do_matic

Design + Business + Story

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Successful ideas usually have all three of the following: great design, great business and a great story.

It's hard to conceptualize and design ideas that do have all three, but that's the goal. It bothers me when people say "ideas are easy" because they're not, at least not good ideas. To design and execute them well is really hard.

How would you know if you've made it?
You've been inspired by and designed for the experience of the user.
You've designed a business system that reinforces that user experience and stands out positively in the marketplace.
You've told a compelling story that connects with the user.

Then you have to get your audience of, often cynical and skeptical colleagues, to be as confident as you are to do the next thing in the chain (prototype, design, prototype, pilot, launch, re-launch, fund, etc.)

The metaphor we've been playing with at work is one of a car (I'm not a car guy, so it's kind of weird to use it). You need great aesthetic styling, you need a great engine and you need a great story of the development of that car and what it's going to do for you. The styling and engine can help tell the story, but so can more overt methods and design details.

How good is your idea? How does the car look and make you feel? Is the engine there for the user and your business? Do folks understand what it is and where it comes from and why it's for them?

Hey Colin: Is there a difference between a prototype and a pilot?

Colin posed a great question.

I've been thinking about it for several days and I've had some fleeting ideas. In particular, I wanted to respond to this quote:

Prototyping has led to amazing products (and some services), but I can’t understand why those same mechanisms are so hard for business and organizations. Businesses like to talk about 
experimenting, but by the time enough people and money are committed to the research, it feels more like a validation. I run into a lot of business pilots, but that seems different than a prototype.

Let's go with the definition that Diego proposed last week that a "prototype is nothing other than a single question, embodied." That kind of sings. I like it.

If that's the case, then I'd propose that:

A pilot is a collection of many prototypes, embodied all at once, that might get me fired.

When you design complex systems, the focus needs to be on the interfaces and integration not just the components. Drawing way back on my Systems Engineering background (go Hoos!), complex systems have normal accidents. Things are destined to fail. My brain is too small to think about things like complex experiment design or Taguchi methods or something. Most people who work in companies are the exact same way.

Maybe what makes pilots so hard are they are such an organizational minefield? Once you get to the stage of a "pilot" in most large-scale organizations there are a few things going on: lots of attention, lots of pressures, lots of questions and lots of money. Not everywhere, but that's the conventional wisdom. Now, I like piloting more than "flipping the switch" all at once. Especially when you really don't know what you're doing yet (and are honest enough to admit it). Small to learn, big to win.

Maybe there's a difference between what it means to be developing prototypes, running pilots, testing and learning in-market and what it means to be "living in Beta." When you've reached organizational learning Nirvana, you can ask single questions again. I took a minute to sketch something. Does this work?

Who's your trust competitor?

(Image from Espinr's Flickr photostream.)

Designing and launching a new business or offering usually presents a company with new competitors. That better be the case when designing something revolutionary or disruptive (in the Christensen sense).

There are lots of ways to assess the current or potential competition. Back at the ranch, we use, try and consume many different techniques. Not all approaches are inspiring or insightful for designing new offerings. Some techniques leave out the emotion that characterizes the user's experience. Others limit the likelihood of recognizing competition from entrants and experiences outside of the industry.

A simple and inspiring alternative that's been working for us lately is to ask: what do people trust instead of our brand? What are we going to do about it?

Trust is personal and powerful and fleeting and essential. If the experience we're designing doesn't compete effectively for a person's trust then we have to deliver better, be more consistent, connect better, or simplify the offering.

For giggles, my colleague Michele challenged us to consider the USPS. What do people trust more than the post office? Probably lots of things. Tracking when they need to feel confident. Support staff to take care of of labeling. A drop box when they need flexible choices. Amazon when they need a gift to just be sent straightaway. A neighbor to pick up the mail. A super to sign for the package.

Who's your trust competitor? What brands out there compete the most effectively trust?

Colin responds: design regresses to the mean

Colin responded to my question proving for the first time, but not for the last time, his easygoing dominance. I'm nervously excited about what he might ask me.

Having read the post, Martin pointed me to the Gizmodo article that's been making its way around that compares the Apple catalog to the Dieter Rams Braun catalog from the 1960s.

What this discussion pointed out for me is that there are some absolutes in great design. And, in some cases, that some great designs have defined the absolutes. Designers are inspired by one another and self-referential and that technology lets that inspiration spread, and fast. So fast inspiration matters, but that history repeats itself.

