The Inmates are STILL Running the Asylum
For every project being considered for the roadmap, my company estimates level of effort (LOE) based on technical complexity alone. I fought and eventually won the addition of an LOE for Product and Design work as a separate line item. But my company still uses the Tech number to represent the overall LOE of the project.
We have a project on our roadmap which is going to take a significant amount of research, specification, and design in Product, but which will be very quick and easy to implement in Technology. It was assessed X-Large for Product and Small for Tech. Consequently, it was deemed “Small” for LOE, despite the fact that it will take the Product Design team months to complete its portion of the work.
This project is very exciting for the Technology team, as it provides an opportunity for them to experiment with new technologies. It has not be vetted for customer interest and there is no indication whatsoever that it offers any significant return on investment (ROI). It is being weighed against another project with a Large LOE on Tech but small LOE on Product. This project has a huge ROI potential and is something that customers have been requesting for years. Due to the Tech LOE being Large, the entire project is assessed as having a Large LOE overall.
“We develop our roadmap around what makes Tech happy, not what makes our customers happy.
When presenting these two projects to the executive team, they approved the one with the smaller development LOE and no proven customer need over the one with the higher potential ROI and clear customer interest. Why? Because the number one goal of the company is to keep the Tech team engaged, excited and happy. We develop our roadmap around what makes Tech happy, not what makes our customers happy.
In 1999, software designer and developer Alan Cooper published a book called “The Inmates are Running the Asylum.” His message was that tech-driven design is creating bad user experiences and frustrating products. He posited that execs in technical industries have given up the reins to developers on what gets built and how. Hence “the inmates have been allowed to run the asylum.”
“Product decisions should be based on customer needs and goals, not Developers’ latest technical interests.
Cooper developed a goal-directed customer-focused design and development approach that puts the power of deciding what to design and how to design it in the hands of the Customers, via Product and Design teams. In his world, decisions how to implement are on the Technologists, but what to implement and how it looks and functions from the customer perspective is dictated by specialized Designers and Product Managers. The design and specification of customer-facing technology products is a specialized skillset that should be maximized in order to provide products that serve customer goals and therefore lead to business success. In other words, Product decisions should be based on customer needs and goals, not Developers’ latest technical interests.
Cooper trained a lot of Interaction Designers over the years in his methods. And for a time, it almost appeared that the tide may turn among U.S. companies, such that they might allow product roadmap and design decisions to be made by those trained in actual user research and design. But as those Interaction Designers moved into Tech companies and attempted to serve customer needs and goals, they found themselves continuously treated as second class citizens to the self-proclaimed royalty of developers. And the momentary surge of interest in doing customer research and designing for the customer has died and given way to the resurgence of “tech-driven” decisions and companies.
“…being “tech-driven” is now the golden keyword in every company description.
Not all developers are guilty of undervaluing the contribution of a well-skilled customer-focused goal-directed Product and Design team, of course, but there is a systemic belief within most tech-driven businesses that the Tech folks are smarter than anyone else. Product and Design folks are often treated like the Technology team’s secretaries, meant to design products to keep the developers excited, interested, and happy, rather than as customer research dictates. And executives allow it because being “tech-driven” is now the golden keyword in every company description. They feel they have to pander to the wishes of developers in order to attract and retain the highest quality technical candidates.
The result is a plethora of companies unveiling “cutting edge” products that make a big splash for a minute due to their flash and “ingenuity,” but fail quickly due to inability to satisfy customer goals and resulting user frustration. This has become such a popular thing that companies are now even urging the rapid fire implementation of un-researched and unproven ideas with no expectation of success — the “fail fast and often” mentality.
Having a strong technically experimental edge in a company is not, in itself, a bad thing. But it should not be allowed to dictate the product roadmap of a customer-facing product line. When it does, it eventually ends in company failure. The technologists who led these innovations, generally offshore consultants, then move on to the next “tech-driven” gig until they manage to tank it too.
Risk taking in technical innovation should be encouraged, and it is absolutely true that successful products often develop after multiple failed attempts. But really, shouldn’t success be the goal?
