Is Your Team Product, Design, or Customer Driven?
Within UX & Product, we have a few catch phrases that end in the word 'driven:' product-driven, design-driven, and customer-driven. And if you dialed it back 10 years - feature-driven.
Do you also notice that the phrases are sometimes used interchangeably? This is particularly true in circles outside of Design & Product. Aside from them being different mindsets, they produce different outcomes. And so to crystallize what they currently mean to us, and prompt you to check the pulse on where your team is at, here's a micro writeup on each.
Feature-driven. Since many of us at New Haircut came from Software Engineering or Product Management backgrounds, we were only aware of feature-driven product development for some time. Today, this tends to be the approach we’re most frequently hired to help groups shift away from; i.e. creating experiences based on a list of features an internal team assumes their customers want.
Pro: Good for building products with many known knowns / unknowns, as well as limited complexity (good luck finding a successful one in this day and age!).
Con: Many - because customers don't care about features, only their experience.
Product-driven. Product organizations, naturally, tend to be biased toward product-driven approaches. The more mature orgs are great at running experiments and leveraging metrics to help guide which problems to work on within the products they manage and how best to solve them.
Pro: Because things are tracked and measured, there is typically a healthy amount of data to inform product-driven decisions, which is certainly better than building in the dark.
Con: Getting caught in the trap of assuming the customer needs this product, as opposed to needing a way to solve their problems, which may not involve using this or any product.
Design-driven. Design / UX organizations use design-driven approaches (like design thinking) to learn about the needs & wants of the customer.
Pro: Empathy for the customer is at the center of all ideas & decisions and can be so powerful that it sparks a design-driven transformation.
Con: Over-indexing on customer empathy can also lead to neglecting what's important to the company - no company... no customer experiences to create.
Customer-driven. We think this approach (which we associate most with human-centered design) is the true intent behind the other approaches above - to develop products & services your customers love & cherish, within problem spaces that the company is excited & equipped to apply its resources.
Pro: The ability to solve critical customer problems that the team and company are excited to work on is a win across the board.
Con: Not enough teams and companies embodying this mindset - or pretending that they do.
Resources & Next Steps
Not sure where your team fits in? Come ask all of your questions at our twice-per-month AMAs on Design Thinking, Problem Discovery, and the skill set that powers these powerful team sessions, Facilitation! Sessions are always free, and provide hands-on opportunities to get all of your questions answered by our leading expert, Jay Melone. Visit our Events Page for the most up-to-date schedules and sign up info.
