Stepping outside of design

One of the first things the programme forced me to do was look much further outside of my normal design remit. We spent time looking at strategy, organisational structures, financial performance, competitive environments, leadership, innovation and change. Individually, none of those subjects were completely new to me, but I’d never really considered them together as parts of the same system.

In product teams, it’s very easy to become absorbed by what’s directly in front of you. There’s a roadmap, a set of objectives, customer problems, technical constraints and usually more work than there are people available to do it. Even when you’re working strategically, you’re often still operating within a set of assumptions that have already been made somewhere else in the organisation.

The programme made me much more conscious of those assumptions.

I started paying more attention to where work actually came from. Not just which stakeholder requested it, but what had happened before it became a project. What evidence had informed the decision, what commercial objective sat behind it, what alternatives had been considered and whether the problem we’d been given was actually the problem worth solving.

That has probably been one of the most lasting changes in how I work. I’m still very comfortable taking a problem and working with a team to solve it, but I’m far less comfortable accepting the problem at face value.

Strategy was one of the areas I found most useful because it’s a word we use constantly in product and design. We have product strategies, design strategies, experience strategies and strategic roadmaps. In reality, some of what I’d previously seen described as strategy was simply a collection of things an organisation intended to do.

The programme gave me a much better understanding of strategy as a process of making choices. A business has limited money, limited people and limited time. Strategy is partly about understanding the environment around you well enough to decide where those resources have the greatest chance of creating an advantage.

That required looking at things I wouldn’t traditionally have considered part of a design process. I spent much more time looking at market conditions, competitors, organisational capabilities and commercial performance. I began to understand why two opportunities that might look equally valuable from a customer perspective could be completely different propositions from a business perspective.

This was also where some of the academic models became genuinely useful. I don’t think the value was in being able to reproduce a SWOT, PESTLE or Porter’s Five Forces analysis. The useful part was having different ways to deliberately examine a business from perspectives I might otherwise have overlooked. Used properly, the frameworks helped expose relationships between changes in the market, customer behaviour, competitive pressure and the organisation’s own strengths and weaknesses.

I became less interested in the framework itself and much more interested in what it helped me notice.

The biggest piece of work on the programme was the strategic business project. I decided early on that I didn’t want to treat it as an academic exercise. If I was going to spend that much time researching and writing something, I wanted the outcome to be credible enough that I could genuinely imagine presenting it inside a business.

That meant resisting one of my natural instincts as a designer: getting to the solution quickly.

Normally, once I’ve understood enough of a problem, I want to start making things tangible. I’ll map something, sketch it, build a proposition or start working through what the experience could be. With this project, I spent much longer deliberately staying in the problem.

I researched the market and the competitive environment. I looked at customer behaviour and broader trends. I examined the organisation’s position and capabilities. I started connecting those findings with the commercial opportunity and thinking about what would actually have to be true for the proposition to work.

As the research developed, the original idea changed. Some assumptions became stronger, others disappeared entirely, and areas I initially thought would be important became much less relevant. It was a good reminder that research isn’t there to prove the idea you started with. Sometimes its most useful job is to dismantle it.

The financial side of the programme was probably furthest outside my existing comfort zone, which made it one of the most valuable areas for me.

I’ve spent most of my career making arguments for customer value. We can demonstrate that something is confusing, frustrating or inefficient, and we can use research to explain why improving it would create a better experience. That’s important, but at a senior level it isn’t always enough to justify investment.

For the strategic project I had to think much more seriously about the commercial case. I needed to consider the potential size of the opportunity, investment, return, risk and the assumptions sitting underneath the numbers. It wasn’t about pretending I was suddenly a finance expert; it was about understanding enough to connect a customer problem to a business outcome.

That connection became increasingly interesting to me. A customer interview might help explain why somebody abandons a journey. Product analytics can tell us how often it happens. Commercial data can start to tell us what that behaviour might be worth. Looking at those things together creates a much richer picture than any of them can provide individually.

It also changed the way I thought about evidence. I’d always associated customer understanding primarily with qualitative research. I came away from the programme thinking much more broadly about customer voice, behavioural data, market evidence and commercial performance as different parts of the same story.

