GM Verified crew 👋 

Happy Friday!

Here’s what I am serving up today:

• The Human Cost of Bad Design - with Thomas Wilson

Reading time: 10 minutes. Grab a coffee!

Thomas goes into great detail on the problem of “product-first” mindsets and the human cost of bad design.

Let’s go! 🚀 

The Human Cost of Bad Design

Product First is broken. Sustainable value comes from the pursuit of a strong Customer and Employee First culture.

Current State

We need not look any further than the daily headlines for the evidence of poor design driven by technical hegemony, greed and apathetic irresponsibility to understand what that begets us as a species. A new level of anti-human, disrespect and harm is abound and we are not only engaging, but as researchers, designers and leaders, we’re actively involved in its creation and prolonged stranglehold of the victims of its existence. US.

From Teslas blowing up and killing people on the road and their special ops legal team who threaten the victims to the rockets of SpaceX blowing up on launch. To the shit-show that is Twitter and what the Twitter Files uncovered about our own covert government ops using backdoors to shadow ban voices of descent.

From the massive hiring of tons of ESG and DEI related positions to their total elimination within ~5 years. How about the recent debacles of American Airlines and Southwest Airlines and their garbage tech and legacy systems that have upended lives and caused undo stress. All while leadership was taking bonuses? They didn’t upgrade systems or planes and treated customers poorly whilst being totally above reproach. Or perhaps, the $893mil UI mistake of CitiGroup almost 2 years ago.

What about Amazon pulling back on Alexa after losing 22bil in one year alone on it? Oddly, the same year they eliminated 10,000 jobs. The Metaverse is an epic fail and cost more than ~36bil and several rounds subsequent of layoffs of more than ~22k jobs as of a few months ago, who knows what the actual headcount is now. All retail stores are learning that customers loathe the 'self-serve' check-out and it doesn't work. In fact everyone including Walmart - the world’s largest retailer is reporting record shrink and theft. And they know it’s largely because of self-check-out. Two entire generations of cell users opting for dumb phones in place of high-priced gadgets with poor experiences. Gen-Z with their flip phones and Mature Market with Jitterbug and the like. Healthcare is learning that patients and members aren't using apps for healthcare and banks and investment groups are learning humans don't like using apps for fintech, unless it's Gen-Z and Millennials trading pennies and then, even that fails (Gamestop short-scandal, Robinhood and more.)

The data at large or complex orgs with robust eco systems, usually shows something like 10-15% of your users are super users. Meaning, they want to play with your apps and technology, self-serve and hack their way through your systems of clunk. Of course those numbers rise when talking about specific products.

How about the toxic chemical train derailment that has ruined and may have even worse lasting health effects on 5,000 residents of a small town in Ohio? More recently, the Titan Submersible, Ocean Gate disaster took 5 lives, including the greedy moron who ignored tons of warnings about the shoddy design of the sub? Historically speaking, know what happened with Chornobyl, Three Mile Island, Fukushima Plant, Apollo 13, Challenger Mission, Deep Water Horizon et all. I could rattle off 20 more. All had poor design flaws that had significant warnings in most cases. BAD DESIGN.

In some of those cases voices were ignored, stifled, fired and disregarded in favour of profit and ‘progress’, ‘immoveable’ deadlines or launch dates siting concerns of development or hold costs, downtime and most were just facilitated by good ol’ fashioned greed.

Know what that says to me, reader? The wrong people are leading this work. It also says that when leaders have no idea what problem to solve or how to read markets, they take risks that aren’t smart, don’t pay off, often dangerous, and unethical and then they make their employees pay for it, by bloodletting their ‘human capital’ (a term I loathe) to balance their broken balance sheets.

The Root Cause of Return-To-Work

The return to work is rooted in the notion that many people were hired in leadership positions for the wrong reason over the course of ~5+ years and they could not perform or execute and that caused a drop in productivity. It also forced a LOT of seniors, managers, pros and director levels out of the workplace and into permanent unemployment, or solopreneurship or leaving their respective industries for good. McKinsey did an excellent article on it. Lots of articles have been written on the subject. These same companies were not and still are not prepared to service Work-From-Home from a people, process and technology standpoint and fell flat there as well.

Given all of those things in a perfect storm of CV19 for 3 years, what you are witnessing is the dramatic plunge of Commercial Real Estate values. All of those companies owned or leased large buildings and spaces that are now empty. Because that is a major issue within the economy -everyone is pushing you back into the office. Those are the real reasons and there are tons of nuances and specifics around each of those massive issues. When CV19 started and it decimated small business owners initially and put restaurants, coffee shops, bars and barbers and tattoo parlours out of business in urban areas, it was a real estate-feeding frenzy to buy up all that property and the rich got richer. But the minute CV19 went on for 2 then 3+ years, and those large real estate investment firms realized people weren’t coming back to the offices they held the notes on, now it was time for the war on the consumer/employee to get those butts back in seats and get the rent machine back up and running.

