Design+Sell/Build: A market-driven innovation framework for B2B2C companies
By: Paul Burke
Tags: Product, Product Design, New York, Design Thinking, Product Management

How design connects sales and product teams to capitalize on market signal

Most product management articles describe how to improve product experiences in a business-to-consumer (B2C) context where there is a clear line of site and access to the end customer. But for many software companies, customer experiences are delivered in partnership with their clients and often as part of a larger service design experience. In those cases, access to the users is often limited for contractual or regulatory reasons and building trust to gain access to this type of information takes time. As they work to build a shared discipline for customer-centric continuous innovation with their clients, these organizations need methods to better consume and deliver on indirect product insights in this challenging product delivery model.

Leaning in to Outside-in Product Insights

Imagining desirable capabilities, features, and services is fundamental to the growth of any product but the ideation is often not exclusive to the product organization. They might originate from executive leadership, a high-risk client, or a board member just as easily as they might originate from within the product organization. But when they do, the challenge the product organization faces is what to do with those new items in relation to existing product priorities.

Even with a formal principle declaring that each idea must be validated before any significant investment is made, the source of the idea can often bring pressure that causes it to move forward despite validation. While the product organization works to defend the release and the doctrine that guides their work, these items make their way into the release just the same and, unfortunately, often make it to market without broad adoption.

This outside-in release planning behavior is most often seen in competitive markets with sales-led organizations managing complex, high-expectation clients. In these cases, the client has choice and can become a very vocal advocate for product capabilities they require in order to commit. In an effort to win or retain business, Sales offers platform flexibility. They isolate and document the value propositions for requested capabilities to build confidence with the client—often agree to add them as part of the deal. In parallel, executive leadership is continuously aggregating and synthesizing client and market feedback into strategic insights that they believe can change the trajectory of the business—often advocating to move these items to the front of the line.

The behavior described above is considered a bad thing within product and engineering teams. But it isn’t in its purest form. It just doesn’t have an intake model that can effectively negotiate it in with other priorities so it creates bottlenecks and resourcing issues that frustrate teams.

Like many other functions in a company, executive leadership and sales leadership are product enthusiast and business strategists. They care just as deeply about the company mission and vision and are equally invested in its success. They respect agile product methods in principle and want to find ways to account for the perspective they live and breathe in the field day in and day out.

Both the salesperson and the executive leader do their homework. They work to understand the product to the best of their ability. Their goal is to increase the likelihood that what both they and the client(s) seek can be achieved in an effort to secure or retain business. As the growth engine for the company, their role is to continue to make connections between the market expectations, clients’ needs, and the solutions they offer. But if the connection to the product discipline isn’t tight enough or the knowledge transfer isn’t strong enough between sales and product, they can color outside the lines more than they know.

Product organizations just need a better way to consume and synthesize the insights and needs as they surface. With a partnered approach to idea refinement in the field, the proposed solution can align to the roadmap and release plan in the flow of the negotiations — as opposed to after it has been sold.

So how can B2B2C product companies embrace this high value input and help validate the hypotheses alongside these front-line strategic partners while protecting the validated release schedule?

Enter Design+Sell/Build

Design+Sell/Build is exactly what it sounds like. It brings product design and product marketing discipline to the front lines of the sales process to help visualize and articulate the possible. As a creative partner, designers draw pictures — including diagrams, interfaces, journey maps, and use cases—and tell stories of what is being suggested so the idea or opportunity can be better understood by all parties.

Concurrently, these designers help pull out the value proposition, product benefits, and key metrics to define how the solution will be judged by the client and its end users. The resulting customer definition, “happy path” user experience, and solution benefits combine into storytelling collateral to help gain alignment within both the client organization and the product and engineering team.

This approach does not replace the product and engineering effort required to deliver the solution. It can't. With limited time and limited exposure, the team leverages design sprints and other problem framing activities to build up a conceivable, relatively untested “happy path” solution to the problem. The primary goal is to provide some objective clarity on the target solution so that clients can feel confident that the solution is in the ballpark, engineering teams can roughly size the effort to build the solution, and product can have a constrained point of departure and set of metrics to drive the capability development.