Ignoring software for a moment, various other product development industries talk extensively about the “fuzzy front end” of innovation.  Whether it’s coming from J&J, P&G, Pfizer, Kraft Foods, or BMW these industries recognize that great products require differentiation through innovation.

The latest trends in Brand Innovation (Google that) are focused on eliminating any stitching between product and brand.  Marketing is no longer thought to be a separate project that you execute at the end, just before a product is ready for launch. A product is its marketing and the marketing and brand identity are part of the product.  And, if you want to win, it’s all about innovation. Lots of innovation!

Innovation is by nature “fuzzy”. Yes, there is a creative aspect but raw creativity does not equate to innovation.  Creativity is about original ideas; but innovation is about good original ideas.

In the non-software world, the term Design describes activities and outcomes of the front end of innovation. Design is where key differentiators and attractors are conceived. Design is where consistency, cohesiveness, and usefulness are agitated.  If a design is greenlighted for production it will eventually end up in what we software folks would call “development”. But a product’s life starts way before development, at the front end of innovation. 

Attention Software Developers! Let’s get on board with this! 

For too long we’ve been focused on process, methodology, and tool innovation. We’ve learned to make software better, faster, cheaper.  But most projects still start life in development. 

Agile almost makes things worse. Because of our loathing for stage gate management and Big Design Up Front (BDUF), teams avoid big up front…everything. Agile projects design their product-level differentiators within iterative sprints using the customer as the chief design talent.  They thrust working software in the face of an untrained professional every week and ask them to weigh in on what the product should do, how it should be organized, and what it should look like.  Agile teams cover their walls with disembodied user stories as their main (sometimes only) previsualization of product-level design, with no hope of consistency or cohesiveness. 

We need to change this. Stop assuming that anything with the word “design” is somehow contaminated. Yes, we all agree that planning every UI element, every class, every method, and every data structure is a horrible idea. But that’s not what Design is.   

We need to step up innovation at a product level. We need to step up the quality of product design, user experience, usefulness, and overall differentiation.   

There should be a Front End of Innovation on every software project. There should be design before Agile development sprints begin.  There should be enough previsualization to justify any expensive development, to greenlight a design or cancel the effort. If more companies were able to simply cancel the undifferentiated product concepts before they got rolling we would save millions, never mind the upside impact of using design to achieve highly innovative differentiators! 

The dirty secret of Agile Software Development is that it does very little to inject innovation.  That being the case, however, when a team starts the fuzzy front end by innovating, conceptualizing, and refining a product’s key differentiators…then the Agile approach kicks into high gear. 

Design Thinking is one technique to be thrown at the front end of innovation. We’ve been refining that for software and the results are (so far) very satisfying.  We get the best of both worlds by using DT up front for innovation and then sandwiching a clutch-plate between it and Agile development.