Subject to Change: Creating Great Products and Services for an Uncertain World (Adaptive Path) (Hardcover)

~ Peter Merholz (Author), (Author), (Author), (Author)
Key Phrases: fab lab, agile manifesto, emotional design, Adaptive Path, Capturing Complexity, Stop Designing (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

The world in which we live and work is subject to change without notice, and succeeding amidst that uncertainty requires continuous improvement. The key to creating successful products and services in a rapidly changing world is not resistance to unexpected change, but the flexibility to adapt to it. With that in mind, Subject to Change presents ideas that will help you improve your work designing products and services that provide great experiences for your customers.

Praise
"Short, but powerful. Easy to read, yet profound. I’ve been searching for just this book: the one perfect book that summarizes the essence of modern product design. This is it. The lessons are as powerful as they are simple: The product is NOT the goal. Successful products are systems. Focus on the experience. This requires empathy, agile product management, real understanding of the target audience. This book practices what it preaches. I will use it in my courses for MBA students. You should use it for, well, for everyone. Short, simple, persuasive, and powerful."
Don Norman
Author of Emotional Design and Design of Future Things
Co-Founder Nielsen Norman group

"Customers don’t care about how innovative you are. They just want to be happy and satisfied. Learn from Adaptive Path a passion for finding and solving the problems that will matter to customers no matter what the future brings."
Scott Berkun
Author, The Myths of Innovation

"Wake up. The future of business isn’t about flying cars and robot butlers. Creating the future is really about changing the way your company connects with its customers. Use this book as your guide."
Jeffrey Veen
Design Manager, Google

"Subject to Change presents complex, challenging ideas in simple, compelling language, with illuminating examples and no shortage of memorable phrases. At once authoritative and nimble, the book itself is an example of the kind of experience the authors admire. No matter who you are, it will change the way you think about design."
Michael Bierut
Partner, Pentagram
Author, 79 Short Essays on Design

"The principles set out in Subject to Change are essential for the design of any product, but especially relevant for the fast-moving world of web software. It used to be the case that a software product was designed once, and refreshed every couple of years. Software is no longer a product. It is a process, a dynamic service that evolves as it responds to constant interaction with its users. The essence of Web 2.0 design is to create a dynamic framework that harnesses the collective intelligence of customers in such a way that the software becomes almost alive. This terrific book teaches the mindset required for this new kind of design."
Tim O’Reilly
Founder and Publisher, O’Reilly Media

Product Description

To achieve success in today's ever-changing and unpredictable markets, competitive businesses need to rethink and reframe their strategies across the board. Instead of approaching new product development from the inside out, companies have to begin by looking at the process from the outside in, beginning with the customer experience. It's a new way of thinking-and working-that can transform companies struggling to adapt to today's environment into innovative, agile, and commercially successful organizations.

Companies must develop a new set of organizational competencies: qualitative customer research to better understand customer behaviors and motivations; an open design process to reframe possibilities and translate new ideas into great customer experiences; and agile technological implementation to quickly prototype ideas, getting them from the whiteboard out into the world where people can respond to them.

In "Subject to Change: Creating Great Products and Services for an Uncertain World," Adaptive Path, a leading experience strategy and design company, demonstrates how successful businesses can-and should-use customer experiences to inform and shape the product development process, from start to finish.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 178 pages
• Publisher: O'Reilly Media (March 26, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0596516835
• ISBN-13: 978-0596516833
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.8 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (19 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #59,742 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars It may sound like an ad, but it is also a wakeup call, May 9, 2008

By	Christina Liu (Lake Mary, FL United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Looking at the other reviews for this book, it appears people either love it or hate it. It does make repeated references to the authors' consulting company and the "success stories" they have achieved using the principles in the book. That being said however, if you simply "tune out" the self-gratifying bits, there is quite a bit of useful content in this book and it is laid out well. I started reading it on a cross-country US flight and found that I could not put it down. I did gloss over the "advertorials" for Adaptive Path, but could readily relate to the pitfalls described as my current company (and several previous companies) have fallen into the trap of thinking that customers simply want more features and functions crammed into a single product. I actually applied what I read in the meeting that I was flying to, tuning my comments and suggestions away from features and traditional product design and development methods. Instead I looked at it from the vantage points discussed in the book -- designing for the user experience and designing a "system" of products that work together instead of cramming it all into a single product. And it worked -- we resolved several lingering product issues by looking at the overall experience the user expects instead of the minutiae of the functions and screens.

