Apple releases a new phone with an incrementally better camera and processor every year, and makes you feel like an idiot for not getting one. How? They don’t say, “We put a better camera in it. Buy it.” or, “What do you think?”. What they do is explain exactly why this camera is the best fucking thing you’ve ever shot photos with, and how the processor is their “fastest yet” (it would be a bit of a head-scratcher if they were putting slower processors in their latest phones).
Delivery is tricky. You obviously want your work to stand on its own merits; so doing good work is your first job, but that’s not your only job. Your other job is as an advocate for your work. This requires some creativity, some confidence, and most of all, some giving-a-fuck. In the research and design world, I often hear phrases like, “throw it over the fence” or sentiments like “at this point it’s no longer in my control”. I find this to be a bit problematic because we should all care about the end result of our work, even if we don’t directly control it. When we hand our work off to an engineer or a product strategist or a client for implementation, we should all want that person — and by extension, ourselves — to succeed. The good news is, there are several ways to ensure that you position the work for great outcomes, even with limited control over its eventual deployment.
Below are a few lessons I’ve learned from working with demanding clients with shoestring budgets.
Note: You might be delivering to an engineer, a client, or anyone in-between. I’m using the term “recipient” as a blanket to indicate anyone who might be a recipient of your work.
Give them what they want; then show them what they need
You build trust by showing that you listened carefully and by delivering exactly what was asked for. By leading with this, you then have latitude to show them what’s possible, which opens you up for future opportunities for innovation (in the contracting world, this also means sweet, sweet money). Focus on the request they gave you, as stated. Avoid giving the full menu of options and alternatives in the beginning as this can create the perception that you misunderstood the assignment and distract from your goal. Keep your eye on what you need to do to consider your work “done”.
Once you’ve stacked some wins by getting some good work completed and delivered, you can cautiously explore the space by introducing new ideas and innovations, while taking care to stay firmly planted in the requester’s most critical needs.
3 Things, Hell Yeah!
My mom — a high school drama teacher (a TONY-award-winning one at that) — plays a game with her students called 3 Things, Hell Yeah!. The premise is simple: you choose a topic and another player, then that player has to name 3 specific things related to the topic in quick succession. So for example, if one player names “Candy” the next might name, “Snickers”, “Sour Patch Kids”, and “Twizzlers”.
If the player naming the things gets tripped up — which happens surprisingly often under the pressure of the game — they “lose” (which just means they have to forfeit their turn). After each thing named, the group exclaims, “That’s one thing!”, “That’s two things!” etc, and claps once in unison. After successfully naming 3 things, the group yells, “Three things, Hell yeah!” and claps once again. The player who’s turn it was chooses the next topic and the next player…and around it goes.
The beauty of Three Things, Hell Yeah! is in its simple premise. It works because it’s accessible, fast paced, and momentum builds as the game goes on and the players react to one another. The game has lessons to teach us about enthusiasm, specificity, pace, and most of all, simplicity.
The recipient of your work will key off of your energy, so it’s important to deliver your work enthusiastically. You don’t want to rush through you work, but you don’t want to dwell on each point either, keep it moving and let the recipient drill into specific talking points if they’re interested. It’s also important to be specific — focus on how the work you’ve done answers precise questions and meets precise needs. And above all else, keep it simple. I mean really simple. Be incredibly judicious about the level of detail you provide because once you zoom in, you’re often times stuck there, mired in details with no means of egress. There are ways to proactively zoom back out, but it takes work. Above all else, make sure there is absolutely no ambiguity that they understand (and can use) what you’ve created for them.
Do what you need to do to help them do what they need to do
You can remember this with the simple acronym: DWYNTDTHTDWTNTD.
Seriously, though, the lesson here is all about empathy. What does this person need to do? Implement your design? Use your product? Make a decision? Show their boss that they’re not an idiot?
Sometimes this requires a bit of reading between the lines. If you do this, try to find a way to confirm what they’re looking for. For example, you might say something like “You had mentioned that the new CEO was hoping to learn more about this research, would you like us to create a report for you to send her? Is there specific information you know she’s looking for?”.
If you do end up going above-and-beyond, make sure that you’re not letting it interfere on what you’re being explicitly asked to do. If it does, table it for later (then destroy the table). If you can deliver on what they were expecting, plus giving them what they didn’t know they needed as a bonus, that’s gold.
Mise en place
Stage it, scaffold it, stand it up, stub it out. Whatever you want to call it, build the simplest version you can now, and worry about the details later. Don’t try to get all the answers up front — you’ll just annoy people and be seen as the bottleneck. Do what you can now based on what you know. Look to creative sources of information for the answers you need (e.g. maybe you can get this insight from a traffic report vs user interviews). Once you’ve got enough for your recipient to react to, show it off and fill in the blanks with targeted questions. For example, “This is where we’ll be letting users know about the deadline for feedback, do you happen to know that date?”. You’ll get better, more informed answers if you ask someone about something they can see and use, rather than in the abstract.
Not good — Good enough.
Too often work gets delivered with a tepid shrug and a “what do you think?”. Follow through and go beyond just handing something to someone. Keep questions targeted. Ask what adjustments they’d like to see, what’s missing, and whether there are any showstoppers to implementation. Drive the conversation towards the bottom line, because in delivery, you don’t care if it’s good, you care if it’s good enough. If it is, great! Your work has met the recipient’s needs and you’ve succeeded. If not, you have framed the discussion around what they want to see, and what you need to do to get there.
Delivery is about intentionality. Avoid focusing on delight. Obviously that’s always a good thing to achieve, but what you’re looking for is acceptance. Think of it more as a pass/fail than an A+ through F grade. Establish your baseline for approval, achieve it, then focus on refining, improving, and innovating. Keep in mind that delivery is also a negotiation. If you can’t clear the bar, make sure it’s at the right height. Often times the requirements are more flexible than anticipated. Look for wiggle room where it makes sense, especially if it means deferring a complex and potentially unnecessary component of the work to a later phase.
In project delivery, getting from 0 to 1 is the hard part, and that’s often where us delivery people get stuck in the mud.
Some adjacent reading on the topic:
- Getting Real by 37 Signals (the makers of Basecamp) is the a great introduction to lean thinking and agile process. It’s written from the perspective of making web applications but is something anyone can understand and will change the way you think about everything in your life.
https://basecamp.com/gettingreal - Just Enough Research by Erika Hall talks about taking a lean approach to user research. It is accessible and unpretentious, and will help you focus on learning enough to take action. https://abookapart.com/products/just-enough-research