Episode #11 - Lisa deBettencourt, Founder and CEO of Forge Harmonic
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Description
Lisa deBettencourt is a product design leader, Founder, and CEO of Forge Harmonic, an innovation and strategic design firm that collaborates with healthcare and life science organizations to envision and create solutions that transform the lives of people, care providers, and health systems. Lisa has been at the forefront of experience design and human-centered design since the pre-dot-com era. Before founding her own strategic design firm, she has worked in-house at notable companies, including Bose Corporation, Autodesk, and Confer Health, and many others. In our conversation, Lisa shares insights on:
The evolving terminology and roles within design, emphasizing skills over titles
The integration of design in healthcare, from care delivery settings to tech-based services
Common misconceptions about design, such as its perceived role as merely aesthetic enhancement
The critical role of design as facilitation, fostering collaboration and alignment
The importance of human-centered design and its impact on user experience
Identifying workflow inefficiencies in e-prescribing and improving patient-doctor interactions
Prototyping in practice management software and engaging stakeholders early in the process
Challenges in health tech design, including the complexity of the healthcare ecosystem and distance from end users
Forge Harmonic's mission to create innovative, human-centered products and services for healthcare
Her optimism about emerging trends in healthcare, such as the focus on patient experience and investment in femtech
Lisa’s insights highlight the strategic role of design in healthcare and the importance of addressing real user needs, underscoring the transformative potential of empathetic, human-centered design in driving innovation in healthcare.
Some takeaways:
Design Terminology and Roles: Lisa explains that design titles have evolved, with many terms often overlapping. She highlights that the primary focus should be on the skills outlined in job descriptions rather than specific titles. Here are definitions of some common design terms mentioned:
Experience Design: Focuses on creating meaningful and engaging experiences for users by understanding the entire user journey and ensuring every interaction with a product or service is intuitive and satisfying. This encompasses all touchpoints, both digital and physical, to create a cohesive experience.
Product Design: Involves designing the features and functionality of a product to meet user needs and business goals. Product designers define how a product works, ensuring it is usable and functional while collaborating with cross-functional teams to bring a product from concept to market.
UI (User Interface) Design: Concentrates on the visual elements of a product interface, such as buttons, icons, typography, and color schemes. UI designers create aesthetically pleasing and consistent interfaces that enhance usability and user interaction.
UX (User Experience) Design: Focuses on optimizing the overall user experience by conducting research to understand user needs, behaviors, and pain points. UX designers aim to create intuitive and efficient interactions that meet user needs and enhance satisfaction.
Interaction Design: Involves designing the interactive aspects of a product, focusing on how users engage with it. Interaction designers define system behaviors in response to user actions, creating engaging and logical interactions.
Human-Centered Design: An approach that prioritizes user needs, behaviors, and preferences throughout the design process. It involves empathizing with users, defining their problems, ideating solutions, prototyping, and testing to create products that truly meet their needs.
Integration of Design in Healthcare: The integration of design within healthcare organizations varies greatly depending on the type of organization. Lisa highlights the differences between physical spaces like hospitals and tech-based healthcare services:
Care Delivery Settings: In hospitals and clinics, designers must consider the physical environment and how patients, staff, and technology interact. Design must address the context in which products and services will be used, considering factors such as workflow, ergonomics, and the needs of all people in the space.
Tech-Based Services: In software companies serving the healthcare industry, the focus is on creating seamless digital experiences that integrate with existing technologies. Designers must ensure that software products are intuitive and effectively meet user needs while considering the technological landscape and user workflows.
Organizational Maturity and Goals: The design approach is influenced by the organization's size, maturity level, and objectives. Larger organizations with more mature design practices might focus on systemic improvements and strategic design integration, while startups might prioritize rapid prototyping and adaptability
Human-Centered Focus: Successful design integration requires understanding user journeys and addressing the unique challenges faced by healthcare organizations, whether they are directly serving patients or developing technology solutions
Misconceptions About Design: There is a widespread misconception that designers are primarily responsible for enhancing a product's visual appeal. Lisa emphasizes that design’s real value lies in addressing complex problems and optimizing workflows. By involving designers early in the process, organizations can leverage their expertise to gain a deeper understanding of user needs, identify pain points, and develop solutions that are both aesthetically pleasing and functional
Design is Only About Aesthetics: A common misconception is that designers are tasked merely with making things look pretty. Many designers encounter requests to "make it sizzle" or "make it look nice," which fails to recognize the deeper value of design in problem-solving and functionality.
Designers as Fix-All Superheroes: There is a prevalent belief that hiring a designer can solve all organizational problems, but this sets unrealistic expectations for both the designer and the organization. Designers are sometimes viewed as superheroes who can come in, fix everything, and then leave, which can lead to failure and burnout if they do not build consensus and facilitate alignment
Reskinning as a Solution: Some people believe that reskinning or simply changing the visual design of a product is enough to improve it. Lisa argues that this approach is often a waste of time and money because it doesn't address the underlying issues with functionality or user experience
Prototyping Equals High-Fidelity Tools Like Figma: There is an unspoken expectation that prototyping must be done in high-fidelity tools like Figma. Lisa advocates for broader definitions of prototyping, including low-fidelity methods like storytelling, whiteboarding, and sketching, which can be more effective in early-stage ideation
Centralization vs. Decentralization of Design Teams: There is often debate over whether design teams should be centralized or integrated within product teams. Lisa emphasizes the importance of considering organizational goals and the experience you want to deliver when structuring design teams, rather than rigidly adhering to one model
Design as Facilitation: Designers serve as facilitators who bring together diverse perspectives and ideas to drive projects forward. Effective communication and collaboration are essential to ensure alignment among team members and stakeholders. Lisa emphasizes that designers must take in ideas, inputs, and data from various sources and synthesize them into cohesive concepts. Here are some examples of how designers can facilitate the process:
Continuous Collaboration: Designers need to engage in ongoing communication with product and engineering leaders to understand business goals, product vision, and technological capabilities. This ensures that design concepts are aligned with organizational objectives and feasible within technical constraints
Iterative Feedback Loops: Designers should present concepts and prototypes to stakeholders early and often, gathering feedback to identify gaps, potential issues, and opportunities for improvement. This iterative process helps refine ideas and fosters a collaborative environment where stakeholders feel involved and invested in the solution
Managing Expectations: By keeping stakeholders informed and involved, designers can help manage expectations and reduce the risk of surprises. This approach ensures that the final product aligns with what was promised and provides a rationale for any necessary changes
Human-Centered Design: Human-centered design prioritizes understanding and addressing the psychological, social, ergonomic, and emotional needs of users. This approach involves conducting thorough research to gain insights into users’ experiences and challenges. By focusing on human needs, designers can create solutions that are more intuitive, effective, and satisfying. This contrasts with other problem-solving methods that may prioritize technical or business considerations over the actual user experience
Identifying Workflow Inefficiencies in e-Prescribing: The company initially sought to modernize its user interface, but Lisa’s team discovered that the real challenge lay in the inefficiencies of the existing workflows. By focusing on understanding the needs of different user groups, they identified opportunities to improve patient-doctor interactions and streamline the prescribing process. This approach prioritized functional improvements over cosmetic changes, demonstrating the importance of addressing underlying workflow issues to create more effective solutions. The story underscores the value of comprehensive user research in identifying the root causes of user dissatisfaction
Prototyping in Practice Management Software: During a prototyping phase, the company used storyboarding to present a new concept involving tablets in exam rooms. Feedback from a practice owner about the cost implications of purchasing multiple tablets led to a reevaluation of the proposed solution. This early, low-fidelity prototyping approach provided valuable stakeholder insights and helped the team identify potential barriers before committing significant resources to development. The story emphasizes the importance of engaging stakeholders early in the design process to uncover potential roadblocks and make informed decisions
Challenges in Health Tech Design: Integrating design effectively within health tech organizations can be challenging due to several factors that Lisa highlights:
Distance from End Users: Designers often find themselves several layers removed from the actual users of their products due to intermediaries like insurance companies, healthcare providers, and regulatory bodies. This distance makes it challenging to gather direct user feedback and tailor solutions to meet users' actual needs
Complexity of Healthcare Ecosystem: Healthcare is a complex field with many entrenched interests, including government, insurance companies, and various healthcare providers. This complexity makes it difficult to implement changes and innovations, as healthcare involves treating chronic diseases and improving health over time, making it a challenging and slow-moving field for designers
Lack of Design Maturity in Organizations: Many healthcare organizations lack design maturity, meaning they may not fully understand or appreciate the value of design beyond aesthetics. This can lead to underutilization of design capabilities and a failure to integrate design thinking into strategic processes
Misalignment of Business and Design Goals: Aligning business goals with design work is essential but challenging. Designers must ensure that their work contributes to broader business objectives, such as improving patient satisfaction or increasing revenue. This requires careful measurement and alignment with business KPIs, which can be difficult when multiple factors influence outcomes
Risk of Oversimplification: There is a risk of oversimplifying problems and solutions in healthcare. Simply reskinning an application or focusing on superficial changes without addressing underlying workflow or user experience issues can lead to ineffective solutions. Designers need to engage in comprehensive research and understanding to avoid this pitfall
Need for Continuous Collaboration: Effective design in health tech requires ongoing collaboration with various stakeholders, including product and engineering leaders. Designers must stay aligned with the organization's direction and adapt to changes quickly, requiring constant communication and the ability to synthesize diverse inputs into cohesive design solutions.