This book is a wakeup call for product designers and marketers -- stop focusing on features and try to understand what the user really wants to accomplish with the product. While this is not radical new thinking, the straightforward style in which the information and concepts are presented should make it easy for just about anyone to finally achieve a "d'oh!" moment when it comes to designing products and services.

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A good guide for tech savvy Product Managers, July 2, 2008

By	Michael Krotscheck (Columbus, OH) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Sooner or later, every developer out there gets sick of the long hours, the process, the verification and the deadlines. Even if we've naturally gravitated towards leadership, the clarion call of management is strong- it's perceived as advancement (potentially into a C* role), comes with the benefit of fewer long hours, you have people you can boss around... all in all good things when looked at in the right light. Yet most developers end up in Development Management, which ends up being more about estimates and balancing resources (aka beancounting), rather than Product Management, which continues apace with the thing I love most about being a Developer: Building Stuff.

When my User Groups' book shipment from O'Reilly came in with a complementary copy of Adaptive Path's "Subject to Change" I was intrigued. From the title, the book is about "Creating great products and services for an uncertain world". It claimed to be a book book that seemed to be all about how to create and manage a product in the everchanging world of the internet. Now, it turns out that my initial enthusiasm was a little naive, since the argument presented in the book was substantially different than what I was expecting. In fact, one of its chapters is titled `Stop Designing "Products"`, which made me more than a little concerned.

Yet having said that, and taking into account the often blatant plugs for Adaptive Path, it turns out the book was exactly what I needed, even though it wasn't exactly what I was looking for.

Chapter 1 lays out the foundation of the argument, which is that customers aren't attracted to features, they're attracted to an experience. Note that this does not mean bells and whistles - I can have an experience at a circus, but that's not what I'm looking for in a laptop. Instead, it is critical to look at what your customer is actually trying to accomplish, and to make the experience of accomplishing that task as positive as possible. Layering on feature after feature is good only if the original intended task experience is not compromised, otherwise it simply adds noise to what should be an all-signal experience. In other words, good products are well designed, by which they don't mean pretty, nor that they have an elegant software implementation. Design is instead used in the inclusive sense- all aspects of the product, experience and execution are carefully considered and integrated into one seamless whole.

This foundation is then built on in Chapter 2 by presenting the idea that the aforementioned experience is a strategic decision, and then clearly defining what that does and does not mean. Those of you who are trying to achieve some flavor of competitive advantage (aka differentiation aka edge etc etc) should definitely read this chapter, because it provides a long list of clarifications given the context. Quite frankly, the whole thing reads like a snopes article that slowly dismantles many lessons learned in academic marketing classes. My favorite one is the ideal of Parity - the misconception that a product can be competitive simply by matching features with the competition. See, a feature is simply that: An implemented piece of functionality on a product spec sheet. If accessing and using said feature requires an advanced degree in astrophysics doesn't matter; the mere fact that the feature exists makes the product competitive.

With the supporting framework of their argument is clearly established, and Chapter 3 puts in context of previously established marketing approaches. When your focus is on the experience and the user's motivations, habits such as market segmentation rapidly get turned upside down. You can no longer assume that the consumer is some faceless drone who exists to give you money, but instead have to give that person a face, a background a motivation, and an objective. A segment rapidly evolves into a persona, and eventually loses its distinction altogether- you're no longer sculpting your message for a particular group or persona, but are instead approaching individuals to discover how you can best meet their needs and improve their experience.

Yet none of this can be accomplished without information, which is usually garnered by research (Chapter 4). Interestingly enough, the book does not necessarily go into individual research methods, but focuses more on the importance of qualitative over quantitative research and the need to involve every team member. Research, as is stated, too often happens in a strategy or research group independent of the team that will actually implement their findings, and thus the opportunity for consumer or persona empathy is lost within minutes of the powerpoint presentation. It is only by keeping everyone involved up front (though perhaps not directly contributive) that information gained is relevant, actionable, and provides durable insight.

