I really like Mike Monteiro’s “Dear Design Student” series on the Mule Design blog. The latest entry gives advice on how to deal with clients who say things like “I hate green!”:

When a client says, “I don’t like green”, most designers translate the sentence into “You must change the green.” But no one asked you to, did they? They merely made a statement about their subjective dislike of a particular color. Your job, as a designer, is first and foremost to listen. And then to gather data. Don’t jump the gun. How, if at all, does the client’s subjective taste enter into the success of the project?

He proceeds to give some good advice about how to figure out what the real problem is that the client is commenting on (if there is one).

(My other favorite post in the series is I want to start a company right out of school!)

Thomas Kempis in The Inner Life:

A true understanding and humble estimate of oneself is the highest and most valuable of all lessons. Should you see another person openly doing evil, or carrying out a wicked purpose, [or launch a really bad website/app], do not on that account consider yourself better than him, for you cannot tell how long you will remain in a state of grace. We are all frail; consider none more frail than yourself.

If you’re at a company where the next step up the ladder means managing people more than managing the quality of the design the company is producing, get the hell out of there. There’s way too much design to be done to be losing good people to idiotic corporate structures that take our best designers out of commission.

– Mike Monteiro, Design Is a Job

Those are some harsh words from Mike. But it’s a topic I’ve been thinking about quite a bit. I’ve now spent about an equal number of years at small companies as I have at big companies. And I’ve come up with a theory that I probably shouldn’t even write about yet, because I might be wrong. But in the spirit of thinking out loud, here goes — as long as you know I’m open to being convinced otherwise.

My theory is that as soon as a company grows to a size where the people who make the strategic decisions aren’t the same people who actively work on making the product, it becomes very hard for that company to continue to serve the needs of its customers. Not impossible, just much harder. We recently did some work with a startup where the founders are also the people who write all the code for their product. They were passionate, engaged, ego-less, and interested in only one thing: how to make their product better for customers.

But in bigger companies, what often happens is that once you enter the management career path, priorities start to change. You need to learn how to play the game so that you don’t become irrelevant. You need to watch your back. You need to figure out how HR works so that you can get to the next step on the ladder. Directors need to know how to become VPs. VPs need to know how to becomes Senior VPs. Senior VPs need to know if there is any growth left for them. And sooner or later, you spend so much time caught up in the politics of the organization that there is simply no room left to worry about customers.

I am not saying that all managers are like this — I have been in these situations myself, and I know how difficult it can be to stay sane, and I know many people who are managing the pressures extremely well. But it doesn’t help that we tend to measure business success by the size of a company, and personal success by the seniority of people’s roles within that company. In his much-praised post Startup = Growth, Paul Graham said the following:

Eventually a successful startup will grow into a big company.

Mark Suster responds to this particular idea in a very interesting post called Is Going for Rapid Growth Always Good? Aren’t Startups So Much More?:

Some entrepreneurs can make a dent in a smaller world. […] It’s ok to build a company that stays small, has a few million dollars in revenue and builds careers, bank accounts and enriches client experiences.

A poster child for this kind of startup is 37signals, whose CEO Jason Fried has repeatedly stated that they deliberately stay small. From an interview with Fast Company:

I’m a fan of growing slowly, carefully, methodically, of not getting big just for the sake of getting big. […] There’s a great quote by a guy named Ricardo Semler, author of the book Maverick. He said that only two things grow for the sake of growth: businesses and tumors. We have 35 employees at 37signals. We could have hundreds of employees if we wanted to — our revenues and profits support that — but I think we’d be worse off.

My point is that each of us needs to think carefully about the kind of career we want to have. If the title at a big company is what you’re after, that’s great, but make sure it’s because that’s what you want, not what the system makes you think you want.

But if you find that a company focus on growth is making it harder to make customers happy, or that you’re no longer able to do the things that you love so much that you decided to make a career out of it, it might be time to consider working at a company where the decision-makers and the doers are the same people. You might make less money, but you’ll also be happier.

Cliff Kuang has a great article in Fast Company called Why Good Design Is Finally A Bottom Line Investment. He tells a bunch of stories about companies who realized that good design is good for business, and he also covers some of the organizational challenges:

When designers lack influence, superb products become almost impossible. Good designs seldom stay good for very long if they must navigate a gauntlet of corporate approval. That’s because the design process is as much reductive as anything else — figuring out what can be simplified and taken out. Corporate approvals are usually about adding things on to appease internal overseers. When something has been approved by everyone, it may be loved by none.

That last sentence reminds me of the old Seth Godin quote: “Nothing is what happens when everyone has to agree.”

Jonathan Jones argues that Science is more beautiful than art:

In the 21st century, art rarely rivals the capacity for wonder that modern science displays in such dazzling abundance.

It’s an interesting viewpoint, but I enjoyed Callum J Hackett’s rebuttal, Science the Usurper, even more:

Art is not just for expanding minds and revealing beauty – that is a demeaning reduction that people too often indulge in, thinking that art is a delivery service for the picturesque and delectable. But art is so much more than that: it is an unbridled form of self-reflection. Art digs deep into every facet of our being – physical, psychological, social – and offers a view of ourselves untainted by comforting romance. Where is the horror in science? Where is the loneliness, the desolation, the unwilling acceptance of mortality? Science is almost too relentlessly beautiful to replace art – it slowly reveals everything we could ever want to know about ourselves, but it tells us nothing about how to interpret and deal with that information. It is all ablaze with the most amazing facts, but void of intimacy, personality and ethics.

