Series Wrap-up: The Business Impact of Product Design

Episode Transcription

Anna:

Well Christian, we put it off as long as we could, but we knew this day would come, the end of our product design series.

Christian:

Oh, say it ain't so.

Anna:

I know, I know, but we still get to recap what we've learned.

Christian:

Well, I guess I'm just going to have to drag this episode out then.

Anna:

You've been warned, listeners. Over the series, we've had some great guests tell us about how product design impacts their teams, their business, or even the world. But before we get those answers, let's bring it all the way back to our conversation with Evan Tank, Senior Product Designer at Innovatemap, to remind us how product design is different from UI or UX.

Evan Tank:

Product design is just creating a product that meets both the needs of the users and the business. It's really that simple. So just making sure that the problems that we're solving for the business turn into exceptional experiences for the users that really also need a problem solved.

Christian:

With that context, we went into each interview to learn what our guests see as a responsibility of product designers through their own experiences. Tyler Wanless, Head of Design and interim Head of Product at Buffer, brought a great perspective to start the series because he came with a generalist product background. In his time as Head of Product, he didn't view design as a separate team, but rather a specific superpower and the product process.

Tyler Wanlass:

I don't even really delineate design and product in my mind. They're so interconnected. Design is about solving problems, product is about kind of helping fit ambiguity and getting it to customers, and you need both of them. Internally, we talk a lot about the default actually is thinking about problem solution and we think about design and research as kind of the solution phase and product is about sort of the problem phase. Like, what is the thing that we need to solve that will have big impact for value for customers and the business?

Anna:

Yeah, Tyler came with a great perspective of the product team as a whole and where design fits, but he did call out one unique responsibility of product design.

Tyler Wanlass:

Design offers a ton of value in the discovery phase. I think what we probably know to be true is that most companies spend way too much time in the engineering and building phase, which is crazy expensive. Do the napkin math and figure out how much it's going to cost you to have four engineers working for a month on a feature, then do the math and figure out how much will it cost to put a design on a design sprint for a week and generate 10 fantastic solutions that have already been taken to customers for validation and feedback, and you'll see really quickly that the dollars and cents just is there.

Christian:

Yeah, I think that's a really important point. Product designers have a unique ability to look at a product problem from a unique perspective and quickly iterate on a lot of solutions.

Anna:

From your completely unbiased opinion though, right?

Christian:

Well, fair. But Tyler said it first. I love his train analogy that he gave to explain this idea.

Tyler Wanlass:

There's a classic train problem. A train takes two hours to get from two locations, how do you make a faster train? And the answer actually is like, "Let's just add wifi to the train." People don't worry about the commute time anymore. That's not the type of solution you would get if you went to engineering, it's not the type of solution you would get if you went to product. Product'd be like, "How do we optimize the timetables and train turnover times" and stuff. It's like, let's flip that upside down. Let's invert that problem and think about something different.

Anna:

Yeah, that was a great analogy. Michael Sacca, the VP of Product turned General Manager of Dribbble, talked about this in his interview as well. In his interview, Michael told us how as a leader, he makes sure everyone understands the business side of their decisions.

Michael Sacca:

I do expect designers to understand the business. I expect everyone on the team to understand the business, from the engineering team to the design team and of course the product team, and we've actually structured our internal kind of product process so that everyone has an understanding of why we're doing what we're doing, how it affects the business itself, and what our goals are.

Anna:

For once, everyone is on the same page. Michael actually uses design's unique superpower of painting the picture to help visualize what could be coming for Dribbble years down the road.

Michael Sacca:

We start at the thousand foot three year view, and we've already done designs for Dribbble that we know we're not going to get to for a year or two, but it helps to inform all the decisions that we make up until that point. So we've actually used design or the design team to build that understanding and be part of that conversation so when we say, "We want to do X, Y, and Z in the next two years," we've actually already pushed that into design and then we present that to the team for their understanding.

If we just say it, they kind of get it. But if they can see it and it might not be the final version, it's usually just kind of a quick aspirational lens, but it helps them understand, "Okay, every decision I make for the next two years leading up to this north star is going to affect our ability to get there." So we try to set that north star both visually, just because we are a very visual company, and without the designer understanding that long-term vision, they would never be able to actually build that aspirational model for us.