Chapter 5 then takes us full circle back to the beginning, and really drives the idea that success is not driven by features, capabilities or marketing, but by the experience of the customer. It's not just the experience of completing a specific task that is meant here, but the entire support system ancillary to that task. You might have an iPod, but without an iTunes all you have is a pretty piece of plastic. Find out what the customer wants to accomplish, figure out what it'll take to perform all steps of that, and build a system to do so simply and elegantly.

At this point, the book could have ended and been a pretty effective piece on product design theory based on experience. It has taken us from the initial presentation of the idea all the way through the strategic advantage and full circle back to the beginning. Instead, it continues on and picks apart the actual implementation strategies, beginning with Design in Chapter 6. This is a beast of a chapter and not for the faint of heart, but is nevertheless utterly critical for understanding the depth of the argument. Design is picked apart by discipline, target, competency, strategic importance and implementation, and the chapter itself does a remarkable job breaking down common misconceptions. Design is necessary, strategic, and is presented as a mindset rather than a discipline, one that everyone must implement to properly contribute to the delivery.

Chapter 7 then goes into the nitty gritty of implementation by speaking about agile development methods. This is where the developer in me went squee, because for the first time I saw Agile presented within a strategic context rather than a reactive context. Too often when management hears "Agile Development" the first thing that comes to mind is "Development will be faster", or more responsive, and in many cases this is true. Even so, the book presents it as an integral part of experience based design, and discusses how its rapid iterative nature can be used to convert a design or motion prototype iteratively into a fully functioning application, while allowing user research and experience evaluation (and revision) at every step of the way. If you've ever had to say "That's what's written in the requirements, we can't change it now" this chapter is for you. Lets face it- issues and problems will arise during development no matter what happens, but if you keep everyone on deck (and not siloed into different expertise groups) you'll be able to confront it much faster.

And with that, Chapter 8 closes the book. I'd copy the two pages that compose it here verbatim if I didn't think there'd be conflict of interest issues, but safe it to say that it is the conclusion and summary of the entire book. The only thing certain is change, and here's how you deal with it.

Overall, a very good book, but I do have a few pointed comments. First of all, the cases presented within the book too often follow the pattern of "Here's company X, known as a genius at Y, and here's their process/methodology/etc." The academic in me chokes at statements like that, because they imply causality - that their process is the reason why they are so well known and respected, when in reality it could be something completely different. The book itself warns of making surface level assumptions like that, so I'm fairly irritated that they do so themselves.

The other one is the mixture of authoring tones. At times casual, at times formal, it's clear that more than one person wrote this book. When I'm reading a structured section about research and am suddenly approached in a conversational tone, my brain kicks me out of the narrative (and thus my experience with the book is diminished). Even so, I'd recommend this book to any marketer, strategist, developer... or, well, anyone who plays a role in a product production process. At 165 pages it's a light read, the ideas are straightforward and well explained, and though they aren't often supported as rigorously as I would prefer, the book itself make an excuse for that: If you spend too much time backing up your argument, you lose the time you'd spend on determining where your argument should take you.

6 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars disappointing and flawed discussion of user experience design, July 16, 2008

By	Nadyne Mielke (Mountain View, CA USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I was disappointed when I got my pre-order of this book. At a scant 160 pages, I was skeptical that it could offer very much insight.

On reading it, I was proven correct. Much of the book was nothing more than an extended advertisement for Adaptive Path. Case studies were too short to learn much from. The only case study really discussed in depth was of Target's new prescription bottles, which have been discussed more in depth and more usefully in too many other books.

The book's eight chapters are full of short sections; many of them read as though they are blog entries. They're strung together with little regard for content or context. The seventh chapter, a flawed discussion of agile development, is completely worthless. The book could have been so much better if the authors had taken the time and effort to better consider their arguments and write a more cohesive work.

If you can look past the book's many shortcomings, there are some interesting nuggets in there. Sadly, the useful bits comprise less than 10% of the book, but they're good enough to earn this book two stars.