The balance of great products and rapid evolution
By Osma on Tuesday 8 December 2009, 20:03 - Permalink
I wanted to link to Andrew Chen's recent article, Does every startup need a Steve Jobs, because it's a useful discussion about the differences between technical feasibility, design-led desirability, and business viability, a triplet productized by IDEO, and one that we also identified a decade ago at Razorfish (wow, it's really a decade ago!). As for the question in the title - no, I don't think that's the only way to create greatness, though clearly if you have Steve at your disposal, you could do worse than have him run everything. :)
Seriously though, at least in this consumer-targeted software business that I'm familiar with, it's crucially important to have those three principles well represented at every level of the business. Sure, it's possible to create a successful business with just two or perhaps even just one of those viewpoints, especially if you can get away with copying someone else but just doing it with better economics. However, to create something new and be successful, it'd be a mistake to ignore business, technology or design. Sadly, of the three, design is the one most commonly ignored. According to this interview of Ken Auletta of his new book, even Google ignores it, Marissa Mayer notwithstanding.
Anyway, what I'm particularly interested about is how can you marry great design with incremental, rapid iterations on the market. I'm pretty sure I've understood how to iterate out in the open with regards to technical work, and relatively comfortable with iteration regarding business aspects. I've yet to come up with a really convincing argument for iteration and design on a very granular basis - well, I can convince myself, but I'm having less success convincing designers. :) If anyone cares to share their secrets, I'd love to hear more.
Comments
Good challenge. Some thoughts from my fluish mind:
Great design is about visualizing concrete solutions that truly serve people's goals, needs and wants.
People use products to get 'a job' done. The job can be built of...
* concrete end goals like "I want to build and share a photo slide show"
* experience goals like "I want my photos to look really good"
* or higher level life goals like: "I want to be respected by other photographers."
In one product, the individual features, UIs or layouts are all there to build a flow that gets that job done. A job done – and you are ready to pay for it in one form or another, and probably recommend to your friends, too.
The challenge with granularity and design is that to satisfy those goals, you need to see the product, the users and the context as a whole. Putting up a photo upload functionality for the user is a start. But to get your slide show up on your friend's computer, and get praise from him, may require a sequence of seamlessly integrated features of uploading, scaling, ordering, previewing, sharing, commenting, etc. Before the chain is complete, all we have is some random meaningless features (for this particular job).
Once you have the flow designed, it's quite easy to design the individual features one by one and take them further incrementally and iteratively. But to serve a new need requires a holistic view of the whole design.