Working with the Product Team

When designers synthesize a solution, programmers often have difficulty accepting their authority and tend to take matters into their own hands. Anyone who has worked for a while with programmers has had this experience: The team meets and everyone agrees on the course of action. Everyone acknowledges their tasks and what the program will look like. Two weeks later, when the group reconvenes, a programmer says — without any trace of irony — "Yeah, I decided to do it this way instead. I thought it was better," while the rest of the team gnashes their collective teeth. Even if it is better (which isn't often), it is still wrong to change things unilaterally when a team is depending on you.

A rigorous development process that incorporates design as an equal partner with engineering, marketing, and business management — and which includes well-defined responsibilities and authority for each group — can dramatically improve the situation. The following division of responsibilities, balanced by an equal division of authority, can dramatically improve design success and organizational support of the product throughout the development cycle and beyond (Korman, 2001). You should agitate for these in your own organization:

• The design team has responsibility for users' satisfaction with the product. Most organizations do not currently hold anyone responsible for this. To carry out this responsibility, designers must have the authority to decide how the product will behave. They also need access to information: They must observe and speak to potential users about their needs, to engineers about technological opportunities and constraints, to marketing about opportunities and requirements, and to management about the kind of product to which the organization will commit.

• The engineering team has authority over the system technology (the implementation details) that users do not see. For the design to deliver its benefit, engineering must have the responsibility for building, as specified, the behaviors that the designers define, while keeping on budget and on schedule. Engineers, therefore, need a clear description of the product's behaviors, which will guide what they build and drive their time and cost estimates. This description must come from the design team.

• The marketing team has responsibility for the product's appeal to customers, so they must have authority over all communications with the customer. (Remember that customers are not the same as users; customers purchase products, but don't necessarily use them as end users would.) In order to do this, the team members need access to information resources including the results of designers' research, as well as research of their own.

• Management has responsibility for the profitability of the resulting product and, therefore has the authority to make decisions about what the other groups will work on. To make those decisions, management needs to receive clear information from the other groups: design's product definitions, marketing's projections of sales, and engineering's projection of the time and cost to create the product.