Christian:

Laura Nunnery, Senior Product Design lead at Strava, pointed out something similar when she got talking about what drew her to product design from her physics background. As she mentioned in her interview, product design requires an ability to step back and see the product problem as a whole, and then visualize a solution.

Laura Nunnery:

I think it's anything that comes within the realm of thinking and looking at things differently from different vantage points and aggregating all of those vantage points to one singular output. I think the people that can do that well are the people that go into product design, because there are so many edge cases that you have to consider.

Anna:

I loved hearing about Laura's unique career path because as product designers, we know they can be sometimes misconstrued as just pixel pushing or art, but Laura has tackled some pretty challenging problems in her career.

Laura Nunnery:

Starting there, initially I was allotted to be on our what we call mobile record. Essentially you go to the mobile device, you tap record, and your activities will be tracked and you can actually have those inputs upload to Strava. So within that, priorities shifted pretty quickly. Fortunately, after identifying some gaps within just ways of working and not thinking there's an actual product market fit, that kind of came onto the plate of me, myself, and one of our new hires, the product marketing director from Uber, we kind of just got in a room and went heads down. And that started off as defining outputs, understanding of the knowledge that was there, and kind of looking through complete threshold and gamut of everything that has been collected over time.

A lot of that was within our external hires that gave us this tiered structure, identifying why that didn't work, and also looking at if Strava was even worth paying for. If there's not a value that's displayed, people won't put their credit card out at all. It was about maybe a five day sprint, and so a lot of it was in discovery mode, which is just the understanding piece of the pie where you just literally take all the knowledge you can and try to synthesize and extract key learnings and start to build an affinity map around that, and some type of somatics to actually guide your next steps.

Christian:

Yeah, Laura has been tasked with some daunting problems to solve through design, from security concerns at Facebook to bullying at Instagram, she didn't shy away from some tough projects. But she wasn't the only one we talked to who set out to use design to solve a problem. Gabrielle Guthrie, co-founder and Designer at Moxxly, also talked about how she was determined to apply user-centered design to address a problem nobody was talking about, breastfeeding.

Gabrielle Guthrie:

For us, it was really important to understand the context in which our product was going to live, and so we would go to women's houses and sit on the floor with them in their living room and do pump alongs that we'd call, and watch them, talk to them about the importance for them. They're telling us this product is so hard to use, it's painful, it's not intuitive, and yet I'm going to do it every day, three times a day for 20 to 45 minutes for a year. It's like, what? Wow, that is so, so fascinating, the commitment that we saw from women, despite the struggles and the hardships that they went through and their partners went through to support them.

Anna:

Gabrielle shared so many great insights in her interview, but I especially loved how she explained the responsibility of designers to keep users at the center of everything.

Gabrielle Guthrie:

It's really important to believe that designers and founders can and should care about issues that do not necessarily affect them personally, and the nuance to that at the same time, it's really important to actually center the people you are designing for, or else you end up with not user-centered design, but designer-centered design.

Christian:

Gabrielle went on to explain that user-centered design doesn't mean you have to experience your user's problems firsthand. You just need to empathize with their situation, and that empathy seems to be missing in the conversation today.

Gabrielle Guthrie:

I've been thinking a lot recently since the resurgence of Black Lives Matter and during the pandemic, I've been thinking a lot about user-centered design and the role that user-centered design plays in actively contributing to the status quo and actively contributing to sexist issues for sure is what I had been focused on with Moxxly, but racist issues as well. So with user-centered design, I think that there are two things specifically that I've been thinking about recently that is kind of missing from the conversation.

Anna:

That tech empathy point was so important, and it'll only become more important as we look to tech to address so many of the problems that we face today.

Well, that's a wrap on this series on the business impact of product design. Don't worry, we'll be back soon with our next series all about product brand, what it is, why it matters, and what products need to know about building a compelling brand identity.

Christian:

Before you go, just a reminder that if you want exclusive content alongside your weekly dose of Anna and I, go to BetterProduct.Community and sign up now.

Anna:

Perfect.

Christian:

All right, nailed it.