If they’re to do their job most effectively, designers should be brought into the innovation process at the very earliest stages. Too many companies still make the mistake of keeping business strategy and design activities separate. Typically, marketers conceptualize a new product based on company strategy; the project team gets input from various areas of the company and creates a business case; and senior executives make a final choice from among the possibilities they’re given. Only then does the idea go to the designers.

That sequential method ensures that the product is aligned with strategy, allows the team to create buy-in and build consensus, and gives senior executives an array of options. But it takes a long time, so even if the original concept drew on real-world data about users, the company is inevitably unable to adapt to rapid, unforeseen changes in markets and user preferences.

The solution is to bring in designers at the very beginning of the process, because designers (if they do what they’re supposed to) will put prototypes into circulation and share users’ responses and attitudes with the project team even as the business case is being developed. That enables the company to nimbly adjust to changes in market opportunities long before the product concept is set in stone.

From concept through development, designers should function in parallel with corporate decision makers, creating prototypes for a number of variations on a product and then testing them with users and, if appropriate, partners. Tracking how customers’ ways of using a product evolve over time also makes it possible for designers to identify desirable new features and in some cases create new functionality in conjunction with users.

Planners should concurrently be considering the business implications, asking questions such as “How much would it cost to incorporate this new feature?” and “How should we respond to users’ changing needs?” The team should continually feed new information from user research and prototype analysis into the evolving business strategy. Constraints that emerge, such as price or a decision to offer standard versus premium features, may be used to inform the next prototype, which can then be evaluated through more formal testing. And the cycle repeats.

Our firm’s recent work with Alltel, the owner and operator of America’s largest regional wireless network, provides an example of this fully integrated process. Alltel wanted to go beyond simply improving existing communications services—it wanted to change the industry by making mobile devices more central in users’ lives. We explored nearly 100 ideas, from basic to wild, and then used prototypes to investigate the most compelling.

We tested these iteratively with users and with Alltel partners to understand what users did with them and what the partners were interested in, and eventually focused on a new platform we called the Celltop, which brings the concept of “widgetization”—on-screen PC miniapplications—to the mobile environment. The findings from our prototypes informed the product road map and helped to develop a model for successful execution through collaboration with various industry players. Because Alltel’s manufacturing partners were exposed to the Celltop concept early on, they were able to make needed adjustments quickly, and the new platform was brought to market in just 12 months.

The traditional method of formulating product strategy, in which the various phases—the options portfolio, the business case, the road map, the execution plan—are sequential and consensus is required for each step before the next begins, is inflexible and often leads to products that are based on outdated assumptions about customer behavior and company potential. This in essence is why the US auto industry was late to recognize the market for hybrids and why Friendster lost its first-mover advantage to MySpace, which had better feature planning and scaling.

By contrast, involving designers at each stage of the strategy and development process can lead to better product decisions and improve a company’s ability to seize new market opportunities.

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Ravi Chhatpar is the strategy director in the New York and Shanghai studios of Frog Design, a strategic-creative consulting firm headquartered in Palo Alto, California. 

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