Planting The Flag
Orienteering is a sport which enjoys enormous amateur participation in Europe though is largely unheard of in the USA. Competitors race across unmarked terrain, collecting tokens from waypoints marked on the course map before crossing the finish line. Racers are free to choose any route they like between waypoints. Success depends only partly on physical conditioning and speed, with the skills of reading the terrain and navigating with a compass as stronger factors in separating winners from the pack. Interpreting topography, knowledge of flora, awareness of weather patterns, and other arcane areas of expertise are all called upon in planning an efficient route, while avoiding steep climbs, streams, bogs, dense woods and the like.
Product design is like that. With our goal to create a meaningful user experience, we set out waypoints, milestones that help us maintain a collective orientation and mark progress to the finish line. The trendy use of the term “north star” as a declared team objective implies a good deal of navigation will be needed to get there. Finding the most efficient route from one milestone to the next, like success in orienteering, requires knowledge and experience in any number of arcane areas to keep us from getting stuck in the mud or staring up at an impossible cliff.
Before we shoulder our rucksacks and take that first step, however, we first need to ensure the team shares a comprehensive understanding of the objective. We need to plant a flag at the finish line. Surprisingly, this is a commonly overlooked phase in product design, maybe because it’s too easy to assume a whiteboard sketch was universally understood, or because the phase doesn’t produce anything that looks like a product. Ignoring or diminishing this critical exercise, however, erodes efficiency and adds significant risk of expensive resets later in the process. In this Feasibility and Architecture phase, all stakeholders must be part of a rigorous and detailed conversation, characterized by healthy debate, technical investigations, and market validation. What emerges from this phase is a vetted and reconciled product requirements document, or PRD.
While the PRD is a living document, updated throughout the development process as a design evolves, it serves as the compass pointing to the objective, a standard reference around which the team can confer regularly to maintain a shared orientation. The PRD is considered locked with the release of final design and engineering collateral to production vendors. Conventionally, a Product Manager is responsible for the care and feeding of the PRD in their role as arbiter among stakeholders.
In turn, a PRD does not simply capture arbitrary wants and wishes of the individual stakeholders in the development process, nor is it a platform for generating product concepts. The PRD is an expression of a product concept in quantifiable terms, informing design strategy and engineering tactics in a pragmatic, nuts and bolts way, just like a topographical map is an expression of a landscape allowing us to plan a route. That product concept itself is hammered out in the preceding phase, Product Strategy and Definition, where creative practices like user research and storyboarding combine with market opportunities, product roadmaps and financial models to establish the platform for distilling a clear articulation of the core user experience we’re setting out to create.
In the latter half of the product strategy and definition phase, we enter into a period of intense concept generation and exploration, seeking out the key features, behaviors and characteristics of the product that best facilitate the stated user experience. As these elements come into focus with the industrial design team, the initial draft of the PRD is framed, usually including more questions than answers at this point.
With a map provided by the PRD, let’s get back to the course itself and the waypoints we need to establish as validation milestones in an effective development process. The design process is famously rife with ambiguity, which we can understand as the unknowns we’ll encounter en route to known objectives. Well considered milestones help keep us from drifting too far off course, losing sight of the finish line amidst the proverbial trees. In the wilderness, waypoints can help indicate when it’s time to change tactics and switch to different gear for what’s ahead. In product development, we set out milestones to declare the validation of increasingly more refined and integrated design choices, inviting the cross-functional team to interrogate those assertions and make sure stakeholder concerns are addressed before proceeding.
At Spanner, these milestones delineate iterative prototype cycles, evolving from fundamental functional validation studies through higher resolution, integrated prototypes, towards a version representing in exacting detail the final design solution. In parallel, we define milestones in the product strategy domain to confirm stakeholders are aligned for go-to-market initiatives, as well as the public announcement of the product, setting into motion sales, distribution and customer service activities.
This leaves us with those bogs, streams, forests & cliffs looming somewhere between the waypoints, where our collective experience and expertise allow us to pace out the most efficient, though not always obvious, route across the landscape. In the world of product development, the obstacles show up as potential problems with manufacturability, cost, reliability, time-to-market and other factors that can blow up a development timeline or torpedo product financials. An easy example is the selection of a chipset and other electronic components, an early architectural decision needing foresight of supply chain status, compatibility or scalability issues, and tech support life spans in order to avoid disaster in later development stages or during the market life of the product. Likewise, deep knowledge of materials, fabrication and assembly techniques, and production tolerances inform mechanical design strategies from the outset, keeping our metaphorical boots dry.
Of course at ground level, navigating between waypoints, we’re prepared to deal with the inevitable and seemingly minor impediments, keeping them from becoming larger issues or gaining a cumulative drag on the timeline. We pack along tools to deal with whatever the terrain might foretell, most of which end up staying in the backpack. We would much rather keep all the tools ready, than be without one at exactly the wrong moment.
Orienteering has its roots in Scandinavia, where my family is from, and where people are famously and deeply connected to the outdoors. My dad taught me how to navigate open wilderness in the Sierra Nevada with a map and compass when I was about ten. Our daypacks would always include an array of emergency and contingency items underneath our lunches and extra layers of clothes. And every day we unpacked, checked and repacked that stuff. You’ll not be surprised to hear that exercise turned out to be quite a life lesson for me for helping clients navigate the wilderness of product design.
Arne Lang-Ree is co-founder and CDO of Spanner.
An innovator, thinker and deconstructor, Arne challenges himself and Spanner’s clients to bring sustainable and responsible products to life. Born in Norway, Arne was inspired early by his engineer father to look at things twice. At an early age, he was imagining inventions that ultimately inspired him to earn both his BSME in Mechanical Engineering and MSE in Product Design from Stanford University. Arne has since racked up more than 30 years of product development and mechanical design experience in a wide range of product markets and with globally recognized brands. Arne is rarely without his trusted canine sidekick, Penny, and the duo can be found at the Spanner office creating together or walking the Silicon Valley for inspiration.
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