Prototyping: Lisa challenges the notion that prototyping should be limited to digital tools like Figma. She emphasizes the importance of low-fidelity prototyping methods, such as storytelling and sketching, to explore ideas and gather feedback early in the design process. These methods encourage creativity and open discussion, allowing teams to quickly iterate on concepts and identify potential issues before significant resources are invested. Prototyping should be viewed as a flexible and iterative process that helps refine ideas and align stakeholders
Forge Harmonic's Mission: Forge Harmonic aims to improve the experience of care delivery by creating innovative, human-centered products, services, and systems for healthcare organizations. The company adopts a partnership model, working closely with clients to deeply understand their needs and collaboratively develop solutions. This approach ensures that the final product aligns with the client’s vision and effectively addresses the challenges faced by their users. Forge Harmonic’s focus on partnership and co-creation sets it apart as a leader in design-driven innovation within the healthcare sector
Hope for Healthcare: Lisa expresses optimism about several emerging trends in healthcare, including the increased focus on patient experience, the shift of care delivery to the home, and the growing investment in femtech and women’s health. These trends reflect a broader recognition of the importance of creating healthcare solutions that are responsive to the needs of patients and embrace technological advancements. The emphasis on patient experience and personalized care models presents exciting opportunities for design to play a transformative role in healthcare
Advice for Designers:
Set Realistic Expectations: Designers should manage expectations by clearly communicating what design can and cannot achieve. It's important to be upfront about the limitations and potential impact of design work, ensuring that stakeholders understand the scope and process involved.
Focus on Collaboration: Collaboration is key in design. Designers should actively engage with other team members, including product managers, engineers, and stakeholders, to ensure that their work aligns with the broader organizational goals and that all perspectives are considered in the design process.
Facilitate Consensus and Alignment: Designers play a crucial role in facilitating consensus among different stakeholders. By bringing diverse perspectives together, they can help align everyone around a common vision and ensure that design decisions are informed by a range of insights and priorities.
Embrace Iterative Feedback: Seeking and incorporating feedback is essential. Designers should create opportunities for stakeholders to provide input early and often, using iterative processes to refine and improve design solutions based on real-world insights and needs.
Build Trust and Credibility: Establishing trust with stakeholders is crucial for successful design work. By demonstrating reliability, competence, and a commitment to addressing user and business needs, designers can build strong relationships that support effective collaboration and implementation
Show Notes
Where to find Lisa deBettencourt:
email: lisa@forgeharmonic.com
Forge Harmonic: https://www.forgeharmonic.com/
—
Where to find Angela and Omar:
Angela Suthrave
Omar Mousa
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Referenced:
Forge Harmonic: https://www.forgeharmonic.com/
Experience Design: https://www.clockwork.com/insights/what-is-experience-design/
Human-Centered Design: https://www.uxdesigninstitute.com/blog/what-is-human-centered-design/
Design Thinking: https://online.hbs.edu/blog/post/what-is-design-thinking
Facilitation for Product Designers: https://medium.com/zalando-design/the-science-of-facilitation-a-guide-for-product-designers-f14bf77910c9
Conway’s Law: https://www.atlassian.com/blog/teamwork/what-is-conways-law-acmi
The Myths of UX Design/ Product Design/Whatever They Call It This Week: https://cwodtke.medium.com/the-myths-of-ux-design-product-design-whatever-they-call-it-this-week-ef37a39cac6b
Product Design Prototyping: https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/topics/prototyping
Some Resources for Product Designers: https://www.edorozco.com/product-design-resources/
Check out our website: https://www.concepttocare.com
Subscribe to our newsletter: https://concepttocare.substack.com/p/episode-11-lisa-debettencourt
Transcript
[00:00:00] Lisa DeBettencourt: Designers really have to have the superpower of communication visually, conceptually, whatever. And so I see that our role is primarily facilitation. We have to take in ideas, inputs, concepts, answers. It's data from all different parts of number one organization and number two, the customers and users.
[00:00:23] Lisa DeBettencourt: And you have to smoosh it all together and try to come up with something that's going to move things forward.
[00:00:28] Angela Suthrave: Welcome to Concept2Care, where we hear candid stories of success and failure, discuss strategy and dive into the details that offer advice on what to do and what not to do in health tech.
[00:00:39] Omar Mousa: Whether you're a seasoned pro. Growing your career or just starting out. Our aim for this podcast is to be relevant, real world, and tactical. We're dedicated to not only entertaining you all, but also empowering you with actionable insights that can be applied beyond the podcast, one concept at a time.
[00:00:54] Angela Suthrave: This is Angela
[00:00:56] Omar Mousa: and this is Omar.
[00:00:57] Angela Suthrave: Welcome to concept to care.
[00:00:59] Omar Mousa: Today, we have a special guest joining us, Lisa DeBettencourt, a product design leader and founder of Forge Harmonic, an innovation and strategic design firm that works with healthcare and life science organizations to envision and create solutions that transform the lives of people, care providers, and health systems.
[00:01:16] Omar Mousa: Lisa is someone who I enjoy and admire a lot, so I'm happy she could make the time to be on this show. In this episode, we dive into Lisa's journey and explore how her work is reshaping the landscape of care delivery. We'll discuss the critical role of design in healthcare organizations, the nuances between experienced design and product design, and the importance of aligning design with business goals.
[00:01:39] Omar Mousa: Lisa will also share insights on prototyping, the power of storytelling and design, and how her team at Forge Harmonic collaborates with clients to create innovation solutions that enhance the patient experience. Get ready for an engaging conversation filled with laughs, valuable insights, and inspiring stories that highlight transformative power of design in healthcare.
[00:02:05] Omar Mousa: Lisa, welcome to the show.
[00:02:07] Lisa DeBettencourt: Thanks for having me. I'm excited to chat with you.
[00:02:09] Omar Mousa: We are very excited. This is the first time we're bringing on a product design leader. So this is a treat for both the audience and us. Before we get into the meat of things, why don't you go ahead and just tell us about yourself?
[00:02:21] Lisa DeBettencourt: All right, sure. So Lisa DeBettencourt, so I own a small design led innovation studio called Fort Harmonic based in the Boston area, work specifically in healthcare. It's been around for about five years. I worked in house at. A variety of different health tech companies building and leading their design organizations and been doing experience design now for too long.
[00:02:45] Lisa DeBettencourt: Came out of the world of engineering and hardware experience design pre. com era timeframe. So been around the block a little bit, but I just focus right now specifically in healthcare.
[00:02:56] Angela Suthrave: We are excited to be talking about design. There are a whole bunch of different terms, experience design, product design, UI, UX design.
[00:03:07] Angela Suthrave: Tell us about what that means to you.
[00:03:10] Lisa DeBettencourt: Well, having, like I said, been around the block for a little while, the names have changed so many times. I think when I started, I was an interaction designer and then that turned into experience design and that turned into product design. So it's, in my mind, it's kind of all just a big.
[00:03:30] Lisa DeBettencourt: semantics game. A lot of the names really mean the same thing. And the titles mean the same thing. And the roles are kind of similar. Some people are very passionate about there being a significant difference between product design and experience design. I don't really get hung up on titles and names. So the biggest place where that shows up is when you're looking at job descriptions, if someone's looking for a job.
[00:03:51] Lisa DeBettencourt: And it's really just about what the skill set entails that's listed in that job description. So a lot of companies call them different things and it really doesn't matter at the end of the day if you're working towards your strengths and the organization is benefiting from the work that you do. So for me, it's kind of all very similar.
[00:04:07] Lisa DeBettencourt: User interface being the thing that's probably the most different or unique from the other two in that you're really focused on. The visual aspect of it, as opposed to the functional, the workflows, the interactions, the user interface layer, the top most closest layer to the user is for me, the one that stands out as being much different.
[00:04:29] Omar Mousa: It's definitely one of those things where I find if you ask anyone on the street, do you know what this is? They're like, yeah, of course. And then forced to put a definition behind it. That's like a, actually you take. Pause.
[00:04:39] Lisa DeBettencourt: Yeah.
[00:04:40] Omar Mousa: One thing I do always say, it's like when I'm experiencing good product design or good experience design, I know what it feels like, you know, the feeling of it, you know, the touch of it.
[00:04:51] Lisa DeBettencourt: Yeah.
[00:04:51] Omar Mousa: Let's talk about, you know, healthcare organizations in more specifically or a health tech company. How does design effectively plug into those kinds of organizations?
[00:05:02] Lisa DeBettencourt: Depends on what. Kind of organization you're talking about. Right? So you have the care delivery, you know, organizations, whether it's hospitals or the more tech based services that are delivering care, clinical care versus the software developers themselves who service the healthcare industry or specifically service the healthcare industry.
[00:05:22] Lisa DeBettencourt: So when you have a physical space, such as a hospital or clinic or something like that. You know, you're plugging in a little bit differently because you're thinking about context very differently of how your products and services are going to be used and what the experience is going to be like with all the people that are in that space versus when you're working with a software company, you know, you're trying to deliver design and deliver a software experience that plugs into.
[00:05:50] Lisa DeBettencourt: you know, other technologies that their customers have in place and the users of those, you know, that suite of technologies. So, you know, it really depends on what the organization is like, how big it is, what their level of maturity is. You know, there's a lot of those kinds of different aspects that define how you plug in as a, as a designer.
[00:06:12] Angela Suthrave: I think that there are a lot of misconceptions about the role of designers. I know that a lot of designers I've worked with in the past have this pet peeve where they're like, don't ask me to make things look pretty. And so can you help? It's so true. Yeah. You know, like I think just
[00:06:30] Lisa DeBettencourt: sizzle. Can you make it sizzle?
