ANALYST VIEW by Jason English

Jason English (@bluefug) is a Principal Analyst and CMO of Intellyx.

Analyst View

BY JASON ENGLISH Product-driven or design-led?

Most software developers work within project-oriented teams, since most companies are not startup vendors that can constantly reinvent themselves and deliver hot new products to market. Upgrades, integration and modernization projects carry forward a sizable estate of already coded software assets and third-party service dependencies.

I once pondered an alternative product-driven strategy for software organizations to behave more like high-growth software vendors, recasting their project managers as product managers. They would spend less time measuring time, and more time measuring the features they deliver.

Ostensibly, this product-oriented approach would cut down on endless initiatives and sprawling scope creep, by getting executives to reconsider the contributions of developers toward finite high-value products. But lately we are seeing a second shift — from product-led to design-led strategy. Some of the founders of today ’ s fastest growing unicorn vendors emerged from design schools and creative industry backgrounds.

Developersareaskedtoput lipstickonapig — without changingtheunderlying functionality.

Costume, or customer experience?

There ’ s a lot of technical and business acumen that a design-led team must develop beyond graphic design that goes into a successful customer experience.

Designers get asked to put ‘lipstick on a pig ’ — pushing pixels to dress up an application visually without changing the underlying functionality. The cosmetics of tweaking icons, fonts and colors can make the software look nicer, but it seldom improves user experience (or UX) by itself.

Users expect clear controls and instructions within an interface, and on their phones or devices, they also expect sensory data — using cameras, haptics and audio inputs and outputs to maximize productivity.

Performance is also a huge factor in customer experience — an identical competitor that displays results two seconds slower will experience high abandonment rates. Design engineering is about tradeoffs between display aesthetics and the concise representation of data returned rapidly from low-latency sources.

When it’s incomplete, it’s ready to show

Successful creative agencies never assume that a concept needs to be fully fleshed out before clients can accept it. They iterate rapidly on design and copy comps or sketches, in order to zero in on the client’ s preferences.

Revolutionary SaaS tools and smartphone apps accelerated design-first principles, as the current version of the application gets dynamically updated for the customer in near real-time. This continuous process merges redesigns into the CI/CD product lifecycle by introducing new user functionality and displays — even if they aren ’t fully baked yet.

Laziness is the mother of innovation

If great design takes 50% of the time required to perform a task away from the customer, that’ s a winning product.

The low-code space and RPA movements provided hundreds of ways to leapfrog between UI and process-driven design and drag-and-drop easy application development without the technical skill hurdles.

The COVID crisis showed off the robustness of low-code for design-driven responsiveness to crisis conditions — take for instance the few banks that could step up with PPP relief loan applications using low-code within 3 months.

I’ m constantly surprised by new vendors that enter seemingly matured spaces such as CI/CD tools, IT operations, security and software testing with better UX as the lead value proposition.

The Intellyx Take

Companies and industries that are internally project-focused rather than customer-focused are woefully unprepared for digital transformation.

Never settle for dogmatic standards when rapid innovation is called for.

Don ’t let anyone tell you there is one best way to build software when there are always multiple valid design-led approaches. Distinguishing between conceptual possibilities is the very stuff of design-led development. z