Design transformation for
software-powered organizations
Remove bottlenecks that are holding back growth. Increase retention through better design, understand what your customers value, and spend sustainably on customer acquisition for long-term growth.
Learn how our world-class consulting team
can transform business outcomes.
Speak with a human
We work with highly experienced consultants that have worked at companies like
Transform business outcomes
How a design transformation can change long-term outcomes
Design is a holistic sport that involves thinking about user experience, interaction design, product journeys, pricing, onboarding, landing pages, market positioning, and product strategy.
Improvements to a product can positively impact all areas of a business, from customer support to marketing and sales. You can spend more on marketing if retention is high, sales can bring on more customers if the features being built resonate with potential customers, and it’s easier to provide support for a product that isn’t confusing to the customer.
Design can change everything from how customers perceive you, net profit per employee, your ability to raise another round and company morale.
When software is a core competency, design becomes a competitive advantage.
Make remarkable software
“In the past, brilliant marketing could sell even the most ordinary product. But today, competition is so fierce that you have to create something remarkable in order to succeed.” — Seth Godin
Google Search, for instance, is a remarkable product. It takes minutes to switch from Google to Bing or DuckDuckGo, yet, without any lock-in, Google has incredible retention – measured in decades per user. They've achieved this by consistently and considerably re-investing in their Search business, their core offering, widening the gap enough to disuade any new entrants.
Compare that with Netflix, which let the quality of its library slip, encouraging competition and leading to a 35% share price drop in April of 2022.
When times are great, invest disproportionately in your economic moat to keep acquisition costs low and reinforce the growth cycle.
Look for constraints
The Theory of Constraints is a methodology for identifying the most important limiting factor (i.e. constraint) that stands in the way of achieving a goal and then systematically improving that constraint until it is no longer the limiting factor. (Eli Goldratt, TOC)
This book is required reading in over 1,400 business schools and at Amazon, Boeing, and Hitachi. The principles in the book are taught in the context of a traditional factory setup. However, they translate really well into the software world. Complex software applications can be broken down into distinct user journeys, each step in a journey resembling a machine with a measurable throughput, which is the potential constraint in a system.
When looking for constraints, distinguish between local and global optimizations. Not all improvements will increase global throughput. In other words, improving your product onboarding is somewhat pointless if your landing page is doing a terrible job of driving users to it.
Use limited engineering
resources to do more
Engineering is often the most expensive resource in a software company for obvious reasons, but it doesn’t have to become a constraint. When designing a feature, strategic tradeoffs can bring the go-to market time down from weeks to days.
Getting rid of low-impact specifications in a feature can help you move a lot faster. Low fidelity prototypes can de-risk a design before it ever reaches engineering, and a short-to-medium-term design roadmap is a great way to build momentum.
Half the battle is not working on stuff that doesn’t matter.
Solve multi-disciplinary problems with cross-functional thinking
Collaboration across departments, also known as a cross-functional style of working, is important for innovation because multi-dimensional problems, like the kind technology companies face, require solutions that overlap across business functions.
In large corporations, change is a risk, and predictability is rewarded. Startups, however need to move quicky and challenge commonly held beliefs to be innovative.
Customer support has front-line knowledge about the customer, engineers have an intuition for complexity, marketing can reframe a feature to feel more relevant, and sales can tell you what people really value in your product.
Connecting the dots is your tactical advantage.
Recent work in
Marketing Automation
Broadly is a California-based startup that builds marketing automation software to help local businesses provide great customer experiences. Their mobile app accepts payments, manages reviews, conversations, and even sends campaigns.
We helped Broadly improve their cross-platform (mobile + desktop) applications and dashboard products. Watch the show reel to see some of the work we did with them.
Play ReelRecent work in
Marketing Automation
Broadly is a California-based startup that builds marketing automation software to help local businesses provide great customer experiences. Their mobile app accepts payments, manages reviews, conversations, and even sends campaigns.
We helped Broadly with their cross platform (mobile + desktop) applications and dashboard products. Play the show reel to see some of the work we did with them.