Another area that became much clearer through the programme was the relationship between organisational design and customer experience.

As designers, we naturally focus on the part of the organisation the customer can see. But many of the problems customers experience are created much further upstream. A confusing journey might be the result of a technical limitation, an operational process, an internal policy, fragmented ownership or a commercial decision made years earlier.

The interface is simply where the customer eventually encounters it.

Looking at organisations through that lens changed the way I approached problems. Instead of automatically asking how we could improve a particular journey, I started spending more time understanding why the journey existed in that form in the first place.

Sometimes design can solve the problem. Sometimes the real solution sits in technology, operations, data or organisational ownership. More often, it requires several of those things to change together.

This also gave me a much more realistic understanding of transformation. Creating a new process or operating model on a slide is relatively easy. Getting people across a large organisation to actually work differently is much harder. People have existing responsibilities, incentives, relationships and pressures, and any meaningful change has to account for those realities.

The programme also gave me quite a lot of space to reflect on my own leadership, including the parts that don’t always come naturally.

One thing I recognised about myself is that I tend to connect information quite quickly. I enjoy taking lots of different inputs, finding the relationships between them and forming a direction. That’s useful in ambiguous situations, but it can also create a problem. Just because I’ve made the connections in my own head doesn’t mean everyone else has travelled through the same thinking.

Earlier in my career, I probably underestimated that.

I could see where I thought we needed to get to and would become focused on getting there. The programme made me think much more carefully about the difference between having a direction and actually bringing people with you.

I’ve become more deliberate about creating context, involving people earlier and allowing teams to participate in forming the answer rather than simply receiving it. It takes longer, and sometimes it’s messier, but the outcome is usually stronger because people understand not only what we’re doing but why we’re doing it.

That has been particularly relevant as my roles have become broader and I’ve worked across different teams, disciplines, locations and cultures. Leadership at that scale can’t depend on personally having the answer to everything. It depends much more on creating enough clarity for other people to make good decisions without you.

Eventually, all of the research had to become the final 4,000-word strategic business document.

I’d accumulated far more information than I could possibly use. There were market reports, financial assumptions, customer insights, academic research, competitor analysis and several versions of the proposition. The difficult part wasn’t finding another thing to add. It was deciding what mattered.

That process taught me something I hadn’t expected. Research can take you a long way, but eventually you have to make a judgement.

There will always be another piece of information you could find. At some point, particularly in leadership, you have to decide that you understand the problem well enough to form a view. You have to be able to explain what you believe the evidence is telling you, what you recommend doing as a result and where uncertainty still exists.

The presentation that followed pushed that even further. Months of work suddenly had to become a story somebody could understand in a relatively short amount of time. I couldn’t take the audience through every piece of analysis I’d done. I had to decide what they actually needed to know in order to understand and believe the recommendation.

That experience has had a big impact on how I present work now. Showing everything you’ve done isn’t the same as demonstrating depth. Often the depth is what allows you to leave most of it out.

I finished the programme with a qualification, a substantial strategic business project and far more knowledge of academic referencing than I ever expect to need again. But those aren’t really the things that made it worthwhile.

The biggest change is in where I now start.

I’m more interested in understanding the business context around a problem before getting into the solution. I spend more time looking externally at markets and competitors. I want customer research and behavioural data to sit alongside each other. I’m more comfortable talking about the commercial implications of design decisions, and I’m much more conscious of the organisational systems sitting behind the experiences we create.

It’s also changed what I expect from design leadership.

Craft remains incredibly important to me. I want designers who care about the details and take pride in making genuinely good experiences. But I also want designers to understand the world surrounding the thing they’re designing. I want them to be curious about the business, comfortable looking at data, close to customers and confident enough to challenge the brief when the evidence takes them somewhere else.

When I started the L7, I thought I was going to learn how to become a better design leader. In some ways I did, but the more useful outcome was realising that the boundary between design leadership and business leadership isn’t as clear as I’d previously thought.

The further I’ve progressed in my career, the less my job has been about personally designing the answer and the more it has become about creating the conditions for the right answer to emerge.

The L7 helped me understand that transition properly.

And despite the 4,000-word paper, I’m glad I did it.}