Want to deliver faster? Have a designer lead your project.

Using a Designer changes everything. The focus becomes the product, rather than the engineering and schedule – even when that product is highly technical. Taking a product view ensures that essential capabilities are done first and done right. We need good engineering but letting the engineers or market experts lead the effort results in products that are unusable and full of unnecessary features. The priority is building the right thing – that is the Designer’s domain.

Isn’t that the job of the product owner?

In a perfect world, yes. The problem is that most product owners are just systems engineers or project managers given a new role. Engineers, product, and project managers focus on market needs and tend to build “bag of feature” products with no coherent theme. Designers seek emergent products and behavior by considering the essence of the problem.

Product owners often revert to eclectic features, rather than Human Centered Design. Worse yet, some product owners are scrum masters that got a promotion. They manage a backlog, but do not have access to, or understanding of, the customer and other stakeholders. A designer has different training and skills. The designer is focused on understanding the customer (who pays for the system) AND the person that will use the system.

Doesn’t a designer just make things look good at the end?

Making a product beautiful is a small part of a designer’s role. The designer must understand the core mission of the system, the reason this system needs to, and deserves to exist, and must reveal that to both the customer and the operator / analyst.

How does that get things done faster?

Every feature, every capability, every line of code must earn its way into the system by proving to the designer that it supports the core mission (also called the Strong Center) of the product. Extraneous features that are favored by market specialists add time and complexity. The fastest and cheapest code is the code we never write. The most expensive code is that which is written and never used. Think of the time spent building, inspecting, hardening, testing, demonstrating, deploying, and maintaining unnecessary code.

Where do I find these designers?

Great question. Product owners are, almost literally, a dime a dozen. You can become a product owner for $29 in about an hour through online certification sites. Designers on the other hand either have formal training in industrial design, the arts, and engineering, or have evolved into the role through years of user experience (Ux) design and program management. The difference between a designer and a program manager is that, in addition to a resume with successful product launches, the designer will also have a portfolio of product designs for which they can explain the strong center.

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