How to Think Like a Trillion Dollar Company
And why a little Design Thinking can go a long way.
Design-led Companies are
Massively Successful
Most trillion-dollar-plus companies have a strong focus in User Experience (UX), moving from technology-centric to user-centric thinking.
Apple - nearly bankrupt, absolutely took off after Steve Jobs rejoined in 1997 and introduced a string of user-centric products (see below).
Google (or Alphabet) - uses Google Design Sprints to rapidly test ideas at very low cost in five days from initial sketch to testable prototype.
Microsoft - Kait Schoeck, designer on the Microsoft Surface Book, joked they made enough prototypes to fill the building more than he’d ever seen before.
Amazon - tests website variations, called A/B testing, on its marketplace like mad, funding customer experience over advertising.
These businesses are design-led and put their customers at the centre of their focus and this has led to massive returns on that investment.
Let’s Take Apple’s Example
Apple, the most famous design-led company in the world, and the first US company to reach a trillion-dollar valuation in 2018, nearly went bankrupt.
Their fortunes changed dramatically when Steve Jobs, arguably one of the world’s greatest designers, returned in 1997 as you can see from the graph below.
This is their growth up until 2015, take particular note of the consumer-centric products launched since 1998.
The iMac a simpler self-contained more beautiful computer banished beige plastic.
The iPod put thousands of songs (or audiobooks) in your pocket wherever you went.
The iPhone introduced touch and gestures and completely reimagined the clunky cellphone.
The iPad first teased as just four iPhones stuck together launched another segment of more tactile causal computing.
If you ever doubt the user-centric ease baked into these devices, spend a few moments watching an illiterate toddler find Netflix (another design-led company) without any help or instruction.
Top cap it off, Apple will likely be the first $5 trillion dollar company by 2028.
“Most people make the mistake of thinking design is what it looks like. People think it’s this veneer — that the designers are handed this box and told, ‘Make it look good!’ That’s not what we think the design is. It’s not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.” — Steve Jobs
You can have any color you want
as long as it’s black
Companies previously focused on production efficiency, or continuously developing and shipping features, doing what was better for the company rather than what was right for the consumer.
As Henry Ford’s famous quote implies favouring a simplified production process over consumer choice.
We writers do this when we write purely for ourselves, disregarding reader expectations. Or when we fail to “show clearly” because we have all the details in our heads we make the mistake of assuming others do too.
A reader-centric shift in perspective can solve that and more.
Design Thinking has taken over
Although these companies have now come to dominate the market, production efficiency or time-to-market or shipping new features were difficult to set aside. Especially for what was once considered a touchy-feely unproven metric.
Now, however we have the hard facts:
A Statista online survey showed 89% of Apple users were Satisfied or Very Satisfied. Only 3% of Apple users said they were Rather Dissatisfied, and not a single person said Very Dissatisfied. Not one.
Design-led companies outperformed the S&P 500 by an extraordinary 211 percent over ten years, shown in a study by the Design Management Institute. Companies that include Nike, Procter & Gamble, Starbucks and Netflix.
Starbucks is famous for putting your name on the cup to personalise the experience and get to know their customers.
Netflix can now launch a cultural phenomenon like Squid Games in 190 countries at the same time. Where’s Blockbuster again? Convenience wins.
By 2022 (according to PointSource.com), customer experience will eclipse both price and product as being the leading differentiator that matters.
Alphabet (Google’s parent company), who’s valuation peaked at an eye-watering $1.98T, have said,
“Whether we’re designing a new internet browser or a new tweak to the look of the homepage, we take great care to ensure that they will ultimately serve you, rather than our own internal goal or bottom line.”
“…focus on the user and all else will follow.”
What is exactly is a Design-led company?
Design-led organisations are intentional about how experiences are designed. They focus on customer needs and contexts to define the problem they’re aiming to solve.
Whitney Hess, sums it up perfectly with her first of 5 Guiding Principles for Experience Designers: Understand the underlying problem before attempting to solve it.
Know your audience, what they want or don’t want. Where they are in their lives, what they struggle with and what frustrates them.
And then write to reduce their suffering.
Design Thinking works at scale,
but what about the solo creator?
These companies have massive budgets and armies of smart creative people.
How could a solo creative possibly compete? In short, we don’t.