[00:06:31] Lisa DeBettencourt: How
[00:06:32] Angela Suthrave: do you
[00:06:34] Lisa DeBettencourt: define that?
[00:06:36] Angela Suthrave: Right. And so how, how do we get people to understand the true value of, you know, what you all do? And Do you have any recommendations for how to correctly ask designers for their help and get the most value out of their input? It's such a huge question,
[00:06:54] Lisa DeBettencourt: really. So how do you, how do you first engage with a designer and how do you get them to help you?
[00:06:59] Lisa DeBettencourt: You kind of, you started with, they get the question of, can you make it look pretty, but really it's backing it up so much further into what's the problem you're trying to solve. It's a little bit of a, it's a yin and yang, right? Cause you have to understand the skillset of the designer that you're working with and you have to understand the problems that you're trying to solve.
[00:07:19] Lisa DeBettencourt: So the, the designers can engage that you want to engage them early on in the process, especially if they're human centered designers. Really focusing on workflows, really focusing on human needs. You want to engage them in the earlier stages so that they can start to collect information, collect customer insights, collect understanding of how people work in their environment or the challenges that they're facing, right?
[00:07:44] Lisa DeBettencourt: So they can go out and do some research. If they're sort of like a generalist designer and they have this research capabilities, then you can engage with them there and help them really try to shape and define the problem that you're trying to solve. And then. They can work with you through the process of, you know, creating concepts, creating whittling down as to what your priorities are, creating the concepts around how you want to solve the problem or serve your customers in a new way or in a better way.
[00:08:11] Lisa DeBettencourt: And then eventually you'll get to the. You know, if it's something that has a visual aspect to it, the look and the feel of it, that's really, you know, trying to engage folks a lot earlier than, than, you know, having engineering already building something and saying, can you, can you fix this up for me? Can you clean it up for me?
[00:08:26] Lisa DeBettencourt: Make it look, make it look nice.
[00:08:28] Angela Suthrave: I heard you say a little bit about involving designers to help shape the problem that you're trying to solve. I'd love to hear a little bit more about that as we understand the roles and responsibilities. So, you know, a lot of times. For a product, I think one of the most important jobs of a product person is to figure out what problems to solve and then to bring it to the team to say, this is the problem we're trying to solve.
[00:08:50] Angela Suthrave: This is the metric that we're measuring. These are the outcomes that we're trying to achieve. Now let's do discovery as three legs of the stool to do that. Do you agree with that approach? I do. I do. Yeah.
[00:09:00] Lisa DeBettencourt: Yeah. It's sort of like, you know, if you're the captain of, if the product is sort of the captain of the ship, they're saying we're going to go towards that island.
[00:09:09] Lisa DeBettencourt: Right. And, and the designer can help guide, you know, how you're going to get there. It's not like, where are we going to go on this map? Right. Product is starting to define where there's opportunities, where there's market potential, you know, those kinds of things, really big, yeah. You know, starting out with this grand like opportunity spectrum and whittling it down to, Oh, we're going to go in this direction.
[00:09:31] Lisa DeBettencourt: And then the design role or the, or the research even role can start to really, um, help shape that and refine that. And, and, you know, Provide more clarity and more definition around it. So, you know, there may be through that process, new opportunities that hadn't even been, you know, uncovered thought of, or anything that gets brought to the surface along the way, of course.
[00:09:59] Lisa DeBettencourt: And then you might change your mind and be like, Oh, actually, this is another thing that we hadn't even thought about, but really you're setting the course and then design can come in and help, you know, help shape how you get, how you get there and uncover a lot more information about. That problem space, the people in it, the needs, all those kinds of things.
[00:10:16] Lisa DeBettencourt: So I totally subscribe to the Marty Kagan, you know, three legged stool, the three, the triumvirate of, you know, design product and, and engineering. Big fan of that. And so absolutely. I agree with that.
[00:10:28] Omar Mousa: Lisa, you and I have talked about this a lot. Product design is critical in facilitation and alignment. How can design sort of support?
[00:10:36] Omar Mousa: In the facilitation and alignment in the product development process.
[00:10:40] Lisa DeBettencourt: So this is like my soapbox. Yeah. You know, I think designers, every, every role has a different set of superpowers and, and designers really have to have the superpower of communication visually, conceptually, whatever. And so, I see that our role is, is primarily facilitation.
[00:11:06] Lisa DeBettencourt: We have to take in ideas, inputs, concepts, answers, data from all different parts of, number one, the organization and number two, the customers and the users. And you have to smoosh it all together to try to come up with something that's going to move things forward. Well, You can't move things forward or you can't come up with those concepts or those new stories in a vacuum.
[00:11:27] Lisa DeBettencourt: Right? And you can't just go into a cave and like spend 4, 000 hours coming up with this amazing solution and then have a big reveal. Right? But there's more like everything. Right? Because all you're going to do is just alienate everybody that's in the room. Because they had no idea what was going on. And so a big part of the role as a designer is to keep everybody in the loop showing, you know, taking all the information in getting suggestions, getting ideas, putting forward a concept that tries to bring all that information together.
[00:12:00] Lisa DeBettencourt: And putting it back out in front of that same group and saying, okay, what's missing? What's wrong? What's broken? What's right? What are we missing? And walking through that whole, that part of it in depth to, you know, foster the communication and get, you know, get ideas back quickly. Get, you know, bring up any challenges.
[00:12:22] Lisa DeBettencourt: Oh, that won't work because it's gonna be too expensive or that will take forever. We don't have the tech to do that. Or did you think about this? Oh, if you show me this now, now that I think about these three other things that we didn't talk about. So you're coordinating all these moving parts and you want to get the disagreements out early.
[00:12:37] Lisa DeBettencourt: And you want to start folding in all of these, all of the new information, I just see the work that we do is like, you know, it's experimentation. Number one, but it's also there. No, it's a, it's a, an object to put in front of people to get some sort of signals back, right? It's, it prompts people. It's like, it gets people to think and talk about.
[00:12:58] Lisa DeBettencourt: You know where you want to go and at the end of the day, you're collectively and collaboratively generating the solution that you're eventually going to put forth into the market or into your users hands. And so what happens along the way is two things. One is everybody's bought in. Everybody knows what the solution is, so they can go back to their respective, you know, roles, teams, whatever.
[00:13:19] Lisa DeBettencourt: And they can start talking about it. Oh, we decided we're going to do such and such. And so in order to do such and such, we have to prep for this thing, or this new thing came up and we have a little bit of a pivot. And we need to talk about that. And so what happens then is that they become, you know, a little bit missionaries for that.
[00:13:35] Lisa DeBettencourt: Those solutions and when everybody's on the same page, you know, then the organization can kind of move forward and and work more cohesively together because everyone has a better, fuller understanding of the solution that you're going to put forward the at the end of the day, the idea is that you don't want to have any surprises amongst the team that's going to be you.
[00:13:56] Lisa DeBettencourt: You know, producing that solution, whether it's a product or service or what have you, you don't want surprises every once in a while. You have a surprise with an executive that's been out of the loop for a little while and they come in and they do their seagull management thing and you're like, okay, well, how is that going to change, you know what we're doing?
[00:14:10] Lisa DeBettencourt: But you sort of, you know, you recover from those things and you realize, oh, we probably should have brought them into the loop a little bit earlier, but you just don't, you don't want surprises. You want to try to mitigate as much risk as you possibly can as early as you possibly can. And you do that.
[00:14:22] Lisa DeBettencourt: Okay. quickly and cheaply through these conversations, these quick prototypes, these discussions and just keeping everybody in the loop. So that's where I see the role of facilitation being such a huge piece of our work.
[00:14:33] Omar Mousa: Interesting maybe spicy follow up for that. I like, I think I've seen this manifest in so many different ways.
[00:14:39] Omar Mousa: There were weird complexes in, you know, that pillar or that, that stool, the three, the three legged stool. Yeah. The three legged stool. You know, one might argue like, Oh, the product manager, that's their job facilitation and alignment. I want to make sure. And so how, you know, what's, what's the argument there for, is it one person's job?
[00:14:58] Omar Mousa: Is it, is it, is it many? Like how, how would you, what's your perspective on that? I mean, I think we're
[00:15:03] Lisa DeBettencourt: facilitating different things, you know, product managers have to facilitate their own set of keeping the business in, in informed of. The goals and you know, I'm not a product manager, right? So there's only so much that I can speak to that.
[00:15:14] Lisa DeBettencourt: But I know that there's a ton of work that they're constantly updating executives and they're constantly updating the business and the finance side of things in the operational side of things to make sure we can deliver on whatever is that we're promising to deliver on. So we just have different. I think we're just focused on different areas, but there's a, it's a Venn diagram and there's huge overlap.
[00:15:30] Lisa DeBettencourt: They take, they take the work that we're doing and they, and they, you know, communicate that outwards. We take the work that they're doing and we're incorporating it into the, into the product, into the solution, into the experience. So I think it's just, we're all facilitators, it's just, we're just facilitating different things.
[00:15:47] Angela Suthrave: Um, talk to us a little bit about how you pick the right approach to design. Within product development, are there certain frameworks that you like to think about or processes? This is like the most famous
[00:15:59] Lisa DeBettencourt: design answer ever and it's, it's, it depends. Um, You know, I don't know if you can see behind me. I have this giant bookshelf of filled with, With books and a big portion of those books are methods books, I don't have an encyclopedic knowledge of all the processes and methods and, you know, frameworks that we can use on any given day.
