On becoming a product design strategist
A company is defined by their products and services. A great many products are defined by the user experience. The Front end, GUI, UX, the User Interaction Layer, the screens. This is where customers, the humans, view, interact, and control their digital communications, complete tasks, entertain, communicate, and just “get things done”. The visuals are dynamic they have state, they have layout, and organization. Shapes, words, text, colors, themes, layouts, animations. There are literally thousands of details even in the most basic mobile applications. UX design teams are tasked with creating, designing, managing, and ensuring common themes, tone, and consistency for all the details. It’s a big job and one that requires specialized workflows, experience, skills, tools and frameworks. The design team owns the style guides, UX pattern libraries, themes with CSS and animations, common icon and glyph libraries and more. This is a full time effort and activity — it keeps a team fully occupied, this is especially the case today with the trend to “refresh” branding, and theming every two years. It’s a full time gig.
The C-Level, CEO’s, Startup Founders, and Product Management drive new product initiatives — the product vision. Large corporations have a product management team with managers directors and VP’s. Also depending on the size and nature of the tech company the CEO may identify themselves as the “Chief Product Officer” as well as the CEO. The CEO as product designer was “iconized” by Steve Jobs. But others have also put a focus on design skills and focus at the CEO, founder level. Most notably Brian Chesky a designer and Founder of Airbnb and Marissa Mayer the former CEO at Yahoo who also started the Associate Product Manager (APM) program at Google. She championed product focus at Google and growing product managers (PMs) with an internal PM program that focussed on what is now the “classic” product manager definition which is a “triad” of skills in technology, business, and design. At Yahoo, as CEO, she had mixed reviews but she did help establish “product” as the center stage for modern tech companies, as a mainstream corporate focus. Now we all hear about how “design” needs to be injected “early” into product ideation and is a “core” skill for Product Managers. Also design has increased in visibility and influence with many companies have a large well structured design teams including a VP role in the product Business Unit.
But it’s still the case that long term strategic initiatives at larger technology companies - the long term product roadmap and vision are driven by the C-suite independent of internal design resources. Sometimes these strategy initiatives are conducted in retreats or “off sites”. They may also be lead by external “strategic consultants” or “design strategy companies”. This is happening more often as “design thinking” gains mindshare with startups and executives.
So the good news is increasingly product designers are getting seats at these strategic initiatives. As a product designer it’s both challenging and rewarding to participate in product strategy and product roadmap discussions and to help create deliverables needed for successful strategic plans. Increasingly companies are realizing that products are about narratives, stories, and that products and services need to be visualized in the context of use. Indeed products and services in the age of omnipresent technology and our technology symbiosis are used in more places, contexts, and situations than ever. Successful products and services adapt to a wide range of contextual variables. These variables, the context are nuanced, complex and each one has a different story.
As a full time Product Designer its never been a better time to get yourself ‘injected” into product strategy discussions as companies look to “disrupt” the market, look to “blue ocean” strategies, or just to gain “competitive advantage” in existing markets with their existing products and services. Design has become a essential part of the “process” in developing the product strategy roadmap, in company ideation, and in futures thinking. Companies that engage high priced design consultants like IDEO, Frog and other strategic design firms know they need to have continity in knowledge sharing and knowledge transfer after the strategic consulting ends. A seasoned designer with some deep domain knowledge, and some technical framework knowledge is well positioned to get a seat at the strategy ideation and strategic development table.
You can position yourself as a essential “bridge”. There needs to be knowledge transfer and continuity to ensure that the strategy goals and details are communicated and continued after the high priced strategic design engagement ends. More companies are realizing that it pays to have highly skilled “knowledge workers” as employees. This is part of the “secret sauce” to the current big tech winners. Technology executives know it's critical to foster full time employee skills and knowledge.
As a company product designer you can be proactive a well thought out “pitch” to the right person can get you a seat at the strategy table. I myself have participated in a many product strategy sessions while at large corporations and a 15 person startup. I also participated in strategy discussions and projects for wireless technology innovation and next generation future network technology explorations with IDEO.
Strategy product design processes requires a different type of problem solving and skills for both business managers, technical professionals and product designers than more tactical product evolution processes. For strategic design the key is to have a toolbox of analytic and critical thinking skills and flexible approaches to complement design skills. Great strategists in product/service strategy development embrace divergent arguments, paradoxes, and contradictions. Roger Martin, a Business School Professor in Toronto, has focussed on business strategy thinking and has identified divergent thinking as an important characteristic to the process to probe and analyze the trade offs and interactions in the new business space continuously and iteratively.
