The value of UX Design in a “product organisation”
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Industries and trends ebb and flow. I think I might have been working during a peak for “design thinking”. Organisations like IDEO, Apple and Adaptive Path helped to establish design as the differentiating factor between successful organisations and the rest. But, in recent years I’ve seen a shift. The faith placed in “design thinking” now seems diverted into “product thinking.”
I can see how this happened. From the birth of the double diamond in 2004 through to the rise of Google Venture’s Design Sprint method, I felt “design” peak around 2017. “Design thinking” felt like a bit of a cult back then. Google Trends seems to back up my memory. “Design Thinking” overtakes “product management” around 2016 — the year Jake Knapp publishes and popularises the Google 5-day Sprint Methodology. Maybe, for a brief while, “design” feels like the way you solve problems for customers and users. But then interest swings back to product management.
I don’t want to pin the “decline” of design on the 5-day sprint. But maybe design process became too linked to creating value by boosting growth for quick returns in start-up contexts. This narrowed the scope and missed some of the point. Maybe UX Bootcamps that taught design thinking over a week or two also contributed. The “market” simplified design to the bare minimum to satisfy demand. It also applied a specific method too broadly. If IDEO and “design thinking” was on the extreme of “big design,” the 5-day sprint, due to its speed, narrowed the spectrum.
Then, people applied design sprints to problems they weren’t well-suited to solve. Then that process got chipped away at. Covid and remote working further mutated design processes. We seemed to sleepwalk into a situation where “design thinking” became a set of sentences that start with the phrase “How might we…” and a session of Crazy 8s. That’s not design.
If you’re always defaulting to “thinking fast,” you’re missing out on a whole type of thinking (thinking slow?)… And it’s also no wonder that when you limit yourself to a move-fast mindset, you more often break things. [In the words of “product thinking” you don’t effectively manage your risks].
I worry that the people working on digital products and services are particularly prone to cults. We like to worship founders. We like trends. I worry that the cult of “design thinking” has been replaced with a “cult of PRODUCT” and that we’re in danger of narrowing our options when it comes to unlocking value. When a single perspective dominates a narrative, it tends to narrow possibilities. I worry that some have lost a sense of what design is and what it can be used for…
Sense-making and difference-making
“Design thinking” and “Product thinking” needn’t be competing schools of thought in a zero sum game. But I think we might need to get better at understanding and describing the value of the trios who work within “product organisations” and operating models. Otherwise we might find ourselves reduced to a sort of ‘5-day design.’ And by misunderstanding “design,” Product managers might develop a sort of thinned view of design as only executing deduced solutions. Even experienced “product people” like Marty Cagan seem surprised when they begin to fully consider and appreciate how skilled designers think and work.
I think design thinking and product thinking are similar. Both seek to understand needs and then meet them. Both rely on deep understanding of a user/customer/audience. Both use data — whether quantitive or qualitative to generate understanding. And both form hypotheses and devise experiments to solve a problem or generate value. But, I think the unique value between the disciplines differs, subtly in a product organisation. In my experience, design is better at “difference making”, product thinking excels at sense making.
Marty Cagan describes how empowered product teams are given problems to solve and risks to manage. But the best product teams I’ve been in are creative. They manage risks, but they’re also more effective in managing ideas as they generate and solve problems. High-performing teams create problems by describing the changes in a situation which might generate value. And they create solutions by solving problems in ways that are good for users and organisations. They manage risks, problems and solutions (ideas) to make a difference. The most effective product teams work in trios of product, design and engineering to first make sense of a problem, and then make a difference with a solution.
Design thinking has approaches to build empathy and make sense of situations. But I think design’s ability to cheaply translate ideas is where the true value sits. If you want to compete in a volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous world, you need those skills. You need a mature design capability, working alongside skilled product managers to blend three types of thinking.
