Chapter Seven. The Political Dynamics of Product Development
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While the stereotypical project manager is consumed by problems of feature creep and budget allocation, the engineer speaks softly but carries a much bigger stick: The engineer is the individual responsible for actually implementing things and it is frequently the engineer who gets final say over the completeness of a product. This is particularly common in companies run and owned by other engineers, which is quite normal in the tech sector. A not very funny joke in the world of engineering regards issues of quality, cost, and completion. The engineer says to the project manager, “You can have the product working, under budget, or completed on time—pick only two.” The various flavors of this platitude imply a particularly large gap in understanding between cultures of management and cultures of development. The engineer realizes the realities of development include unforeseen circumstances and problems to be solved along the way. A mediocre manager learns to ignore all problems found outside the realm of the specifications document. The spec dictates function, cost, and time—just follow the spec, and all will emerge in one piece.
There is also another member of the development team vying for leadership in the development of a product: the marketer. The marketer has traditionally been thought of as a form of salesman. Marketing was used to create advertising campaigns to move products externally. Many companies have seen a shift away from traditional advertising, in an effort to capitalize on new technologies, and there has increasingly been an introduction of words like “rogue” or “guerilla” associated with marketing techniques. Perhaps this shift is due to the realization that marketing as a brute force “campaign” to encourage and promote sales might not work. Commercials are frequently ignored, and the consumer has learned to block out the constant barrage of product placement in popular films and television shows. Marketers understand that technology provides new opportunities to move product, but technological advances in marketing usually mean more intrusive and obnoxious ways to advertise. In response, a new breed of marketers has emerged. Educated in the early 1990s, this group is frequently referred to as the “creative” department and include those with MBA degrees. Commonly, these MBAs find their way into positions of marketing management. Recently, and particularly in high-tech companies, this marketing management position translates into a strange combination of the external salesmanship described above and a form of internal governance and ownership. These marketers are trained in formal business practices and gravitate towards the creation of a spec with a fancier name (the PRD, or Product Requirement Document) and fancier graphics. The “creative group” is usually considered both client presentable and user presentable. These marketers have probably discussed the development initiative with various stakeholders (either internally or externally), and they may have even conducted some focus groups with users to determine what they think they want out of a new product.
Unfortunately, this bizarre combination of roles (marketer as external publicity engine and internal project leader) doesn't adequately address many of the new and complicated challenges modern businesses face with regard to technology, shrinking price points and offshore product development. Specifically, thoughts of “campaign-style” marketing leave little room for the necessary duality of convergent and divergent strategy. A business problem is no longer a linear path from invention to production to distribution. Instead, the development of a product requires the strategic analysis of conceptual and historical frameworks of ideas, the mapping of complicated data, and a highly emotionally-charged understanding of humanity and human needs.
Interaction Design at the center of the world
Thus, there end up a diverse assortment of players vying for internal ownership, rather than a collaborative team participating in a cohesive strategy for success. Strategy implies an elaborate plan for accomplishing something, and business relies on strategic imperatives to drive a company in a certain direction. Strategy is usually considered long term and broad. A strategic approach is usually complicated, multi-tiered, and process centered. These are all qualities of an Interaction Design process, too. Bernie Marcus and Arthur Blank, founders of The Home Depot, reflect on the importance of strategic relationships that value people: “We had customers coming into our stores who were consumers of many of these [manufacturer's] products. When they couldn't buy these products in our stores, they bought something else. So we had to convince the manufacturers that they had to be in our stores because that's where their customers were. That was our selling point… Every business is there to please the customer.”86 Again, the general trend of strategic business success is customer focused. While a primary tenet of any business is to make a profit, a more fundamental goal should be to “understand humanity.”
86Marcus, Bernie, et al. Built from Scratch: How a Couple of Regular Guys Grew the Home Depot from Nothing to $30 Billion. Crown Business, 1999.
As has been previously discussed, Interaction Designers are in the business of understanding people in order to act as their advocate. Yet curricula in business administration or economic theory generally do not focus on the individual: Emphasis placed on humanity usually highlights the group (market behavior, demographics, etc.) instead. Few marketers or executives have been formally trained in issues of design or psychology, much less anthropology or sociology.
Interaction Designers have a similar problem to overcome: They haven't been trained in issues of business. How critical is that formal business training in preparing one for the pragmatic strain of business administration? According to Tom Peters, not very. As he recollects some twenty years after writing In Search of Excellence, Peters relates a particularly relevant anecdote of John Young, the president of Hewlett-Packard, sitting in a common cubicle and wearing shirtsleeves. In order to truly understand how to manage his people, Young immersed himself in the environment of work—he became one of the regular workers, and led his team by becoming the team. 87 The informal approach to management may ultimately work better than more traditional management techniques in shepherding the creative process of Interaction Design.
87Tom Peter's True Confessions. Fast Company, December, 2001. < http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/53/peters.html>
The following contribution is written by a practicing Interaction Designer who has experienced the unique relationship Interaction Design has with the rest of the business and engineering community. Interaction Designer Ellen Beldner offers her thoughts on communicating with product and project managers in the course of the development of software. She articulates the value Interaction Design can provide to a project team, and uses her own experiences at Google to illustrate some of the challenges—and ways around these challenges—Interaction Designers face in industry.
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