Play Reel (1 MIN)
Attention to detail adds up
When it comes to interaction design, you've just got to dive into the miniscule details and do the painstaking work of refinement. It's an obsessive craft where you consider every detail, almost meaningless on their own; working out the exact paddings, margins, font sizes, weights, letter spacings, colors, shadows, and the thousand other details that only really great designers obsess over. These are the thousands of micro-decisions that really no user will ever remark about, but in aggregate, they make interactions feel seamless, delightful, almost magical!
How it works
What makes for a successful design transformation?
Our working style is collaborative, fast-paced, and high-impact. The success of a design project lies in how well we think about the foundations.
Lifecycle Analysis
The data between acquisition and churn tells an incredible story
Retention is the cheapest customer acquisition. It’s like selling to customers in the store, they’re already here! Spending more on customer acquisition is a waste of resources if your product funnel is leaky. Data can help solve this.
In a connected system, a constraint is the single weakest link that holds back the entire system. As outlined by Eli Goldratt, solving this constraint should become an organizational priority.
Not all data is created equal and is often an unreliable source of truth. Data can be statistically insignificant, miss important vectors, be a lagging indicator or be only locally optimal. While we value data when good data is available, we are careful not to be blinded by it and weigh that data against intuition and experience.
Lifecycle Analysis
The data between acquisition and churn tells an incredible story
Retention is the cheapest customer acquisition. It’s like selling to customers in the store, they’re already here! Spending more on customer acquisition is a waste of resources if your product funnel is leaky. Data can help solve this.
In a connected system, a constraint is the single weakest link that holds back the entire system. As outlined by Eli Goldratt, solving this constraint should become an organizational priority.
Not all data is created equal and is often an unreliable source of truth. Data can be statistically insignificant, miss important vectors, be a lagging indicator or be only locally optimal. While we value data when good data is available, we are careful not to be blinded by it and weigh that data against intuition and experience.
Customer Feedback
& User Testing
Build features customers actually want
The elusive product-market Fit is a spectrum, not an event. By understanding the customer better, deliver more value for every dollar spent and unlock new growth potential. In other words, build features customers actually want.
Read between the lines to understand why retention isn’t improving. While some customers will articulate how they feel about your product perfectly and help you improve, most will be polite and mask negative feedback. Obvious problems might be difficult to spot until you speak with customers and pay close attention.
Making feedback a habit helps you maintain a pulse on product. Digg.com, the homepage of the internet, lost marketshare to Reddit when they made major moves that didn’t resonate with their audience. When things start to take a rough turn, course adjust before it’s too late.
Customer Feedback
& User Testing
Build features customers actually want
The elusive product-market Fit is a spectrum, not an event. By understanding the customer better, deliver more value for every dollar spent and unlock new growth potential. In other words, build features customers actually want.
Read between the lines to understand why retention isn’t improving. While some customers will articulate how they feel about your product perfectly and help you improve, most will be polite and mask negative feedback. Obvious problems might be difficult to spot until you speak with customers and pay close attention.
Making feedback a habit helps you maintain a pulse on product. Digg.com, the homepage of the internet, lost marketshare to Reddit when they made major moves that didn’t resonate with their audience. When things start to take a rough turn, course adjust before it’s too late.
Iterative Approach
An iterative approach builds momentum and reduces risk
It's not only possible to transform a complex product one feature at a time; in fact, it's the better approach. Major re-builds are often a risky “bet the company” move that can backfire by costing more than expected or closing the gap for competitors.
Momentum builds team morale; customers see frequent improvements; sales gets to speak about the constant improvements and new features to potential customers; and while you work on the next thing, the built-up features start to generate returns.
Something appears to be working with your current product. A big redesign can miss what makes your product work well right now, and you risk launching a product that’s less so. With continuous feedback cycles, gauge customer feedback and only build features that matter.
Iterative Approach
An iterative approach builds momentum and reduces risk
It's not only possible to transform a complex product one feature at a time; in fact, it's the better approach. Major re-builds are often a risky “bet the company” move that can backfire by costing more than expected or closing the gap for competitors.