Truly amazing craftspeople learn about and play with and tug at these absolutes. And as a layperson relative to their fields (graphic design, industrial design, writing, plastic injection molding engineering, computer science), it reminds me why I seek out and respect knowledge expertly applied. It's another argument for depth of craft, amplifying mastery of a subject and respecting differences in differences and approaches.

Small to learn and big to win

(Image from Wadem's Flickr stream.)

A few months ago, I was telling the project backstory for a service that our company helped to conceptualize and design. It's been a big commercial success. The backstory is always so much messier than the marketing story, but you learn much more from it.

Describing the efforts that our client had made once our project had ended, I said "they went big with their launch and made a splash. They went big to win."

The chatter in the room started and a voice called out from the back (it's always from the back): "See. We should be putting more money behind our launches. We have to go big to win."

Whoops. I found myself in the midst of my own messy backstory moment only having shared half the story.

You should go small to learn and big to win.

I think when the goal is to win, yes, you should seriously considering big investments and be relentless. But some initiatives and growth efforts goals aren't really destined "to win", no matter what we tell ourselves as businesspeople.

This is especially true when you're pushing on the boundaries of what users expect from you, what you know how to do and how you're set up as an organization. (That is, more revolutionary and evolutionary outcomes.) In these situations, it comes down to thinking about initiatives as options. How little can we invest to learn the next bit of critical information?

I told another story, this one about the development of ACC Select, that illustrated a different goal (not one of ours). In this case, the goal was to learn if the team could develop a small and profitable offering with the potential to scale.

This is one of the big challenges facing the people in charge of growth at companies. Separating the and identifying the outcomes and processes to pursue different types of growth and innovation goals. But corporate cultures, especially in established distribution-driven businesses, ask for confidence and scale immediately. Anything else is a distraction. But there are some distractions that are worth it. Finding them and pursuing them the right way is the trick.

I'm left wondering about whether and how "small to learn" strategies have to play out. Are they always in the open? And when should they occur discretely?

Managing out the connections

(Creative Commons licensed photo from Vasta's Flickr photostream.)

Joan Magretta wrote a wonderful book called What Management Is. In the book, Magretta defines a business model as "a story about making and selling." That is, you better have a unique and compelling story about how you'll both make and sell your mousetrap. I like that definition, especially the "story" part.

But I've been thinking for about four years now that something is missing each time I quote the definition or recommend the book.

Connecting is missing.

By connecting I mean maintaining a vibrant and open dialogue with users and customers. Connecting is just as important as making and selling.

If you're working at a small company, you should be designing ways to truly connect with your users. If you're working at a big company, you should be thinking hard about how the balance of effort and energies should shift back towards connecting (or reintroducing it altogether).

You see it in successful small and entrepreneurial firms. They are often founded on an insight and benefit from a connection that the big guys can't see. Some of the Web 2.0 companies are touching their customers hundreds of time each day right now. Is Zappos poised to continue connecting?

Alas, over time a company becomes more efficient. Listening to customers seemingly takes too much time. Leaders have heard it all before anyway. And besides, connecting to users could very well lead to complications like having to change. Organizations also become more complex. Leaders get further and further away from their users, customers and the frontline employees that may actually have the connections.

I once had a client that ran a division who had never gone through the process of buying his products in the same way his customers did. He just couldn't understand it in the same way as our team that went through the process dozens of times. (Peter Merholz from Adaptive Path just wrote a great post about this on Harvard Business Digital.)

If you spent the same time and energy perfecting how you went about connecting as you did making and selling, where would you be?

You've got to get out there.

Principles

My colleague and collaborator Diego is starting something big.

I was able to start doing what I'm doing because of Diego. I'm lucky to have been given the chance to work with him and lucky he took a chance on me.

Trapped in a model

(Photo from Steve Jurvetson's awesome Flickr stream.)

I spend some part of each day working with teams to design better offerings for users on behalf of big companies. I love it.

Part of my job is to constantly search for inspiring business models, design new ones and assess the business implications of our early and evolving designs. When we're working on an established business, I'm constantly reminded that big companies have highly-evolved business models. There's a reason for it: very smart people and competition have taken them there over time.

But doing something new and better, by definition, challenges the model. I have to constantly remind myself to (respectfully) challenge them. Otherwise, we might not find the right "new" thing to do.

Arguing usually doesn't work, but designing can inspire a worthwhile change. We might design a compelling enough alternative to reconsider the current model. Or, we might find other inspiring models to help us reconsider the possibilities of the brand and offering.

It can feel like kicking your way out of a sleeping bag. But when it works, it's a beautiful thing.

