Adaptive Path Blog

Adam Richardson, frog design

Ways of dealing with projects where you have to think really far out in the future (3-5 years), but you also have to be designing in the near-term. You have to be in two mindsets simultaneously.

Evolve: incremental innovation (~1 year of competitive advantage)
Expand: 2-5 years of competitive advantage. Growth innovation (into new markets)
Envision: Breakthrough innovations (5+ years)

Usually loads and loads of stuff in the evolving area, very little in envisioning. Most companies want pay-off from innovations within three years.

Four Easy Steps to Manage Schizophrenic Projects
1) Manage the dimensions. Dimensions (”constraints”) are enablers, not hindrances. Avoid designer’s block. Some dimensions are load-bearing (can’t change them), some are more decorative. Hard to tell which is which.

2) Manage the communications. In particular, communication around dimensions. Can’t manage long-term projects with the same metrics as the short-term. Have to manage up and down the chains of command. No surprises. Executives hate surprises. “One last thing…” is for the audience, not key stakeholders. Know what kind of organization you are in: Where does innovation come from: bottom-up or top-down? and How do they make decisions: faith-based or proof-based?

3) Manage the design factory. (read the book by Donald Reinertsen of the same name) Pay attention to the interfaces. Not the UI, but more about if you can break the experience you are designing into chunks, then figure out how information is passed between chunks. Do this early. Manage the queues. Large batch activities (can hold up everything else) vs. small-batch activities. Split up things and make them happen in parallel so that the big-batch stuff doesn’t hold everything up.

4) Deploy the scouts. There is a spectrum of scouts: illustration, prototype, partial market test, full market entry, fast follower. Try out different pieces of the system. Start with the simple, then move to the hard(er). All have different pros and cons. The product itself can be a scout.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 12th, 2007 at 12:58 pm and is filed under Conference commentary, Design leaders, Experience strategy, Product Management. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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