Chapter Fourteen: Start Small, and Iterate

I was 22 years old. I had just graduated from college and was starting my first full-time job as an application software developer at HighWire Press, a division of the Stanford University Libraries and a pioneer in bringing STEM journals online. I was hired as a designer and front-end engineer working on several online communities for academic researchers. Our goal was to bring researchers from across disciplines (think biology, chemistry, medicine) who were working on the same types of problems together in a collaborative online space. We were working on innovative features like virtual folders to replace physical filing cabinets that stored decades of journal articles and message boards where researchers could discuss said journal articles. This was 1999, and the World Wide Web was the new frontier.

As a college student, I was introduced to human-centered design and was excited to put what I learned into practice on the job. I remember my first design assignment like it was yesterday. Our client, the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) was our collaborating partner on our first online community, and they had a long list of feature requests. My job was to design site navigation that encompassed all of those features. I spent a grand total of three days playing with different ideas and then walked into my first-ever client meeting.

I presented my designs, confident in my work (after all, my manager liked it), and waited for the accolades to roll in. That’s when someone on the client side said, “This is horrible.” It was a sucker punch. She continued, “This isn’t what we want at all. Why can’t you just do it like this?” At which point, she proceeded to describe what (unbeknown to me) she had asked for a few weeks prior before I joined the company. That’s when I realized: I had no idea who our client was, what they wanted, or who their end-user was. What in the world was I doing throwing designs over the wall? So much for that high-priced, human-centered design education.

Actually, what that education gave me was the ability to bounce back. I knew that, while my boss (and the rest of the company) operated by throwing designs over the wall, it didn’t mean I had to. I got to choose how I did my own work, and I knew if I was going to be good at design, I needed to keep the client and the end-user close. I started right then and there on that call. I invited the woman who was unhappy with my design to partner with me on the next iteration. We scheduled a phone call (this was before the days of Zoom) and agreed to work together.

From there, when I was asked to do design work, I joined the client meetings from the beginning of the project. I got involved at the contracting stage. I listened in when the client described what they wanted. I asked to attend their conferences. I spent time talking to the journal editors. I read the discussion forums in our product to learn more about end-users’ research. I mined our feedback channels, looking for needs and pain points. I built feedback loops directly into the product. I didn’t know how to get direct access to our end-users, so I looked for every proxy I could find.

This didn’t happen overnight. I was 22. I had no idea what I was doing. I simply had a guiding principle: If I’m going to do good design work, I need to get close to my customer. That guiding principle stayed with me as I went on to work at early-stage startups; it’s guided me as I started my own business, and it’s helped me develop the coaching curriculum that this book is based on.

So why am I telling you this story? If you are reading this book and feel like these methods won’t work at your company, here’s what I’ll tell you: I rarely had the support of senior leadership to do product discovery well. I worked at HighWire Press, where we let our clients dictate what we built for end-users. I worked at a startup where our Vice President of Product thought his job was to manage a spreadsheet of feature requests that came from the CEO. I worked at another startup where customers submitted requests and we built them. Trust me, I know what it’s like to work at places that don’t do modern product discovery.

However, in every single one of these jobs, I found a way to get close to the customer. I found a way to advocate for human-centered design. I found a way to build products that worked for our customers—and it wasn’t that hard. Here’s how I did it: I had a strong sense of agency.

I knew that I could impact how I did my own work. I didn’t worry about what other people were doing. I didn’t try to change the way these companies worked. I simply did my work my way, and I got results—so much so that, by the age of 32, I was the CEO of someone else’s company. I don’t share that to brag; I share that to show that you have more agency than you think you do.

Instead of asking for permission or waiting for someone to show you how, start small. Iterate from there. I made a career doing that, and I’ve coached hundreds of others to do the same. This chapter will help you get started on your own continuous-discovery journey, regardless of where your company is in its own transformation.