How companies can build winning ventures using the ‘design critique’

Rawpixel

Sebastian is a TIA Star Contributor and publishes high-value content that serves the Asian tech community. Read more from TIA Star Contributors here.

This article was co-authored by Marc Seefelder.

In 10 seconds, name a single venture started within a large enterprise which managed to become as big as that corporation itself. If you can name a case, please reference it in the comments.

There are very few strong examples of companies that internally created a new venture or product category which has re-invented them—IBM, Netflix, and Nokia, to name a few.

Yet for every success story, there are many more that failed.

Many corporations today have not challenged themselves enough over the last years. It is often from the outside that new juggernauts are created to replace the old, not from the inside: The biggest asset of Yahoo was their stake in Alibaba, eBay’s best move was purchasing Paypal, etc.

So, how can we increase the likelihood of producing outsized wins from inside corporations?

Design critique

A key concept from the design world might come in handy: the design critique.

This is an important tool to iteratively improve designs by getting feedback from highly skilled peers. It helps designers get different views on the work at hand.

Great feedback comes from experts, and it is all about asking the right questions and also to know when to be quiet. The intention is to improve something in a short amount of time and give the people working on it a different view.

Insight 1: You only get it right when you get the right people to do it.

If you put together random groups of people, you will not achieve quality outputs. This should be a no-brainer, but sadly it is often overlooked. 

An expert puts thousands and thousands of hours into his domain, so what you want is to build up on the lessons these experts learn.

The critique board