanding

• Silos and politics

• Resource contraints

} Influence

problem

• Overall firm culture

• Lack of leadership

• Partial implementation

• Lack of understanding

• Silos and politics

• Resource contraints

} Visibility

problem

Look in the mirror too• Speaking different languages

• Different measures of success

• Not embracing wider goals

• Deliverable Dogma

• Assuming non-designers don’t get design

Change Management Problem

What are the attributes of an organization that enables good design process, strategy, and

delivery?

Limited to feature implementation

Design informs product strategy, opportunity, innovation

Strategy

PROGRESSING / TACTICAL MODERN / STRATEGIC

Build solutions based on requirements, specs

• Address problems first • Establishes standards,

patterns, priorities

Design

Tactical usability testing validate features

• Beyond screens or dept • Hypothesis-based • Quant and Qual

Research

Mature Design Teams…• explore unknown possibilities

• create elements of value/differentiation that don’t exist

• unlock new growth in unfamiliar contexts/markets

• investigate problems resistant to other methods

Find an Advocate

Selecting the right challenge is paying attention to who else cares about it“

Find that Advocate• Revisit your team vision—who can help reify that vision?

• Expertise (may not be as important as others)

• Control over resources (time, budget, people, expense)

• Political support (access to influential colleagues, partners, network)

• Build a coalition of advocates—don’t stop at 1

Establish a Sense of Urgency

Traits of Complacent Orgs:Yes, we have our problems, but they aren’t that terrible, and I’m

doing my job just fine

Kotter 5

Traits of Complacent Orgs:• Too much past success

• Lack of visible crises

• Low performance standards

• Insufficient feedback from external, trusted sources

How to increase urgency• External data refutes comfortable status quo

• Talk to unhappy or former customers

• Show how profitable future opportunities are unobtainable with current mindset

Craft a vision *and* a story

• Feasible, appealing picture of the future

• Focused • Flexible • Easy to communicate to a variety of

audiences

• Tie back to vision • Anyone could deliver the story • Describe backgrounds, skills, techniques • Reinforce credibility, including external success • Describe reporting line, org hierarchy • Share physical locations

Vision Story

Our product development process was too incremental and focused on features and ease of task completion.

We needed an awakening and more of a grand vision.

We needed all our people to understand that designing great products and user experiences is a team sport that includes not just designers and product managers but everybody else—even the CEO

“https://hbr.org/2015/01/intuits-ceo-on-building-a-design-driven-company

Communicate the future state

How to communicate the vision• Share the spirit of vision, if not vision itself

• Keep it simple, jargon-free

• Multiple channels, forums even if not 100% official

• Repetition

• Create a dialogue, not one-way communication

Celebrate short term wins

Short term wins…• Visible to outsiders

• Unambiguous

• Tied directly to change effort, vision

Short term wins…• Provide evidence you’re on the right track

• Help hone the vision and long-term strategies

• Build momentum

• Keep bosses/advocates on your side

Feature designers and products at corporate-wide events

Raise your visibility• Present at annual sales kick-offs

• Demonstrate work at townhalls/all-hands meetings

• Become part of the pitch of new hires or client visits

• Attend conferences/trade shows formerly only attended by sales/marketing/account teams

• Use corporate communications as another channel

In my career at both Thomson Reuters and

Nasdaq, I’ve never seen us build a solution that looks as clean and solid as this one

usIn my career at both Thomson Reuters and Nasdaq, I’ve never seen

build a solution that looks as clean and solid as this one

Deliver the goods

To become that trusted partner, there is no substitute for demonstrated competence.“http://boxesandarrows.com/recruiting-your-army-creating-the-in-house-design-agency/

How to show you’re good• Share usability clips—audio or video is best, not just transcripts

• Perception of pace, even if you’re right on schedule

• Performance metrics

• Adhering to budget

• Additional stakeholder validation

More KPIs• Revenue generated from new

products

• Projects in pipeline

• Stage-gate specific

• P&L impact

• Patent applications or patents granted

• Internal rate of return

• Earned-Value Analysis

• Press/Social mentions

We are most optimistic on the Next Gen IR platform…[Nasdaq] is in advanced beta testing, set to be launched in Q4.

This software appears to be best in class…

Wall Street Research Report

“

Learn about the silos

On silos (or closed, tight networks)• Nonaligned and unshared priorities

• Lack of information flow

• Lack of coordinated decision making across silos

• Groupthink / overconfidence of decisions / confirmation bias

• Few new ideas

• No incentive to share knowledge

Building those bridges Collaborative workshops • design studio • gamestorming activities

• pre-mortem • design-the-box • magazine cover

Promote & Publish • shared vision, north stars • useful, reusable assets

• personas • successes • research findings

Managers enable good design

• Facilitate introductions & conversations

• Best evangelist may not be your best designer

• Provide a strong team

• Embrace the unknowns, let go from planning

• Don’t overspecialize—enable generalists, growth, exposure

Managers enable good design

Deploy design research beyond usability testing

Managers enable good design

Don’t pull the ladder up

Table Stakes for change

• Invite the weak ties—not weak links—to design events

• Share their participation with their leadership

• Publish & promote research and deliverables

• Skunkworks: align with your dept’s goals, then partner out

• Connect to the big picture.

Connect to the big picture

• Map your success to company goals

• Is customer service mentioned as a core value? • Show how you reduced support calls by 20%

• Is increasing margin a business goal? • Prove the new features command a higher price with less maintenance

investment than preceding release.

Help others help themselves

Resources• Inventory of your work

• Design patterns lets designers focus on big problems

• Style guide, fonts, palettes (or point to Marketing)

• Personas & other research findings

Workshops• How to conduct design studio

• How to discuss design via critique

• How to conduct a customer interview

• How to write a user story

• Rethink the kick off meeting

• Facilitate a retro

But it can’t stop there.

The real risk• Other businesses or orgs will use their own budgets for hiring designers who

won’t report to you

• Those businesses may hire consultants or outside agencies to execute one project, but no long term engagement for knowledge sharing later

• Design will be the scapegoat

Projects end

Allies move on

Market conditions changePriorities shift

Competitors evolve

Teammates quit

Such Disruption

Building a Culture of Design

Building a Culture of Design

Experimentation

Innovation

Learning

Quality

A culture of quality requires employees to apply skills and make decisions in highly ambiguous but critical areas while leading them toward deeper reflection about the risks and payoffs of their actions.

Creating a Culture of Quality

http://hbr.org/2014/04/creating-a-culture-of-quality/

A culture of quality requires employees to apply skills and make decisions in highly ambiguous but critical areas while leading them toward deeper reflection about the risks and payoffs of their actions.

Creating a Culture of Quality

http://hbr.org/2014/04/creating-a-culture-of-quality/

Don’t atrophy

Persuasion is a process not an event

Delivery is your currency

Credibility is your social capital

Your vision is your access

THANK YOU Chris Avore / avore@erova.com / @erova

Further Reading• Leading Change

by John Kotter

• Communicating the UX Vision: 13 Anti-Patterns That Block Good Ideasby Martina Schell and James O’Brien

• Designing for Growth: A Design Thinking Tool Kit for Managersby Jeanne Liedtka