[00:16:23] Lisa DeBettencourt: But, you know, it all really has to, you have to pick the approach that's right for the task at hand. So if you're doing a new feature, In a massive enterprise level application, you're going to take a different approach because you have subject matter experts in your organization and you have a different timeline, you're going to take a very, you know, different approach than if you're doing a zero to one innovation, you know, project where you have a market that you're going after and you don't know necessarily everything that you need to know about it and you're not sure which direction you're going to go in.
[00:16:56] Lisa DeBettencourt: So how much do you already know is a big. Variable, a big piece, right? Do you already know a lot about your customers, about their workflows, enterprise and healthcare there? There's a lot of subject matter experts that are inside the organizations and you can mine that knowledge. Um, and then you can leverage your end users in a different way.
[00:17:16] Lisa DeBettencourt: It's also really hard to get to them because you have about 47 layers between you and the end users of your product. And then if you're just doing, like I said, net new speculative, you're doing future casting kind of stuff. Like where could we go wrong? Oh, in five years, it's all just, you have to pick the framework or the approach that's appropriate for the task at hand.
[00:17:35] Lisa DeBettencourt: And like what, like I said before, what are your goals and what are your success metrics? How do you know, how do you know you've accomplished your goals? And so you have to define or choose the approach that you want to take based on, based on the need really. Because you can't, you know, design the, I'm going to pick on design thinking for a second, but like design thinking is like the method framework de jure, right?
[00:17:55] Lisa DeBettencourt: It's super popularized, especially in healthcare. It's really, you know, infiltrating the, the, the nomenclature. Ooh, design thinking, you know, it's, it's got its place and it's, It can be used in certain ways, but it can't be used in all the ways. It doesn't make sense to do a 12 week long discovery research, you know, project when you're doing a, you know, iterative design on a small part of a screen in an enterprise application, right?
[00:18:28] Lisa DeBettencourt: Like it's just doesn't, it's too much of a sledgehammer. So you just have to really take the time to think about what's the best, what's the best approach.
[00:18:35] Omar Mousa: All right, let's shift gears here. Let's talk about human centered design. You've, you've brought it up a couple of times. Can you define human centered design and explain how it differs from other design approaches?
[00:18:44] Lisa DeBettencourt: So human centered design is exactly how it's described. It's, it's creating solutions that come at it from the lens of the human needs first. So you're talking about psychological, social, Cognitive, ergonomic, emotional, physical needs of the person that you're solving for people that you're solving for relational needs as well.
[00:19:04] Lisa DeBettencourt: But you try to understand their perspective and their needs, and then you try to design solutions for them with their needs in mind. And. And I'll juxtapose that against a lot of other ways that organizations try to solve problems, you know, is, is more linear thinking like we have a problem and then I have this technology I can shove in and fix it that way, throw more money at the problem or, you know, You know, there's business approaches where it's just very direct.
[00:19:34] Lisa DeBettencourt: So like I have a problem and then, and then I just, you people just come up with a solution, not thinking about all the changes that could happen from a result as a result of the, the way that you solve the problem. So there's, you know, entrepreneurial thinking, which is kind of like ready, fire, aim, you know, or, or entrepreneurial approach.
[00:19:52] Lisa DeBettencourt: I shouldn't say thinking, you know, you're like, I have a, I have a solution in mind. And I'm going to go out there and build it and try to find the people that, you know, the problem that it solves for them or technology focused. So it's really just starting with the human needs. And to do that, you have to start with doing a lot of research and understanding, understanding the people that are involved.
[00:20:14] Lisa DeBettencourt: And, and I can't juxtapose it against other ways of design because human centered design is different from say like user interface design, right. Or other aspects of design. So it. It's broad in nature. I would say
[00:20:28] Omar Mousa: that makes sense. We wanted to directly ask you why product design is essential in building products.
[00:20:34] Omar Mousa: However, you hit that indirectly earlier in the conversation. Is there anything else you would like to add to that point?
[00:20:41] Lisa DeBettencourt: I would say so. I think the only part that's missing in that discussion was, you know, we talked a lot about the beginning phases and sort of work with the team and conceptualize things.
[00:20:51] Lisa DeBettencourt: But design also plays a very significant role in the, in the, in the build out and the, and the execution of the solution. So, you know, if you imagine, I like to, I like to sort of, people sometimes have a hard time conceptualizing the design, the work that we do in, In experience service and product design, because you can't really touch it, right?
[00:21:14] Lisa DeBettencourt: It's not like something that you can see or feel on a day to day basis. So I sort of use the analogy of architects and building buildings. And I think a lot of designers do this as well. So if we're sort of the architect. It's in the role of, as designers, you know, we're not just conceptualizing the building and doing, I worked for, I worked for Autodesk for six years.
[00:21:34] Lisa DeBettencourt: So I like have a lot, a lot of, too much understanding, I think of the architecture process, you know, they're doing zoning. They're looking at the land, they're looking at how the sun moves, they're looking at all kinds of, you know, things. Ecological and environmental factors. And we do too, but it's at a different scale, of course.
[00:21:50] Lisa DeBettencourt: And so they're looking at, okay, where's the building going to go on the land? And how does it, how is it oriented? And how is it going to make best use of the, of the context? Once you have. Those pieces figured out what's the, you know, what's the flow of people through the inside of the building, how many rooms, all that stuff, then you're going into like, you know, you're going into the detailed design levels.
[00:22:11] Lisa DeBettencourt: So what is each room floor? Every part of the building look like they're doing blueprints are doing all that. Detailed level design, and they're doing all of the documentation. So we do that as well as in the, in the experience design, we're still, we're documenting out whether it's workflows, step by step or it's screens or all those kinds of things.
[00:22:30] Lisa DeBettencourt: We're starting to document and specify all parts of the, well, just for the sake of simplicity, software, let's just say software. So we're talking screens, layouts, step by step workflows. Well, the architecture doesn't go away. Once those blueprints are built, they play a very significant role alongside the builders, the general contractors, to ensure that The building is actually being built to spec there.
[00:22:57] Lisa DeBettencourt: It's being built the way that it was intended to be built. Inevitably something comes up, something doesn't work in practice as it does on paper. So they're also there to be available to make quick adjustments. Oh, well, you know, we didn't think about this weird thing that could have happened. So let's make some adjustments on the fly.
[00:23:16] Lisa DeBettencourt: And so they provide that service and they ensure that, you know, that, that they're delivering the building. as promised to their customers, their owner, the owner of the building. Same for designers. They stay alongside the development team to ensure that the delivery or to ensure that the product is being, is being built to a level of quality and specification that we've detailed out.
[00:23:44] Lisa DeBettencourt: And so that Going back to what we're talking about with facilitation, if you get, I don't know, you get marketing or you get a salesperson and they start seeing some early, you know, alpha, or like they get a demo in an all hands meeting or something, and they're like, what the hell is going on? Because what I saw in the prototype is not what I'm seeing here in this demo.
[00:24:05] Lisa DeBettencourt: And you want to try to avoid that at all costs. You don't want to have those kinds of conversations. And so. The design function can help ensure that there's like, you know, less gaps between what you've promised and what you're delivering. And if you do have differences, there's some rationale for it. Oh, we realized that this thing came up and we couldn't solve for it in this way.
[00:24:24] Lisa DeBettencourt: So we had to make some on the fly adjustments and then you can communicate that out. So you're just trying to, again, no surprises. Do
[00:24:30] Angela Suthrave: you have an example where you used human centered design and you were able to uncover something that you didn't anticipate? I have so many examples,
[00:24:40] Lisa DeBettencourt: you know, we were working with an e prescribing company and they were, it's kind of a classic scenario.
[00:24:44] Lisa DeBettencourt: They're like, we need to modernize our application. It looks like it was built in 1998. People are complaining. It's hard to use. And so we're like, okay, we go in there and we start, you know, opening up the body and start doing research and really understanding the workflows. And while they're thinking that they want to modernize the product.
[00:25:01] Lisa DeBettencourt: You know, to be honest, as someone who's done this a lot of times, you always know that that's really not the problem because if you, if you just want to reskin it, like you don't, you're not going to get very far. So when we started mapping out the workflows and talking to the pharmacist or talking to the providers who are prescribing, and then also the pharmacists hearing from their side of the things, the problems were like, The classic problems that you've experienced when you've gone to pick up your medicine, right?
[00:25:26] Lisa DeBettencourt: It's like you get there and you're, you know, your, your, your pharmacy benefits don't cover the medicine or, you know, there's like a lot of human problems that were, that were documented, but also their diversity of their customer base was so significant that we had to work on solving for, prescribing in a really, really, really tight time constraint, like a tight window, meaning that the patient had to get their medicine at a very specific time, because for a whole host of reasons.
[00:25:59] Lisa DeBettencourt: One, because, just because of the nature of the medicine they needed, they couldn't have a break in the medicine at all. And then, The timing of that, plus when their pharmacy was open, plus the benefits, all of that stuff. That was one thing. Then you had other, you know, the other customers that were like, they just only prescribed these five medications because they had a really specific focus for their practice.
[00:26:22] Lisa DeBettencourt: And, They didn't want to be like picking these five different medications from the whole laundry list of medications in the whole database. They just wanted to batch it. They're like, just sit, you know, here's a prescription set. And so it turned out that the problem, like you could have kept the same look and feel, but if you fixed all the workflows, you would have saved the.
[00:26:42] Lisa DeBettencourt: prescribers tons and tons of time. The big insight though, the hugest one was we uncovered that the doctors really wanted to use the information that they had access to in their fingertips to have better conversations with their patients, to really talk about options for their, for their care. And maybe they couldn't afford the medicine.
