In reading Lean UX, you’re about to

In reading Lean UX, you’re about to embark on a tour of a new way of
working. For those of us steeped in traditional management techniques, it
may seem a little disorienting. I sometimes like to imagine what it would be
like to have a birds-eye view of the typical modern corporation. From on
high, you could examine each silo of functional excellence one at a time.
See them in your mind’s eye: Marketing, Operations, Manufacturing, IT,
Engineering, Design, and on and on in a tidy row of crisp, well-run silos.
Let’s imagine you reached down to grab one of these silos and popped its top
off to see inside. What would you see? This being a modern company, you’d
see each silo designed for maximum effciency. To achieve this effciency,
you’d likely fnd a highly iterative, customer-centric approach to problem
solving. In Manufacturing, you’d encounter traditional lean thinking.
In Engineering or IT, perhaps some variation on agile development. In
Marketing, customer development. In Operations, DevOps. And of course
in Design, the latest in design thinking, interaction design, and user research
techniques.
Zooming back out to our high perch, we might be forgiven for thinking
“This company uses a variety of rigorous, hypothesis-driven, customercentric, and iterative methodologies. Surely, it must be an extremely agile
company, capable of reacting quickly to changes in market conditions and
continuously innovating!” But those of us who work in modern companies
know how far this is from the truth.X ForEword
How is it possible that our departmental silos are operating with agility,
but our companies are hopelessly rigid and slow? From our far-off vantage
point, we have missed something essential. Although our departments
may value agility, the interconnections between them are still mired in an
antiquated industrial past.
Consider just one example, which I hope will sound familiar. A company
decides it must innovate to survive. It commissions a design team (either inhouse or external) to investigate the future of its industry and recommend
innovative new products that could secure its future. A period of great
excitement commences. Customers are interviewed, observed, analyzed.
Experiments, surveys, focus groups, prototypes and smoke tests follow
one after the other. Concepts are rapidly conceived, tested, rejected, and
refned.
And what happens at the end of this process? The designers proudly
present—and the businesses enthusiastically celebrates—a massive
specifcation document with their fndings and recommendations. The
iteration, experimentation, and discovery ceases. Now engineering is
called upon to execute this plan. And although the engineering process
may be agile, the specifcation document is rigidly fxed. What happens
if the engineers discover that the specifcation was unworkable or even
slightly flawed? What if the concepts worked great in the lab but have no
commercial appeal? What if market conditions have changed since the
original “learning” took place?
I once spoke to a company who had commissioned—at terrible expense—a
multi-year study of their industry. The result was an impressive “view of
the future” display custom-built into their corporate headquarters. Inside
this room, you could see an extrapolation of what the next 10 years would
look like in their industry, complete with working demos of futuristic
product concepts. You can guess what happened over the succeeding 10
years: absolutely nothing. The company rotated hundreds or thousands of
executives, managers, and workers through this glimpse of the future. And
in fact, 10 years later, the room no longer looks futuristic. Against all odds,
its forecasts turned out to be largely accurate. And yet, the company had
failed to commercialize even one of the recommendations in the attendant
specifcation document. So I asked the company what they planned to do
next; they told me they were going back to the original designers and asking
them to forecast the next 10 years! The company blamed their engineers
and managers for their failure to commercialize, not the designers.
When I tell this story to nondesigners, they are horrifed and want to
convince me that it is the fancy design frm who is to blame. When I tell
it to senior executives—in both large companies and startups alike—theyForEword XI
cringe. They are constantly deluged with complaints from every single
function that they are fast and cutting edge but it is the other departments
that slow the company down. When the whole company fails to fnd new
sources of growth, there is plenty of blame to go around.
But the fault is not with the designers, or the engineers, or even the
executives. The problem is the systems we use to build companies. We are
still building linear organizations in a world that demands constant change.
We are still building silos in a world that demands thorough collaboration.
And we are still investing in analysi