Field Research

When building software the hardest part has always been knowing exactly what to build.  This hasn’t changed, it’s still the hard part. Knowing how to build a system is the easy part.

If you build the right thing then you are 90% of the way home; but what makes it the right thing?  How do you know if you have the right thing?  How do the people financing NPD know if you have the right thing?  These questions have driven us toward formal requirements and stage-gate processes.  Sadly, formalism and stage-gating failed to solve the problem so we moved over to Agile.  But Agile cannot provide a solution for “what to build” either.  Most Agile teams abdicate design responsibility and throw users/customers in as chief designers.

At the end of the day there is no substitute for field research and great idea filtering.

In most industries it is nonsense to think you can design great next-gen products by having creatives with black rim glasses and turtlenecks sit around in Obeya rooms “ideating”. You can STYLIZE a product using that approach – but you cannot design a product with that approach.

Effective design starts with field research.  If your design team’s early meetings aren’t in an actual operational setting, if they aren’t doing field research, then your product will head the wrong direction.

Take IDEO and Bank of America for example. When they came up with the now famous Keep the Change service, the first thing IDEO did was travel with the BofA innovation team on a multi city tour to Atlanta, Baltimore, and San Francisco where they interacted with people in their target audience. The KTC service would never have been discovered sitting around in an Obeya room with “customer proxies”.  In less than a year this innovation attracted 2.5 million customers and 700,000 new checking accounts for BofA.  Now, that’s product innovation!

In the world of software design, the next gen system will be underwhelming if those people responsible for design (A.K.A. requirements) are either (a) disconnected from the field, or (b) disconnected from technology possibilities.  You don’t need to be Steve Jobs to do a good job as a designer, but you need customer intimacy to explore the possibilities, then follow up with great filtering to pick the things that really pop, and finally an eagerness to leverage the latest advances in technology…