Shipulski On Design

Archive for the ‘Fundementals’ Category

Cigarette companies rebranded themselves because their products caused cancer and they wanted to separate themselves from how their customers experienced their products.  Their name and logo (which stand for their brand) were mapped to bad things (cancer) so they changed their name and logo.  The bad things still happened, but the company was one step removed.  There was always the option to stop causing cancer and to leave the name and logo as-is, but that would have required a real change, difficult change, a fundamental change. Instead of stopping the harm, cigarette companies ran away from their heritage and rebranded.

Facebook rebranded itself because its offering caused cancer of a different sort.  And they, too, wanted to separate themselves from how their customers experienced their offering.  The world mapped the Facebook brand to bullying, harming children, and misinformation that destroyed institutions. Sure, Facebook had the option to keep the name and logo and stop doing harm, but they chose to keep the harm and change the name and logo.  Like the cigarette companies, they chose to keep the unskillful behavior and change their brand to try to sidestep their damaging ways.  Yes, they could have changed their behavior and kept their logo, but they chose to change their logo and double down on their unhealthy heritage.

The cigarette companies and Facebook didn’t rebrand themselves to move toward something better, they rebranded to run away from the very thing they created, the very experience they delivered to their customers.  In that way, they tried to distance themselves from their offering because their offering was harmful. And in that way, rebranding is most often about moving away from the experience that customers experience.  And in that way, rebranding is hardly ever about moving toward something better.

One exception I can think of is a special type of rebranding that is a distillation of the brand, where the brand name gets shorter.  Several made-up examples: Nike Shoes to Nike; MacDonalds Hamburgers to MacDonalds; and Netflix Streaming Services to Netflix.  In all three cases, the offering hasn’t changed and customers still recognize the brand.  Everyone still knows it’s all about cool footwear, a repeatable fast-food experience, and top-notch entertainment content.  If anything, the connection with the heritage is concentrated and strengthened and the appeal is broader.  If your rebranding makes the name longer or the message more nuanced, you get some credit for confusing your customers, but you don’t qualify for this special exception.

If you want to move toward something better, it’s likely better to keep the name and logo and change the offering to something better.  Your brand has history and your customers have mapped the goodness you provide to your name and logo.  Why not use that to your advantage?  Why not build on what you’ve built and morph it slowly into something better?  Why not keep the brand and improve the offering?  Why not remap your good brand to an improved offering so that your brand improves slowly over time?  Isn’t it more effective to use your brand recognition as the mechanism to attract attention to your improved offering?

In almost all cases, rebranding is a sign that something’s wrong.  It’s expensive, it consumes a huge amount of company resources, and there’s little to no direct benefit to customers.  When you feel the urge to rebrand, I strongly urge you to keep the brand and improve your offering.  That way your customers will benefit and your brand will improve.

Image credit Quinn Dombrowski

When you don’t know what to do, what do you do?  This is a difficult question.

Here are some thoughts that may help you figure out what to do when you really don’t know.

Don’t confuse activity with progress.

Gather your two best friends, go off-site, and define the system as it is.

Don’t ask everyone what they think because the Collective’s thoughts will be diffuse, bland, and tired.

Get outside.

Draw a picture of how things work today.

Get a good meal.

Make a graph of goodness over time.  If it’s still increasing, do more of what you did last time.  If it’s flat, do something else.

Get some exercise.

Don’t judge yourself negatively.  This is difficult work.

Get some sleep.

Help someone with their problem.  The distraction will keep you out of the way as your mind works on it for you.

Spend time with friends.

Try a new idea at the smallest scale. It will likely lead to a better one. Repeat.

Use your best judgment.

Image credit – Andrew Gustar

When you want new thinking or rapid progress, create a small team.

When you have a small team, they manage the handoffs on their own and help each other.

Small teams hold themselves accountable.

With small teams, one member’s problem becomes everyone’s problem in record time.

Small teams can’t work on more than one project at a time because it’s a small team.

And when a small team works on a single project, progress is rapid.

Small teams use their judgment because they have to.

The judgment of small teams is good because they use it often.

On small teams, team members are loyal to each other and set clear expectations.

Small teams coordinate and phase the work as needed.

With small teams, waiting is reduced because the team members see it immediately.

When something breaks, small teams fix it quickly because the breakage is apparent to all.

The tight connections of a small team are magic.

Small teams are fun.

Small teams are effective.

And small teams are powered by trust.

“LEGO Octan pit crew celebrating High Five Day (held every third Thursday of April)” by Pest15 is marked with CC BY-SA 2.0.

Clean-sheet designs are fun, right up until they don’t launch.

When you feel the urge to do a clean-sheet design, go home early.

When you don’t know how to make it better, make it worse and do the opposite.

Without trying, there is no way to know if it will work.

Trying sometimes feels like dying.

But without trying, nothing changes.

Agreement is important, but only after the critical decision has been made.

When there’s 100% agreement, you waited too long to make the decision.

When it’s unclear who the customer is, ask “Whose problem will be solved?”

When the value proposition is unclear, ask ‘What problem will be solved?”