There's a lot being written on the topic right now, especially from the standpoint of the entrepreneur. John Mullins has a great little essay on the ins and outs of business models and how entrepreneurs need to evolve into them. Colin has been doing a lot of thinking about how this thinking is translating into big companies as well as small companies.

New + Facts = Learning

"If it doesn't involve new facts, it doesn't count as learning."

This quote comes from Eric Ries. My colleague Meg pointed many of us to his post recapping his talk at the Web 2.0 Expo. I also really liked his notion of the fallacy of iterating too many times on the whiteboard.

I'm learning a bit more about the state of the world in web start-up development to help think about the work of designing businesses, ventures and learning plans for our clients. The velocity of learning at the product and business level online is awe inspiring.

Translating that into world with the specter of big capital investment seems a bit harder, but I'm going to try and think about it some. It could be that I'm just worrying about something that doesn't need to be an issue (or staring at the whiteboard a bit too long as Mr. Ries might say).

Hey Colin: Does design regress to the mean?

(Note: This is a new feature on a new blog. This is when I pose ridiculous questions to my bud Colin who's generally more insightful and has more interesting things to say than I do. I think I stole the idea of the "to and fro" from my friend and colleague Martin who wrote a book that's about to launch that is written in this style. Which, now that I think about the question, is ironic.)

Hey Colin, I bought a Kindle. You know this because I talk about it a lot. It looks like an iPod. The second iteration even more so than the original

The new and fleeting Tropicana identity (whether you liked it or not) had a lot of similarities with the Innocent look and feel (Coke just invested, coincidence?). Lots of that clean and natural graphic design going on in the world. Some much better executed than others my graphic design colleagues tell me.

Designers get inspired by things they see in the world and the work that others are doing. What works once, will likely work again. There are some "laws" or principles that define a better approach to design. For example, the golden ratio is just comforting.

When designing business opportunities and businesses, you have a lot things to play with and levers to pull. But the fundamental business model levers are somewhat limited.

So is it ok? What's the half-life on a design language or system design? If people mimic you, is that ok?

And when should you embrace the inspiration and when should you eschew what's been done recently or close-at-hand for something that feels more unique and further afield? When do you know it's time to shake it up and when to fight normalization? 

NYT: Depression-era voices

(image from http://nytimes.com)

My colleague Ashley pointed me towards this recent NYT article. It represents some more inspiration and fodder to get your mind designing for extreme affordability.

Discovery-driven Growth

Rita Gunther McGrath has written a new book with her collaborator Ian McMillian. It's about taking a design mindset into prototyping businesses. I recommend it (and the other books they've written together).

Composting with no garden

I was very lucky to be a panelist at the PSFK conference on Thursday. Thanks to Piers and the gang for the invitation and the chance to join many, many passionate people.

The topic of the panel was Sustainability - something I know very little about. Designing better businesses and offerings perhaps. But sustainability? Gulp. I'm not an expert and I'm generally a hypocrite... But sure, I guess so.

I was humbled to be a less-than-qualified panelist alongside Sarah Beatty, Simon Collins and Matthew Lusk. So I thought I better think a bit about it before getting up there.

Preparing, I found that the term "sustainability" really kind of sucks. It's so big and abstract that it stifles action. It gets in the way. It's one of those abstract words that can easily handcuff a team or an entire organization.

So what to do?

To loosen the cuffs and design something a bit better and a tad bit less wasteful, I think of the most "sustainable" person that I can conjure without a big research effort. My dad. It's because he's so very, very cheap.

Pops pulls steel bed frames out of dumpsters because a) the steel is worth something and b) he's thinking of things to weld. When I was growing up, he composted even though we didn't have a garden. (Now that the kids have long since relinquished the backyard he does.) As a kid, I learned to dump the lawn clippings on the compost pile but I didn't know what compost was all about.

 I think Dad thought he had a better use for the garbage than the dump. I doubt he thought "I'm saving the trash truck gas." Not only did he deal with some of our organic waste, he also fixed everything we owned and sometimes made us toys (that was a bit traumatic). He still has the speakers he bought  in the mid-70s. They are so old, they're are almost retro.

So if you're looking for a sustainability angle, try starting by getting inspired by someone who tries to waste nothing and spend as little as required. Someone here or there. Design for "extreme affordability" and for the output to last and see what you get.

Who do you think about when you're trying to loosen the cuffs? What would you design for my Dad*?

* Go easy - that's my Dad.

Hello

I've decided to force myself to produce more and distill more and share more.

I'm also challenging CR to do the same. We'll have dueling banjos soon.