Dominika Babulicová

It always strikes me how creative people get when it comes to keeping time
records. I’ve heard about filling double-the-time inputs, writing custom
scripts, or even putting the optical mouse into a glass cup to generate fake
activity so the corporate computer stays awake. But what surprises me the most,
these stories usually come from my smartest, most lively friends. That’s how I
realized it’s not about laziness. People just don’t believe the time records are
worth anything. 

The core problem with agility
When it comes to implementing agility, most companies think it’s about tools and
processes. Breaking down silos into multidisciplinary teams, introducing kanban,
training Scrum masters or having those beautifully tidied Jira boards... But
imagine how many times you’ve found yourself or your team being late with the
project deadline although you followed the process and used the tools with 100%
accuracy. Still, the work got prolonged somehow or you realized the whole
initial roadmap wasn’t estimated well.

Tools themselves are misleading. Often this is mistaken because organizations
are more focused on iterating the visible elements of agile transformation,
although the less visible are the ones that matter and have the real impact. Of
course you’ll appreciate tools and processes, but becoming agile solely because
of them is nonsense. Agility – as an ability to adapt to change – is less about
specific practice, but rather about attitude.

Being agile starts with data
In Lighting Beetle*, we’re strong believers in data-informed decision making.
And just like we can use it when analyzing a customer research, we can do that
for work estimations, too. Being able to confidently say how long a certain task
or project would take, was actually the very first step we took to transform
into an agile studio.

Back in 2009 when LB* was established, we wanted to do every project that came
our way. To deliver it in a record-breaking time and the highest of quality. But
we quickly realized this is no easy feat. We struggled with resource
estimations, faced tight deadlines and felt overloaded. And we put the pressure
on ourselves by unconsciously agreeing to unrealistic commitments.

Only when we implemented time tracking into our workflow, we started to see
patterns and the work became more predictable. The time tracking reports became
an essential tool. Not just for account managers making invoices, but for any of
our designers or developers deciding about how to invest their time to bring the
highest contribution to overall value. We learned to work agile and it enabled
us to deliver on time and in budget.

Measure time for better decisions
1. Start benchmarking time spent on tasks and regularly evaluate it. Not to boss
around but to identify possible obstacles and collectively discuss how to
overcome them. That’s what all the agile ceremonies exist for, as this article
explains
[https://www.lbstudio.sk/blog/lean-ux-rituals-an-invaluable-tool-for-agile-design-teams]
.

2. Gain confidence – yourself and in your team – by being aware of your efforts.
Knowing how difficult a certain challenge was, enables you to plan the next one
better. Data is useless if we don’t learn from it, so let people be conscious
about their work and feel in control. At LB*, this awareness helped us 
implement
the Lean UX process
[https://www.lbstudio.sk/journal/lean-ux-our-recipe-for-agile-design].

3. Once people feel confident about their knowledge and experience, they are
ready to take over the responsibility. They start to make bold informed
decisions and plan the most impactful work autonomously. And that’s the moment
of agile transformation you’re so desperately aiming for.

Confidence is sexy
A client recently told me: “Agility is not a threat. It’s like a fire. It scared
people until they learned how to tame it.” I bet you’ve heard this one before:
The trick to boost agility is in the mindset change. For us, the trick was
hidden in time tracking and you can read the whole story in the Toggl’s case
study about Lighting Beetle*
[https://toggl.com/track/customers/lighting-beetle/]. 

Data allowed us to gain confidence in decision making and taught us enormous
learnings about running agile projects. We allocate resources better and deliver
on time and within budget with almost zero scope creep. And thanks to agile
decisions we also succeed in keeping our work and lives balanced. I highly
recommend trying it yourself.

Why time tracking is (not) useless in agile environments

Over the past 30 years, design has become a key tool in the transformation of
companies. In the tenth episode of the Minimum Viable Podcast, Michal Blažej
examines how the design segment and the role of designers have changed and
developed over the years. He invited Anton Schubert, a British designer and
consultant, who years ago taught LB* design thinking to the microphone.

Anton started his career as a car mechanic and has been designing since 1993.
For more than a decade he worked for such important companies as IDEO
[https://www.ideo.com/eu] and Futurice [https://futurice.com/], and today he has
his own company Good Growth [https://goodgrowth.co.uk/], which is dedicated to
sustainable design.

