Notes on Maria Giudice’s Remaking the Making Company: Moving from Product to Experience

(From Maria’s session at EUX 16: The Politics of Innovation)

Maria’s identified several key themes to affecting change in large orgs:

1. Build community
   • Design isn’t a noun—it’s an active verb, a multidisciplinary effort shared by the team. Everyone’s a designer at some level!
   • The ultimate goal of design isn’t to create artifacts, it’s to build something new or create change in something that exists
   • Design tools aren’t for our exclusive use—they’re the org’s tools for everyone to share
   • (Ok this is my point) Don’t get hung up on the preciousness of design artifacts
     • Create them in a democratic tool (like Excel or Word) that’s used across the org
     • Sure, they’ll be less pretty but anyone in the org can now edit or add to the artifacts—they don’t “belong” to design as they would if made in a design tool
     • This will help create buy-in on the democratized design process from non-designers
   • Run an “X Summit” to help introduce design thinking and UX across the org
2. Focus on the customers
   • Customers = people. Users = faceless entities. Dump the word “user”—only UX folks and drug dealers use the term!
   • Focus on how you can start to co-create with customers. Then magnify the outcome across the enterprise and figure how to amplify it across the org
3. Connect experiences
   • What are the consistent touchpoints shared by the org’s multiple products? Identify the most obvious/important ones
   • Run a company-wide design hackathon to crowdsource ideas across the org
   • Identify signature product moments and the org’s most valuable assets
   • Assign tiger teams to create change within the above
4. Forget the MVP—who wants a cake with no icing?
   • Focus on the MLP—minimum lovable product. See Oonie Chase on this. Emphasize that an MLV requires a product to be easy to use, valuable AND well-crafted

So dig in as a team and get some lovable shit done!

Nice sketch (thanks!) of the talk by @andreaop_ux:

About Maria (from her Twitter): Vice president of experience design at autodesk, co-author of RIse of the DEO, mother to Max and Olivia