Momentum builds team morale; customers see frequent improvements; sales gets to speak about the constant improvements and new features to potential customers; and while you work on the next thing, the built-up features start to generate returns.
Something appears to be working with your current product. A big redesign can miss what makes your product work well right now, and you risk launching a product that’s less so. With continuous feedback cycles, gauge customer feedback and only build features that matter.
Dubai
Kumail Hunaid
Kumail is an interaction designer at Fleet. He’s worked in design and engineering roles at companies like Dubizzle and McKinsey & Company. At Dubizzle, Kumail worked on software serving millions of users, while at McKinsey he supported digital transformation engagements with clients in banking, government, and insurance in the UAE, Johannesburg, Singapore, and Prague.
The components
This stuff sounds complicated. Let's break it down
There are three distinct phases in a design re-think. We start with a process of discovery, then define an approach and work towards making it all real.
Discovery
Stakeholder interviews
Our goal here is to build context around your business, to understand the challenges and complexities you're dealing with, your vision for the future, the key metrics you care about, and learn more about your customers. Stakeholders are generally the chief officers and the heads of product, design, and engineering.
Data collection
We'll work with your business intelligence team to build project-specific dashboards or run exports to answer key questions that are important to the success of the transformation. For data that hasn't been collected, we'll work with you to identify and setup collection methods.
Approach
From everything we’ve learned about your business and what the data shows us, we’ll work with you on planning an approach for this project. We’ll prioritize what’s important and create a plan for the upcoming weeks. This is the time to ask the big questions once more: what are we trying to achieve? What would make this transformation a success? What are the key risks and challenges? How will we measure the results in the end?
Approach
Wireframing
At a high level, we break the design process into user journeys, wireframes, and high-fidelity prototypes. The process for greenfield and brownfield projects is quite similar, with differences in implementation. Wireframes are rough sketches that offer us the opportunity to visualize what the end result might look like. It's an easy way to discuss a particular approach and identify flaws before investing time in building out more refined prototypes.
User journey mapping
Before we can start designing the details of a web application, we need to know at a high level how the application will flow. For existing applications, we can map out what currently exists and then review the flow to identify where improvements can be made, spot redundancies and inefficiencies (eg: funnel leaks).
Customer interviews
Talking to customers is the best way for us to understand their pains and learn more about what your customers value in your product. While speaking to customers is often very complicated, we think it's worth building out processes that naturally open up pathways for outreach, whether through sales, customer support, or other means.
High fidelity nodes
Complex applications can have hundreds (and sometimes thousands) of relatively unique pages. We'll select the most high-impact user journeys to start with and turn wireframes into high-fidelity mockups. This sets the tone for the rest of the re-design and gives us an idea of what works at the extremes of the application, building confidence that it will translate well into the rest of the application.
Synthesis
User testing
At this stage, we're quite happy with our key user journeys and feel quite confident that they'll work well for our customers. But before we go any further, we need to check our intuitions against reality. By performing user tests where randomly selected people are asked to navigate the application journey, we'll get an understanding of how well our work performs in the real world.
Design Feedback Sessions
At every stage of the design transformation, we'll schedule feedback sessions with key stakeholders to align on important decisions, collaborate on cross-functional problems, discuss blockers, and review metrics.
Roadmap development
Design transformations are ambitious, and natural constraints like time and engineering throughput will limit how much your engineering team can build during the transformation. A design roadmap is a forward looking document that engineering and product teams can continue to iteratively develop over the coming months. It is a live document that is updated as internal design teams continue to rework existing and new feature sets.
Implementation Consulting
Our implementation consultants can advise on technical decisions, tradeoffs, and approaches. They can help break down larger flows into phases that are easier to deliver on and help with maintaining a high bar of execution for client-facing flows.
Work with us
Please tell us more about your product and we’ll hop on a 15-30 minute introductory call (free) to talk through what we can do for your software. You can also email us on contact@fleetglobal.ae.
Follow us on LinkedIn
Fleet Global FZ-LLC,
Ras Al Khaimah Economic Zone,
United Arab Emirates
2018—2022 © All rights reserved