There’s a trend in the UX and design community in the industry right now of bringing design in house. No longer going to be outsourcing design, but design becomes key to a company strategy. It’s the we want to be the Apple of X company or X industry. In order to do this, you start building your internal design team and you make design a business driver. That is the trend.

There’s big salaries being paid out for chief design officers. They’re building internal design teams. Not all companies maybe should be driven by design or really want to be. There’s a certain level of a commitment that you need to have in order to make this successful as we well know.

One of the things I thought we would discuss is that many companies are constructed to do one or just a few things very well, which is produce that product or service that they’re doing currently. How when we go into a company can we overcome this sometimes overwhelming inertia against change and innovation and design? How do you reorient a company, whether it’s a startup or a mid-sized company to become more design driven?

The other thing that I would say is that’s probably one of the biggest reasons why design is still in its infancy, I would say, at least as far as being widely adopted is that design can be and most often is a very expensive function to have in your company. Unless you have had sort of the ability to start your company with a design mindset and have a designer as one of the founder, it’s extremely hard to bolt design right into an existing rocket ship or something that is going its own trajectory.

To do that is actually an imperative, because if you want to be successful, you need to do that for most companies. I would say it’s a challenge actually to consider which company doesn’t need it, because design’s not just like drawing lines or putting pixels on the screen. It’s a lot more. It’s being considerate and thoughtful about what is it that you’re doing and then taking … It’s like in an oversimplified way, it’s probably the exercise of taking the problems and the mistakes out of the shipped product and keeping this mistakes while you are building the product, before you actually release it.

That requires a cultural shift on numerous levels. Again, very few people are probably equipped with even understanding that kind of challenge. It’s not just a matter of hiring one chief designer, officer, then hope for the best.

I find that one of the key things that is missed when incorporating design into an organization is really getting buy-in at all the different levels. You know when it’s the executive team has some vision of where the product needs to go, the managers value design as part of the process and it’s not as seen as a waste of time or talking to customers and incorporating user centric feedback is seen as valuable at the management level. Finally, that the makers and doers, the engineers and sort of the boots on the ground people who are building the product, also have an understanding of appreciation of and can see the value in design across the product. All of those levels need to be working together.

What I’ve seen a lot of is there’s some attention paid at the senior level, but only to the point where you want to become known in your industry for design, and that’s it. That’s the total vision of the product. That small sort of phrase is just repeated over and over again. When design deliverables do show up, the implementation falls apart, right? Because you don’t really have executive buy-in and it’s more about sort of making sure this thing gets released quickly and not correctly. Have you, in the many times that you’ve been a chief product officer, what are some of the things that you’ve seen that have been successful for achieving buy-in at sort of that executive level for a design?

That is never like a really effective function. It’s not a thing that can be really easily bolted, especially on a product that’s complex. You may be doing some kind of sub-portions of the product, perhaps, but unless you embark on some kind of real at least redesign of an existing product and then you really get into something that is now going to make anybody really happy, especially the user. You’re going to go into like a very longer shipping times.

The engineers will be frustrated, because engineers are happy when you give them something that doesn’t change, because to make that something already will take a lot of their creativity and hard work. If you go there in the middle and you change something, then all sort of hell breaks loose. For all the day, they are unhappy. When you have unhappy engineers, you try to shoot something.

That’s to say that I’ve seen design working great for new products, possibly in the new markets, something completely blank slate, where you get the design from the very beginning and it stays and it continues to drive that. To make that work, there has to be leadership who deeply understands that. That has done its own process and like come into that realization, otherwise they finish an item or Excel spreadsheet, this much for design consultant, and it stays like that, then it’s just going to be not nearly as effective as it should be, right?

I must say that it’s very easy to talk about convincing people to be patient or in the initial stages of engagement, everybody getting that buy-in, and saying, “Yes, we’re going to have a design vision and follow it.” I find that it gets a lot more difficult when you encounter friction, right?

When the rubber hits the road and all of a sudden the software just has to shift, you know, because of reasons from investors, of pressure from competitors, of just the realities of you’ve got this payroll of developers going and you need to show some results. When there’s friction and tension then the natural human tendency, or what I’ve seen, is just to go on this march and go with what you’re familiar with, right? If company structure is not familiar with design but is familiar with shipping product on a certain rhythm, it’s easy to fall back into that rhythm under pressure. How do we mitigate that under even the best of our intentions to introduce product design and product management in a scenario where you start to get pushed? How do your resist that and pull back a little bit?

That it’s a foundation of good design, because if you don’t have a sense of what people … What kind of pain points are they experiencing. Maybe they’re happy with your software, but they wish … They have other problems to solve and maybe an opportunity for your new future, new module, to start being developed with that kind of mindset. That might as well be one of these design gardens.

If you want to be more aggressive, if you want a little bit more confidence, if you find that you want to … You can take more calculated risks and for sure, starting by providing something like a forum or an advisory board, or a customer satisfaction, something like that for getting consistent feedback from users. That is great.

Then tracking that and see how much are we … In a month or two or three are users saying that they have the same problems or the same complaints, then we haven’t moved much in the right direction. Are we addressing something? Oh well I guess we’re doing something right. How can we do more of that faster, better?

I think it’s a good sign of maturity as an industry that digital design and design strategy are being seen as business drivers and as more important, but I know that it’s very difficult to understand all of the sort of business, technical, and aesthetic constraints and keep all of those in mind while having the confidence to say, “Yes, we are going to go down this path and we will get there. It’s just not going to be in the same way that you’ve done it before.”

To have that confidence as a designer just takes time, takes experience, and is not easily gained. Not an easy thing to do. Ultimately, some companies will be able to do that and other will have to kind of try a couple of times before they get there.