Designing + Managing a Software Product Design

At Yahoo! I’m designing a product (something that I love doing :) ). What Yahoo! had was a new technology & what I’m doing here is that I’m using that technology to make a new product for Yahoo. This is great opportunity for me because not only that I am trained into designing products (and not only UIs) but also that I’m really passionate about ‘designing'. I have been quite lucky that I have been given full liberty and great amount of “charge” of this project.

There have been quite a number of learnings as this project is moving. What I have realized and what I’m learning is that designer needs to be good manager. As a designer what I need is to innovate, be creative and bring new ideas to the table; and as a manager I have to break up the designing process into phases, where each phase leading to some conclusion/learning and the next phase building on the learning of the previous one, constantly evaluate results, build and modify timeframes (based on conclusions from the previous phase which might sometimes be surprising - It very often happens when your tying to do something new. Where the conclusions can not be very definitively predicted.) And then to make sure the project is completed “satisfactorily” with in time frame. It’s one learning that one can not get in an academic environment and one that is very vital for a designer.

I’m not a management guru and this is not from any book. It a reflection of what I’m doing or have done. It’s sometimes good to sit back and ‘reflect’ on what you are doing or what you are learning…so here it goes… with my experience this is what one needs:

VISION – a vision to see the not only the results but also in between milestones.

ANALYSIS – to be able to break that vision into reasonable milestones and to analyze the problem statement.

FOCUS and CLEAR – it very easy to get carried away as a designer and lose track of the original problem statement. A clear focus brings a better design.

FLEXIBILTY – both to accommodate new ideas and to respond to it (by modifying the project plan to accommodate the findings). With whatever little experience I have most often a good Field Study results in some surprises to designer/user study researchers; and it’s very easy to keep a blind eye to them if we are too biased or in love with our designs. We generally tend to see thing the way we want to, things that support our assumptions and ignore the real learning.

What I have been missing out is ‘People’s Skill’. That’s because till now I had a good experience from people. I have been a little lucky. So I would include all that one I face it or get a LEARNING from it ;)

It’s an important aspect though…