Marcelo Somers wrote a good article arguing that to compete with the likes of Amazon, e-commerce companies need to focus on telling stories through the products they sell. From Disrupting Amazon: Rethinking eCommerce:

An eCommerce site should be about more than just selling stuff. It should embody a set of values that are distilled in how the product looks, how it feels, and what it contains. It should have an opinion – the story is how we go about telling it through our interface, how we merchandise, the photography, and the products on the site.

He also provides some examples of companies that do this well.

Related post from the Elezea archive: The welcome shift to context-based e-commerce.

Make It So is a new book by Chris Noessel and Nathan Shedroff that tries to draw some design lessons from science fiction interfaces. It looks really interesting. From Nathan Hurst’s review in Wired:

Science fiction is the province of imagination, which, says Shedroff, is just like design.

“Everything that happens in the design process is fiction until it gets on the market,” he says. “We create prototypes; nobody ever sees them. They’re inspirational, we learn from them, but they don’t exist.”

“It doesn’t mean that everything you see in science fiction is right,” says Shedroff. “That’s why it’s a prototype, and it may or may not survive, like any other prototype in the real world.”

Last week I used a product development theory called the Kano Model to explain why it’s wrong to be disappointed with the iPhone 5. I wrote the article just before the launch event, and lo and behold, it didn’t take long for the Internet to start yawning:

Um, it’s a little bit longer. Really Apple? You spent months in court fighting Samsung and portraying yourself as the world’s only truly innovative company and this is the best you can do? A phone that looks like what would happen if phones were capable of inbreeding?

Today I’d like to explore the fallacy of this kind of disappointment further using a mathematical theory I alluded to in my previous article, Maxima and Minima:

In mathematics, the maximum and minimum of a function are the largest and smallest value that the function takes at a point either within a given neighborhood (local or relative extremum) or on the function domain in its entirety (global or absolute extremum)

More specifically, I want to discuss the idea of the local maximum within the context of product development, and how that relates to innovation. For the purposes of product development, I liken the mathematical concept of neighborhood to product. For example, the iPhone (as a product) will hit a local maximum when the current design cannot be improved any more. This isn’t necessarily the best product you can make in the entire industry, but it is the best iteration of the current product¹.

(Image source: 52weeksofux)

To explore this further, we also have to differentiate between the concepts of iteration and variation. In product development, variation is a way to explore a bunch of alternative product solutions. In contrast, iteration solidifies the product idea that gets chosen. To quote Jon Kolko: “Where an iteration moves an idea forward (or backwards), a variation moves an idea left or right.” Or, to put it into the language of maxima and minima, variation surveys the landscape to help companies choose the right neighborhood (product) to move into. Iteration then helps them to find the local maximum in their chosen neighborhood.

Now, let’s look at the iPhone. Because of the Samsung trial we know that Apple did a great deal of variation work before they chose their neighborhood. See, for example, this sketch of different possible designs from a slide show on AllThingsD:

(Image source: AllThingsD)

If you dig deeper into the slide show you’ll see many variations they considered before settling on the basic design for the original iPhone.

It’s not just the hardware though, of course. There’s also iOS. As far as I’m aware there aren’t any early sketches for iOS publicly available, but I’m willing to bet a lot of money that they didn’t just sketch one thing and then designed it that way. It’s pretty safe to assume that the variation process on iOS was every bit as rigorous as for the iPhone hardware.

Once they’ve done a bunch of variation work on the hardware and software for the iPhone, Apple chose their neighborhood and started iterating. There were some major improvement jumps along the way (like iOS2, and iPhone 4), but it’s all still in the same neighborhood.

So let’s get to the crux of the matter. From an engineering perspective, variation is expensive, iteration is cheap. Especially if a product is already out there. Apple is able to give away the iPhone 4 for free because they have been iterating on the hardware for so long that they can manufacture the phones very cheaply. If the iPhone 5 was a drastically different phone (I’m talking about a completely different neighborhood), everything would have started from zero.

From a business perspective, why would Apple choose to make a very expensive move to a different neighborhood, when they know that they haven’t hit the local maximum on the current phone yet? Apple is iterating because they understand this concept, and because they know that the only thing that matters is if customers like it. As John Gruber said:

The collective yawn from the tech press was louder this year; the enthusiasm from consumers is stronger.

What does it mean for startups?

There are some important lessons for startups in the story of the iPhone evolution.

First, spend as much time and money as you can afford on variation upfront, because if you move into the wrong neighborhood, it’s really hard to change that later on. Some companies have done it successfully, like when Path completely redesigned their product from the ground up. Other companies are finding it really hard to move, as evidenced by the almost universal disdain for the new Twitter app for iPad². And the jury is still out on whether Microsoft’s very expensive foray into the tablet OS world will be a success or not.

Second, don’t move to a new neighborhood until you’re absolutely sure that you’ve hit the local maximum right where you live. I’ll say it again – iteration is cheaper than variation. Instead of trying to rethink your product every few months/years, rather spend time to understand how you can make the current variation better. Apple is proof that this strategy pays off.

I have a feeling that Apple isn’t going to move out of their phone neighborhood any time soon. They might send some family members to buy a new house in the TV neighborhood. But when it comes to phones, they’re still on to a good thing, and they’re smart enough not to be tempted by the fake grass on the other side of the “change everything!” fence.