Design the startup

I've been attending a course/lecture series at Stanford this quarter on 'the ecosystem of design'. It's been very enjoyable and almost always instructive and relevant. I do like the fact that it gets me to 'think different', something that one needs to be reminded about when in heads-down tactical mode.

This week the lecture was by Brenda Laurel, the chair at the graduate school in design at the California College of the Arts. She was entertaining and informative, and I found her perspective particularly interesting as she'd been an entrepreneur and done a couple of startups herself. When she stepped through the design methodology used in her design projects, I was struck by how similar the sequence was to what one goes through when launching a startup:

• opportunity space
• secondary research
• primary research
• analysis
• findings
• values
• design principles
• design
• change

But for the financials/business plan and the replacement of 'design' with 'build' or equivalent, this pretty much tracks with what one should be doing when launching a new venture. I was particularly drawn to 'primary research' where you go out and try to determine what to do and how to do it instead of relying on what analyst groups and topic trends say - all to often, the initial offering is built without doing first-hand research of the customer's wants, needs, constraints, behavior etc. And the very last item, 'change', is a gem (there is an implied release/launch to the customer before that) - the first version is rarely the one that makes general release.

Though 'design' for many conjures images of cool post-modern shaped everyday kitchen gadgets in the MOMA, the process is still a structured exercise in defining a problem and designing a solution - just like a startup. And it is imperative that design be a part of the process when building that startup. It is a challenge for pre-funded early stage startups that don't have access to high-priced design outfits, but design principles and methodology can be adopted by just about anyone quite successfully to achieve at least a first level of design sense. I've found it helps to get everyone involved in the product to think of themselves as a potential user/customer and that has generated a ton of good ideas - mostly on what not to do. Though it does take a little bending of the mind to get an engineer to think like a designer, it can be lot of fun and the results are more, well, friendly.