Introducing Product Design and Methodologies

A product is an object, a system, or a service made available to consumers through a market to satisfy the desire or need of a customer. This definition sets the stage for a new series of articles where I'll delve into product design, organization, and culture. In this first article, I'll concentrate on methodologies and processes in product design.

Service Design

When two bus companies provide the same service from origin to destination, with comparable prices and amenities like comfortable seats, the deciding factor becomes the quality of service. The company that stands out with an exceptional experience — offering an omnichannel, seamless purchasing process, additional services before and after the trip, and fast, personalized customer care — will be the preferred choice. This is the essence of service design, a methodology that enables companies to create new customer service experiences and strategies or enhance existing ones, making everything easy, attractive, and useful for the customer.

This represents a major shift in how companies compete. During the early industrial revolution, the competitive edge for traditional companies laid in their industrial capacity: those who optimized manufacturing processes sold the most. Later, globalization shifted the advantage to cost control, with market leaders being those who produced the cheapest. Today, with the rise of technology and the internet, consumers are more informed and seek products and services that best meet their needs. To succeed, companies must now create what customers want. This is the essence of customer centricity — it's not enough to have top marketing teams inventing and selling products well, or efficient operational teams controlling manufacturing and costs. Now, companies need to truly understand what customers want and don't want, and then build products and services accordingly. This is the crucial role of the product team.

Customer Centricity

Customer centricity means starting with the customer — or more precisely, the people. The rise of technology has given birth to a new design field: human-centered design. In the 1960s, Douglas Engelbart invented the computer mouse at Stanford Research Institute, often considered the birth of human-centered design. This approach involves understanding humans from an ethnographic perspective, using tools like the empathy map to ideate and design products, services, and technologies that truly serve people. Engelbart's challenge was to create a way for humans to interact with machines.

In the 1970s, pioneers like David Kelley at Stanford, Bill Moggridge in London, and Mike Nuttall, who moved from London to California, established design agencies that heavily invested in this field. Eventually, they came together to found IDEO, the company that developed and popularized Design Thinking across various domains. This concept revolutionized design by moving away from a top-down approach, where a few individuals (marketers, designers, directors) create products and push them to people, to a bidirectional interaction between users and multidisciplinary teams of engineers, designers, and marketers that address real needs. 

This shift had a profound impact on companies' mindsets, cultures, and governance.

Design Thinking

According to Tim Brown, executive chair of IDEO, “Design thinking is a human-centered approach to innovation that draws from the designer’s toolkit to integrate the needs of people, the possibilities of technology, and the requirements for business success.”  

The Design Thinking methodology brings together what is desirable from a human point of view with what is technologically feasible and economically viable. The process can be illustrated by the double diamond model, each diamond consisting of a diverging phase followed by a converging phase.

First, the product team needs to define with the business the general challenge to be addressed, which could stem from the customer (qualitative research), the data (quantitative research, business intelligence, analytics), the market (new regulation, new technology, technical debt or evolution, new service offered by a competitor) or the business itself (a new company strategy targeting a market, segment, service, or functionality). Hereafter, I describe the complete process, which can be adapted according to the nature of the challenge. 

The first diamond begins with the diverging phase: discovery through qualitative research. Here, ethnography helps explore human actions, sayings, thoughts, and feelings — the four empathic dimensions — related to the challenge. At this stage, data isn't useful; the goal is to understand how humans would naturally approach the challenge. A user persona portfolio is then created to represent the different types of people who would address the challenge in various ways, based on their capacities, knowledge, understanding, and expected outcomes, among others. These personas replace traditional socio-demographic or data-based market segmentation. When an existing service is involved, the product team maps out customer journeys to understand how the service is currently delivered, examining customer actions across different channels and their empathic reactions. Pain points identified here need to be addressed. The ideation phase, supported by benchmarks from similar journeys in other industries, allows teams to brainstorm ideas and hypotheses on how humans would tackle the challenge. For example, consider punctuality in transportation services: different individuals have varying needs depending on their specific transportation scenarios.

Then comes the first converging phase: challenge definition. With hypotheses and ideas on hand, evaluation and prioritization of different solutions begin. Data is used to measure the desirability and feasibility of each hypothesis. Returning to our punctuality challenge, the specific issues could range from insufficient timetable information and unrealistic travel times, lack of real-time updates, to poor treatment or compensation for delays. Each specific issue requires a tailored solution. At that point, it is highly recommended to design specific prototype for each specific challenge so to validate hypothesis and test user acceptability and usability before beginning development. 

The second diamond starts with the diverging phase of solution development. Here, the goal is to design the "to be" journey (as opposed to the “as is” initial challenge), envisioning the new customer experience. The Service Blueprint tool is used to design this expected service. It includes:

• The story board that describes steps, choices, activities and interactions the customer performs while interacting with a service to achieve a particular objective. Customer actions are derived from research or Customer Journeys.

• The front-stage actions that occur directly at the customer's view. These can be human-to-human or human-to-machines interaction.

• Then, below the visibility lines, the backstage actions: internal activities supporting front-stage actions, invisible to the customer but essential for service delivery. These actions can be performed by an internal backstage employee or by a front-stage employee who does something that is not visible to the customer (for example, filling a form on his frontdesk)

• Finally, below the internal interaction line are internal steps and interactions that support employees in the execution of the service. This is the world of processes and backend systems to automate processes.

  

  The second convergence phase is the specific solution delivery. The product team delivers products that enhance customer and employee experiences and improve processes. In that phase, the product team is hungry for data, as data will validate or invalidate initial hypotheses and assumptions. It’s not too late to adapt the products or address other specific challenges. Finally, the process becomes a loop: after delivery, customer feedback is analyzed to start an infinite test-and-learn cycle.

  For tech companies and startups, these product team methodologies and processes are no-brainers, but they are a hell of a challenge for traditional companies. Common errors include:

• Over-reliance on data and quantitative inputs during the discovery phase that pushes out of the equation the necessary human qualitative input. This stems from traditional business intelligence and market insights practices that have historically driven marketing teams over the 20th century. But without this input, solutions are less likely to meet real customer needs.

• A top-down approach during definition, excluding the customer. Traditional companies, accustomed to optimizing and standardizing industrial processes and cost control through top-down methods, struggle to involve customers from the outset.

• Focus on product, data and technology during development and delivery, overlooking human interactions and processes. It is what I call the iceberg challenge: companies only see the visible part of the stage (the product for the end user), ignoring the importance of people and processes. If a company is more interested in the means rather than the ends, the desired outcome is unlikely to be achieved. While it’s easier to pressure product and tech teams, it's crucial to focus on people and processes to ensure customer-centric transformations and improvements.