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AgileDC – Mixing Product Design/Innovation and Agile

Copyright 2011 by Sphere of Influence, Inc. All rights reserved . www.SphereOfInfluence.com

Slide 1

I hope this presentation doesn’t suck. If I have good material but not prepared as a speaker, it’ll suck. If I’m prepared but I don’t present things effectively, in the right order, it’ll suck. If I don’t have anything new, no matter how pretty my charts- then it’ll suck. So, there’s a lot of ways for a talk to suck. The same is true for products. In product development we can do 1,000 things right and 1 thing wrong that causes the product to suck. Product development isn’t just about features or aesthetics or user experience or marketing, it’s about wholeness and consistency to a strong center. There are so many things that go into making a great product, and every one of them needs our devoted attention to be designed.



Slide 2

Seth Godin

WHEN A PRESENTER ISN’T WASTING YOUR TIMEHE’S THERE TOCHANGE YOUR MIND

My goal for today: Convince you that product thinking (i.e. Design) workflows need to be included in the future of Agile. But…why? As Agile developers you are already devoted to a process that produces reliable innovation (Agile). Why do you need anything else? Answer: CAKE MIX (next chart)



Slide 3

CAKE

MIXErnstDichter

In the 1940’s famous psychologist Ernest Dichter, father of modern “consumer behavior” studies, solved a problem for Betty Crocker. The instant cake mixes were not selling despite focus groups that said the product was delicious. Dichter conducted experiments and discovered the housewife was not happy with the product because it infringed on her sense of obligation to family, put simply – it was too easy. He suggested “just have her add her own egg”. Instead pre-mixing powdered egg, the instructions now called for the preparer to add egg. As a result, the product started jumping off the shelf. This is an early example of how ethnography and consumer behavior studies can be successfully applied to product development and design. In old-school marketing the trick was to make people like (want to buy) whatever once-size-fits-all mass produced product you make. In the new-school the trick is to design a product that appeals to people naturally, that means adapting the design to resonate with individual lifestyle types. This leads to design variation, i.e. different designs for different lifestyles. It also means you need to spend a lot of time with consumers.

Trivia: Yes, this is in fact the same model as the “painted face girl on the cover art”.



Slide 4

These companies do something very different than what we do in software. First, people actually like what they design. Second, these companies are considered hip and sexy to work for. Why? What are they doing that we aren’t?



Slide 5

PRODUCT thinkingDO SOMETHING USEFULCAUSE SILENT APPLAUSEDOPAMINE HIGHDIFFERENT | NEW | UNEXPECTEDTRIGGER LOYALTYHAVE IMPACT (SOCIAL, CULTURAL, ECONOMIC)EXCEED THE SUM OF FEATURES

All the points on this slide are important, but there are 2 we want to talk about: • Software people already get “do something useful”. Our problem isn’t doing something

useful, it’s serving useful features in digestible portions. We tend to put way too much useful stuff into our products, stuff that doesn’t go together, stuff that fills the dinner plate but doesn’t make the meal enjoyable. It’s like mixing the function of a toaster with that of a can opener. Both are great functions and deserve a creative solution…but they don’t belong in the same device. Software people don’t get that.

• Game developers induce dopamine highs by introducing delays after achievements. A dopamine high is that feeling of quiet bliss that we in software forget to let our users attain. Video game designers get it, they give the gamer time to reflect on the experience between levels. A gamer still needs time to reflect on the experience and let it sink in. The delay between levels is deliberate. Not only is it used to advance the story line but it lets the gamer have a enough “downtime” to realize she enjoys the game. Tremendous design fiddling goes into getting the cadence right and striking the best ratio of game play versus downtime. Enterprise, IT, and consumer products can also benefit from dopamine highs.

The other points (not discussed in public presentation).