[00:27:10] Lisa DeBettencourt: They wouldn't be able to find it, find out until they got to the pharmacy. Maybe there was, uh, side effects that they had been struggling with. So there's just so many, there were just so many things that they weren't having the opportunity to have the conversations about because the information wasn't presented in a way or wasn't available and brought together in a way that the doctor could say, hey, You know, how, what about this?
[00:27:38] Lisa DeBettencourt: What about that? Right. They couldn't bring up those kinds of conversations cause they just weren't presented with the, with the options.
[00:27:43] Omar Mousa: Yeah. And did I hear you say re skinning is kind of like never the option or never the right answer. Yeah. Please elaborate more. Cause like I can't tell you how many times I've been in that's been someone's answer multiple times.
[00:27:56] Omar Mousa: Like I've heard that as being like, this is the answer to our problem. So tell me why. So that other people listening to this could be like re skinning. Is not a good idea.
[00:28:06] Lisa DeBettencourt: I think it's a waste of time and money. What does it solve? What does it get you? I mean, it might get you some marketing splash. Look, we redid it.
[00:28:12] Lisa DeBettencourt: And like, but as soon as people start using it, they'll realize it's the same old dog underneath the hood. You know, do you want to buy a Ferrari that has a Chevy Ford, you know, Honda engine in it? Yeah, it looks great. It's amazing. You get in and you're like, why doesn't this have any power? Oh, but I just repainted it.
[00:28:31] Lisa DeBettencourt: It looks great. You know, I just put a new body on it. It just doesn't. It just doesn't help you at all. And you can put the, you know, you can, you can change the colors and change the typeface, but it's not going to give you a better experience. Design is how things work, right? If you want to improve a product, you have to improve how it works.
[00:28:52] Omar Mousa: I've heard people say things like, is it, well, it makes us look more professional and more like representative of the maturity that we have. And. You know, guests or customers or clients or users will come in and they'll, they'll think, Oh, I'm, I'm working with the real deal here. And so, you know, let's get into this.
[00:29:10] Omar Mousa: Cause like, this is a whole thing. You find yourself kind of believing the narrative, almost like I've heard it. And I've been like, that kind of makes some sense.
[00:29:18] Lisa DeBettencourt: Podcast is your podcast is called concept to care, right? In my opinion, design is care. How you do anything is how you do everything in an organization, right?
[00:29:26] Lisa DeBettencourt: How much do you care? How much do you care about your users? And like, if you just want to make it look nice, then as soon as. Someone starts to use it, and things break, or it's buggy, or it crashes, or it doesn't solve for the problem that they're trying to, you know, solve for, or they have to hack it by pulling a piece of data, or, you know, something from one part of the application's interface to another part of the application's interface, and put it in a spreadsheet, or write it down on a post it note, or something like that, and they're doing all this heavy lifting in their brain.
[00:29:59] Lisa DeBettencourt: they're going to become frustrated and the patina is going to wear, you know, like the shine is going to wear off and they'd be like, it's just a piece of crap. I don't care how nice it looks. How does it work? And if it doesn't work and it's not well thought through and it's not well designed, then.
[00:30:16] Lisa DeBettencourt: People just feel like you don't care about them. You're like, oh, well I have this problem, but like, they don't care about, they don't care about this and it falls apart and it's crappy. So if I, if I call customer service, are they gonna treat me like crap? Are they, do they even care? Are they going to fix it for me?
[00:30:29] Lisa DeBettencourt: Do they even have a solution? Like, what's it going to be like? And so I feel like. The whole experience, not just the product, but the whole journey of being a customer or a user of a, of a product or service from customer support to the product itself to the sales, you know, process, all that stuff has to be in alignment.
[00:30:50] Lisa DeBettencourt: All that stuff has to work together cohesively. So that, you know, You know, if the product itself is working great, maybe there's some self serve options in there or something like that. And people can do some things themselves. Great. Awesome. But if they pick up the phone and call customer service and they're put on hold for two hours, or they get somebody who can't answer their question, or they get bounced around to five different people and then booted.
[00:31:10] Lisa DeBettencourt: Like that's a terrible experience. So how, how you do anything is how you do everything inside of an organization. If an organization truly care about their customers and users, then they'll invest in and ensure that all of the touch points along the way for the service and product they're delivering.
[00:31:32] Lisa DeBettencourt: You know, work and are of decent enough quality and the people that are answering the phones care about the people that are calling in and they can have the resources or have the, you know, autonomy to try to solve problems for them so that, you know, you can learn a lot about a company by calling their customer support line.
[00:31:52] Lisa DeBettencourt: And, you know, again, like I said, design for me, design is care because design, design is all about your intent, right? You're documenting or you're, you're, you're stating your intent. I, you know, we believe this and what really matters to an organization, right? What really matters to the people that are, that are solving problems or, or, or serving opportunities and then they're defining what works, right?
[00:32:13] Lisa DeBettencourt: So they're, you take that definition, you take that intent and you're defining how you're going to solve for it. And then, you know, The care part is how are you going to do it? Like what wows people, how are you going to impress people? How are you going to really serve them? How are you going to think about things and serve them in ways that have never been served?
[00:32:30] Lisa DeBettencourt: They've never been served before. You know, there's so many consumer examples of this, you know, and they're the classic ones we all go to. There's Airbnb, there's Uber, there's all kinds of stuff from Apple. There's all these companies that, that show that they care in really specific ways. Ways and how they do anything is how they do everything.
[00:32:53] Omar Mousa: The challenge is a couple of thoughts on that one. I'll just, I'll just hit the, like the challenge thing. I think though, it's like one has actual, like, those are really good consumer problem. Those companies do really well at solving consumer problems. Healthcare is also a consumer problem, but healthcare,
[00:33:08] Lisa DeBettencourt: right.
[00:33:08] Omar Mousa: is, you know, the process of maintaining and improving one's health over time and, you know, treating and, you know, either chronic diseases or, you know, what have you. And that, that's more of a slog, I think. So it's like, it's a hard investment.
[00:33:26] Lisa DeBettencourt: Yeah. Healthcare is massive. It's like comparing it to like, you know, I don't know, education.
[00:33:31] Lisa DeBettencourt: It's just, there's problems abound. It's every, there's stuff to solve everywhere. And it's even more complicated as you have. You know, you have government involved, you have, you know, all kinds of entrenched interests and what have you, but I think,
[00:33:45] Omar Mousa: you know, if you're the product manager or the ice, you know, your product manager, product designer, engineer, and you're listening to this and.
[00:33:52] Omar Mousa: I think a product manager's job is to make bets. And so if you hear, if you're at your organization and you hear someone's bet is we need to reskin this, I think, you know, I'd be
[00:34:02] Lisa DeBettencourt: like, why? What's the problem? Yeah. Like what's the problem? Okay. So if you say, well, we just relaunched a new brand in the market and we re, you know, re, we redesigned our, our whole brand presentation, like our logos and all those kinds of things for the web and the marketing.
[00:34:19] Lisa DeBettencourt: Okay, fine. Right? Throw a little money into the product and change some change, you know, change some things there, but like, don't just don't do it for the sake of doing it. Don't just reskin because you want to make it look quote unquote modern. That just doesn't just doesn't make any sense to me. I think it's a total, you know, it's like blasphemy, right?
[00:34:38] Lisa DeBettencourt: Because it's like, I'm a designer and I'm saying don't don't put money in that. No, I just feel like it's a waste.
[00:34:43] Omar Mousa: It's a good, this is a good segue to solution validation. So like, Yeah. How can design help validate some of the solutions within products, right? Yeah. Just like straight up. Like, how do they, you know, make sure we're making bets, you know, or going out or proposing, you know, folks are proposing solutions.
[00:35:00] Omar Mousa: How do we validate that?
[00:35:01] Lisa DeBettencourt: Yeah. So I would, um, say that we don't validate design doesn't validate anything, right. Because, you know, there's no such thing as a right answer. There's like you said, there's a lot of bets and so our job isn't to validate the bet. It's to, it's to find all the places where it can go sideways and opportunities that you might be missing or, or nuances that might be, that might really impact how you solve for it.
[00:35:29] Lisa DeBettencourt: And so We want to inform the bet and give you more information to build your confidence to understand that you're heading in the right direction. You know, we're not going to tell you, you should go for this or not. Designers aren't going to tell you that. They're just going to inform you and do the best that we can to deliver the best experience for that bet.
[00:35:53] Lisa DeBettencourt: But then try to find out where it, where it doesn't work. And then if you're willing to take that risk, you know, maybe, maybe the risk is something can happen. It's a huge thing can happen, but it's like a one in a million chance. You'd be like, yeah, I'm going to take, I'm going to take that bet. There could be a risk that is uncovered where it's like, something is going to, you know, Is missing or something could potentially happen every single time, but it's a really minor thing and people might just be annoyed by it.
[00:36:19] Lisa DeBettencourt: You might be like, I'm going to take that bet too. Cause we need to ship or whatever. And there's probably a whole bunch of stuff in the middle. But the thing is, is that we're presenting, you know, information. We, we give you the options and you make the decisions ultimately. And that's, that's my philosophy, right?
[00:36:33] Lisa DeBettencourt: I'm going to tell you, I think you should. You know, I think this is important and here's the impact that it's going to have on the, on the user and their perception of your product service company brand. And then you can make that call. Maybe you want to, you know, maybe it's above your pay grade and be like, here's what we discovered.
[00:36:50] Lisa DeBettencourt: And you know, should we go for this or should we not, or should we invest a little bit more time in fixing it? You make those decisions.
[00:36:57] Omar Mousa: So we don't
[00:36:57] Lisa DeBettencourt: validate, right. We're assessing and giving you the information that you need to make those decisions.
