Why Designing Products and Services is a Team Sport

A useful piece on Why Designing Products and Services is a Team Sport - by Peter Merholz Experience Matters - useful to think of in drawing on for my own methodology for the dynamics of working with agile development. A interesting point how the apple process of the continual iterations acceptance of end -

"So how can you avoid the blinking "12:00" products and the fragmented efforts that produce them? In the world of products, we see that focused, multidisciplinary teams deliver the best experiences. I interviewed Margaret Schmidt, Vice President of User Experience and Research for TiVo, for our recent MX Conference, and she stressed how the engineering, product management, and user experience teams eschew departmental hand-offs and reviews. Instead, product managers, marketers, designers, engineers, and user advocates work closely on a single project.

In his book Inside Steve's Brain, Leander Kahney explains Apple's design and development process: "Under Jobs' guidance, products are developed through nearly endless rounds of mockups and prototypes that are constantly edited and revised. This is true for both hardware and software [and their retail stores, it turns out]. Products are passed back and forth among designers, programmers, engineers, managers, and then back again. It's not serial."

In the world of services, make sure your project teams are multichannel. Coordinate in-person, online, phone, and mail interactions and communications. Recognize that your customer doesn't distinguish between channels they way you do, and make sure she's satisfied no matter how she chooses to engage.

Without such coordination and collaboration, companies will either deliver slapdash experiences, or, due to the gauntlet, nothing at all."

It concludes

"make sure your project teams are multichannel. Coordinate in-person, online, phone, and mail interactions and communications. Recognize that your customer doesn't distinguish between channels they way you do, and make sure she's satisfied no matter how she chooses to engage.

Without such coordination and collaboration, companies will either deliver slapdash experiences, or, due to the gauntlet, nothing at all." - I need to bulid further a wider the background collection of informaiton of socio-technical issues in knowdge communication.

- A further useful follow on by piece by Margaret Schmidt - TiVo VP Margaret Schmidt on Redesigning.

- And another piece on information technology and knowledge management.

Why information technology inspired but cannot deliver knowledge management.

Article Abstract:

Recent developments in information technology have inspired many companies to imagine a new way for staff to share knowledge and insights. Instead of storing documents in personal files and sharing personal insights with a small circle of colleagues, they can store documents in a common information base and use electronic networks to share insights with their whole community, even people scattered across the globe. However, most companies soon discover that leveraging knowledge is actually very hard and is more dependent on community building than information technology. This is not because people are reluctant to use information technology, rather it is because they often need to share knowledge that is neither obvious nor easy to document, knowledge that requires a human relationship to think about, understand, share, and appropriately apply. Ironically, while information technology has inspired the "knowledge revolution," it takes building human communities to realize it. (Reprinted by permission of the publisher.)

author: McDermott, Richard

Publisher: University of California Press