You can find the Minimum Viable Podcast on:

 * Spotify [https://open.spotify.com/show/5aRmaKcccGkKT5USoN3hMB]
 * Apple Podcasts
   [https://podcasts.apple.com/sk/podcast/minimum-viable-podcast/id1475081821]
 * Google Podcasts
   [https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy9jNTY5NjcwL3BvZGNhc3QvcnNz]
 * Anchor [https://anchor.fm/minimum-viable-podcast/]
 * Castbox [https://castbox.fm/ch/2223485]
 * or below in the transcript.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I mentioned in the introduction that you are a veteran designer. Can you give us
a quick run through your job experiences? What formed Anton the designer
becoming who he is today?

I have to say that what really made me a designer was the first job I ever had.
I left school really early and all I wanted to do was fix cars. So I became a
car mechanic. When I look back at that first job I had, I think that was the
spark for my interest in all things designed. You know – when you think about
fixing things and solving problems and taking things apart... A very physical
activity. It relates quite well to what designers do, but in a different way.

And then, long story short, I moved from car mechanics into engineering. I
worked at an engineering factory as a machine operator, where I met engineers
and designers for the first time. I mean a mechanical engineer here, not a
digital engineer. And not really having any kind of education in what design
actually was back then, it was these guys from Japan who inspired me what I
could do. So I went to study three dimensional design. I ended up being a model
maker, we’re talking like 28 years ago. A model maker back then was somebody who
used to make prototypes. You make models of designs. And my area was very much
on consumer electronics. Back then, we were making works-like-looks-like models
of computers, telephones, hairdryers, toothbrushes... Anything that was a
physical product. And I got a job at IDEO as a model maker in a London office.
If anybody knows IDEO, it works all over the world. We were working with some of
the biggest customers in the world.

I was there for twelve years and it was my design school, I learned so much
about design. I went from being a model maker to being a client relationship
lead and running huge projects with really big international clients. But then,
I have a Finnish wife. I was already doing some work with Nokia in Finland. I
was teaching as well. And I decided to move to Finland. And from then on, I've
had a number of jobs in Finland, which have been building off each other.

The first job, I moved to brand strategy, because I realized that the design
work in IDEO was never really thinking about the story of the brand. And it was
more about just the thing that we were actually designing. Then I moved to a
company called Futurice, which was a technology company. I'd never worked in
technology, so it was something I really felt I needed to get on board with, and
I became their head of design. That was another good learning curve for me,
because we're at that point merging design with technology with business. That
was the start of the digitalization revolution, really, and helping our
customers to digitalize. And then I got a head of design job in Vincit, a
similar kind of digitalization company.

I want to mention, I joined this company called Scope Impact, which is actually
quite inspiring because I ended up doing social impact work. I was in Africa for
a few months designing health services for adolescent young women and got really
keen and interested in this more purposeful design work, something that has more
meaning. And also sustainability was a really big passion of mine. Since then,
I've been developing sustainability offerings. I've been doing customer work
around sustainable transformation, and that's what the Good Growth company is –
a company using a design lead methodology that helps customers transform and
move towards delivering on their sustainability strategies.

> Designers inspire people to do things that they wouldn't normally do through
vision, through dreams, through insight, through really beautiful envisioned
futures.
When you talk about design, you talk about engineering, you talk about different
kinds of problems. What kind of non-digital designs have you been doing in the
pre-Futurice era?

We didn't have the Internet or mobile phones, designers weren't designing that
stuff. For instance, when I was working at IDEO, we used to do a lot of work for
companies like Nestle and Johnson & Johnson. We used to design shampoo bottles,
IDEO was designing a dog toothbrush for the American market... So, applying the
design approach to understand how you would design a toothbrush for your pet.
There's nothing digital about that but it's the same approach as we use now for
digitalization, but it's a very physical outcome.

Some of the stuff that we did at IDEO back in the day was, there was a lot of
hype and effort around organizational design, and it's still very strong. It's
called transformation these days, but we did projects where we would go into
companies and coach companies on how to work better together. That's definitely
not a physical thing, it's not even a software thing. It's a human interaction
thing.