SILENT APPLAUSE: Just like good theater the product needs to a have applause lines built in; i.e. little features that make the user want to clap. Note: they don’t really clap for software, we know this. DIFFERENT | NEW | UNEXPECTED: Speaking as a product guy, our job is to “do something new that doesn’t suck”. There are two sides to this, first “do something new”, easy to say hard to do. How do you take a new spin on some old system or technology? You’ve got to seek inspiration to drive the creative process. Maybe that comes from ethnography, maybe from some new tech, or maybe from your own head. The other side is “not sucking”. Just because you have a new interpretation on a product doesn’t mean it’s good. You need to be able to select the good ideas from the bad ideas. The formula is easy, good ideas “resonate” with the audience, bad ideas don’t. TRIGGER LOYALTY: If your audience won’t defend your product when it is attacked, then your design sucks. HAVE IMPACT: Great products have disruptive impact, either social, cultural, or economic. For a product to have impact it must have MEANING, and that means having a STRONG CENTER. EXCEED SUM OF FEATURES: Features are valuable, “yes, it makes toast”. But some toasters are worth several hundred dollars while others sell at cost. The great products of the world are valued greater than the sum of their features. In fact, features are a commodity. A competitor will have (or will soon have) the same features if those features are differentiators.



Slide 6

RESONATEGREAT PRODUCTS

HAVE MEANING Great products don’t DO, they ARE. Great products stand for something, they have meaning. If your product stands for something people will resonate with it…not all people…but some…and that’s what you want.



Slide 7

To make someone happy with product design

The often comes from surprise.

HAVE “MOMENTS” To be successful you need two moments: (1) for the client; (2) for the audience.



Slide 8

“Customers like lots of things but don’t really know what they like. They do know what they dislike.”

You cannot trust their likes, but you can trust their dislikes. Why they like something is more important that what they like. Cannot defer design decisions to customers. They will be wrong and your product will be mediocre.



Slide 9

When they design movies the way we design software

ADDITIVE PROCESSES suck! Wall Street 2, voted most formulaic movie of all time. Had no STRONG CENTER, was just a collection of features. If you design around what people say they want, or what surveys say they want, then you end up with an “additive process” that results in no meaning or strong center.



Slide 10

Agile IS BROKEN

SXSW Story: Team goes out and gets dunked in Agile; buys the tools; uses the tools; realizes the tools suck. Quote: “The agile products looked like someone had thought about each feature one at a time then implemented it”. Agile is broken because it is additive and there is no system for exploring strong centers or unfolding wholeness.



Slide 11

WHERE DO GREAT PRODUCTSCOME FROM

Just a question. Move on.



Slide 12

Be Creative

Great products come from an intense focus on ideas. Ideas lead to STRONG CENTERS and strong centers lead to great products. Ideas come from…creative workflows that start and end with a focus on the audience.



Slide 13

Find aSTRONG CENTER

then unfold it

Contrast with Agile. Unlike Agile…Design is an unfolding process, not an additive process. Design is a process of unfolding by maintaining wholeness, consistency and strong center. Agile is purely additive.



Slide 14

Be Creative

Unfold WholenessChristopherAlexander

Once your product has a strong center, development is about “unfolding wholeness” around that center. Inspiration during the midstream of the creative process comes less and less from external sources, and more from the strong center itself.



Slide 15

DESIGN UP FRONT

Insert a design step upstream of the Agile project

All of the pitfalls of waterfall. Nice try but doesn’t work.



Slide 16

DESIGN IN SPRINTSDo a little Design at the front of every sprint, spreading it like testing.

Requires time travel to work. Sets up mini-waterfalls in each sprint, never enough time to do good design without delaying developers



Slide 17

JUST-IN-TIME DESIGNTwo parallel workflows with Design running two sprints ahead of Development.

Ok but not ideal because the farther ahead design work the less Agile you become. Designers end up living in several sprints at once, which sucks.



Slide 18

DESIGN SPRINTSUse “down sprints” where the entire sprint is dedicated to Design.

Not everyone is talented as designer. Makes inefficient use of talent.



Slide 19

PARTNERSHIPSSimilar to pair programming, uses designer/developer partnerships

Fused innovation. Requires co-location. Complex because the ratio of designers to developers is not 1:1. Suffers matrix management pitfalls because Designers might stop working as a design team and therefore stop “unfolding wholeness”.



Slide 20

Thank you for attending this presentation or for spending the time to download these slides. At Sphere of Influence we are committed to making BETTER SOFTWARE. In the old days that meant trustworthy, reliable, dependable, predictable computing; i.e. languages, technologies, architecture, and process. Today we still need all that but we need to be focused on product, not process. The product is the core of everything we do at Sphere. We build beautiful custom software for serious applications. Our clients are medium to large companies or public sector projects. Our staff of 42 talented people need to eat, so if you know of any opportunities where good work will make a difference…we always appreciate a referral. THANK YOU!

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