THE BRAND GAP — MARTY NEUMEIER

Solving the Engineering Strategy crisis.

These are speaking notes for my October 4th, QCon talk in San Francisco. See a video of this talk. Slides for this talk. Over the course of my career, I’ve frequently heard from colleagues, team members and random internet strangers with the same frustration: the company doesn’t have an Engineering strategy. I don’t think this problem is unique to Engineering: it’s also common to hear folks complain that they’re missing a strategy for Product, Design or Business. But, whereas I don’t feel particularly confident speaking to why so many companies are missing a clear Business or Product strategy, I’ve come to have some clear opinions about why so many engineering organizations don’t have a written strategy.

6 steps to perfecting an open source product strategy

The future of building great products lies in breaking down the boundaries between business and technical thinking.

Design: A powerful but neglected marketing tool

Design is a potent marketing tool that can be used to gain competitive distinctiveness and provide consumer satisfaction. But with few exceptions, most companies neglect or mismanage design as a marketing tool. The authors describe what constitutes good design; how companies can employ design to enhance their products, environments, communications, and corporate identity; and how companies can improve the working relationship between designers and marketing people. The article includes two audit instruments which companies can use for measuring company design sensitivity and design management effectiveness. Design (Entwurf und Gestaltung von Produkten) ist ein wirksames Marketinginstrument im Rahmen der Konkurrenzstrategie und zur Erhöhung der Konsumentenzufriedenheit. Mit einigen Ausnahmen jedoch vernachlässigen die meisten Unternehmungen das Design als Marketinginstrument oder setzen es schlecht ein. Die Autoren beschreiben, wodurch sich ein gutes Design auszeichnet, wie Unternehmungen das Design zur Aufwertung und Verbesserung ihrer Produkte, zur Abgrenzung in ihrer Umwelt und in ihrer Kommunikationspolitik und im Bereiche der Corporate Identity einsetzen können. Ferner zeigen die Autoren, wie die Unternehmungen die Zusammenarbeit zwischen den Produktgestaltern (designers) und den Marketingspezialisten verbessern können. Der Beitrag zeigt zwei Kontrollinstrumente für die Unternehmung zur Abschätzung der Design-Empfindlichkeit von Unternehmungen und zur Messung der Effizienz des DesignManagements (Handhabung der Produktgestaltung).

Who—and What—Will Customers Become? - DesignIntelligence

Innovation transforms the customer as well as the product

Portfolio of Work | Nivedha Nirmal

A curated mix of brand identities, digital design, and experiments - crafted with clarity and taste, reflecting my approach to design.

Design Thinking

In the past, design has most often occurred fairly far downstream in the development process and has focused on making new products aesthetically attractive or enhancing brand perception through smart, evocative advertising. Today, as innovation’s terrain expands to encompass human-centered processes and services as well as products, companies are asking designers to create ideas rather than to simply dress them up. Brown, the CEO and president of the innovation and design firm IDEO, is a leading proponent of design thinking—a method of meeting people’s needs and desires in a technologically feasible and strategically viable way. In this article he offers several intriguing examples of the discipline at work. One involves a collaboration between frontline employees from health care provider Kaiser Permanente and Brown’s firm to reengineer nursing-staff shift changes at four Kaiser hospitals. Close observation of actual shift changes, combined with brainstorming and rapid prototyping, produced new procedures and software that radically streamlined information exchange between shifts. The result was more time for nursing, better-informed patient care, and a happier nursing staff. Another involves the Japanese bicycle components manufacturer Shimano, which worked with IDEO to learn why 90% of American adults don’t ride bikes. The interdisciplinary project team discovered that intimidating retail experiences, the complexity and cost of sophisticated bikes, and the danger of cycling on heavily trafficked roads had overshadowed people’s happy memories of childhood biking. So the team created a brand concept—“Coasting”—to describe a whole new category of biking and developed new in-store retailing strategies, a public relations campaign to identify safe places to cycle, and a reference design to inspire designers at the companies that went on to manufacture Coasting bikes. [hbr_brightcove id=”4443548301001″]

The Informed Life with Andy Budd

Overview of a conversation on how designers can create value in early-stage startups.

DesignABetterBusiness.tools | Tool Overview

Search and download all of the tools from the book Design A Better Business

Being Open by Design

“We were born as a radically open, radically participatory organization, unbound to traditional corporate structure. We played a role in…

Rebuilding product strategy for the next era

For tech leaders navigating change, this is how we’re doing it differently. By Suba Vasudevan, COO, Mozilla.

Otherkind

An interface and brand design studio

How to not screw up your product strategy | Jade Rubick - Engineering Leadership

An overview of common mistakes people make while developing a product strategy, tips for creating a successful strategy, and how to communicate and execute on a product strategy.

Know How

Jony Ive’s Philosophy of Design

Tynan Purdy

A design thinker and builder bringing rigor and craft to strategy and products.

Tynan Purdy

A design thinker and builder bringing rigor and craft to strategy and products.