[00:37:02] Omar Mousa: Yeah, so, for example, like, you could have a conversion funnel for a expensive product and the product manager's bed is like, hey, this product price point is really high.
[00:37:12] Omar Mousa: I want to introduce by now pay later to increase conversion rates. So, like, I want to put a clarinet or pay by a pay later affirm. And it's not design's job to say that's correct design should have been involved in identifying that. Hey, your product that you're selling, you know, 1, this is the friction in your funnel, right?
[00:37:32] Omar Mousa: Your funnel. It's we're getting a lot of drop off here at payment. And when we looked into it, it seems that they understand the value prop of this said thing, but. There's either, let's say that I found five other examples. They all have the same value prop and they're cheaper in the market and equally as good, or the people, the way you've positioned yourself to sell to people who don't have the income to purchase this kind of thing.
[00:37:58] Omar Mousa: And so you're saying you're more saying that then.
[00:38:00] Lisa DeBettencourt: Yeah,
[00:38:01] Omar Mousa: I see. Yeah, let's
[00:38:02] Lisa DeBettencourt: find out. Let's find out why there's drop off. Did you put the buy button below the fold? Like, it could be anything is the color wrong? It could be anything psychos, you know, psych, psychographic. It could be like location. It could be a bigger problem.
[00:38:19] Lisa DeBettencourt: And let's like, get at that problem. Don't just say, and this is what you know, this is the difference between human centered design and like others like, Oh, well, there's a drop off. So we're just gonna, we just are going to get, you know, buy now pay later. Yeah. But you don't know if that's going to fix it.
[00:38:33] Lisa DeBettencourt: How about if we just do a little bit of research to try to understand why people might be dropping off?
[00:38:39] Omar Mousa: Yeah. This leads me to like structure design in a health tech org. So Cool. I actually, like, I truly believe this that I haven't really seen. There are a few, you've seen good examples. I've seen a lot of bad examples of how people do this health tech organizations don't really know how to work well with designers.
[00:38:59] Omar Mousa: I think at times, and I think it's by virtue of like, you're so far removed from customer, the customers, the patient patients don't pay for healthcare. Partners do payers, providers, pharma, whoever. So, you know, In that, you know, what are the steps involved in standing up a, like a design function at a health tech organization?
[00:39:20] Omar Mousa: Is it any different? Like, who are the right people? You know, what characteristics should they have? Like what, what are those skills?
[00:39:27] Lisa DeBettencourt: Well, again, it depends on, it depends on how big the organization is and what their goals are. So if you're a startup, you know, you're going to want to start with, if you want to bring design to the organization, there's a lot of different things you can do.
[00:39:44] Lisa DeBettencourt: You can, you can bring in a freelancer. Or, you know, an outside consultancy or an agency or something to kind of get you like, you know, quick fix and get you over the hump and get you where you need to go for a short period of time. If you want to start building out an internal organization, cause you truly believe that the, that value that you truly believe that design can be a.
[00:40:03] Lisa DeBettencourt: Functional differentiator for you in the market, then, you know, you're going to want to start with a generalist, you're going to want to start with someone who can do soup to nuts that can fly by the seat of their pants, that can adapt with a growing, changing organization that's small and nimble. And, you know, with founders that are.
[00:40:23] Lisa DeBettencourt: You know, that have active ADD and unmedicated and like, you know, the shiny new objects are coming in and they're changing gears and whatever, like you can, you can, you can, they can live within that or an environment. It's not always like that, but sometimes, and then for more mature organizations, like if you're talking about a healthcare organization and a hospital system or something care delivery, a lot of these designers show up and live in either the IT organizations.
[00:40:49] Lisa DeBettencourt: Or they live in some sort of internal consulting organization for innovation and they start to build out like that. So it really depends on the goals of the organization and the size and like the level of design maturity that they're already at. And when I say design maturity, I mean how. How mature is the organization when it comes to experience design?
[00:41:11] Lisa DeBettencourt: Do they understand, like I said, do they understand the value of it? Do they believe in it or do they think it's like, Oh, I want you to come and just make things look pretty. So how much education and, and, you know, work do you need to do with the leadership team to get the buy in to get the understanding of those folks to be able to truly leverage design as a differentiator, as opposed to like, you know, let's just reskin it or make it look pretty or something like that.
[00:41:43] Omar Mousa: Yeah, that makes sense. You and I had this interesting conversation a few weeks back, you were talking about Design as a superhero. Can you kind of discuss the concept of designers as superheroes and why this is potentially damaging?
[00:41:58] Lisa DeBettencourt: So the dirty little secret, I guess, in the world of product, maybe it's not.
[00:42:07] Lisa DeBettencourt: But there's this, in some cases, this prevalent philosophy that a designer can come in and fix everything. All you gotta do is hire a designer. All you gotta do is hire somebody or bring somebody in that's gonna, that's gonna, you know, solve all your problems. Cause all you need is design. Design thinking, human centered design, whatever it is, they're just gonna come in and solve it.
[00:42:29] Lisa DeBettencourt: And like, that's just setting the whole organization and the designer up for failure. Complete failure. I think that there is a sense of number one, arrogance on the part of the designer to think that they can actually take on that kind of problem. They can't, they don't have the skills to fix everything all at once.
[00:42:50] Lisa DeBettencourt: And the expectation that they could potentially change it whole and the whole organization is also fraught with, you know, trouble. So there's some talk where, or there's a philosophy or theory or something that because designers are trained in a very specific way to come up with the solution and then present it and, you know, get all the accolades and awards and everything's so great and applause and everything.
[00:43:16] Lisa DeBettencourt: That therefore they take that sort of idea experience attitude into the workplace with them, you know, I wasn't trained that way, so I can only take that from, you know, other folks that have been trained that way or have seen that, but, you know, I just, there's a lot of, there can be a lot of friction inside of organizations and when you have designers in and come in and, You know, they're trying to solve for everything and they think that they can, and they're just going to, they're just going to fail left, right, and center if they don't build consensus, if they're not, you know, driving alignment, if they're not getting people to share their and their expectations and their needs, and if you're not facilitating all those conversations and getting people to talk and move kind of in a similar direction, like we talked about earlier, like I, Okay.
[00:44:03] Lisa DeBettencourt: Obviously it's not the only designer, not the only ones that are facilitating that, but at least for the product or the, um, service that you're designing, like you, they, they can't just come in and, and try to fix everything. Um, it's just gonna, it's a recipe for failure. I've seen it happen too many times, right?
[00:44:20] Lisa DeBettencourt: And designers get burned out because they've set themselves up for failure. The organization gets pissed off. People are expecting things that, that don't work. End up happening. And I've seen a lot of designers in my teams, even think they're going to fly in, they're going to fix everything. And then they're going to fly out.
[00:44:38] Lisa DeBettencourt: And it's just like, they end up burning out. Everybody gets frustrated with them. The deliver, they're not delivering the quality or the results that everybody wants or people want. And they just end up, you know, quitting and it just, it's really frustrating. And, and then it gives leaves a bad taste in the organization's mouth, collective mouth for the role of design.
[00:44:59] Lisa DeBettencourt: So I think. We need to be more focused on collaboration and facilitation and bringing the experts to the table to co create and co design solutions together as an organization, as a business, as a company and whatever. I
[00:45:15] Omar Mousa: think it's a good transition to like, you know, what you're saying is like the focus, you know, the designer isn't.
[00:45:20] Omar Mousa: Them designing this solution isn't really, you know, the answer, you know, everyone's problems. But, you know, the customers at the center of, of what we need to be thinking about. But another thing is like, what are we trying to accomplish? And what are the metrics or KPI? This is how we like, what objectives do we have?
[00:45:37] Omar Mousa: What KPIs are we setting for ourselves? So I'm wondering, question is like, what KPI should be used to measure the success of a, Of a design function at a health tech company. Like, you know, so that it is, you know, baked into real expectation, something, you know, tangible.
[00:45:57] Lisa DeBettencourt: So I would change the question a little bit as is less about the KPIs of the design function and more about the KPIs of the design work.
[00:46:06] Lisa DeBettencourt: So what are you trying to, what matters to you as a business, you know, are you interested in patient satisfaction or, or product performance or, you know, Are you, are you focused on design team efficiencies or process? There's different metrics that you can apply to all these different things. Are you look, are you really focused on revenue growth and how can you leverage design to get you there?
[00:46:25] Lisa DeBettencourt: Right? So what are the, what are the metrics for the thing that they're working on and are they moving the needle on that? And you can do a, B, you know, like you can measure the before and after to see if the design changes are really having an impact. The big problem with trying to measure the measure design is that, you know, This, this function is so far removed from the actual end product.
[00:46:48] Lisa DeBettencourt: You know, you have marketing, you have sales, you have engineering, you have all these things that are between the functionality or the capability of, and the work of design and what gets, what gets put into the hands of the end users. That it's hard to sometimes, not always, but it's hard to know what was the thing that actually moved the needle.
[00:47:08] Lisa DeBettencourt: If you're looking for revenue growth and there was a bunch of design changes that were made to improve that. But also you launched, you know, a new marketing campaign and you opened a new territory in your sales organization. What really moved the needle and how do you, how do you take those metrics?
[00:47:29] Lisa DeBettencourt: Cause metrics are important, right? How do you dissect those metrics to really understand what the impact of the design piece was versus the rest of the organization. And so trying to isolate that. So sticking to things like You know, satisfaction or a drop in customer support calls or, or should say customer complaints.