When your technology becomes mature, no one wants to believe it.

When everyone believes the technology is mature, you should have started working on the new technology four years ago.

If your projects are slow, blame your decision-making processes.

Two of the most important decisions: which projects to start and which to stop.

All the action happens at the interfaces, but that’s also where two spans of control come together and chafe.

If you want to understand your silos and why they don’t play nicely together, look at the organizational chart.

When a company starts up, the product sets the organizational structure.

Then, once a company is mature, the organizational structure constrains the product.

At the early stages of a project, there’s a lot of uncertainty.

And once the project is complete, there’s a lot of uncertainty.

“Toys Never Forget” by Alyssa L. Miller is marked with CC BY 2.0.

If you’re asked to be faster, choose to be more effective.  There’s nothing slower than being fast at something that doesn’t matter.

If you’re given a goal to be more productive, instead, improve effectiveness. There’s nothing less productive than making the wrong thing.

If you’re measured on efficiency, focus on effectiveness. Customers don’t care about your efficiency when you ship them the wrong product.

If you’re asked to improve quality, that’s good because quality is an important element of effectiveness.

If you’re asked to demonstrate more activity, focus on progress, which is activity done in an effective way.

If you’re asked to improve your team, ask them how they can be more effective and do that.

Regardless of the question, the answer is effectiveness.

Image credit pbkwee.

When you have no slack time, you can’t start new projects.

When you have no slack time, you can’t run toward the projects that need your help.

When you have no slack time, you have no time to think.

When you have no slack time, you have no time to learn.

When you have no slack time, there’s no time for concern for others.

When you have no slack time, there’s no time for your best judgment.

When there is no slack time, what used to be personal becomes transactional.

When there is no slack time, any hiccup creates project slip.

When you have no slack time, the critical path will find you.

When no one has slack time, one project’s slip ripples delay into all the others.

When you have no slack time, excitement withers.

When you have no slack time, imagination dies.

When you have no slack time, engagement suffers.

When you have no slack time, burnout will find you.

When you have no slack time, work sucks.

When you have no slack time, people leave.

I have one question for you.  How much slack time do you have?

“Hurry up Leonie, we are late…” by The Preiser Project is licensed under CC BY 2.0

When you design something, you create a solution to a collection of problems.  But it goes far beyond creating the solution.  You also must create objective evidence that demonstrates that the solution does, in fact, solve the problems.  And the reason to generate this evidence is to help the organization believe that the solution solves the problem, which is an additional requirement that comes with designing something.  Without this belief, the organization won’t go out to the customer base and convince them that the solution will solve their problems.  If the sales team doesn’t believe, the customers won’t believe.

In school, we are taught to create the solution, and that’s it.  Here are the drawings, here are the materials to make it, here is the process documentation to build it, and my work here is done. But that’s not enough.

Before designing the solution, you’ve got to design the tests that create objective evidence that the solution actually works, that it provides the right goodness and it solves the right problems.  This is an easy thing to say, but for a number of reasons, it’s difficult to do.  To start, before you can design the right tests, you’ve got to decide on the right problems and the right goodness.  And if there’s disagreement and the wrong tests are defined, the design community will work in the wrong areas to generate the wrong value.  Yes, there will be objective evidence, and, yes, the evidence will create a belief within the organization that problems are solved and goodness is achieved.  But when the sales team takes it to the customer, the value proposition won’t resonate and it won’t sell.

Some questions to ask about testing. When you create improvements to an existing product, what is the family of tests you use to characterize the incremental goodness?  And a tougher question: When you develop a new offering that provides new lines of goodness and solves new problems, how do you define the right tests? And a tougher question: When there’s disagreement about which tests are the most important, how do you converge on the right tests?

Image credit — rjacklin1975

People don’t leave a company because they feel appreciated.

People don’t leave a company because they feel part of something bigger than themselves.

People don’t leave a company because they see a huge financial upside if they stay.

People don’t leave a company because they are treated with kindness and respect.

People don’t leave a company because they can make less money elsewhere.

People don’t leave a company because they see good career growth in their future.

People don’t leave a company because they know all the key players and know how to get things done.

People don’t leave the company so they can abandon their primary care physician.

People don’t leave a company because their career path is paved with gold.

People don’t leave a company because they are highly engaged in their work.

People don’t leave a company because they want to uproot their kids and start them in a new school.

People don’t leave a company because their boss treats them too well.

People don’t leave a company because their work is meaningful.

People don’t leave a company because their coworkers treat them with respect.

People don’t leave a company because they want to pay the commission on a real estate transaction.

People don’t leave a company because they’ve spent a decade building a Trust Network.

People don’t leave a company because they want their kids to learn to trust a new dentist.

People don’t leave a company because they have a flexible work arrangement.

People don’t leave a company because they feel safe on the job.

People don’t leave a company because they are trusted to use their judgment.

People don’t leave the company because they want the joy that comes from rolling over their 401k.

People don’t leave a company when they have the tools and resources to get the work done.

People don’t leave a company when their workload is in line with their capacity to get it done.

