The U-Curve of Project Leadership — Using Your Time for Maximum Impact

Whether it’s agile, lean or waterfall, there are a myriad of big and small decisions that a team makes to influence a product’s outcome. But none are more key than the beginning and end. While the bulk of the work and course-correction happens in the vast middle, the bookends of a project are what determines success or failure, each for very different reasons.

The U-Curve of Effectiveness

Most project lifecycles have a beginning and an end, but that’s the only thing they share in common. The beginning is where critical decisions and alignments take shape. It’s where problems are defined using a combination of quantitative or qualitative measurements. It’s also where an articulation of what success looks like happens. This takes time and effort to do well, with a direct investment of leadership time and effort to create real value for users (and project team).

The beginning does not end with a feature request or idea. It requires a holistic, actionable strategy, a vision for why the project is worthwhile to pursue, and what’s needed to accomplish in measurable terms. Framing these discussions and providing leadership is what project leaders must find the time (and attention) to do at the start.

In the case of Netflix and Amazon, they always start with the end, working backwards with the creation of a PRFAQ, which includes a forward-looking press release (PR), frequently-asked questions (FAQ), and design mockups of what the customer will experience. The goal of the PRFAQ is to show how the product will solve a customer’s problem, and to align everyone working on the product about the expected value to be created. The approach is designed to address what Amazon calls “perpetual customer dissatisfaction,” a belief that customers won’t be satisfied tomorrow by what’s available today.

For that reason, kickoff and discovery must include leadership and a cross-functional team representing as many sides of the problem as possible. This is not an everyman design thinking session where everyone is a designer. It’s insight- and empathy-driven, informed by people close to the problem. Bring in customer reps, people at the front-lines, research, sales, marketing, and operations to inform the team and product owner of what’s needed today and what tomorrow might look like.

As a leader, devote more time to this early stage and you’ll reap rewards later with more time and less stress. This includes time spent helping to shape and define the problem, and to set the necessary constraints to work within, whether that’s timeline, budget, or people. It takes time to be more inclusive and thorough, and for that reason, more effort is needed to get clarity on what the innovation could look like.

Management as old as wine

An analogy for the U-curve approach is the ancient art of growing and making wine. Understanding the best varietal to grow based on the terroir and climate, then planting the vines, is both an art and a science. It’s also where the big decisions are made. The middle portion of pruning, pest control, and general upkeep is where the bulk of the production happens, where the sweetness of the grape is built. But it’s also where less effort is required if the first part was done right. Where the magic happens though is in the end — the harvesting, sorting, fermenting, crafting, and bottling the wine.

The properties of the wine you drink is a direct byproduct of a series of decisions that were made long before you opened that bottle. For the middle part, you must rely on several factors that are mostly out of your control — the environment, soil, and weather — but you are still needed to track when things are looking off or the conditions change suddenly from wet to dry. That’s when you may be called upon to prune differently, to influence the direction of the production to maximize the vine’s output.

Design-Builders, Not Design Thinkers

The middle part of the project timeline is where you want your A-team of design builders, the people who are both doers and thinkers. These are people who innately invested in the outcome, who have skin in the game, and have the time and resources to experiment and iterate on ideas.

The problem with the design thinking approach is that it relies on non-experts, with no skin in the game, to walk in someone else’s shoes for an afternoon, a day, or a week. This is useful to get a big picture and to generate ideas, but lousy at truly innovating. Instead, what’s needed are people who can walk the walk, not just talk the talk, and do it endlessly, like a song stuck in someone’s head. They must cycle through this over and over again through the entire bottom part of the U-curve.

Harvest Time

Now that you are nearing launch day, make yourself available as this will often require more time and energy than you expect, even more than the beginning. For that’s where critical de-scoping and tradeoffs happen, such as security vs ease of use, design polish vs device compatibility, performance vs visual impact.

Ideally, all those considerations would have been defined in the beginning, but that’s nearly impossible. Things come up. And that’s where tracking at a continuous, but low intensity way, making decisions as you go, will make the end more productive. The end phase will be more of an additive process rather than a negative one. In other words, this approach will allow you to find ways to enhance the experience rather than ways to lessen it. This is the point where quality improvements are maximized, such as UI polish, performance, and defect resolution.

The Bottom Line

The U-curve provides a framework for using your time wisely, helping to ensure you as a project leader are effective when time is scarce and ambiguity is high. It boils down to first, getting involved early in a meaningful way to shape the conversation. Second, letting the designer/builder/thinker (not design thinkers) do their job as you oversee them periodically to steer the ship. Third, getting heavily involved towards the end to make the hard decisions needed to meet the goals set out in the beginning.

With this approach, while your overall time and effort may be the same, it’s applied in the extremes, the beginning and end, where it’s most needed to launch a quality product.

Ehab is a product discovery advisor and coach, helping product teams accelerate their discovery process to make better products, faster.

Throughout his 20+ year career in Silicon Valley, Ehab has worn many hats, from Product Manager and Director of UX to User Researcher and Developer. His clients include fast-paced startups to Fortune 500 companies. Ehab teaches teams the skills, mindset, and processes to develop concepts informed by insights gleaned from continuous customer feedback.

