5 things you need to know when starting a product or service

Over the past few years, I’ve worked on a variety of products and services, each bringing new challenges and learnings.

The following are things I observed during this time across different sectors, audiences, teams and client types — some successes, failures and everything in between.

Getting started, 5 things you need to know

1. New partnerships for new solutions

Exciting things happen when we work with people who think differently. When we set up new work we should encourage partnerships with people who have different skills and experience. We can think of it as a modern take on the ‘creative team’ familiar in advertising. In products and services, these pairings can reflect the diversity of how we make things, allowing ideation to feel less siloed and more open across disciplines to help us create even better ideas. This can be especially important when we are tackling new problems that require new experts to come together.

So get cracking and add some hybrid vigour to your team!

2. Strategic objectives need validating too

Every service or product journey can be changed, fail or succeed long before we start making any apps, interfaces or websites. The strategic objectives and briefs we set for our services, and how we choose to deliver them, can be just as faulty or badly designed as any form or button.

• Always remember that a vision is just that, and should find ways to learn and validate it at a strategic level sooner rather than later.

• Easier said than done right? I have worked on countless briefs and projects that despite best efforts kick off at breakneck speed. It’s only natural for people to jump ahead and start thinking of solutions before asking ‘why’  are we making them.

One thing I’ve definitely learnt is unresolved poor strategy results in a longer more complicated (and expensive) road to delivery. That often misses the simple solutions and reduces risks. So it’s worth taking the time to do it properly at the beginning no matter how pressing your deadline feels.

3. User experience is an outcome, not a job title

I’ve said this many times, it’s a biggie and something every team or product has to work hard on to make a reality. User experience is how our users understand and interact with the products and services we create.

• Every single aspect of what we make can affect how our users experience what we do and no single person is responsible for it. From the build stability and visual language to the marketing and tech support, every aspect affects the whole. To make an experience truly great we have to consider the ‘whole’ experience from our user’s point of view.

• Everyone in a team should be empowered to think about how they can deliver the best experience. Leaders should support the whole team to take on this mindset, helping them to understand their users better and think of why and how their expertise can make a difference.

This is truly one of the greatest unlocks - it spreads responsibility, expertise and ideas while making decisions to be more connected and considered. But the most rewarding thing from my experience is how it helps your team understand the implications of their role in a more tangible way — through the experience of real people.

4. The combined value of insight, real people and data

Today data is king in how we qualify for success it is our ‘premium’ tool to understand what is happening. We can build up behaviour patterns and track journeys to help us interpret what is going on, successes and failures alike.

However, we mustn’t forget the value of seeing real users. I’ve seen great success from the human aspect of qualitative research and as we become increasingly more engaged with what data tells us we must not forget the value seeing people delivers alongside this.

• The value of empathy, of seeing our products and services being used by real people can not be underestimated. It can help unite and motivate teams at all levels of an organisation and engage people in a way a numerical evidence in a graph never can.

• The value of ‘why’ people do things can often be seen in the behaviour patterns in data, but we can learn even more from it by understanding and engaging with the people who made it happen. For me this is where opportunities are unlocked, it’s how we adapt and find new paths we never even knew even existed!

Together the insight we glean can be rich and truly change making.

5. Design is good business

This last one comes from a recent discussion at home over my Christmas break. Sitting with my younger brother trying to describe what exactly I do these days to my 95 year old grandmother who actually got it straight away ‘What you do sounds like business?’

She is correct. Much of what we do these days is; uncovering new opportunities, fixing journey problems and defining them as features or services, is in fact transforming the way companies do business.

We should all remember that the value we deliver in design has moved up the business food chain. What design can do is no longer limited to making thing look good, moving pixels or printing, it’s a way of solving problems that can be applied to almost anything.

So when we talk about design and the opportunities it can offer we should think of it as a business value.