Deduction is the first. It happens when we move logically from the general to the specific to generate certainty and facts. It’s great for priorisation and drawing conclusions in information-rich environments. Induction is the second type of thinking. It does something similar with less data. It generates a prediction rather than the more solid conclusions of deduction. Induction allows us to build theories from data. Deduction allows us to validate them. But this thinking makes sense and “creates” out of what is already in the system. To innovate and gain a competitive edge, you often also need skilled people who can think in a third way: abduction. Abduction isn’t about kidnapping your competitors. Abduction generates new ideas.
Anyone can apply the different thinking styles. But design is valuable because it’s particularly good at moving away from deducted certainties or inducted predictions towards abducted possibilities — managing ideas, testing and de-risking along the way.
I realise that by seeming to define the value of design as idea generation and refinement I risk “design” seeming redundant next to the awesome creative power of AI. But my point is that design isn’t just necessary to generate ideas, it’s necessary to manage them effective. Marty Cagan says that ideas can come from anywhere — customers, data, sales teams, technology trends, competitors. In the furture they’ll definitely be coming from AI. But product thinking isn’t about where the idea comes from, rather about how thoroughly they’re validated before being built. Design is really about the effective translation of ideas through different forms of validation — does it make sense in your head, how can you describe it, how can you draw it, how can you prototype it, how can you test it, how can you iterate and optimise it?
The most effective form of creation and validation will blend the three types of thinking I’ve described. And successful organisations need to be able to do all three because the risks and rewards we see from the different styles of thinking differ. Sometimes you might lead with data, sometimes you might need to act to generate data, other times you might need to cautiously probe and predict.
Trust the experience
I’ve suggested that our sector is particularly prone to cults, and maybe some forms of design have a reputation for hero worship too. The humility of “product thinking” trusting data rather than relying on a “creative genius” is important. And a school of thought that argues that in an oversaturated marketplace of ideas, the value of design is as the arbiter of taste might miss the point too. Designers shouldn’t be defending their position and value by urging people to “trust my gut” or even “trust my process”. Design enables us to “trust the experience”… it allows us to translate ideas at increasing levels of fidelity and scale. This means we can progressively increase our confidence that the difference we plan to make can be achieved, and will unlock the value we think we’ve spotted.
“Being controversial, I’d suggest that both Design + Product are just idea monkeys without engineering to turn the ideas into something real. And its such a common pitfall to spend way too much time in a theoretical bubble before bringing the makers into the conversation, so ideas never actually get built.”
A friend very recently assured me that “design and product are really just idea monkeys” who play with ideas — the engineers are the ones who build the real thing. And that might be true. But my point is that an effective trio of design, product and engineering will always generate more value than a single dominant perspective or style of thinking. And “building ideas” is an act of design and architecture just as much as engineering. Good design spends relatively little time in “theory” — good design translates things to make them increasingly concrete. And it is really great at cultivating and translating ideas at their earliest, most delicate and immaterial stages so they can be validated early and cheaply.
If you don’t have competency in different thinking styles or if the order of your thinking is limited to ‘analyse, decide, create’ — you can only operate in limited situations — cynefin taught us that. Effective organisations switch that sequence depending on their context. To succeed you need the greatest number of good ideas and the right forms of validation to test them. Partnering and pairing design thinking with product thinking and engineering expands the range of possibilities open to organisations.
I’m a design leader — so I set off trying to write an article defending and valorising design. But I’ve talked myself around — this isn’t really about specific job titles or disciplines. It’s really about an organisation having diverse people with diverse skills — and most importantly, knowing how to use those skills in different contexts. Your organisation will always have a default approach and a dominant culture or perspective. But if your organisation doesn’t understand or value design, it might be limited to deduction and induction. Experiments might be costly and inaccurate as prototypes and experiments at lower levels of fidelity evade you. Your “continuous discovery” might be reduced to tiny, incremental improvements. And you might find yourself aping the competition, following trends, rather than setting them.
Maybe I’ve got nostalgic for 2018, when design thinking was ‘on trend’. But I do think a dominant narrative can sometimes narrow debate and therefore reduce practice and the possibilities that we see. So, even if we are living in the age of “product thinking,” I still think there’s a specific and valuable role for design.
