Business: DesignOps

In Part 1 of this two-part series, I described some challenges that companies have in managing their customers’ experience as their software products evolve. These are not uncommon problems, nor are they easy challenges to overcome.

In my experience, developers of legacy software that are working to grow their platform are generally the furthest behind the curve. If, in general, they have dealt with change management in a piece-meal fashion, they are bound to face a sobering reality at some point. These companies also have existing customers who have contributed to and have a vested interest in the legacy software. Plus, they need to onboard new customers on the legacy system who may struggle with the legacy software and want improvements. This situation can present a wicked problem that puts a company in a perpetual technical tug of war. Read More

As software products have expanded over the decades, companies have had to apply a fair amount of effort to managing their customers’ experience. Since companies have added more and more features and functions to their software products, customer engagement has begun to fluctuate. Managing customers’ expectations had become complicated. These products have continued to grow because customers desired more features and the software companies wanted to offer more value—for a nominal fee, of course. Now, these companies confront the challenge not only of how to design and build the new features but also how to manage and release them.

Several companies—for example, Google—have managed these changes fairly well, but many have a lot of room for improvement. The days are over when we can honestly say, “If we build it, they will come.” We must do the work necessary to truly understand our customers’ needs. If we understood our customers, we would understand that we can’t just jam new features or functions into our software and expect customers joyfully to accept them. Read More

Imagine you’re responsible for providing services to a stakeholder—whether you’re working for an agency or within an inside group. To win the stakeholder’s business, your value proposition must make your services more attractive than those your competition provides. This is a pretty typical situation for those of us who are responsible for business development—whether external or in house.

In Part 2 of this series, I presented a tutorial for creating a spreadsheet that helps you transparently scope, estimate, and reconcile services in a way that puts your customers in control of the scope of effort. In doing so, I defined the five basic steps that are necessary to build this tool:

1. Identify the services you’ll provide.
2. Perform a time-and-motion study for delivering each of these services.
3. Quantize and assign a price to each of your deliverables.
4. Build a spreadsheet that includes each quantized element.
5. Refine the spreadsheet as necessary. Read More