I like board games okay (thought I don’t really care for the Monopoly phase my son is in), but this seems like a very cool exercise in embodying a quarterly cycle of product development.
It’s like a movie, can you get the scope of a story spanning days, months, or years in a couple of hours? Can you feel a little bit of it and perhaps aspire to your own story?
The pattern is always the same. The most innovative teams are the ones obsessed with how work flows. They obsess about how they work together. They build systems. They measure what matters. They remove friction relentlessly.
Start with a systems view. Map it. Understand how work flows from idea to customer value. See where it moves. See where it sticks. You cannot improve what you cannot see.
We’ve identified 16 blocks across 4 facets in Glare that address these problems that 100’s of people product and design leaders have expressed:
1. Tie design work to business outcomes
2. Pick the right metrics for each initiative
3. Isolate design impact from everything else
4. Make “soft” qualities measurable
5. Create a shared metric language across teams
6. Clarify the real problem worth solving
It’s hard for teams to embody or even practice getting better at this because the simply do not have the right tools to play the game.
@Bryan you had mentioned elsewhere that we are in the ‘simplicity’ stage. I think part of simplicity is the ability to comprehend a group of things easily. A game that turns a 3 month team effort into a 2 hour experience does this.
What does it look like to create an experience of Glare that people really relate to? I think we’re still looking for the right stakeholder and situation to lean into and articulate in a visceral way.
We’ve been playing the wrong design game. And the beliefs we trusted most have been holding us back.
Designers and Product leads get blamed for things they never controlled. They get judged on outcomes they never defined. They get measured with metrics they never picked.
We need to shift how we work, sell, and show impact.
Right! And designers have accepted this situation. The cognitive dissonance is so great that the only escape is either “this is how it has to be” or “this system has to change”.
This binary mental model is what creates so many issues right now. Design is more nuanced, and has the opportunity to be a strong collaborator in the org, but it requires different approaches.
The design will not speak for itself, nor does the business care to make it easier for the design to be understood.