Details Make the Experience

I am guided by a few core principles, gleaned from a lot of trial and error (i.e., doing a lot of projects):

Rule #1. Design for oneself first.
Do this not because it's easy, but because it's hard. It also happens to be the most worthwhile kind of design and the best way to produce something that "just works." You are your worst critic, and for that reason, we tend to work on projects we either understand, need, or ideas that simply pique our curiosity. It’s easier to design starting with empathy when you’ve actually walked in their shoes, not just imagined it on a whiteboard.

Rule #2. You are what you mobilize. 
We believe that mobile's built-in scarcity and form factor help simplify the design process, revealing the product's "soul." It helps clarify why the product exists by sharpening its focus, and delivering the minimum viable product.

Rule #3. Design via negativa — adding by subtraction. 
Innovation comes when you can do more with less -- the most loved products ask more of themselves than of their users. Once you've identified what your product or service is all about, it's time to peel everything else away. That means paring down that "wish list" into something actionable and worth doing right. By eliminating superfluous things, we can achieve the clarity to make things better/simpler.

Rule #4. Avoid adding features at the cost of complexity.
Features and updates are important, but the feature of 'simplicity' should remain front and center with every decision. There's a ton of great ideas, just like there are an infinite number of notes on a piano. The trick is knowing what combination of keys and chords to press to produce that beautiful piece of music. The rest is noise.

Rule #5. Small is beautiful.
Big things are essential, but small is beautiful. Whether it's the spacing of a layout, load time, the words on the screen, or the gradient that's just a bit jarring, details matter. They are the all-too-forgotten element of user experience, the collective "Feel" in look and feel. By getting the details just right, simple design becomes invisible, letting your product speak for itself.

Rule #6. Design is a language.
Great experiences are based on the powerful idea that pictures speak a thousand words. In product design, successful products create a visual language that allow us to connect with them (even emotionally sometimes) and they in turn to us. Like a good conversation, the design engages us, guides us, and ultimately becomes as seamless as interacting with the real world, and maybe even easier.

Rule #7. Speed is a feature.
This should be obvious to anyone who's used a website or mobile app, but often overlooked by those creating them. Moore's law holds true for user expectations, too. Fail the speed test and risk losing your users to the next, new thing.

Rule #8. Design for your power users with ADHD.
It's no surprise that the average song length is 3 minutes, and it’s been sinking over the past 15 years. Most users have short attention spans when it comes to technology -- power users are the worst. Win them over, and you'll eventually win the rest. These early adopters help define your product and answer the key assumptions behind your product strategy. Get their attention, and the admiration of others will follow.

Rule #9. Prototype early and often.
Enough said.

Rule #10. Visualize and communicate the product vision
Einstein was right, "Imagination is more important than knowledge." A well-conceived product starts with a clear picture of what the product should be. The idea is one thing, while visualizing it is another. Few people are gifted enough to envision what something should look like. So, if you're not a Steve Jobs, a Hitchcock, or a Michaelangelo, the guidelines above become even more important. 

Here’s to the Doers, Thinkers, and the Crazy Ones

“The people that really create the things that change this industry are both the thinker and doer in one person.”

— Steve Jobs

At the core of innovation is an inventive mindset. This is a person that is eager and capable of attempting countless trials and errors until their vision is achieved. It is an approach that doesn’t work well in the corporate world, where deadlines, budgets, and specialization rule the day.

In early ideation phases, however, an opposite approach is required. Taking an idea, reframing it, and running it through the mill doesn’t play nice with timelines and well-defined roles and responsibilities. To address this problem, we’ve seen the rise of incubator-like groups within larger organizations, with names like innovation labs, accelerators, incubators and research hubs. The goal usually revolves around coming up with ideas faster and better via out of the box thinking.

However, where corporations fail is the unwillingness to promote the inventive, falling-forward mindset. They’re seemingly unable to reconcile that great ideas cannot simply be willed into existence. It also doesn’t instantly appear by throwing so-called innovation leaders, design experts and researchers in the mix. Innovation is not magic, it’s mostly perspiration, and a little spot-on inspiration. And this is where corporate leaders confuse inspired ideas for innovation.

For in the wild, there are no incubators, no walled gardens, and no moats to protect you from failure. It’s the willingness for trial and error, combined with the need to solve a real problem, that keeps the thinker/doer going. In larger organizations, it takes the thinkers and doers working together to make this happen.

Every generation has its Thomas Edisons, Michael Michelangelos, and Sam Farbers (creator of OXO tools) that are able to single-handedly merge the thinker and doer into one person. But these are truly the crazy ones, the brilliant thinkers with a work ethic to never give up. For the rest of us, it takes a team of people constantly ideating on a solution, grinding it out with the right talent to create that new product that moves people. This is the messy reality of innovation.

The inventive thinker/doer isn’t content with merely diverging on ideas in design thinking workshops, but rather in finding real value in converging, and doing the hard work of thinking through a design solution to its end.

And along the way, if you’re lucky enough, you may create a SpaceX rocket, or settle with a flying car. In either case, you’ve done something that’s never been done before, innovate.