When we look at the design from a more general perspective, do you spot any
phases of development of the design industry or how the impact of design has
changed over years?

Yeah, there's been some really big ones. If I think about just my career, I
think the first big driver for design was user-centeredness. And even now, I
still make customers that think this is a new concept. But I think that was one
of the big things that IDEO also built their business on, even back in the late
70s when we started to be user-centric and designed for the user. Then, the next
biggest influence on how design was done was the emergence of software. I
remember Bill Moggridge already promoting this whole idea of interaction design
– designing for software as well as hardware. It wasn't just about form and
function anymore, it was about user experience. And that was definitely because
of the digital revolution.

And then, there's quite many smaller influences around how design is done, one
is design as a methodology. Design at that point started to become a methodology
and approach to problem solving rather than just being the thing you did when
you designed a product or service. Whether it was for brand strategy, whether it
was for transformational, organizational stuff... you could apply the design
thinking methodologies. And I think the whole startup world – everybody wanted
to be a startup – where design played a huge role in merging all of these things
together: user centricity, prototyping, sprints, conceptualization, testing,
minimum viable products... That was a very design led approach when you think
about innovation, and innovation was all part of that.

But now, in regards to what I do now, it's now very much around sustainability.
Design as a problem solving approach to sustainability in all its forms, not
just environmental but social sustainability and also business sustainability
design. It's a great approach to that size of problem that we are faced with in
the next few decades.

In addition to his career as a designer and consultant, Anton Schubert also
teachesI remember when we worked, like, twelve years ago on a website I usually
talked to a marketing department. But today we talk to C-level people about
design. Clearly, it has changed over years how they perceive design in
corporations. Has the impact of design changed and grew bigger?

It has, for sure. But I think it depends on what kind of company you're working
with. There's a maturity curve. There are some companies that are design lead
from day one. But there's still many companies, big corporate organizations who
don't understand the value of design and don't know how to apply it in their
business and often see design as a sort of aesthetic layer to products and
services.

It's a little bit more mature in the UK and maybe in some parts of the US, but I
think it's a people thing. You meet some CEOs and C-level people who really get
how to apply it in a business sense. You meet other C-level people who don't
understand it. They're very traditional in the way they run their businesses.

But overall, yes, design is being considered a viable approach. It's also being
compared to the old way of doing things. When you think about the McKinsey,
Accenture and other management consultancies, design is an attractive
alternative. It's a desirable approach that brings new things that those other
approaches don't bring. And I think some businesses are really looking to do
things differently.

When we enter some of the more conservative industries, it seems to me like:
Okay, maybe this is just the way they operate and it works for them. Maybe
design doesn't have room here. Do you think that the companies actually will
evolve into more design-centric and user-centric?

My game plan is yes, they will. If you look at the challenges we have, there are
three words I often talk about that designers bring to the table really nicely.
They are inspiration, creativity and collaboration.

Inspiring people to do things that they wouldn't normally do through vision,
through dreams, through insight, through really beautiful envisioned futures.
Designers are pretty good at doing that stuff. And I think we should be even
better at that, because that's really what people need at this point. They need
a sense of hope, they need a sense that we can have a really great future. And
designers are creative people, right? They can do that.

The second word is creativity. So the approach to solving problems, it's not
static. Of course, there are many design tools out there. There's co-creation,
prototyping, user insight, conceptualization... there's all sorts of tools we
can use. But I think designers are really flexible, adaptable people, and they
can bring new creative approaches to problem solving and that's really needed
now. Creativity is needed to solve against some of these really complex
challenges.

And the third word is collaboration. If you look at some of the problems we're
solving now, they're very complex and they're systemic. There are
multi-stakeholder problems with people across value chains who’ve never worked
together before. And especially if we want to solve sustainability challenges
with design, we've got to become radical collaborators. We've got to become the
people who are able to get all of those different people in a room together,
simplify a complex dialogue and help people to make decisions.

> Designers are crafts people. Whether it's about strategy or whether it's about a
UI, it's a crafted thing.
When we worked together, you had these really great presentation skills, you
were able to decide quickly, had a lot of empathy, you were able to generate
ideas quickly and interconnect people to collaborate. It seems that part of that
you still see as the future skills and attitudes that the designers need to
adopt. What skillset the designers used to have and what will they need in the
future?