[00:47:46] Lisa DeBettencourt: Anyways, you can start to measure those things, but it's really about what's the product being measured by and what's important to the business to really understand. So design is, you know, design's role should be, is a function of the business. You're trying to deliver something for the business. So therefore it should be measured on that.
[00:48:05] Lisa DeBettencourt: You know, those metrics as well, but in their own, you know, in their own flavor, patient outcomes, patient engagement, is that a big deal? Is that what you're looking for? Those kinds of things. So it, I can't say that there's like, you know, the NPS scores. The only thing that matters for design team, well, you know, what if you don't care about NPS?
[00:48:23] Lisa DeBettencourt: As a business, then why would you, why would you, you know, dump that onto a design team?
[00:48:27] Omar Mousa: Yeah. Like thinking out loud here, like business goals, you know, ideally everyone's department goals kind of roll up into business goals, but like I think department goals. You know, when I think about that, the three legged stool engineering is an interesting set of KPIs that they track.
[00:48:44] Omar Mousa: It's like, well, they're responsible for delivery and quality. So how quickly are they delivering and how, how quality is their build? Do they have good uptime downtime? Are they reducing the amount of incidents or bugs that are being produced? Sure. Are they, you know, every 2 weeks prints or whatever increments are planning and are they.
[00:49:02] Omar Mousa: Okay. Planning the right amount and hitting it. Are they moving, you know, exceeding that target. Right. And that's like, that's how I'd evaluate a scrum team or a sprint team, like engineers who are contributing to the product. I'm sure design has its own set of those things, but
[00:49:17] Lisa DeBettencourt: right. We have usability metrics, right?
[00:49:19] Lisa DeBettencourt: We can measure time on task. We can measure success rates. We can measure all those kinds of things. Absolutely.
[00:49:24] Omar Mousa: But, you know, when you look at the company stuff, it's a weird, it's a weird, like you guys, we all own it. We all own the, no, if I could say that like product managers or like engineers or, you know, product designers, you know, individually own certain parts of that.
[00:49:43] Omar Mousa: Right. I just, that's where the. It's a little clunky,
[00:49:46] Lisa DeBettencourt: and I'm sure there's other people out there that have better handle on some of the metrics that they've applied. But having worked in health care, like you just said, for so you know, having worked in health care inside of enterprise organizations where you're so far removed from the customer, there's so much that can happen between your work and what gets shipped that it's hard to you can measure all kinds of things, right?
[00:50:07] Lisa DeBettencourt: But, you know, how do you do? How do you know whether you provided that change or it was some other part? You have to make sure you have that part of it as well covered.
[00:50:18] Omar Mousa: How does Conway's law influence the organization?
[00:50:23] Lisa DeBettencourt: So Conway's law states that effectively we ship our communication Structure of the organization to our customers, right?
[00:50:35] Lisa DeBettencourt: So our, our products and services reflect the communication structure of the company that they came from. I actually proposed a corollary to that pre COVID 19, 2018, where I was like, okay, well, if that's true, then they also ship the biases and. You know, the lack of diversity or diversity in the team inside of that organization.
[00:50:58] Lisa DeBettencourt: So, hey, better, more diverse teams ship better products. So if you know, if you understand Conway's law, then, and you want to ship a product that has a cohesive user experience, then you should structure your organization in a way that can deliver the experience and the result that you want to get, right?
[00:51:13] Lisa DeBettencourt: So you shouldn't be designing, I guess, like organizational, you know, design stuff, but You shouldn't be building an organization in a vacuum without understanding that you're going to ship it basically to your customers. So you should be, you should be thoughtful in how you design the organization to deliver the quality and the experience that you want to deliver.
[00:51:39] Lisa DeBettencourt: So it's not just the organization or design teams, right? So there's a lot of, there's a lot of, uh, conversations around should design be centralized? Is it a centralized? Is it like marketing, right? So it's like, You just have a centralized team and they serve all the parts of the business. If it has multiple parts, maybe they get, you know, charged out to different product teams or, or should they be distributed into the product teams and have a matrix kind of organizational structure.
[00:52:06] Lisa DeBettencourt: If you're not thinking about what you want to deliver to your customers, then how do you answer those questions? Cause you can have arguments on both sides of it. Well, I think it should be centralized because we want the designers to be able to grow in their careers and we want them to have, you know, be able to provide a unified experience across all the products.
[00:52:20] Lisa DeBettencourt: And we have to do that through the centralization of a design team counter to that. Well, how are they going to be able to influence the day to day operations and the day to day build out of all of the products and services if they're not? You know, integrated into the teams that that they're delivering with.
[00:52:35] Lisa DeBettencourt: And then how do you build trust and on and on and on, right? So it's sort of this back and forth, centralized, decentralized, centralized, decentralized. But the real question is, what are you trying to deliver? How are you structuring your organization to deliver it? Are you just structuring it by, you know, product feature?
[00:52:49] Lisa DeBettencourt: Are you structuring it by steps in the customer journey? How are you structuring, how are you structuring the organization to deliver the thing that you want to, the experience that you want to deliver?
[00:52:59] Omar Mousa: Let's hit something interesting that might. Spawn a difference of opinions. Let's talk about prototyping.
[00:53:06] Omar Mousa: Like what is, yeah, what is prototyping and you know, what's best practice and what does it feel like when you're actually prototyping versus maybe not?
[00:53:18] Lisa DeBettencourt: I mean, my philosophy is that prototyping is everything from a conversation to like sample code. that somebody can play around with. And, and I think that the, like, I think that there's this unspoken expectation out there in software land right now that prototyping is Figma, period, end of story.
[00:53:46] Omar Mousa: Oh no.
[00:53:48] Lisa DeBettencourt: And so, like, I think that's just a, it's like, You're shipping your first idea. Okay. You got to prototype this. Okay. Go into Figma and make it like, well, I, but I, how about if we have a conversation first, how about if we get in front of a whiteboard? How about if we draw some stuff and pencil and paper?
[00:54:06] Lisa DeBettencourt: How about if we, you know, tell a story storyboarding and telling stories is my favorite part type of prototyping, you know, you're, you're, you're sharing. Ideas of what the experience should be like with someone else. They can respond to it. They can react to it. You can share it with customers and they can get, you can think, get your, get their feedback on it.
[00:54:29] Lisa DeBettencourt: It's like story is so powerful, a prototyping method, whether it's, you know, two or three slides in a, in a PowerPoint deck or, you know, You know, a comic book that you've made or, uh, a movie, right? We actually made a, we made a movie once in a previous company, hired actors and went on, just like went on location and it was amazing and it was a product, it was a prototype to tell a story.
[00:54:57] Lisa DeBettencourt: Well, yeah, it was definitely expensive. I think they were, they were trying to use it to raise money too, but they had multiple purposes, but it was amazing. And so prototyping is all of those things from, you know, low fidelity, To super, super high interactive, you know, super high fidelity is very interactive.
[00:55:13] Lisa DeBettencourt: And I want to break this idea that Figma is the end all be all of, of prototyping.
[00:55:19] Omar Mousa: Yeah. People will jump to Figma pretty quickly, I think. Yeah.
[00:55:23] Lisa DeBettencourt: Too quickly.
[00:55:24] Omar Mousa: And then often it's like not even real and very much in waterfall approaches. You'll see this. Right. They're like, well, where's the asset that I can interact with?
[00:55:33] Lisa DeBettencourt: I want to see
[00:55:34] Omar Mousa: in Figma so I can comment on the thing
[00:55:36] Lisa DeBettencourt: and, and they're like, I don't like this blue. And you're like, I don't even care about the blue,
[00:55:41] Omar Mousa: you know, does this step in the process make sense? All of healthcare is blue.
[00:55:45] Lisa DeBettencourt: Yeah. Right. Okay. That was a bad example. But you know, you, you get caught up in the stupidest, most irrelevant conversations when you're going to high fidelity prototyping out of the gate.
[00:55:56] Omar Mousa: You really are. I've started screen sharing chat GPT prompts. Like I will get into chat GPT and I will start prompting and I will start like this is what we're talking about. And it'll be like, show me this table, add these fields, put it nested under some tat, like tabulated profile structure. And it just starts.
[00:56:17] Omar Mousa: No, you didn't quite get that right. Like try like this, here's a better example than given attachment. And it does such a great job. folks go like, ah, like they have, they hit that aha moment and it was fairly inexpensive. Like it was just me prompting.
[00:56:33] Lisa DeBettencourt: So I want to, I want to tell, I'm going to tell you a story.
[00:56:36] Lisa DeBettencourt: I was working with a company, God, this was four years ago or something, three, four years ago. And it's a practice management. Software company, and they were, you know, doing a modern modernization kind of thing. They're actually smooshing three companies together in three different products on three different platforms.
[00:56:51] Lisa DeBettencourt: So iOS web and like windows, whatever, and they were making a SAS product out of it. And so, uh, We went out, did all the research, talked to their customers, trying to understand the workflows, going through the practices, everything from the patient walking through the door, sitting in the lobby, filling out the papers to the, you know, their encounter, working with the, with the provider, and then checking out all this stuff.
[00:57:16] Lisa DeBettencourt: And so did all this work. We had a bunch of concepts, a bunch of ideas, and we were using storyboarding as a prototyping. methodology in this early, early, early phases. So we're just trying to, we're trying to inform our ideas for how we could solve and, you know, re imagine this whole platform. And so we made, I don't even know, I have an illustrator on my team.
[00:57:40] Lisa DeBettencourt: So he was doing these incredible drawings. We had this main character and this main. You know, doctor and the whole thing. And so we walked through this story of just a, an encounter, right? Pre visit, visit, post visit. And one of the core components of it was there was a use, there was a tablet. It was like heavily based on a tablet interface.