There’s no need to. They spend billions making it easier for us to succeed. Most of these companies are creating the platforms we use to build our businesses:
Books: Kindle Direct Publishing or Google Play Books (a possible opportunity to watch)
Audio: Apple Podcasts or Audible
Videos: YouTube or Prime Video or TikTok or Netflix
Funding: Kickstarter or NFTs
Swag: Merch by Amazon or Patreon or Redbubble
Productivity: Notion (which I used collate research and draft this post)
Most, if not all of these tools are free to access.
All we need to do is stand on their shoulders and learn from their example, because the real problem lies in doing the right work.
Time and money are not the problem
Because we have limited time and resources as a solo or authorpreneurs, a reader-centric approach matters even more.
Basecamp, is a completely bootstrapped customer-funded business meaning they’ve never taken on venture capital. They’ve never had to grow more than needed and they could stay small and focus on what matters.
For years they’ve eschewed a marketing budget for building a better product by engaging with their customers. And letting their customers spread the word.
You don’t have a ton of time, so you need to work on what brings in the results.
Do more of what works. Do the right work. Create what people want.
People live in complex and chaotic systems
To understand what people want, what our audience wants, I’ll show you how to create a Reader Persona, sharing a template to make it a 10 min task.
We’ll create it first from our assumptions then from data we collect when we test our ideas (using short short fiction, like in the 100 Story Challenge)
Then we’ll contextualize that person in their hero’s journey: from discovery to reward.
Mapping out their emotional process of discovery and interaction to helps us understand possible problems at the various points of interaction.
Then we can zoom out one level more to our service: how we reduce suffering
Bringing joy, providing escape, healing trauma and providing guidance are all things fiction can do. And creating a reader-centric service can remove the friction and frustration in accessing these boons.
The world is a noisy place, readers want to find good stories written for them.
Every step of the way I’ll be doing it first, testing the process, and sharing the simplest version of tools and templates to get the job done.
Don’t over invest creating
the wrong thing for no one in particular
Part-time creators don’t have the time to create blindly. Not when data is so easy to access, in reader likes, claps, interactions and comments.
User Experience research has been shown to half software development time, because 50% of development time is wasted on rework from building the wrong thing.
Don’t write a novel (build the entire expensive thing) until you know:
How to write shorter stories that work
What your ideal audience actually loves and why
This is the design principle of testing cheap, failing fast and often
For this we’ll create cheap prototypes to test our core ideas. The easiest way to do this is to write flash fiction on Medium, a free social writing platform with an abundance of data and supportive communities like Microcosm.
Start small, get data, learn, refine, repeat. Then scale.
It’s about being data-driven not assumption driven. Seeing what readers, who buy your stories or simple pay attention, like and what they don’t.
Then making more of what they like. Simple.
Once we know then it’s about making space and finding focus.
We’ll use productivity tools
and 80/20 to multiply our efforts
I’m not going to make insane promises, but I’m going to ask a few questions.
Why can’t we reuse massively successful, but simple, design methods to improve our author businesses?
If readers like good fiction. If they read voraciously, then is our problem discovery, access, ease, friction, word-of-mouth, referrals or the actual product?
I’m on this journey with you, because I’m a full-time designer working, experimenting, testing and pushing towards becoming a full-time writer.
I may get there faster with non-fiction than fiction, because we tend to pay for shortcuts, but most of my experiments will focus on fiction. It’s where my heart is.
I’ll demonstrate and experiment with versions of Design Thinking methods from User Experience Team of One and other shortcuts I’ve learned from being the only designer in a company for years.
Making the most impact and improving the most lives, with limited time and money. Focusing on what can be done today, now, to make things better.
Takeaways:
Experience design has been used by the biggest leading tech companies to reinvent, reimagine and redefine their products and categories.
Design Thinking has a proven massive return on investment for the most successful companies on the planet.
We can make the same shift in thinking to do the right work, to create for existing needs, to differentiate our stories, marketing and platforms using actual data instead of biased assumptions.
We can get a lot of that success using 80/20 versions of these design methods, the lite versions for single person teams.
I’ll do it first, then show you how.
Next week:
How I use Notion to capture all of my writing ideas and article research.
Spoiler: I’m Building a Second Brain using Notion, I’m using that for fiction and I’ll be sharing my templates and my knowledge gardens when they’re ready.
Credit where it’s due: Icon by Gan Khoon Lay from NounProject.com
This was incredibly inspiring and helpful. It's a new way to look at content creation. Everybody always talks about "know your audience." Nobody really shares how.
I will be following this closely, Zane. I'm excited!