by John Mansour |
10.08.2007
3 Reasons it’s a “Must-Have” for Successful Products
The most absent and overlooked role in the entire product delivery cycle is the functional designer. Ironically, it may have a greater impact on the success of a product than any other role. Here’s why.
Functional designers are process and workflow experts, acting as user surrogates to your organization. They form the glue between product management and engineering, translating market needs and business problems into detailed user requirements that drive product usability.
If your products have a high degree of user interaction, there are three reasons the functional designer role is a must-have.
- Functional Designers allow product management to stay focused on markets and problems.
The Product Manager determines what capabilities should be added to the product and why, from a business and market perspective. The Functional Designer determines how those product capabilities should work in relation to their users.
Successful products require both roles because people who are good at “what & why” are not typically good at “how” and vice-versa, not to mention the time constraints that go with fulfilling both roles satisfactorily.
Combining both roles into one usually results in the following: product direction that’s well aligned with the market but poor product usability, or great usability for features the market doesn’t care about.
- Functional Designers accelerate product development.
There’s easy to use and there’s easy to build. Rarely do the two go hand in hand. Functional designers are the middlemen that produce detailed user requirements to ensure products are simple for users to use but also reasonable for engineers to build.
Functional designers accelerate product development cycles in two ways. They keep engineers focused on technical designs by eliminating the need for engineers to become user domain experts, and they improve quality by making sure user functionality works as designed.
For those who think the functional designer role is unnecessary, remind them how you never take the time to do it right but you always take the time to do it over.
- Functional Designers improve the quality of product rollouts.
A key objective of every product rollout is the self sufficiency of marketing, sales, service and support teams. A low self sufficiency quotient translates into poor sales, lack of customer references and slow time to market because product management and engineering end up doing everyone’s job but their own.
The functional designer is critical in raising self sufficiency across the service and support teams. They possess the knowledge and content required for a successful rollout, and are in the best position to transfer that expertise to the service and support teams at the end of a development cycle.
Product management then has the bandwidth to focus on improving self sufficiency across the sales and marketing teams while driving the next set of priorities through product development.
In summary, Functional Designers make the product delivery process click. They allow product managers to focus on the market and engineers to focus on technology. Their combination of domain and product expertise improves product usability, quality and self sufficiency across the organization. No other role has a greater impact on the success of a product than the Functional Designer.
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Last Updated ( 09.09.2008 )
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