The Paradox of Product First vs Human-Centered Design

This brings us to what is happening in most large organisations internally right now. With the decimation of Design leadership and design hierarchy within the organization, there is a toxic wave of control, rooted in fear and disrespect of researchers, designers and customers. This can be seen in; the push for generalized skills and org flatness. And the push for Product First cultures. Why? Because somebody at your org read ‘Continuous Discovery’ and the ‘Lean Startup’ and thinks PMs and programmers should be doing qualitative research, everything should be done in a sprint, everything should ship as an MVP initially, and the only type of designer you need is part of a three-legged stool. What kind of designer is that you ask? An IC production worker who manages assets, screens inventories, d-systems and makes Figma prototypes. Reducing design to UI incrementalism and iteration while increasing complexity with unnecessary feature bloat. Overdoing apps and sites for the sake of doing ‘something.’

The design leaders who are still inside of these orgs are living in chaos and abject fear and embracing some serious Stockholm Syndrome. They’re order-takers and serve the dullest, reactionary minds in business history.

Product managers are often rewarded based on the size of their teams and their position in the hierarchy, rather than the efficiency and effectiveness of their output. All while using metrics like NPS that have been disavowed by its own creator. Many companies have circled the drain and filed bankruptcy from following NPS as a lagging indicator of faux customer love. Businesses do this to pretend like they're having value or impact, rejecting any form of legitimate metrics. And denying craft, practice or specialization in favour of generalists who will simply make trash on command in a CX/UX Theater near you. NPS in conjunction with CSAT and CES can provide a more holistic picture of your CX.

Full disclosure: I don’t refer to people who write code for software as ‘engineers.’ That’s kind of disrespectful to Mechanical, Electrical, Structural and Chemical Engineers. Someone who types well and learns different languages like eh, Spanish or C++, is a developer or programmer.

PMs and developers are often incentivized to pile on new features, even when they’re not necessary. Players wanna play, and programmers wanna program. Most times, in circles. I get it. This leads to code bloat and overly complex software that’s virtually impossible to maintain and even harder to use. Product managers are often rewarded for adding new features, rather than improving stability and usability. This can lead to software that is feature-rich but unstable and difficult to use. If it’s fresh UI on bad data stacks, even worse. We’re building things for no reason and creating tech that solves no real human problems. In fact, it’s creating them.

This is all exacerbated by the fact that many developers are emotionally attached to their code build and therefore reluctant to admit when their solutions are unnecessary or overly complex. I can assure you I’ve never met a programmer, CIO or CTO in 27 years who understood the notion of Pragnanz or Gestalt. They embrace the sunk cost fallacy and Dunning-Krueger Effect ad nauseam. This leads to inefficiency in product environments. So, when features and complexity rise, the experience deteriorates. It’s a pretty complex concept. Pun intended. Motion doesn't equate to action and just because you want to keep your developers busy building stuff doesn't mean you should. We all should be learning more than we launch. That’s called discovery and it’s done by trained UXRs and Service Designers who are passionate about Customer Experience.

Creating an environment that is conducive to innovation and efficiency isn’t that hard. Productivity and innovation cannot exist in mass entropy. You can't ensure customers get great experiences with poorly conceived products and services, through top-down, reactive strategy.

It all begins with consensus, focus, support, the love of problem identification/definition, solving and reduction of pain and waste. Product teams claim to profess to be innovative and agile, yet facilitate rigid behaviours and embody identities more akin to ideologues and zealots than free-thinking innovators. That same destructive rigidity filters into the products, services and poor delivery of value to customers. That culture and thinking creates an environment that lacks psychological safety and intellectual honesty and it also encourages people to cope, not thrive within organizations.

My feeling is the key to all of these changes are hiring more experienced UX Researchers, Service Designers and Strategists, Design Ops and structured design leadership hierarchy. And the critical understanding of the division of labor through defined roles and specialization. The maturity to embrace ‘Bottom Up’ structures as opposed to Top-Down. We need these processes and practitioners and we need to commit organizationally, to regular short run qualitative and continuous discovery of our customer’s specific use cases, experiencing our products and services. Because the only way to imagine a more preferred future state is to really define what the current state looks like for every customer, across every journey through every single touchpoint within our products, services and eco-systems. Especially the outliers and edge cases.

Revaluate who you are and what you stand for as a company. Part of design is understanding your North Star values and business strategy with foresight and purpose. We need to really make it clear what our strategy as; Plans, Position, Perspective and Patterns of Action are as organizations.

Who Comes First with Regard to Value Creation:

Customers- We need to commit to continuous generative discovery and put them top of mind by speaking to them and co-designing with them regularly.