Not everybody has to talk big picture and vision. We need people to create real
things as well. So those UX and UI and those detailed designers, those people
who visualize beautiful concepts and bring them to life, they are very
important. It definitely helps if designers have that core skill, a specialism.
I see a lot of designers coming out of universities as generalists, but it's
important to develop your craft. And designers are crafts people. Whether it's
about strategy or whether it's about a UI, it's a crafted thing.

To be a holistic designer is the thing that we're developing now, designers need
to think about the big picture. They need to connect the dots between the detail
and the big picture. IDEO taught you to think about desirability, feasibility
and viability. Nowadays designers have still got to think about that, but
they've also got to think about:

 * Does the customer want it?
 * Does it make money?
 * Does it harm the environment?
 * Is it good not only for the individual, but does it improve the lives of that
   individual's community, the society that individual lives within?

You do need to have a more holistic, big picture view on things. It's going to
be really important because the problems are becoming more complex. The
solutions will naturally become more complex. But you'll have to look at more
things to find a good solution.

That's exactly the journey that we took over the last couple of years. We first
thought about us all being designers and being really T-shaped because that was
something that we believed would bring us a more holistic point of view on the
problems. But one thing is being really good at something and having the craft
and the other thing is actually having a more general view on the problems,
being able to connect the dots. So that's where we are today, we have started
specializing our people, but still equipping them with the skill of
interconnecting the dots and having a more business and general point of view on
the problems.

I think that's why those three words I mentioned are important because the
customer often needs that a lot more than just the craft itself, because that's
going to help them do something that they wouldn't normally do. Now we're having
to help people do things they would never have normally done in the past.

Anton during a lecture at the Dash Hack design eventYour first agency job was
probably IDEO which you joined in ‘99, and the agency definitely had to evolve
over that time. Do you see how evolution has gone and how the agencies have
changed?

If you call yourself a consultancy, a consultant is somebody that you trust to
give you advice or support on something that you don't know much about – like
your doctor. It's like the metaphor of a kitchen: The chefs and the cooks are
making the food in the kitchen and sending it to the customers. And there's the
delivery guy outside delivering the ingredients. I think that has been the
biggest journey for the agencies, especially the digital agencies to not only
deliver the great ingredients, but also to get in the kitchen with the cooks.
And even if possible, start serving the food to the customers.

It's a weird metaphor but that's the kind of journey that they've been on.
Especially the digital companies, a lot of them have come from this very easy
business model of “let's sell our developers to companies who need developers”.
But as digitalization has matured, a lot of customers have already hired their
own designers, their own tech people. They already know how to do agile, design
or be user-centric. Design agencies always have to reinvent themselves to be
seen as the consultant, to bring something to the customer that the customer
cannot do themselves. So design companies have gone from craft, from “let's
design something”, to coaching or transformation.

I've recently watched a keynote from Jacob Nielsen from their energy conference,
and he basically predicted an exponential growth of the design industry. Today
we have tens of thousands of designers, but in the future, we'll have millions.
And with the future, he meant a few years ahead. Where do you think the industry
is headed? And is his prediction something that you feel is true or not?

Well, I haven't seen anything to suggest otherwise. There was one point, maybe a
decade ago, when I lost a little bit of hope in the impact of design and the
power of designers to change things. But then I see companies like Futurice go
from 16 designers to 150 designers all over Europe, and I think that wouldn't
happen unless there was a need there.But I've also seen another trend, a sort of
attitude. These days designers want to work on customer projects that are really
meaningful and deliver impact. They want to work with sustainability, they want
to work with inclusivity. And I think that's great, it goes all the way back
down to this basic user insight work.

If you're the person that connects the customer to the business, that's a really
important need. And I think the designers are quite good evangelists that they
can actually make a change in the companies where they are present. As I said
earlier, design is really good for envisioning the future because that's
becoming harder and harder for companies to do. Even now, companies have a three
to five year strategy, but in this climate it doesn't make any sense. You can't
invest your company's strategy in a three to five year plan. You've got to
continuously create the future step by step. And that's where designers have
unique skills, much more than the management consultants, because they can bring
futures to life, pilot different experiments and co-create futures with
customers and networks.

