Research, then Strategy

The last few months have put me through the wringer, but it seems like I’ve made it out the other side alright. Two large programs running in tandem meant a lot of long hours through August and September, skewing the work-life balance towards the former. Now that things are slowing back down to a normal clip, it’s time for some much-needed reflection.

I thought I’d start with the simple question - how did I get into this mess in the first place?

It’s easy to point at unrealistic timelines and feature creep and declare the trail end there, but these are merely side effects of a more significant root cause - a poor strategy. For this particular client, our approach was merely to keep them happy. They controlled the spec as “they knew their brand”, and we just had to deliver. This led to several issues with the project, including numerous spec changes, BOM inflation, copying the competition, and parallel pathing various architectures and component schemes. Naturally, this caused the timeline to slide and risked the success of the program and relationship with the client.

Rather than please the client, our strategy should have been to please the customer. For all the HCD’ers out there, I know this is a “duh” moment, but when there are a lot of cooks in the kitchen this principle is ignored alarmingly often. If some time was spent to “validate” the project direction in the beginning, a foundation could have been built to guide the client towards the right path forward. There are many methods that design researchers use to do this - ethnographies, online surveys, product journals, strategy canvases, etc. The key is to distill down to the appropriate path for this brand with these customers. Todd Bracher calls this “irreducible complexity” (more on that in another post!). This core idea informs price point, features, color/finish/material, UX, marketing/messaging, sales channel, etc. Without this foundation, how can you steer a client away from a bad idea or give them the confidence to commit to a key design decision? Taking “shortcuts” by not performing research is the equivalent of sprinting through a maze, seeing only the next wall in front of you, rather than marching straight and steadily towards the prize.

In my opinion, this leads to a better strategy - generate (or when necessary, validate) your brand’s North Star, and this will guide your customers home.

Why Write?

It's a question that I had grappled with continuously throughout my time in college. Being so much more engaged in my design and engineering coursework, I would put quite literally anything before getting around to writing papers. Time and time again, I could be found hunched over a desk in a study carrel the night before a due date, hastily spilling the contents of my exhausted brain into barely conceivable, double-spaced lines.

As I've gotten older, the animosity I had for the "liberal arts" side of my education has ebbed and transitioned into something more akin to reluctant gratitude. I've found that the act of writing is an opportunity to make sense of the vast amount of disparate information we take in on a daily basis. In a world that spins ever faster and with vast oceans of information at our fingertips, writing requires us to clear our minds for a brief moment and try to connect the dots. 

A Sensei of mine from years past used to say that "you don't really know something until you have to teach it", underscoring that earning a black belt is not the end of learning, but rather the beginning. I've found that writing functions much the same way. In this spirit, I am kicking off a personal campaign to write more - to make sense of what inspires me, puzzles me, and challenges me. To learn...and hopefully, at least a little...to teach.