For me the centerpiece of a design exercise is seeking knowledge and adapting your design ideas to that knowledge. You create and adapt and discard ideas readily and easily if they don't fit the emerging situation. So it is essential to ask questions during the exercise to understand as much as you possibly can about the people, environment, stakeholders, goals, and constraints so that you can demonstrate this process.

You don't want the entire exercise to be taken up with this "research" activity – you do need to design something. So consider offering a very rough concept and then asking questions that will lead you either deeper into or away from that concept.

Example – imagine Home Depot had a magical way of printing and delivering orange aprons to new employees, and employee apron customization/self-expression is culturally important. What ideas does this spark? What do you want to know to confirm or discard some of these ideas?

My thoughts immediately go to a part of the new employee offer process that leads people to a website where they can customize an apron at their leisure. But these are hourly employees – the store manager is not going to want ANY work activity to be done outside of the store or in off hours. So the kernel of that idea needs to come in-store. Come to find out that they'd also like to offer this capability to existing employees. What is the technical environment in-store? How much time is the store manager willing to have an employee spend on this while on the clock? What are the required elements of apron customization and what are the optional ones? Etc. Understanding these you can sketch out a process that quickly gets the basics taken care of (perhaps in ONE or ZERO steps) and offers any options easily and quickly.

In a design exercise you'd do this all narratively – talk about the core idea, check it against their answers to your questions, change the core idea, sketch a little, ask more questions, adapt to the answers, etc.

My current employer is much like others in that it has a product management process, an engineering process, a design process, a customer onboarding process, a customer support process, etc.

What do you notice? That's right – each discipline group has a separate process. But what is it we are trying to ship?

If you turn on a machine, and hammers come out, it's a machine designed to make hammers.

Geoffrey Canada, Harlem Children's Zone (paraphrased from memory)

We're trying to ship a problem-solving, efficient, coherent, usable, pleasant, and effective piece of software. So our process, the design of our organization, needs to be arranged such that this is what the machine produces. We're not trying to ship a little bit of engineering, a little bit of design, a little bit of support, and a little bit of product management all shaken up in a bag.

So I don't offer a UX process. I talk about what the product development team needs to do informationally to get from the customer need to the satisfaction of that need. You've heard this before from me:

• Benefit: What benefit do our customers need? What problem are we solving?
• Concept: What concepts can we come up with to deliver that benefit? Which concept should we deliver? How should it work?
• Detail: How should it work specifically? As we work on this are we maintaining or improving usability, intelligibility, functionality, appeal?
• In Use: Are users successful in using it? How might we help them be more successful?

You'll note that "In Use" folds right back into "Benefit" and the cycle continues.

The specifics of each informational phase might be organization-specific, but you'll need to harness all of the faculties of the product development organization, including (but not limited to) product management, design, engineering, customers, and users to do a good job in each phase. So this should be a single, integrated process.

In his LinkedIn post on November 29, Thomas W. laid out a handful of arguments a designer or research could use to object to demands that UX "prove its value." It feels good to read the list, but I don't recommend following his advice. I've used arguments like this before and heard the objections. In most cases the arguments are too high-level to meet the business where it is trying to operate, i.e. the points are a bit askew for a company hoping to change its business results in the near-term.

He lists these points. For each I mention the typical objection:

• "72% of businesses claim that improving customer experience (CX) is their #1 priority today." – irrelevant
• "80% of CEOs claim their customers’ experiences are superior, while only 8% of their customers think so." – reflects the Dunning-Kreuger effect among those other dunces
• "64% of people think that customer experience is more important than price in their choice of brand. (Gartner)" – we've been successful competing on price, too high-level to be actionable, is this for consumer, is it true in our industry
• "Companies that excel at their customer experience grow revenues 4-8% above their market (Bain)" – too high-level to be actionable, is this for consumer, is it true in our industry, which improvements matter
• "$370 MM is the average amount of revenue generated by a modest improvement in Customer Experience over 3 years for a $1Billion company. (TemkinGroup)" – how much is modest, which improvements mattered, we are not in this cohort of companies
• "Superior CX creates stronger loyalty turning customer into promoters with a LTV of 6-14X that of detractors (Bain)" – we spend a lot on CSMs as it is, are we already reaping this benefit, if so it's not enough
• "89% of consumers cite customer experience as a critical loyalty Builder. (eConsultancy)" – correlative, sure but what's the effect on revenue
• "92% of customers who rates their experience as Good were likely to repurchase from that company compared to 9% of customers who rated their experience as very poor. (TempkinGroup)" – we're already in the good category, is this true for our inductry, is this true for businesses like ours, and we're B2C so it's not relevant anhyow
• "Experience Led business have 1.7 higher customer retention, 1.9x return on spend and 1.6x higher customer satisfaction. (Forrester)" – than what, is this for consumer, is this true in our industry, what does it mean to be "experience-led" and is that even a sensible thing for us to consider given where we are and how we work
• "Brands with strong omni-channel engagement strategies retain an average of 89% of their customers (Aberdeen Group)" – we have good retention without "strong omni-channel engagement strategies" whatever that means
• "Consumers with an emotional connection to a brand have 306% higher lifetime value and stay with a brand for an average of 5.1 years. (Motista)" – consumer, not for our industry, we're not in the emotion business, how does this apply to us specifically
• "Organizations classifying themselves as advanced at CX are 3x more likely to have exceeded their goals (Adobe Analytics)" – self-reported, correlative, and indirect
• "86% of customers have stopped doing business with a company after a single negative customer experience. (Harris Interactive)" – this is for consumer, we don't have a lot of direct customer interaction, we have projects to reduce the need for costly call center interactions, etc.

The common thread among these objections is, in essence "how does this high-level correlation apply to us, in our industry and situation, and guide our thinking now, in the near-term?" And that's sensible. A company dissatisfied with its results wants to change something pronto and wants to choose that thing with some assurance that it will work.

The worst part, though is the last part, the part that will have a lot of UX and CX people cheering, the part that feels the best:

• "Now go ask your CTO or PM to show you metrics on the value of their code stack. Or their shitty MVP. Or their roadmap of fake metrics, costs and delivery dates. Ask to see where the actual value in ceremonies and sprints is. Ask them to show you how failing at 95% of the time is profitable to the business. Ask them to show you the value in terrible useless apps like Jira, Confluence and GitHub. Ask them to show you how democratized research and crowd sourced discovery and Qualitative is profitable."

If I were to uncork this in a leadership meeting it would (rightly) be dismissed as snarky and combative. "Ha ha, you suck too" is not going to win anyone over.

Instead, how do we express our success in terms of user and customer behavior? How do we choose to learn about those behaviors? How do we choose to run experiments and make interventions that change those behaviors in measurable ways? That is where attention to experience should come from. it's common for organizations to be immature in this area, and we can lead them in the right direction.

• A short work week is a beautiful thing. Having your entire department out for a day so you can catch up on administrative tasks is also nice, if a tad lonely.
• The dreaded "calibration meeting" where you explain your people's reviews to your peer managers (our first at this company, so likely to be a bit fraught) went just fine. No drama.
• Although my three vaccines set my night (and the following day) on fire, folks were understanding and I recovered quickly.

In spite of the organization's urges to snap back to old ways (ways that got us to where we are, so are not sufficient on their own to change our results):

• My people are not overreacting to the politics…
• …assisted by their work in making us more customer-centric being shouted-out in public forums by the CEO…
• …who is also publicly mentioning themes that have been part of my mission at the company since I was hired.

This all is setting me up perfectly to talk about quality and how the product needs to change (i.e. what we need to organize ourselves to produce) at the offsite after Thanksgiving.

Also,

• I'm in the interview panel for the new product leader for a key product.

Interesting times!