Product design is a complex balancing of conflicting constraints and what works for a product idea in one company might be very different than would work for the same idea in a different company. Given that – does it really make sense to say the design is centred on anything?

The answer to this goes hand-in-hand with the use of ‘people’ as the representative of that centre. The purpose of good design is to make something that fits well into its world and at the centre of that world are all the people that might use, interact or be affected by it. By saying ‘people-centred’ we are avoiding a declaration of which people are at the centre, but fully embracing the idea that the needs of some people need to explicitly drive the design.

A startup might have limited funds and therefore pressure to be earning revenue sooner than a well-established company with deep pockets. In this context one wants an experience strategy that is about delivering an experience quickly and then growing it over time; which in turn makes it critical to identify the fundamental core value of the product concept and the people who will most embrace that value, and that can define the starting point for the growth to mass market.

Alternatively a technological breakthrough may be the core fundamental idea (and IP that must be protected) and a product needs to be launched to claim the idea and the IP.  

We can think of these different possibilities as different starting points for the people-centred design process – starting in commerce or technology, but then rapidly progressing repeatedly through technical, experiential and commercial explorations until something is defined enough to be the first release.

Sometimes it is easier to see where quality goes astray – it is common in medical domains for a product to start out being built for one hospital, or even for one team at one hospital. I these cases the very existence of the product is all that matters – the product is being built for themselves to use and it is in many cases following a good user-centred, or people-centred approach. The complex interactions between this new product and existing products is easily understood and addressed since all the users are in the same context. However, the next step is when someone decides that the product should be commercialised and then, when it looks like a finished product exists, there are suddenly numerous other workflows and tools that the product must accommodate in order to be successful.