Better Product Managers, and Product Management

(Originally answered on Quora.)

Why do so many products have crummy design?

Many designers do not (fully) use the product they are designing. Sometimes this is due to laziness on the designer’s part; much more frequently company culture and the product management/engineering organizations are to blame. Why?

Many applications — especially B2B applications — are difficult, if not impossible, to use in an isolated manner.

A single designer who sets up a project in a project management application may be able to input tasks, but they are not truly “using” the product and experiencing the use cases they are designing for unless it has real projects and real team members interacting with it.

For any product that relies on customer data (and nowadays, that’s almost everything: personal financial applications, social, local, analytics, healthcare), you can’t really recognize what is difficult or unclear unless you are looking at your, relevant, personal data. Sample data is a poor substitute (though better than nothing!)

The other reason is that, in many organizations, designers are brought into the process too late.

Instead of being included in early discussions where business goals and constraints are identified, designers are often thrown a fully-written spec and told to “make this pretty”.

This is basically impossible: all the visual design in the world can’t save features and workflows that shouldn’t have been spec’d in the first place.

So how do we fix this?

Here are some of the things that are needed:

• Product management needs to involve design early in the process
• Product management needs to explicitly define problems, business goals, and constraints
• Design needs to also have access to other teams who are familiar with customer problems — customer support*, sales, engineering — and the company culture needs to support a “there are no stupid questions” mindset
• Executive management needs to buy-in to the idea that designers aren’t just there for ‘making it pretty’ (i.e. schedules need to support designers taking part in early meetings)
• Executive management needs to lead, top-down, a company cultural expectation that “everyone uses the product, no exceptions.”
• Design, product management, and engineering need to collaborate to provide internal tools that support use of the product (e.g. sample data, test accounts, training)

*Customer support, incidentally, is the overlooked knowledge gold mine in most companies.  They know why customers are unhappy, cancelling, or singing your praises, but they rarely get to share that info with other teams.

Those are the first 2 reasons – and, in my experience, the most pernicious. Next week I’ll cover the other 2 problems, and how your organization can improve upon them.

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