Hey,
I’ll let you know right now that this will not be yet another newsletter about the pandemic.
Happy Monday.
Small quiz: what is decision speed?
- The speed with which you make decisions
- The speed beyond which takeoff can no longer be aborted
- The time in which you see the results of a decision made
The answer is at the bottom. You can think about it as you read this entire newsletter.
Time is everything
Whatever initiative you are thinking of undertaking to revitalize your business, invent from scratch, or keep it growing and thriving, ask yourself only one thing: does it save time? If the answer is no: it is not the right thing.
Two things led me to this conclusion:
1. My work
My job is to have at the same table Designers, Engineers and Managers who need to achieve their goals and resolve the most common of conflicts that occur every day in organizations.
Managers demand results while limiting investment to a minimum. Engineers are satisfied that there are no errors. Designers can’t explain why their mockups still don’t look like code in testing, let alone in production.
The new conference calls that have replaced the meetings all have a similar script in which the Managers take note that the product will not be as they imagined it thus moving away from their goals, the Engineers immediately freeze by avoiding being collaborative so as not to self-generate problems, and they stand by waiting for the Designers to produce new screens that represent the opposite of the decisions made in the previous meeting but with different people. Does it sound familiar?
2. The Cafes of STRTGY
This week I did an experiment, you may have noticed from the emails you may have received. Every day from 2:00 p.m. to 2:30 p.m., before going back to work, I had a virtual coffee with you in the community. Just 30 minutes to take stock of important things.
Every now and then a few friends have popped up, but also new faces from different industries who are striving, from different angles, to adapt their business to a new world that is becoming more concrete day by day.
What do the people I met in these two contexts have in common?
Everyone says they care about a certain User Experience.
The problem is that no one knows who this User is nor what they really want.
There is only one thing that everyone, users and/or customers, want, and you don’t need to do any market research or user testing to figure it out. It is simplicity.
Unfortunately, however, simplicity is something subjective, an opinion, and if one does not recognize a richness in diversity, options drive people away rather than bring them closer together.
So, if you really want to align Design Business and Technology, and create a new advantage that will separate you from the competition ,I suggest you talk about speed.
If it is fast
seems simple.-John Maeda
Speed is an easy concept to understand, by anyone.
Engineers can look at the time in which various pages load, the time taken by queries, the transitions between screens, and the speed with which the system responds.
Designers can count the numbers of clicks to complete a given task. To the time it takes to read text or fill out forms.
Managers can count the time from customer acquisition to the first euro of revenue to the speed with which they move inventory or service customers.
But speed in doing what?
The only speed that really matters is the one related to the progress that user will make as a result of using our product or service.
The idea of progress is a fundamental concept behind job-to-be-done theory. If you want to learn more, you can read this article I wrote on the subject.
If you adopt the performance paradigm to prioritize decisions about your products then you can get to thinking like Google where engineers invest so much energy to get every single page of their search engine to load in a few milliseconds.
You may think like Amazon, which is famous not for the quality of its products but for the speed with which you can get anything in 24 hours (sometimes less).
Like Netflix that understood that the distance between the click on play and the first scene is important to you.
Like Uber who cares about pick-up time.
Prioritizing for performance impactsuser acquisition and retention and thus helps you maximize your marketing investments.
Prioritizing for performance impacts the Customer Experience And on their perception of your brand.
Prioritizing for performance means giving an optimal experience to people using your products and services in different contexts.
Whether you have a product in Saas, an e-commerce, or a consulting agency, your task in this new world we are going to address is to overcome V1, the speed of decision making.
It is that speed once you exceed it that you will have to continue the takeoff maneuver even in case of the next system failure. When you hear the co-pilot say “V1” out loud, you will have to get off the ground. The wind will support your wings even if there is turbulence.
If you need help finding your V1 you know you can always reply to this email.
“Cabin crew prepare for take off, please.”
Good work!
Make yourself heard.