> Design agencies always have to reinvent themselves to be seen as the consultant,
to bring something to the customer that the customer cannot do themselves. 
Is there something that's your design challenge, something you'd like to address
in the future?

Yes, it's obvious for me there's one design challenge – climate change,
environmental sustainability. That's the biggest challenge we face now. And
that's happening now. And within this decade, we're talking about eight years,
we need to address some huge existential questions for humanity. And if
designers aren't active in answering those challenges, then I don't know what's
the point. You don't have to read very much to understand that the next big
transformation is going to be the sustainability transformation. And we're
already 40 years too late. Companies are going to have to deliver on their
sustainability targets according to law. How are they going to do that? They're
going to do that because they're going to have to get a shit load of help from
companies like us, people like us, designers, developers, business people,
consultants. They're going to have to get help to deliver on those targets.
That's what I hope that design can play a really big role in.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Listen to the full interview with designer Anton Schubert:
The Mimimum Viable Podcast is brought to you every two months by the design
studio Lighting Beetle*, which focuses on creating an exceptional customer
experience.

Design is all around us. The Minimum Viable Podcast explores design with a small
“d” – the one that looks for solutions to people's problems. In it, together
with our guests, we address topics that are related to design, but which we do
not normally associate with it. Thanks the Zeldeo [https://www.zeldeo.com/] 
production studio for the cooperation.

We look forward to every listen, follow, share, and suggestion for improvement.
Send us your tips for interesting personalities with whom we can talk about
design to podcast@lbstudio.sk.

Enjoy!

Minimum Viable Podcast #10: The Evolution of Design

Albert Fourage

What is this guide for?
Launching a new product is extremely risky, 90% of startup ideas fail. This
guide is a summary of best practices combined with our 11 years experience in
bringing successful new products to market. Following our 7-step process, you
will maximize your chances for success.

In this handbook
 * Complex process simply explained: No need to be an expert in product
   management to read this guide. We write in plain english what you should know
   about creating a new product.
 * 7 steps process: From your first meeting to the launch, we explain in 7 steps
   how to build your product for your customers. 
 * Recommended tools: For each step, you can find some of our favorite tools.

The process
 * Business goals
 * Problem exploration
 * Solution development
 * Business model definition
 * Solution validation
 * Build a minimum solution
 * Continuous build & measure & learn

Get the Product Discovery Guide First Name* Email* Which one best describes
you?* Freelancer (I work as a freelance or an agency designer) Product team
member (I build or market products & services) Product owner (I manage a product
or startup lifecycle) Corporate leader (I manage a division in a bigger company) 
Academic (I am a student or a teacher) What language do you prefer to read our
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By clicking on "Download" you agree to the processing of personal data by
Lighting Beetle s.r.o. as explained in our Personal data protection policy
[https://www.lbstudio.sk/gdpr.pdf]. 

Newsletter opt-in I'd also like to subscribe for the occasional CX Insights
newsletter by LB* Download

Customer experience that drives your business

We are Lighting Beetle

What's your destination?

Digital Product Design

DNA ERA

Service Design

Orange

CX Transformation

Dôvera

What's your destination?

Digital Product Design

Service Design

CX Transformation

DNA ERA

Orange

Dôvera

Paving pleasant customer journeys for 15+ milion users world-wide in automotivetelcoinsurancee-commerce

52 doers & explorers

Journal

Why time tracking is (not) useless in agile environments

Minimum Viable Podcast #10: The Evolution of Design

Product Discovery Guide

Don’t miss out

Your journey
starts here

Customer experience that drives your business

We are Lighting Beetle

What's your destination?

Digital Product Design

DNA ERA

Service Design

Orange

CX Transformation

Dôvera

What's your destination?

Digital Product Design

Service Design

CX Transformation

DNA ERA

Orange

Dôvera

Paving pleasant customer journeys for 15+ milion users world-wide in automotivetelcoinsurancee-commerce

52 doers & explorers

Journal

Why time tracking is (not) useless in agile environments

Minimum Viable Podcast #10: The Evolution of Design

Product Discovery Guide

Don’t miss out

Your journey starts here

Your journey
starts here