Presented at Prototypes, Process, & Play on August 7, 2015 in Chicago IL

1. Design Upstream
Advancing Strategic Design Without Going Against the Current
Chris Avore / @erova / August 7, 2015

2. Today’s Agenda
• The current state: design in the organization
• How to enable culture change
• What you can do tomorrow

3. 3 bullet bio
• Grown, lead a 25 person product design & research team at Nasdaq
• We design mobile & desktop products for corporate customers
• I’m primarily responsible for product strategy, new design opportunities
throughout the organization

4. people are
thinking
talking
writing
about culture

5. “Type a quote here.”
The Defining Elements of a Winning Culture
There’s No Such Thing as a Culture Turnaround
A Winning Culture Keeps Score
How to Engender a Performance Culture

7. why now?

8. Business needs to
• reduce costs
• improve quality of products & services
• identify new opportunities for growth
• increase productivity

9. meanwhile…

10. Businesses are suffering from:
• Incremental or little innovation
• losing market share to new ideas, competitors
• finding fundamental problems too late
• narrow job descriptions that confine talent
• cultures of hoarding vs sharing

11. It used to be that when we said we were
going to be design-driven, the
engineers said, “Well, here’s the
technology constraints.”
!
The product manager said, “Well, here’s
the thing we have to solve,” and then
gave it to the designers and said…
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-03-20/intuit-how-design-drove-its-turnaround
http://www.bloomberg.com/bw/articles/2014-03-20/intuit-how-design-drove-its-turnaround

12. Make it pretty before it ships
http://www.bloomberg.com/bw/articles/2014-03-20/intuit-how-design-drove-its-turnaround
Make the logo bigger!
Make it pop!
This doesn’t look like Apple
Less whitespace plz kthx
is this above the fold?

13. deliver the
planned thing
deliver the
right thing>

14. Design averse culture leads to…
• low morale
• distrust among departments, teams
• design team perceived as decorators, not deciders
• loss of credibility in good design
• high turnover

15. A respectful, multi-team collaborative
working environment where designers
are empowered to effectively solve
business problems via exploration,
iteration, and validation.

16. Solve better problems

17. Design better products

18. Right people

19. Right room

20. Right questions

21. If they want you to cook the dinner, at
least they ought to let you shop for
some of the groceries.
“

22. https://www.forrester.com/Modernizing+User+Experience+In+Your+Firm/-/E-WEB18803

23. “What barriers prevent UX from
having a greater impact?”
LACK OF
LEADERSHIP
11%
OVERALL FIRM CULTURE
9%
https://www.forrester.com/Modernizing+User+Experience+In+Your+Firm/-/E-WEB18803

24. • Overall firm culture
• Lack of leadership
• Partial implementation
• Lack of understanding
• Silos and politics
• Resource contraints
} Perception
problem

25. • Overall firm culture
• Lack of leadership
• Partial implementation
• Lack of understanding
• Silos and politics
• Resource contraints
} Influence
problem

26. • Overall firm culture
• Lack of leadership
• Partial implementation
• Lack of understanding
• Silos and politics
• Resource contraints
} Visibility
problem

27. Look in the mirror too
• Speaking different languages
• Different measures of success
• Not embracing wider goals
• Deliverable Dogma
• Assuming non-designers don’t get design

28. Change Management Problem

29. What are the attributes of an
organization that enables good
design process, strategy, and
delivery?

30. Limited to feature
implementation
Design informs product
strategy, opportunity, innovation
Strategy
PROGRESSING / TACTICAL MODERN / STRATEGIC
Build solutions based on
requirements, specs
• Address problems first
• Establishes standards,
patterns, priorities
Design
Tactical usability testing
validate features
• Beyond screens or dept
• Hypothesis-based
• Quant and Qual
Research

31. Mature Design Teams…
• explore unknown possibilities
• create elements of value/differentiation that don’t exist
• unlock new growth in unfamiliar contexts/markets
• investigate problems resistant to other methods

33. Find an Advocate

34. Selecting the right challenge is paying attention to
who else cares about it
“

35. Find that Advocate
• Revisit your team vision—who can help reify that vision?
• Expertise (may not be as important as others)
• Control over resources (time, budget, people, expense)
• Political support (access to influential colleagues, partners, network)
• Build a coalition of advocates—don’t stop at 1

36. Establish a Sense of Urgency

37. Traits of Complacent Orgs:Yes, we have our problems, but
they aren’t that terrible, and I’m
doing my job just fine
Kotter 5

38. Traits of Complacent Orgs:
• Too much past success
• Lack of visible crises
• Low performance standards
• Insufficient feedback from external, trusted sources

39. How to increase urgency
• External data refutes comfortable status quo
• Talk to unhappy or former customers
• Show how profitable future opportunities are unobtainable with current mindset

40. Craft a vision *and* a story

41. • Feasible, appealing picture of the
future
• Focused
• Flexible
• Easy to communicate to a variety of
audiences
• Tie back to vision
• Anyone could deliver the story
• Describe backgrounds, skills, techniques
• Reinforce credibility, including external success
• Describe reporting line, org hierarchy
• Share physical locations
Vision Story

