Back in 2019, I pondered the nature of product-oriented strategy for business software delivery with a few bowling metaphors thrown in.
The idea? If all enterprises could behave more like high-growth software vendors, they would recast their project managers as product managers. They would spend less time measuring time, and more time measuring the features they deliver.
Everybody knows that every company is becoming a software company. Ostensibly, this product-oriented approach would help companies cut down on endless initiatives, continuous scope creep and sprawling review cycles, and get executives to reconsider the contributions of enterprise IT groups as high-value products.
Since then, I’ve seen another trend reemerging among a rapidly evolving cohort of unicorn startups we track. Some founders are not coming from traditional engineering or business leadership roles in the fastest growing vendors – they are instead emerging from design schools and creative industry backgrounds.
What are some of the practices that are leading enterprises past feature-driven software product delivery, with its Agile epics and function points, to a more design-driven approach?
From costuming to customer experience
Obviously there’s a lot of technical and business acumen that a design-led team must develop beyond graphic design that goes into a successful customer experience.
Designers are often asked to put ‘lipstick on a pig’ – pushing pixels around the screen to dress up an application visually without changing the underlying functionality. At best, modifying icons, fonts and colors can only make the software demo a little better, or improve readability, but it seldom improves user experience (or UX).
Users expect clear controls and instructions within an interface, and on their phones or devices, they also expect sensory data – using cameras, haptics and audio inputs and outputs to maximize productivity.
Performance is also a huge factor in customer experience. A competing app with similar functionality that displays results two seconds slower will inevitably experience high abandonment rates. Design engineering takes over here in making tradeoffs between display aesthetics, and the concise representation of data that is queried and processed on higher performance scalable architecture and returned from closer, lower latency data sources and caches.
When it’s incomplete, it’s ready to show
INABIAF. It’s not a bug, it’s a feature, goes the old developer maxim when software users don’t understand what they are seeing on the screen.
Design-led development teams no longer respect this binary feature-or-bug definition when conceptualizing software.
Successful creative agencies have long operated without the assumption that a concept needs to be fully fleshed out before clients can accept it. They iterate rapidly on design and copy comps or sketches, in order to zero in on the client’s preferences, as well as measuring the preferences of end consumers.
The SaaS revolution brought about a new design paradigm in software that was further reinforced on our smartphones, in that the current version of the application can be dynamically updated for the customer in near real-time.
Call ‘continuous redesign’ a process that merges into the CI/CD product lifecycle by introducing new user functionality and displays – even if they aren’t fully baked yet.
‘Shift-Right’ practices such as real user monitoring (RUM), A/B testing and feature flagging are great ways to gauge performance improvements and test functional integrity, but the biggest benefit is getting live customer feedback into the product design loop.
The engine of easy invention
Laziness is the mother of innovation. If a design team finds a solution that takes 50% of the time and toil required to perform a task away from the customer, they have created a winning product that frees up that individual or organization for a drastic improvement in productivity.
The low-code space and RPA movements provided literally hundreds of ways to leapfrog between UI and process-driven design and declarative, drag-and-drop easy application development without the technical skill hurdles.
The COVID crisis showed off the robustness of low-code for design-driven responsiveness to crisis conditions – take for instance the few banks that could step up with PPP relief loan applications using low-code within 3 months.
Development teams themselves are just as sensitive to design-centric tooling. I’m constantly surprised by new vendors that enter seemingly matured spaces such as CI/CD tools, IT operations, security and software testing with better UX as the lead value proposition. A development tool with a relaxing, easy-to-learn interface that delivers even small improvements in toil reduction and work efficiency can achieve quick adoption via word of Slack and stack overflow.
Designing a diverse team
Consider yourself fortunate if work is no longer the simple transactional activity of trading hours for money. We are all complex, autonomous beings. We operate in different modes as end users of technology. We have families and friends, we have unique interests and pursuits, and we have intellectual work to do.
When designing technology for others to use, we must wear a functional engineering hat. A customer service hat. An accounting hat. A security hat. A human-centric hat.
The most creative organizations tend to favor higher levels of diversity within their teams, not just in terms of ethnicity, class and identity, but in the different intellectual perspectives that variety can produce.
Just like there are many unique ways of solving problems, there should also be many different types of thinking within your team’s makeup by design. Embrace these differences and cultivate them for design-driven success.
The Intellyx Take
Disruptive changes like economic crises and pandemics often prove how companies and industries are internally focused rather than customer-focused, and woefully unprepared for digital transformation.
Never settle for dogmatic standards when rapid-innovation is called for.
Don’t let anyone tell you there is one best way to build software when there are always multiple valid design-led approaches. Distinguishing between all of these conceptual design possibilities is the very stuff of design-led development.
©2022 Intellyx LLC. Intellyx publishes the Intellyx Cloud-Native Computing Poster and advises business leaders and technology vendors on their digital transformation strategies. Intellyx retains editorial control over the content of this document. Image credit: ellenm1, Karen Dolziel, flickr, CC2.0 license.
