[TMA] Design maturity and the laziness of 'best practices'
From the sofa of Peter Merholz—
We start with Andy Budd’s understandable frustration with “design maturity” as an objective in an of itself, instead tasking UX/Design types to appreciate how organizations decide to invest resources in order to realize gain.
We continue with the latest 99 Percent Invisible podcast, about how the global supply chain tanked at the outset of the COVID-19, because a lot of companies behaved identically to one another (often at the suggestion of management consultants like McKinsey), particularly around the idea of ‘just-in-time’ manufacturing, which led to no redundancies, and thus no resilience in the system.
And we finish with the realization that exactly the wrong lesson is learned by every company that sees another company’s success and copies it. The lesson of Toyota isn’t that ‘lean manufacturing’ and just-in-time is the best way to do it; it was the best way for them to do it. That 2-pizza-teams isn’t the best way to build software, it was a good way for Amazon to do so. That extreme spending on content development coupled with ravenous global expansion wasn’t the best way to build your media company, just what made sense for Netflix.
I could go on. I originally phrased this “the tyranny of best practices,” but really it’s “the laziness of ‘best’ practices.” The lesson to be learned is not to copy another’s solution, but to ‘copy’ the means by which they arrived at that solution, which is through critical thinking and experimenting to figure out what made the most sense for them.
“Design maturity,” like “the democratization of user research,” is a red herring. The insight I had a little while back is that all that matters is: is yours a learning organization? Are decisions made based on quality evidence, even if it contradicts prior suppositions? If so, your organization is ‘mature’ in all kinds of ways. If not, if decisions are made based on ‘best practices’ without context (e.g., adopting the supposed agile development practices of a Swedish music streaming company because a management consultant or IT consultant told them to), all the design maturity in the world won’t save you.
Qualities and principles > linear maturity
In writing Org Design for Design Orgs, we researched UX maturity models, thinking they’d help frame organizational development. However, the linearity of these models (that there’s a discrete number of stages you evolve through) masks the interesting and nuanced complexity that underpins these orgs. Thus, we instead developed the 12 qualities of effective design organizations, an array of factors that better enable you to identify strengths and weaknesses.
In my work, I use maturity as a heuristic, not as an objective, but simply in understanding the context in which you’re operating, because your ability to succeed is contingent upon understanding your environment.
ICYMI: Dialogues around User Experience and Product Management
This past week, LinkedIn provide to be fertile ground for discourse around the relationship between UX/Design and Product Management.
There’s my post on how UX/Design types only have themselves to blame for have ceded authority when they refused accountability, and why it shouldn’t be a surprise to hear that PMs, in doing the work in front of them, are doing UX work. And Andy Budd’s pushback that PM and UX are not the same. But when he writes about PMs that “their accountability covers alignment with business goals, customer needs, and cross-functional coordination, adding a layer of administrative and strategic oversight that UX design doesn’t typically entail,” I’m thinking, “Shouldn’t UX entail that?”
At Adaptive Path, a ‘user experience consultancy,’ we aligned business goals, customer needs, and cross-functional coordination. Maybe we were a Product Management consultancy and didn’t even know it.
I’m in London next week…
From November 9-15, I’m in London, speaking at Design Leaders+ and teaching my UX/Design Leadership Fundamentals masterclass. The class has sold out, but there are still tickets for the main event. And if you’re in Londinium and would like to meet up, just hit reply!
… and in Toronto Jan 29/30 for the only Design Leadership conference in North America (that I know of)
An annual ritual is attending the Design Leadership Summit in Toronto, which has shaken out to be the only sizable gathering dedicated to design leadership in North America. This year, I’m helping develop the program, and we’re hoping to have some exciting announcements soon. Follow DesignX Community on LinkedIn to stay informed.
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—peter