Authority Magazine: James Young of Tangible On 5 Tips for Accelerating Product Ideation & Innovation
Our very own James Young was recently interviewed by Rachel Kline for Authority Magazine. They covered career origins, product ideation and innovation, and a few funny stories. We’ve collected a few of our favorite moments below, but you can read the complete interview online here.
What are some of the most interesting or exciting projects you are working on now? How do you think that might help people?
My team is working for a very early start-up called VeraScore that is going to majorly disrupt the credit score industry. We are creating an amazing set of products for the traditionally underserved consumers and we are set to run a series of pilots with an established credit union and their membership. The tools for the credit union and their members should really prove an increase in credit union memberships as well as an increase in loans. It is going to be such an exciting win for financial institutions as well as consumers. Once we prove this, it’s going to blow the industry right out of the water. These kinds of results from design are what get me out of bed every morning.
In your experience, what is the anatomy of a strong product idea?
First and foremost is that the idea will bring value to the business. Secondly, and related, is that it will bring a better outcome or future for the product user. The core metric is whether the solution achieved the desired business impact — making more money, spending less, or both. Tangible’s work always begins by detailing these objectives so that, together with our clients, we can evaluate every decision through the lens of those business impacts. This is often missing from product development processes. We make it primary.
Based on your experience, what are your “5 Tips for Accelerating Product Ideation & Innovation”?
We have a mini book we give our clients called the 19 Tenets of Value-Centered Design. My top tips are drawn from that book–these are the five I see as being the most critical (and the spots where I see our clients struggle most often):
1 . Know thy business objective — This is how we start every project, and we make sure everyone on the team up and down the food chain knows it, as well. If we don’t know what it is, we go out and find it. Seems obvious? Unfortunately, it is more common for teams to just begin a project without really knowing this information. But it makes all the difference in your decision-making.
2 . Work in a circle, not a chain — Working in a chain is when one business throws requirements over the fence to design then design throws specs over the fence to development. We don’t like to work this way. It just does not make for good product development. When our team works inside enterprises, we make sure that the teams are able to work in a circle and at their best, together.
3 . Take time to find the problems — Once, one of our designers was working inside a large hardware company. She had been handed a bunch of requirements from the business team and was told to “go and design.” She instinctively knew that these sets of requirements were really not going to solve the problems for the user. So, we had her go a little rogue and do some basic journey mapping with the team. Through that exercise, she was able to show the team that the set of requirements that she was given were not going to move the needle for the business or the user experience. This should be a requirement at the front of every project. It’s so important.
4 . Invest in evidence or invest in nothing — I loved our tenure with the TurboTax marketing team. Day in and day out, we created rapid experiments to be tested. Each test taught us something. When we had a winner, we leaned into it. And when we had a dog, we pivoted and moved quickly onto the next thing. No regrets. I firmly believe this mentality with the whole team is what made TurboTax the powerhouse it is today.
5 . Spend the least effort to get the right evidence — My favorite story is the one I shared above when we were working for a major cloud computing company and we needed to prove our idea of inserting an interview step for the sales engineer into the CRM. The team actually spent an hour and a half spinning up a Google Forms doc and then a day or two measuring the results with it. We had all the evidence that we needed (cutting the time to trial in half) to prove that this was worth building in less than two hours.