People don’t leave a company when they feel valued.

People don’t leave a company so they can learn a whole new medical benefits plan.

People don’t leave a job because they get to do the work the way they think it should be done.

So, I ask you, why are people leaving your company?

“Penguins on Parade” by D-Stanley is licensed under

Creating new ideas is easy.  Sit down, quiet your mind, and create a list of five new ideas.  There.  You’ve done it.  Five new ideas.  It didn’t take you a long time to create them.  But ideas are cheap.

Converting ideas into sellable products and selling them is difficult and expensive. A customer wants to buy the new product when the underlying idea that powers the new product solves an important problem for them.  In that way, ideas whose solutions don’t solve important problems aren’t good ideas.  And in order to convert a good idea into a winning product, dirt, rocks, and sticks (natural resources) must be converted into parts and those parts must be assembled into products.  That is expensive and time-consuming and requires a factory, tools, and people that know how to make things. And then the people that know how to sell things must apply their trade.  This, too, adds to the difficulty and expense of converting ideas into winning products.

The only thing more expensive than converting new ideas into winning products is reusing your tired, old ideas until your offerings run out of sizzle. While you extend and defend, your competitors convert new ideas into new value propositions that bring shame to your offering and your brand.  (To be clear, most extend-and-defend programs are actually defend-and-defend programs.)  And while you reuse/leverage your long-in-the-tooth ideas, start-ups create whole new technologies from scratch (new ideas on a grand scale) and pull the rug out from under you.  The trouble is that the ultra-high cost of extend-and-defend is invisible in the short term. In fact, when coupled with reuse, it’s highly profitable in the moment.  It takes years for the wheels to fall off the extend-and-defend bus, but make no mistake, the wheels fall off.

When you find the urge to create a laundry list of new ideas, don’t.  Instead, solve new problems for your customers.  And when you feel the immense pressure to extend and defend, don’t.  Instead, solve new problems for your customers.

And when all that gets old, repeat as needed.

“Cave paintings” by allspice1 is licensed under CC BY-ND 2.0

I like to help people turn complex situations into several important learning objectives.

I like to help people turn important learning objectives into tight project plans.

I like to help people distill project plans into a single-page spreadsheet of who does what and when.

I like to help people start with problem definition.

I like to help people stick with problem definition until the problems solve themselves.

I like to help people structure tight project plans based on resource constraints.

I like to help people create objective measures of success to monitor the projects as they go.

I like to help people believe they can do the almost impossible.

I like to help people stand three inches taller after they pull off the unimaginable.

I like to help people stop good projects so they can start amazing ones.

If you want to do more of what you like and less of what you don’t, stop a bad project to start a good one.

So, what do you like to do?

Image credit — merec0

By definition, the approach that made you successful will become less successful over time and, eventually, will run out of gas.  This fundamental is not about you or your approach, rather it’s about the nature of competition and evolution.  There’s an energy that causes everything to change, grow and improve and your success attracts that energy.  The environment changes, the people change, the law changes and companies come into existence that solve problems in better and more efficient ways.  Left unchanged, every successful business endeavor (even yours) has a half-life.

If you want to extend the life of your business endeavor, you’ve got to be novel.

By definition, if you want to grow, you’ve got to raise your game. You’ve got to do something different.  You can’t change everything, because that’s inefficient and takes too long.  So, you’ve got to figure out what you can reuse and what you’ve got to reinvent.

If you want to grow, you’ve got to be novel.

Being novel is necessary, but expensive.  And risky. And scary.  And that’s why you want to add just a pinch of novelty and reuse the rest.  And that’s why you want to try new things in the smallest way possible.  And that’s why you want to try things in a time-limited way. And that’s why you want to define what success looks like before you test your novelty.

Some questions and answers about being novel:

Is it easy to be novel? No.  It’s scary as hell and takes great emotional strength.

Can anyone be novel? Yes. But you need a good reason or you’ll do what you did last time.

How can I tell if I’m being novel? If you’re not scared, you’re not being novel.  If you know how it will turn out, you’re not being novel.  If everyone agrees with you, you’re not being novel.

How do I know if I’m being novel in the right way? You cannot. Because it’s novel, it hasn’t been done before, and because it hasn’t been done before there’s no way to predict how it will go.

So, you’re saying I can’t predict the outcome of being novel?  Yes.

If I can’t predict the outcome of being novel, why should I even try it? Because if you don’t, your business will go away.

Okay.  That last one got my attention.  So, how do I go about being novel? It depends.

That’s not a satisfying answer. Can you do better than that? Well, we could meet and talk for an hour.  We’d start with understanding your situation as it is, how this current situation came to be, and talk through the constraints you see.  Then, we’d talk about why you think things must change.  I’d then go away for a couple of days and think about things.  We’d then get back together and I’d share my perspective on how I see your situation.  Because I’m not a subject matter expert in your field, I would not give you answers, but, rather, I’d share my perspective that you could use to inform your choice on how to be novel.

“Giraffe trying to catch a twig with her tongue” by Tambako the Jaguar is licensed under CC BY-ND 2.0