workshop: design upstream - scaling design culture
TRANSCRIPT
Today’s Agenda
• Introduction
• Lecture
• The current state:Design in your organization
Second halfFirst half• Lecture
• The future state:Enabling change as a team
• Wrap up
“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
Business needs to • reduce costs
• improve quality of products & services
• identify new opportunities for growth
• increase productivity
Businesses are suffering from:• Incremental or little innovation
• losing market share to new ideas, competitors
• finding fundamental problems too late
• 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?
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.
If they want you to cook the dinner, at least they ought to let you shop for some of the groceries.
“
What barriers prevent UX from having a greater impact?
30 minute exercise10 minutes: Jot one barrier per Sticky
20 minutes: organize Stickies into themes Label themes and be prepared to share with group
15 minute discussion
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
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 lenses
Research
OUTDATED PROGRESSING MODERNSCOPE Ad#hoc,#
digital#onlyMultiple#digital#touchpoints
End5to5end,#digital#and#non5digital
STRATEGYAbsent
Gather#requirements Set#vision#and#shape#a#road#map#aligned#to#firm#strategies
RESEARCHUsability#testing
Iterative#testingEthno#research
Qualitative/quantitative#drive#hypothesis5driven#experiments
DESIGNWireframes
Process#goes#from#sketch#to#high5fidelity
Sets#and#governs#experience#standards
STAFFINGGeneralist#individual#contributors#only
Full#teams#with#research,#IxD/visual#design,#prototypers
Executive#leadership#plus#centralized#strategy#and#governance
Identify 1 point in each attribute of design teams on the maturity model where you want to advance one step.
Then briefly describe your plan of how you could lead that change effort.
15 minutes to complete
15 minutes table discussion
OUTDATED PROGRESSING MODERNSCOPE Ad#hoc,#
digital#onlyMultiple#digital#touchpoints
End5to5end,#digital#and#non5digital
STRATEGYAbsent
Gather#requirements Set#vision#and#shape#a#road#map#aligned#to#firm#strategies
RESEARCHUsability#testing
Iterative#testingEthno#research
Qualitative/quantitative#drive#hypothesis5driven#experiments
DESIGNWireframes
Process#goes#from#sketch#to#high5fidelity
Sets#and#governs#experience#standards
STAFFINGGeneralist#individual#contributors#only
Full#teams#with#research,#IxD/visual#design,#prototypers
Executive#leadership#plus#centralized#strategy#and#governance
What’s next• Enabling Change
• Team-based scenario challenge
• Additional practical approaches
• Wrap up
Enabling Change
Find an advocate
Establish a sense of urgency
Craft a vision and a story
Communicate the future state
Celebrate short term wins
Raise the profile
Deliver the goods
Enabling Change
Find an advocate
Establish a sense of urgency
Craft a vision and a story
Communicate the future state
Celebrate short term wins
Raise the profile
Deliver the goods
Find that Advocate• 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
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
• 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
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, Repetition, Repetition,
• Create a dialogue, not one-way communication
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
Raise your visibility• Present at annual sales kick-offs
• Become part of the pitch of new hires or client visits
• Attend conferences/trade shows attended by sales/marketing/account teams
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
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
Tie performance 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.
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
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
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
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/
THANK YOU Chris Avore / [email protected] / @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