April 16, 2014, Churchill club, Santa Clara, CA—Jim Walsh from Global Logic moderated a panel that addressed the need for "greatness" in engineering and design. Panelists included Catherine Courage from Citrix, Steve Johnson from Linked-In, Frederick Pferdt from Google, Larry Tesler from MINE, and Charles Warren from SalesForce.
The term "great" has to be added to the business vocabulary, as the high-tech companies increase their sales and market capitalization. The challenge is that adding greatness requires a change in culture since design and software are how the products are implementing the secret sauce for success.
The panel generally agreed that product marketing, design, engineering, and the leadership need to change. Engineers have to become more playful, while designers have to become more logical. Leadership needs to learn about all facets of the process, and the process itself needs to change to reflect the greater inputs from the designers.
In addition, the definitions of completeness and quality have to change to include more subjective measures, while ensuring that the minimum quality to be shipped will meet or exceed the users' expectations. Since design is inherently wasteful, as 9 of 10 ideas are dead ends, the teams have to understand that change and fast movement to a prototype, and rapid iterations are a part of the whole process.
The new design environment is related to the work environment. The workplace has to encourage changes in feelings, and interactions as well as being a place where programs are available for matching ideas. The organizational structure has to morph to meet the dynamic nature of the design effort, and the roles become more of peers working together rather than separate departments working on a project. The whole organization has to value greatness, a challenge in which the enterprise lags.
The level of greatness continues to rise, as consumers become more accustomed to the polished apps on mobile devices. The assumptions made about the users and their needs becomes the drivers for features and functionality, while the necessary tasks and capabilities of the existing technologies have to be included in any discussion of designs. This means that A-B testing is not easy, since the user has to be exposed to the full, final product for a meaningful response. All testing, market research, user interface design, and usability measures have to be considered at once.
Therefore, the team needs to ask a lot of questions at the beginning, and define the tools and testing based on a clear definition of the problem to be solved. It is important to avoid incremental A_B testing which can keep the team focused on a potentially flawed concept. The team has to show value to the potential user first. A better approach is to set up experiments to test and evaluate concepts quickly. The test results that work are moved into the product while other features are developed and added.
Defining people and the research teams facilitate the product manager and engineers to understand the user. More teams need anthropologists or culturalists to help with this user evaluation, especially when the users don’t know what they really want. The teams need to plan on empowering and delighting the user, and can get closer by observing the prototype products in use.
The addition of the term greatness to the product specifications means that the engineers can no longer work on getting to good, which includes not fragile and complete, and add new quality metrics that address the user experience. Most engineers will be unwilling to accept such subjective requirements as immeasurable, but these soft requirements are the key to success. The engineers can help the designers by making the product easy to change and upgrade. A modular design also can be segmented to adjacent markets with little effort.
Many startups fail because they get the first one close enough, but then don’t move on to the next phase. Their assumptions about the users stays fixed, even though the user now is changed by the first product. The design has to have desirability built in to address the user changes in wants and ideas about the product space. Established companies are actually worse than many start ups, because of their legacies. The prototype, fast learning, evaluation, and iteration cycle has to accelerate for everyone.
All companies need to consider their hiring practices with respect to rapid development. New hires not only need to have the necessary skill sets, but must fit into the organization and its culture. Spare no expense to get the best people, because a great person will contribute 10 times more to the company. A design team can create a culture in the company and change the emotional tenor of the whole business. They can also promote the idea that it is embarrassing if the products are not convenient and beautiful. As Frank Lloyd Wright said in response to a question about an ugly building, if it is not good looking, someone made a mistake.
The viral metaphors call for better user interfaces and good human-to-machine interactions. Human factors can help to reduce the number of motions needed to get to a function, and now include visual and emotional factors. This emphasis on easy functionality also leads to design becoming fashion, a challenge relative to the length of design cycles.
New, design teams need crisp, common goals and full buy-in from all. The company mission matters, and multi-disciplinary teams need common vocabulary to give a design-like approach to all people. The team leader needs to have a working knowledge of each of the team specialties, and the ability to translate between areas of domain expertise. The requirements for such a leader may have to be developed on the job.