Creationism in digital products
Digital product work keeps believing in creation from nothing: from Levitt in 1960 to Cooper and Christensen, the same diagnosis returns under new names.
A few years ago, Jerry A. Coyne published "Why the theory of evolution is true". A beautiful book, packed with facts and reasonable arguments. The time has come, Coyne suggests, to lay all the evidence on the table and see whether creationists can produce a comparable amount of proof. The sheer weight of it is intimidating; you may not end up convinced, but what does become clear is how much work it would take to assemble a similar body of evidence, held together by a general theory.
Digital product development is missing its Coyne. And it has creationism to spare. When I wrote "Circumstances", I wanted to underline once again one of the most frequent mistakes in the product strategy of any company. There is nothing new in that article, though that is precisely what is new about it.
In 1960, Theodore Levitt published "Marketing Myopia", which has since become a classic. When Christensen, Cook and Hall revived Levitt's message a few years ago, they distilled it into a line I used to quote in class.
People don't want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole!
Neither Levitt's article nor the later ones appeared in some new journal trying to make a name for itself with provocative claims: they were all published under the Harvard Business School umbrella. All of them come out of marketing and business administration.
Christensen, Cook and Hall had already published other pieces along the same lines, but given that the diagnosis had been available first-hand since 1960, there is no doubt that the word Levitt chose, myopia, hit the mark. Why did it take us so long to arrive at the same conclusion?
In 1995, when Alan Cooper published the first edition of "About Face", he explained that he was putting forward a specific proposal for building software, and ultimately products, because the prevailing approach struck him as failing at the essentials. From a different angle, from a different domain, Cooper was pointing at the same problems Levitt had placed at the centre of the debate. Through interaction design, Cooper proposed a methodology of his own, Goal-Directed Design, which among other things introduced Personas as a tool specific to the discipline.
In 1998 he published "The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity", where he summarised the problem like this:
The real interaction designer's decisions are based on what the user is trying to achieve.
The goals of a few decades ago are today's jobs-to-be-done. We keep trying out new names for the same problem, but the myopia never leaves us.
In 2003, Raynor and Christensen published "The Innovator's Solution: Creating and Sustaining Successful Growth", and assembled in that book a solid battery of what aspires to be historical evidence: how many companies have succeeded by building products that grow out of the study of circumstances and purposes. That is, far from the segmentation and attributes of the marketing tradition; far from the resource management and the code of the software development tradition; far, in the end, from the belief that the way we organise ourselves internally is a mirror of what is out there.