Article - Lego Your Product Design

Lego Your Product Design

Modular design at the coding level is not enough to have a winning and cost-effective product strategy. Your product concept must also be built up from a handful of fundamental reusable blocks that each address multiple business problems. If you can achieve a one-to-many application of product concepts to business problems you will not only accelerate your ability to deliver continued innovation to your customers, but you will also dramatically improve the reliability of what you deliver, improve the ability for your customer to effectively use the full scope of your product and you will ultimately spend a higher percentage of your development resources on new features and functions instead of on refactoring what is already delivered. You will also probably get through the Shiny Penny syndrome I wrote about in my earlier article.

Unfortunately, you cannot always force the creation of building blocks entirely from even the soundest product design processes. Strangely enough, there seems to be a correlation between degree of innovation and opportunity for realization of one or more powerful building blocks. Their shape often only appears for a fleeting moment in the early stages of a product design – you need to be attentive to recognize them. Once your head returns to the trees, you miss how they cluster to form a block. 

Once you do find one, pull it to the top of your team design discussions and force it to become a focal point of how you will solve the target business problem. Re-state the business problem if needed, using the language of your reusable component. High degrees of innovation mean you are likely reshaping how to look at a business problem, to see new approaches applied. Low degrees of innovation probably mean you are implementing what the customer wants in the way they express it, which although useful to the customer, does not make you indispensable as a strategic supplier nor create a path to breakthrough efficiencies in the future.

This challenge is much like finding the Greatest Common Factor in math for a series of large numbers. The large numbers are the business problems you are trying to address with your product and the GCFs are the reusable concepts in the proposed solution. If your level of innovation is low, you are likely implementing unique functionality for each user workflow and your list of GCFs will almost map 1-1. If you level of innovation is high, you are likely trying to refactor the user workflow to express it as a formula of your reusable concepts and you will have but a handful of GCFs to focus on.

I find the challenge of locking down GCFs comes from getting the entire design team to raise their game. Everyone needs to tough out the internal battle to give in and simply implementing the solution mapping it into how the customer expresses their problem. The team needs to force itself to re-express the problem as an innovative expression of GCF concepts. If you feel your product is suffering from a lack of GCF thinking, or you have a new design you want to get an opinion on, do not hesitate to reach out me at [email protected].