> I think this phenomenon is more generally connected to the political economy of small problems. Most UX/CX is not some big thing (exception: the site is always down) but instead lots and lots of little things. It’s hard to agenda-set on a long tail of little things. Political upside is low and legibility is low.
This resonates a lot coming from a tech company background too! Two thoughts I have based on my experiences around this, neither of which fully address the issues, but are techniques I've seen work reasonably well to make progress.
1. One theory I have is that these are best addressed through culture rather than planning. If the culture has high standards, it makes it harder to ship low quality stuff. (This only goes *so* far, obviously, but I saw at Dropbox how a culture of quality in, e.g., hiring, was incredibly powerful in maintaining a rigorous hiring process in the face of a competing need to hire quickly.)
2. Another technique that I've seen is to provide a fixed time budget to product teams that is meant to be spent on quality issues. If something feels subjectively "low quality", that gives leaders a way to say "I want to invest in this" without having to micro-manage the specifics of "what needs to be done". This is also useful for technical debt. (For example, you can say that teams should spend 20% of time on quality and customer issues, 20% of time on technical debt, etc, and then that creates space for each of those specific constituencies at the local level to know that the time is protected.) Of course, this only works if the culture is willing to support that kind of investment. At Dropbox, we actually had a standard 60/20/20 framework that we asked teams to align to during our roadmapping process. (There are some downsides to this approach, particularly if you get into too much detailed accounting of the work, but it is a nice way to help, e.g., product management, engineering and other strategic functions talk about this kind of work without having to mis-micro-manage it.)
I definitely agree about culture here. That said, I think it presents an interesting challenge to “reform” (rather than “disrupt”) theories of change here. A new org can select for this and reinforce it early, making it the dominant culture. Compare that with government, where the cultural change cost is massively higher. So to some extent I think a “this is at root about culture” is in fact a token in the jar of disrupt over reform approaches.
I also like the fixed budget. I will say I’ve seen struggles with that internal to government, specifically because a roadmap item called “comply with new change Y” consistently gets prioritized over one that is more “grab bag of small CX improvements.” This can be overcome but I think useful to delineate where it still requires some corollary change, such as leadership ensuring that fixed effort each period into the bucket.
I think I'd generally agree with that. I also think that that culture is often downstream of the larger environmental context and incentive systems (which I think is why disruptive leadership changes can ultimately influence culture--e.g. Lou Gerstner at IBM).
I suppose the positive case for reform is that culture is the product of many people's choices and interactions, so anyone in a complex system has potential to influence and change it. If there are multiple stable cultural equilibria within the environmental context and incentive systems, it seems plausible that local positive culturally changes that find another one of those equilibria should be able to grow and possibly snowball without the need for top down disruption. (Google's Testing on the Toilet initiative that was [from what I understand] driven bottom-up comes to mind as a small example - https://testing.googleblog.com/2007/01/introducing-testing-on-toilet.html)
Great article, the Kalil paper link appears to not work, FYI.
> I think this phenomenon is more generally connected to the political economy of small problems. Most UX/CX is not some big thing (exception: the site is always down) but instead lots and lots of little things. It’s hard to agenda-set on a long tail of little things. Political upside is low and legibility is low.
This resonates a lot coming from a tech company background too! Two thoughts I have based on my experiences around this, neither of which fully address the issues, but are techniques I've seen work reasonably well to make progress.
1. One theory I have is that these are best addressed through culture rather than planning. If the culture has high standards, it makes it harder to ship low quality stuff. (This only goes *so* far, obviously, but I saw at Dropbox how a culture of quality in, e.g., hiring, was incredibly powerful in maintaining a rigorous hiring process in the face of a competing need to hire quickly.)
2. Another technique that I've seen is to provide a fixed time budget to product teams that is meant to be spent on quality issues. If something feels subjectively "low quality", that gives leaders a way to say "I want to invest in this" without having to micro-manage the specifics of "what needs to be done". This is also useful for technical debt. (For example, you can say that teams should spend 20% of time on quality and customer issues, 20% of time on technical debt, etc, and then that creates space for each of those specific constituencies at the local level to know that the time is protected.) Of course, this only works if the culture is willing to support that kind of investment. At Dropbox, we actually had a standard 60/20/20 framework that we asked teams to align to during our roadmapping process. (There are some downsides to this approach, particularly if you get into too much detailed accounting of the work, but it is a nice way to help, e.g., product management, engineering and other strategic functions talk about this kind of work without having to mis-micro-manage it.)
I definitely agree about culture here. That said, I think it presents an interesting challenge to “reform” (rather than “disrupt”) theories of change here. A new org can select for this and reinforce it early, making it the dominant culture. Compare that with government, where the cultural change cost is massively higher. So to some extent I think a “this is at root about culture” is in fact a token in the jar of disrupt over reform approaches.
I also like the fixed budget. I will say I’ve seen struggles with that internal to government, specifically because a roadmap item called “comply with new change Y” consistently gets prioritized over one that is more “grab bag of small CX improvements.” This can be overcome but I think useful to delineate where it still requires some corollary change, such as leadership ensuring that fixed effort each period into the bucket.
I think I'd generally agree with that. I also think that that culture is often downstream of the larger environmental context and incentive systems (which I think is why disruptive leadership changes can ultimately influence culture--e.g. Lou Gerstner at IBM).
I suppose the positive case for reform is that culture is the product of many people's choices and interactions, so anyone in a complex system has potential to influence and change it. If there are multiple stable cultural equilibria within the environmental context and incentive systems, it seems plausible that local positive culturally changes that find another one of those equilibria should be able to grow and possibly snowball without the need for top down disruption. (Google's Testing on the Toilet initiative that was [from what I understand] driven bottom-up comes to mind as a small example - https://testing.googleblog.com/2007/01/introducing-testing-on-toilet.html)