Stronger Design Principles Start with One Question: ‘Versus What?’

One of the best ways to drive large projects and end to end experiences is to be clear from the beginning about the set of principles that govern the work. These principles are designed to remain true irrespective of what comes up throughout the project’s journey. One way to think about them is the constitution of the work. You can amend the constitution, but it requires a significant amount of alignment and debate.

The sooner in a project’s lifecycle you’re able to come up with principles, the more likely they’re going to be the true governing document of the experience. The more work you do in figuring out a solution the more these principles will start reflecting your view of the solution instead of being grounded in how to stay true to the problem.

Many teams do come up with principles often. Sometimes they’re design principles and other times they’re product principles but in either case, they’re the principles driving the work and aligning the team. They are the set of opinionated choices that teams go back to when they disagree and they’re the set of choices teams go back to in order to evaluate if a solution is on track. They’re also the easiest to align on early on and the hardest to enforce later on as the project takes a life of its own.

The reason they’re hard to enforce is that they’re often not hard choices and instead, they’re a watered down alignment method full of compromises that were chosen instead of having the real debate early on in the process. Aligning on what a team can jointly agree to isn’t coming up with principles, it’s writing down your compromises.

In order for principles to truly drive the work and serve as a good framework for the outcomes, they have to be debated, opinionated, and painful. Just like strategic choices, if they’re not painful, they’re not strategic.

One of the tests that I’ve developed in thinking through writing down principles, design or otherwise, is to ask the question: “versus what?”.

For example, if you were coming up with principles for your Design team and you chose the principle: “we deliver good experiences”, the next question to ask is: versus what? ”we deliver bad experiences”?

The goal of this question is to provide a cynical view of every principle you run across, it’s a way to hold yourself, as a design leader, and your team accountable to making more opinionated choices early on that hold you, your teams, and your cross-functional teams accountable later on. It’s a way to ensure that the debate happens before the solution goes too far instead of happening too late when the urgency is about delivering a solution rather than delivering the right solution.

Another example to think about is a principle that looks like this: “we ship good experiences”. Again, versus what? “We ship bad experiences?”. The spirit of this principle is somewhat understood but it’s not enforceable. It doesn’t generate the debate needed early on in the process to be useful. It’s almost default for everyone involved to say “yes” and move on. However, when that experience hits a deadline, for example, it’s hard to enforce this principle because “good” means different things to different people at different times in different contexts.

A similar but far more powerful principle could be: “we define ready and ship only when ready” or “we gate on quality, not deadlines”. These principles may not be the right ones for your company or project but they’re opinionated. They generate the right debate early on in the process. Are we really not going to gate on a timeline? Are we really going to ignore the deadline if the experience isn’t good enough or of the quality we’ve determined to follow at the beginning of the project? Is our time to market gated by quality over deadlines? What do we do in the case of low quality experience but high demand from customers?

All of these questions can come up early on in the process in a way that help shape the thinking of the team on what matters that when it inevitably comes up later on, the debate has happened and decisions were either made or at least aligned on.

Here’s the thing. This also works for company values and strategy.

It’s easy to come up with company values that feel good but don’t do good. For example, “Integrity” as a company value is quite interesting. Versus what? Defrauding customers? (Integrity was a company value of Enron, by the way).

It‘s also a good test, although not the only one, for strategic choices. If you’re reading a strategy document, it’s always good to ask yourself the same question: versus what?

Strategy is about painful choices you’re making as a result of constraints either imposed on you by market position or internal constraints like focus, resourcing, etc. Strategic choices have to have alternative paths to be strategic. ”Growing our business” is not strategic because what’s the alternative? Shrinking it?

The one cautionary tale I’d give about “versus what” is that once you start asking it, you see it everywhere. The other cautionary tale I’d give is that if you ask it often in a cynical way, it stops being useful and starts being a way for you to the point the finger instead of lending a hand to help.

The best place to start asking the question is with the documents, principles, values, and strategic choices you’re putting together.