43. Our product development process was too incremental and
focused on features and ease of task completion.
We needed an awakening and more of a grand vision.
We needed all our people to understand that designing
great products and user experiences is a team sport that
includes not just designers and product managers but
everybody else—even the CEO
“
https://hbr.org/2015/01/intuits-ceo-on-building-a-design-driven-company

44. Communicate the future state

45. How to communicate the vision
• Share the spirit of vision, if not vision itself
• Keep it simple, jargon-free
• Multiple channels, forums even if not 100% official
• Repetition
• Create a dialogue, not one-way communication

46. Celebrate short term wins

47. Short term wins…
• Visible to outsiders
• Unambiguous
• Tied directly to change effort, vision

48. Short term wins…
• Provide evidence you’re on the right track
• Help hone the vision and long-term strategies
• Build momentum
• Keep bosses/advocates on your side

49. Feature designers and products at
corporate-wide events

50. Raise your visibility
• Present at annual sales kick-offs
• Demonstrate work at townhalls/all-hands meetings
• Become part of the pitch of new hires or client visits
• Attend conferences/trade shows formerly only attended by sales/marketing/
account teams
• Use corporate communications as another channel

51. In my career at both
Thomson Reuters and
Nasdaq, I’ve never seen us
build a solution that looks as
clean and solid as this one

52. us
In my career at both Thomson Reuters and Nasdaq, I’ve never seen
build a solution that looks as clean and solid as this one

53. Deliver the goods

54. To become that trusted partner, there is no
substitute for demonstrated competence.
“http://boxesandarrows.com/recruiting-your-army-creating-the-in-house-design-agency/

55. How to show you’re good
• Share usability clips—audio or video is best, not just transcripts
• Perception of pace, even if you’re right on schedule
• Performance metrics
• Adhering to budget
• Additional stakeholder validation

56. More KPIs
• Revenue generated from new
products
• Projects in pipeline
• Stage-gate specific
• P&L impact
• Patent applications or patents
granted
• Internal rate of return
• Earned-Value Analysis
• Press/Social mentions

57. We are most optimistic on the Next Gen IR
platform…[Nasdaq] is in advanced beta
testing, set to be launched in Q4.
This software appears to be best in class…
Wall Street Research Report
“

59. Learn about the silos

60. On silos (or closed, tight networks)
• Nonaligned and unshared priorities
• Lack of information flow
• Lack of coordinated decision making across silos
• Groupthink / overconfidence of decisions / confirmation bias
• Few new ideas
• No incentive to share knowledge

63. Building those bridges
Collaborative workshops
• design studio
• gamestorming activities
• pre-mortem
• design-the-box
• magazine cover
Promote & Publish
• shared vision, north stars
• useful, reusable assets
• personas
• successes
• research findings

64. Managers enable good design
• Facilitate introductions & conversations
• Best evangelist may not be your best designer
• Provide a strong team
• Embrace the unknowns, let go from planning
• Don’t overspecialize—enable generalists, growth, exposure

65. Managers enable good design
Deploy design research beyond usability testing

66. Managers enable good design
Don’t pull the ladder up

67. Table Stakes for change
• Invite the weak ties—not weak links—to design events
• Share their participation with their leadership
• Publish & promote research and deliverables
• Skunkworks: align with your dept’s goals, then partner out
• Connect to the big picture.

68. Connect to the big picture
• Map your success to company goals
• Is customer service mentioned as a core value?
• Show how you reduced support calls by 20%
• Is increasing margin a business goal?
• Prove the new features command a higher price with less maintenance
investment than preceding release.

69. Help others help themselves

70. Resources
• Inventory of your work
• Design patterns lets designers focus on big problems
• Style guide, fonts, palettes (or point to Marketing)
• Personas & other research findings

71. Workshops
• How to conduct design studio
• How to discuss design via critique
• How to conduct a customer interview
• How to write a user story
• Rethink the kick off meeting
• Facilitate a retro

72. But it can’t stop there.

73. The real risk
• Other businesses or orgs will use their own budgets for hiring designers who
won’t report to you
• Those businesses may hire consultants or outside agencies to execute one
project, but no long term engagement for knowledge sharing later
• Design will be the scapegoat

74. Projects end
Allies move on
Market conditions change
Priorities shift
Competitors evolve
Teammates quit
Such Disruption

75. Building a Culture of Design

76. Building a Culture of Design

77. Experimentation

78. Innovation

79. Learning

80. Quality

81. A culture of quality requires
employees to apply skills and make
decisions in highly ambiguous but
critical areas while leading them
toward deeper reflection about the
risks and payoffs of their actions.
Creating a Culture of Quality
http://hbr.org/2014/04/creating-a-culture-of-quality/

82. A culture of quality requires
employees to apply skills and make
decisions in highly ambiguous but
critical areas while leading them
toward deeper reflection about the
risks and payoffs of their actions.
Creating a Culture of Quality
http://hbr.org/2014/04/creating-a-culture-of-quality/

83. Don’t atrophy

84. Persuasion is a process
not an event

85. Delivery is your currency

86. Credibility is your social capital

87. Your vision is your access

88. THANK YOU
Chris Avore / avore@erova.com / @erova

89. Further Reading
• Leading Change
by John Kotter
• Communicating the UX Vision: 13 Anti-Patterns That Block Good Ideas
by Martina Schell and James O’Brien
• Designing for Growth: A Design Thinking Tool Kit for Managers
by Jeanne Liedtka