In my previous post I talked about the “Design of Things to Come”. I proposed that companies should start taking design very seriously by giving it an equal footing compared to the other areas of product development.
In this post, I propose the strategies to find change agents within your organization. If you cannot find the change agents, I propose hiring one at the top most level so that change can happen throughout the organization.
Before I give you the solution, here are things you should NOT do:
- Do not give absolute authority to a graphic designer, doing so will give you a product that looks like a runway fashion show, looks striking, but highly impractical for daily use.
- Do not give absolute authority to a product manager, doing so will give you a product with features that everyone somehow wanted, but no one uses.
- and lastly, never, ever give absolute authority to a software programmer, doing so will give you a product that will never function the way a common man expects it to function.
What you need to do is find a left-brained Software Developer. A left-brained Software developer in my opinion has the following qualities:
1. Understands Software Architecture
2. Understands Business and what it means to be profitable (doesn’t need to have an MBA)
3. Is creative enough to understand design
4. Has worked directly with customers long enough to understand what they say v/s what they mean
5. Highly motivated and enthusiastic
Start with a couple if you find them. Most organizations have such guys, trust me, they do. These guys are smart enough to pick a little bit of everything, but have not been utilized enough for them to be dangerous (in a good way!)
Once you find them, send them to a bunch of UX workshops, send them to UX related blogs, send them to potential mentors, send them to specialists for training, send them to search for case studies on UX, send them to customers. Tell them they need to get educated. Make them read blogs from Jared Spool, Seth Godin etc.
Make them the face of your product for the next few months. Give them clear cut objectives. Tell them that:
1. You want to improve your product by 10x
2. You want to make a usable product that caters to a target market (and nothing else). [This can change depending on your needs]
3. They are responsible for amassing as much knowledge about other successful companies, individuals as possible. They will be the change agents within your organization.
4. They should hold weekly lunches with other team members sharing their experience.
5. They should spend daily time with product managers, graphic designers and other key stakeholders to communicate and collaborate on ways to improve the product.
6. You want to see weekly improvements and plans to further improve the product, even if the change is small.
7. Change should affect the customers in some way. It should improve the product in some way. If it doesn’t, it is not worth changing. For e.g. a lot of people get bogged down in the font-sizes or colors. How important is this change? Depends on the context we’re talk about. If it is a call-to-action element, colors and fonts do matter, but if it is a paragraph on a page, you do not want to spend hours fighting over this.
8. Tell them that customer service should become their number one priority and should be reflected in all aspects of your product. They should make it easy for a customer to do something, even if it means that the customer wants to do something that is detrimental to the business, for e.g.: closing an account.
Your only task from there on is to wait and watch and make adjustments as necessary. Office politics will come up, find a way to deal with it. Be honest and open. Tell people you are running an experiment and everyone is being watched, so co-operation is critical to your experiment.
There are cases when you can’t find a change agent in your organization. It happens all the time. This is when you look to either hire someone like that or even better, just bring in a specialist (who can start the process of change).
I hope you enjoyed reading this post. More to come…
SMS
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