The CEO of Amazon, Jeff Bezos hosts a yearly invitation-only conference, MARS that explores futures for Machine Learning, Automation, Robotics, and Space to explore futures with business leaders, corporate technologists, and academic technologists and scientists.
Under Bezos’ direction Amazon has moved on from “bulleted” slide presentations to a 6 page narrative to propose new product/service initiatives. Amazon requires executives to read the 6 page narrative prior to the meeting and be ready with questions to probe the ideas presented and arguments outlined in the narrative. The management team realized powerpoint slide presentations were “passive” in that the team listened to the information at the meeting. This “one way” communication wasn’t an efficient use of the group “brain power” critical insights were lacking without the prior review of a narrative story and reasoning behind the proposal. New products/services need justification, a story for why the proposal will work, how it improves on current products and services, and detailed “stories” for how the product or service functions and interacts with today’s complex digital service multi-device ecosystem.
This is part of the reason why strategy sessions are gaining in popularity. It’s apparent that you need a focussed process to explore trends, and opportunities presented by new technologies and business models. Business leaders are realizing that it’s these “stories” back by data on trends that show where there is opportunity worth pursuing and the contexts wh ere the new services will prosper.
Designers are trained to contribute to this development process - they are skilled personas development , and storyboard creation. The fun part of “new omnipresent multi-device technology” is that its so seamlessly integrated into everyone’s lifestyle. Almost any product or service is omnipresent — its available on any device web, mobile, watch and increasingly voice, AR, etc and in almost any location. This puts new emphasis and value on the product “story” in the operation context. Storyboarding how a new product/service impacts consumers in context of “what they are doing, where they are, and who they are with” is illuminating and essential to understanding product or service potential.
I have been a Product Strategist as part of a Digital Video group and a company Technology research group. I have participated in many design strategy sessions and spun off my own ideas creating “proof of concept” storyboards, interactive prototypes for ideation in Entertainment Ecosystems, reimagining city safety collaboration and workflows, and smart “things” in healthcare service, manufacturing services, wireless AR visualizations.
Our design group in the Video Business unit was able to “move upstream” from tactical design refinement of program channel designs to a design strategy focus. I was part of a design team that was able to refocus part of our design effort from a tactical “next generation program guide” to strategic research and explorations for “Entertainment delivery in a multi-device ecosystems”. Instead of focussing on Video streaming tech delivery and program channel UI design which is an important for tactical competitive advantage, we looked at the evolution of the space from a broad technology perspective, from a cultural generational perspective, and brainstormed on the possible opportunities, trends, and contradictions. At the time the space was starting towards a complete transformation from the TV “living room” or “man cave” to entertainment everywhere, ondemand and personalized.
For the video space we also noted the contradiction of participation. On the one hand consumers want instant access to many thousands of videos for private viewing by themselves or with a few friends and family. But on the other hand they global shared events keep getting bigger and bigger, everyone has to see the the World Cup, the Olympics, and yes even some TV shows like Game of Thrones, the “hive” mind is still around and growing even for Millennial. We sketched out these trends and contradictions with personas and common usage scenarios in this new “multi-device” entertainment ecosystem. These “stories” have implications for efforts in video delivery architectures, video delivery for mobility, as well as specific features and functions for consumers.
As part of the effort we also pivoted deliverables, we delivered deeper persona development backed with statistical usage trends and numbers. We then storyboarded many concepts showing users in a wide range of contexts from home to business to lifestyle activities. As a UX design team this pushed our deliverables into more toward telling “stories” with narratives. We found we could use stock image resources and combine with quick 3D renderings in SketchUp and other 3D tools to create “mashups”. We used After Effects combining with clip art to more “hi-fi” mashups showing how people would consume entertainment in context. The product and service adapting to the myriad contexts for use — to paraphrase a popular hip hop song the new experience had to respond to: “what you doing? who you with? and where you at?” This context impacted the product and services features, functionas and design we presented to users.
Strategic deliverables are inspirational, informative, and inspiring. They can serve to energize and inspire. They can also contribute to tactical product efforts, for example by delivering up to date personas backed by deep research. Posting the deliverables in physical strategy “futures rooms” can immediately immerse executives in “the possible” of the future. The deliverables can also be shared in internal sites for further review and discussions, and evolution.
Design drives the creation and refinement of the product strategy storyboards getting everyone on the “same page” to realize the “possible” from Product Managers, to Engineering, to Finance. As we move into the “technology everywhere” and are able to leverage increasingly sophisticated cloud services the “what’s possible” is almost unbounded. Design is a essential to product strategy to visualize in detail “the possible” beyond the powerpoint bullets, and beyond 6 page narratives.
