Swiftly Move Through Any Design Process With These Powerful Tools

The following is adapted from Learning to Build.

As an innovator and entrepreneur, I design a lot of products. To do that successfully, I have to continually consider how everything will fit together as a whole. I also need to take into account a multitude of perspectives about the future product (including my customers’ perspectives, my designers’ perspectives, my builders’ perspectives, and so on).

Along with these and other considerations, I also need to think about what tradeoffs I’ll have to make. That means I have to continually consider cost and demand. In fact, this is especially important, since focusing solely on making the product perfect usually ends up with a project that’s way over budget and may not even be well received in the marketplace.

Luckily, there are a couple of tricks I employ that force me to see tradeoffs and thereby swiftly move me through the design process: setting constraints and seeing the big picture.

Setting Constraints

One of the keys to forcing tradeoffs in innovation, as well as selling, is a time wall or a time box. A time wall can be artificial or not, but it’s the fabricated notion that you must complete something by a certain date.

If there’s no time wall, you might innovate forever rather than bring your thing to market. But the moment a time wall is established, it forces you to make tradeoffs. What’s most important? What’s least important? It sets your priorities. It’s a triangulation between time, cost, and quality.

No one can have it all! A time wall pushes you to decide rather than endlessly tweak and expand your thing. Think of an hourglass: it’s always running out of time.

When innovating, I give myself what I call a time box: I have this much time, to do that much work. After I set the time box, I shape the work to fit into that box. When you innovate without a time box, you end up continually playing with your creation, adding on features and benefits. As a result, you fail to make explicit tradeoffs. When you hold the time box constant, you give yourself a time wall that puts pressure on the situation. It allows you to see what’s really important.

Another effective constraint is a dollar wall: I can’t spend more than this amount of money to get that accomplished. Again, it forces you to make explicit tradeoffs by placing yet another set of constraints on your creation. The dollar wall forces you to scope the work and de-risk.

Seeing the Big Picture

Forcing yourself to view the whole so that you can see how the pieces are interconnected is another way to help manage tradeoffs. In my office, for instance, I have a room lined with boards that represent categories of work: suspects, prospects, proposals, etc. Then within each board are cards for the work within that category. This allows me to see the whole while realizing that I have a limited capacity. Therefore, I can shift my priorities and easily make tradeoffs.

Playing with a set of possible scenarios is an excellent way to see the big picture. When a company comes to me for advice, I’ll use this technique to help flush out potential opportunities and weaknesses. I might say: “Imagine that I just bought you. Here’s what I would do….” Or I might ask them questions: If I was your competitor, what should I do? If I’m a startup trying to disrupt your industry, what should I do?

Similarly, when someone comes to me for help building their thing, I’ll present several possible scenarios to flush out what’s important: “If I wanted that done in half the time, what would you change? How much would it cost?”. Or, “If I gave you unlimited money, what would you do? How long would it take?” Or even, “If I gave you unlimited time to make your thing perfect, how much time would you need?”

Setting different types of possible scenarios forces you to think about your thing differently. Remember, you can’t have it all. Do you value time or money? What’s good enough? What does progress look like? It also helps you see the next iteration of your thing. It’s a way to remember that everything is a draft: in the first round we do this, and in the second round we do that. You’re not saying that you’ll never do it; you’re just prioritizing.

Make the Right Connections

Most people plan horribly because they can’t see the big picture; they plan for what they know, but they don’t plan for the unknowns. And therefore, they are building their thing off assumptions. To see the tradeoffs, you’ve got to see the whole so that you can make connections, and therefore make better decisions in whatever you’re trying to do.

Instead of making isolated decisions and asking, “Do I do this, or do I do that?” you are now taking a step back, seeing the bigger picture, and understanding the cost, time, and performance implications of your decisions.

Successful innovators and entrepreneurs do not view tradeoffs as a compromise. Rather, they see them as necessary tools for managing the speed at which they move forward. And instead of trying to make all the progress in one step by building the “best” version, they see half steps to make progress and evolve to the solution through multiple iterations.

When you can’t see tradeoffs, you get stuck. It’s like continually trying to put 10 pounds of crap into a five-pound bag. Overstuffing the bag never works. You’re just left with unintended consequences, where you solve one problem just to create another. That’s why you must set constraints and look at the big picture. Ultimately, that’s the only way to understand which problems you’re going to care about.

For more advice on how to swiftly and effectively move through any design process, you can find Learning to Build on Amazon.

Bob Moesta is a builder, teacher, entrepreneur, author, and co-founder of The Re-Wired Group, a design and development firm based in Detroit, Michigan. Early in his career, Bob received an education in building and launching new products from renowned innovators Dr. Clayton Christensen, Dr. Genichi Taguchi, Dr. W. Edwards Deming, and Dr. Willie Hobbs Moore. The worldview he gained has enabled him to work on and launch thousands of new products over the last thirty years, be the founder of ten different companies, and become a mentor to the next generation of builders and problem solvers. Bob is an adjunct lecturer at the Kellogg School at Northwestern University and a guest lecturer at Harvard Business School, and MIT’s Sloan School of Management.