Employees - We need to show that and indicate we hold a safe space to learn and fail and innovate. Encourage and support psychological safety and intellectual honesty. High-performing teams understand and instil both as well as define the work that is best suited to our backgrounds and mental models. Know the difference between innovators and adaptors. Please embrace neurodiversity. It’s estimated that ~25+% of your workforce is neurodiverse.

Shareholders- If you treat your employees and customers with respect, shareholders will garner a tidy profit. There are so many examples of doing the right thing and how design led businesses are more profitable.

Product First mentalities work if all you are is a singular product like Slack, Uber, Spotify, etc. That also works if you’re in startup mode. Then everything you do is solely about requirements gathering and feature farm incrementalism and product compulsion. Most Fortune 5 to 500s and SMBs are so much more than a single product.

We’re in a service economy. Everything is a service. Even software. Hence the acronym SaaS. Software as a service. Not the other way around. There is no acronym for everything in the business as a piece of software. That’s why Product First is a bad idea in MOST cases.

Product First is an epic fail. The fail rates do not lie. It’s more like a toxic religion of technicals comprised of short-sighted fools, tech tyrants and product oligarchs seeking control and wanting to be something they’re not than it’s a smart culture or process that facilitates successful outcomes. Every business cannot function like a startup or a singular-minded product. In reality, a very tiny percentage can or should. Every product launch or initial alpha/beta cannot be an MVP. In fact, there are many cases where that will be absolutely disastrous. Very little can be done in a one-week sprint and in an enterprise-level environment, good luck getting traction or consensus on more than a button placement in five days. There are a hundred reasons why you would not allow PMs or developers to speak to customers directly in large service organizations. Allowing them to listen in on interviews or watch videos and read transcripts after the fact, is perfectly fine. But PMs and developers doing discovery interviews is a terrible idea. Having them be involved in product-specific usability interviews, evaluative testing and experiments, just fine.

UX Research, CX and Service Design Works and is Hugely Profitable

When you're a large enterprise with many products and services, of many LOBs and BUs and various touch points, lots of journeys for many types of customers, in a massive eco-system, you must be Customer First. You must commit to regular discovery and Customer First driven innovation must get its own budget or you will eventually go out of business. You're just living on borrowed time and waiting to be bumped by a challenger brand that is willing to do that important work, rooted in respect and love of customer needs.

Research by IBM and NASA revealed that every $1 invested in UX could result in a return up to $250. McKinsey studied 2 million pieces of financial data and 100,000 design actions over five years. Conclusion: Design-led companies had 32% more revenue and 56% higher total returns to shareholders compared with other companies.

Uber disrupted the Taxi Service industry. AirBnB disrupted the hotel/hospitality industry. CostPlus Drugs just disrupted the PBM and pharma distribution/payer industry. If you want to know how they and hundreds of other businesses did this in just the last 10-15 years, I can assure you that a study of their strategy and approach was 100% Service Design and Value Chain strategy. The product was a manifestation of that smart rethinking of an old idea, and a broken or costly service model, with pain and friction to the customer.

Summary and Solution:

Embrace CX, EX, UX and Service Design now. Everything is a Design problem. The majority of what you see in any business is a Service Design problem. The only thing that isn’t a design problem in business is Design itself. That is usually a cultural problem. Product First is a huge strategy, organizational, service and internal cultural problem.

If you're unwilling to be Customer First, design-led and disrupt your own business or industry, someone else will do it for you. And tons of research indicates a recession is the absolute BEST time to innovate new areas of service.

If you don’t love your customers and employees enough to innovate, you don’t deserve either, or to stay in business.

At this very moment, we’re being pushed into the singularity and unbridled greed, explosion of AI/ML tech growth, the rise of broken methodologies, disrespect of specialization and culture by techno-tyrants seeking power and hegemony to the point of serious consequence and harm. We are losing the numinosity and wonder of what it means to be uniquely human.

The least humane and least creative people in your company are most likely in control of human outcomes. God forbid you’re in an environment like any of the previously mentioned or healthcare, wherein poor products and services can inflict serious harm and even death.

When we put people first, the profit will come. It’s likely to flow freely when customers see that your organization’s vision and values are righteous and you’re concerned with serving their needs.

Empathy is rooted in respect and love. Greed and poor design is rooted in scarcity, fear and apathy. Poor design isn't just inconvenient, it’s creating a world none of us wants to be in, many can’t thrive in, and unnecessarily facilitates stress then death.

Let’s create a world that’s inclusive, human-centred and driven by love. The love of simplicity and the people we serve. Let’s do that by putting humans (Customers and Employees) FIRST.

A quick note from me:

• I made a quick typo in yesterday’s newsletter, apologies. We’ve all done it! Thanks for your kindness in understanding.

• On Sunday we will have Alen Faljic talking about all things business literacy and the importance of understanding business for designers in their careers.

Until then! 👋 

Tom