Abstraction

 “Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that’s creativity.”
- Charles Mingus

I was thinking today of the ideal product management team structure, building on my assertion that the product management primary role is to define successful products. I tend to agree with the “Triad” structure promoted by the Pragmatic Marketing folks, in that this structure provides for a manager of each of three important elements of successful product definition: a person to guide overall strategy (in my mind this is the leader of the team), a product manager to define requirements, and a product marketer to tell the world about the product.

So far so good, but I think there’s an important role missing within the triad; namely, a person responsible for ensuring the usability and overall look and feel of the product — a product designer. This person is responsible for defining the experience of using the product, for building prototypes, for conducting usability tests, and for acting as a counterweight to the person defining the requirements. This last is particularly important as it sets up a healthy discussion within the product team, testing whether important requirements are missing (”if we don’t have a breadcrumb, the user gets hopelessly lost”), or whether existing requirements are really high priority from a user perspective (”23 options for report generation will only confuse the user, since only three types ever get used”) .

Among the most consistent experiences I’ve had over the course of my career is an organization’s consideration of user experience as a second, third, or last priority. The “hard part” is seen as the development of the features themselves, with user design seen as a trivial exercise to be addressed sometime later. Incredibly, I’ve seen a company ignore user design even after its enterprise customers refused to purchase a product because it was too hard to use.

I’ve got a theory that this attitude is a symptom of “technical bias” prevalent in high tech, which posits that writing code is hard and important, while everything else — interface design, for example, or documentation — is easier and less important. People that write code are smart, and everyone else is less so. Engineering offers real ROI, and other functions don’t contribute equal value for the money.

It’s certainly true that writing code (at least writing it well) is hard, that it takes a certain cognitive acumen to do it, and that an organization will fail without it. But it’s also true that a development team’s effort is worth nothing if people don’t buy it. Seriously, have you seen people try use a product with an interface designed by engineers? “Wow, check out them elegantly coded algorithms” just isn’t typical feedback.