drove home the importance of
career-development and perfor-
mance-feedback discussions.
May + June 2010
design as business Partner,
not service Function
Early on, we had a tendency to
“execute the order” even if we
thought it did not make sense.
At times, we literally had people
saying, “I know this won’t make
sense to the customer, but it’s
what the product manager (or
marketing manager) wants.”
Wow! Over time, we replaced
that tendency with a joint
approach with product man-
agers, marketing managers,
and engineers, who constantly
asked, “When this product/
design/email is doing its job for
the customer, how will we know,
and who is that customer?”
I personally drove this
approach home via executive
design reviews for every project,
and we later switched, at the
team’s suggestion, to mostly
peer design reviews, which
were even more effective and
efficient. As a leadership team,
our focus on analytics—making
sure we could measure intended
customer and business benefit,
such as checkout conversion
and related revenue uplift—
during every design review
reinforced design as a business
partner. We got into the habit of
literally reviewing every project,
whether product- or marketing-
oriented, resulting in more and
more design folks, product man-
agers, and marketing managers
crisply stating their measurable
customer and business goals at
the beginning of each design
review.
my PayPal tenure, asking folks
whether we had any analytics
that would tell us, for every 100
customers who try to pay/check
out with PayPal, how many are
successful (i.e., payment conversion). Early on, we had limited
data on this, which seemed
somewhere between odd and
staggeringly hard to believe.
After all, checkout (paying for
something online) is the core
of the PayPal business. I then
asked, “Do we believe that the
limited data we have is accurate?” The entertaining answer
to that: “Absolutely not.” Again,
these are the types of “good
problems” you encounter when
your biggest problem is keeping
up with growth. We aggressively pursued instrumenting
every payment flow and tying
checkout conversion to revenue
achieved. We calculated, and
evangelized throughout the
company, the revenue lift that a
1 percent improvement in conversion for all our top payment
flows brought about. Suffice it
to say that a 1 percent change
in one payment flow can literally swing revenue to the tune
of millions of dollars per year.
Given that business impact, our
analytics team became very
disciplined at working with
product managers to set targets
for conversion improvement and
subsequent revenue increases.
Not surprisingly, conversion
improvement became a favorite
area of investment with particularly big fans in the finance
department.
measuring design success
I’ll never forget, early on in
standards? giddy up!
So you’ve got a solid team,
great skills, and great people
managers. And the partnering
with other key groups and func-
tions is cranking along. Then
the question hits you.... How
many times do we really need
to redesign the fields on a sign-
up page? Or how many times
do we need to revisit whether
the login should be on the right
side or the left side of the page?
Ultimately, our design leaders
did a fantastic job of getting our
design-standards effort going
in partnership with engineer-
ing. Effective standards require
two core parts, the design and
the code, which is the technical
implementation of the design.
We struggled for a while try-
ing to get our standards efforts
going; we just couldn’t seem to
get our design standards aligned
with the Web coding efforts in
engineering. Eventually, I per-
sonally teamed with one of our
key engineering vice presidents
to actively drive and support the
standards effort. He and I met
with the design and engineering
standards team every two weeks
to track standards creation and
adoption to plan, and to ensure
that impediments to progress
were quickly addressed. The
designers and engineers driving
the standards greatly appreciat-
ed giving regular status updates
of their efforts to the sponsors
of the initiative, the vice presi-
dents of design and engineering.