[00:58:00] Lisa DeBettencourt: And so when the patient walked in, they were given a tablet and they had to fill out all their forms on the tablet. And then while they were waiting, they could peruse some, you know, some materials and then they would bring the tablet in with them to the room and then they could have their encounter there and their chart would be there.
[00:58:16] Lisa DeBettencourt: All that kind of stuff. So we proceeded to tell this whole amazing story all the way through to like I said, to check out and post visit followups and we were doing the tour, the listening tour, bringing it back to the customers we had already interviewed and we were walking them through it and collecting all kinds of amazing information and insights about how that would work for them and what their thoughts were and how things, you know, stumble, you know, how the, how it would work in their practice and if the, their clinicians would stumble through it or, or whatever.
[00:58:44] Lisa DeBettencourt: We get to this one. I'll never forget this conversation. We introduce it. We're walking through, we're like, I don't even know, six or seven slides in and the owner, the, you know, the owner of the multiple practices, he says, hang on a second. And he says, so we have 14 exam rooms. In our practice in the one location, are you telling me that I need to buy 14 iPads for my practice in order to use yours?
[00:59:17] Lisa DeBettencourt: This software solution, this practice management solution. And so as a researcher. I've been trained thoroughly to never answer those kinds of questions, right? You don't answer the questions. It's like, well, tell me what you think about that. If that were to be the case, tell me what you think about that.
[00:59:35] Lisa DeBettencourt: And you want to use their questions as an opportunity to dig further into the prompts behind it, what they're, what they're thinking and what they're reacting to. So I said something like, well, you know, if this were to be the case, what would that mean for you? Or something like that. And he just went on a, you know, a whole financial.
[00:59:53] Lisa DeBettencourt: rant about the, the impact that that would have on his business and how he wouldn't want to go with the solution if that was the case and on and on and on. Right. So when you do this kind of, and the prototype that we made, again, it was like a bunch of pencil sketches. It was written in, like it was designed in a drawn in a cartoony kind of format.
[01:00:11] Lisa DeBettencourt: It probably took us about a week of You know, not full time, but just iterative design of the storyboard itself and then recruiting all the participants or getting all the people scheduled to go through it. Didn't take that long at all. Super cheap, really fast. And we started getting that level of feedback.
[01:00:30] Lisa DeBettencourt: Could you imagine if we had gotten all the way out to high fidelity, you know, prototyping and the, and the dev team was getting stood up to build the tech stack and we were doing it with full steam ahead. Only to find out that like 50 percent of their, I'm just making a number up, but some portion of their customers would be like, no fricking way are we going to buy this because it's requires iPads, right?
[01:00:51] Lisa DeBettencourt: That's the kind of stuff that it can save you in the long run when you get out in front of customers and you give them this, you know, give them the concepts and the ideas and super low fidelity and story form and get their feedback. It's expensive.
[01:01:04] Omar Mousa: I mean, how many expensive activities happened? Like that, avoid that, that potentially avoid, you know, engineers are picking up components, like, you know, library, I mean, like
[01:01:17] Lisa DeBettencourt: you're hiring a whole outsourced team and, you know, in Argentina or something to build this full steam ahead.
[01:01:26] Lisa DeBettencourt: And you're like, haven't even
[01:01:28] Omar Mousa: mobile enabling things. You're making it accessible. You're thinking about all these other things. So yeah, I totally get it. Let's, let's, let's talk about forge harmonic a little bit. So you're the founder. Yes, I know. But
[01:01:45] Lisa DeBettencourt: I'd rather talk about the work cause it's so much more interesting.
[01:01:49] Omar Mousa: Goodness. Try. Yeah. Yeah. Try to talk about not selling what, so let's talk about forge harmonic. Can you tell us about your company's mission? And the unique approach you take towards design with your clients.
[01:02:02] Lisa DeBettencourt: Yeah, absolutely. If you insist. So we, so our mission, you know, healthcare, as we talked about before, is massive and complex and what have you.
[01:02:10] Lisa DeBettencourt: And there's a lot of different areas that we could, we could really focus in on. We could be broad and big picture and we can focus on other areas, but our mission is really to advance the experience of care delivery. So we're really focused on, you know, improving the patient experience through the delivery of care.
[01:02:27] Lisa DeBettencourt: Yeah. And we do that by really, you know, designing innovative human centered products, services, and systems for healthcare organizations, whether they're hospital systems, clinical care deliveries, clinical care organizations, or, you know, software companies. So that's really our focus. And then how do we, how we do it is we focus on a partnership model.
[01:02:50] Lisa DeBettencourt: So rather than consulting model, it's we really focus on partnering with our clients and engaging with them in a really deep and co creative and collaborative way so that we're ensuring alignment, we're ensuring facilitation, we're ensuring that there aren't any surprises as we're co creating this, you know, their solution along the way.
[01:03:11] Lisa DeBettencourt: The company, our clients have a vision and we're there to help them, you know, help them achieve it and bring to life solutions that meet their unique part of their, their goals and serve their end users, customers, and what have you in the way that they want.
[01:03:31] Omar Mousa: Yeah, it's incredible, incredible offering, incredible service.
[01:03:34] Omar Mousa: Could you share a specific success stories where your work significantly improved the delivery of care?
[01:03:43] Lisa DeBettencourt: So. We, you know, I talked a little, I want to say that I talked about the e prescribing solution that we worked on that was probably, you know, Really one of the more rewarding examples of getting into the workflows, understanding the needs, and then really changing, not just the way that they delivered the care, the providers delivered the care, but also based on the feedback that we've had from the clients themselves, got the organizations to start thinking about their end users and their customers in a
[01:04:28] Lisa DeBettencourt: They've used it to change the way that they think about their acquisitions. So as they bring in other companies, which is really interesting. I hadn't thought about that. They use the work that we did to rethink their front end and back end tech stacks and how they're solving for how they're going to scale the work that they're doing.
[01:04:44] Lisa DeBettencourt: So it was pretty significant. We just finished a project with LG cardiac tech company post discharge congestive heart failure. Organization and we don't have the, I don't have data to say what the impact was, but the work that we did during the process was very fulfilling. It was one of my favorite projects because we had such a deep integration with the clinicians.
[01:05:09] Lisa DeBettencourt: We had the cardiology. We had cardiologists in every call, almost team of nurses. And so they were in there. They were raising questions, concerns, problems, needs at every single step along the way. So that's to be built. And I don't have a, I don't have an answer to like, how has it fundamentally changed the delivery of care yet?
[01:05:28] Lisa DeBettencourt: But I hope to have that information soon.
[01:05:30] Omar Mousa: Yeah. It's very cool. Very impactful. What gives you hope and optimism about healthcare today?
[01:05:35] Lisa DeBettencourt: There are a lot of really interesting things happening in a lot of really interesting corners of healthcare. Selfishly, the, the, the, The use of the term patient experience and that the increasing popularity of the concept of patient experience really excites me.
[01:05:52] Lisa DeBettencourt: It's very selfish, of course, uh, focusing on the patient experience as, as not just being like, are they getting the medicine they need? Are they getting the care they need? But what's the experience that they're having with their providers, with their healthcare organizations, institutions is really, Is really exciting to me.
[01:06:09] Lisa DeBettencourt: The, the trend of moving care outside of the hospital into the home, pushing that out and all of the technology and services that are being built and deployed to support that is also really exciting and then also selfishly, I'm so excited about the interest and investment in research and women. And, you know, Femtech and the investment in solving for women's unique biology and women's unique needs.
[01:06:37] Lisa DeBettencourt: Those are things that are really exciting to me.
[01:06:39] Omar Mousa: And before we move into our concept closing call, who are the types of customers or partners that you sort of look to look forward to working with?
[01:06:49] Lisa DeBettencourt: We typically partner with chief product officers in sort of in the software organizations. And then in hospitals, you know, we work with the CIOs or like chief information officers, chief innovation officers, and folks that are more pushing the boundaries on the clinical care side that have the influence to get those kinds of projects done as well.
[01:07:13] Lisa DeBettencourt: Sometimes some, you know, a really unique person will kind of Pop out of the woodwork and was like, yeah, we'd love to work with you on X, Y, and Z. So it's, but it's mostly folks that are at the leadership level that can have that kind of influence on the organization, on the business itself, company itself.
[01:07:29] Omar Mousa: Got it. So if you're listening to this podcast and you're one of those individuals or someone in need of a service, like Ford Tarmonic, reach out.
[01:07:44] Omar Mousa: We're hitting our very exciting concept. Closing call. This portion of the podcast is meant to be rapid fired questions. We ask you things and just quick answers and cool. It should be meant to be really fun. First question is what is a tool that you highly value or you find highly valuable and you think others may not be using.
[01:08:04] Lisa DeBettencourt: Paper.
[01:08:08] Lisa DeBettencourt: What? Yeah. Why? I thought this was fast.
[01:08:14] Omar Mousa: Okay.
[01:08:16] Lisa DeBettencourt: Paper because like, because geez, people get out of your computers, go sit in a coffee shop and draw something, like get your sketches down. You can have, you can have like tiny pieces of paper. I used to back in pre COVID. I had a printer that would print four foot wide by infinite long, you know, printouts and like we were just, I would print workflows and charts and everything on eight feet long and hanging up on a wall and then hang sharpie markers all over and be like, people, let's get together in a room.
[01:08:45] Lisa DeBettencourt: Like next in front of this poster and like just beat the crap out of it. So, you know, wall post its like it doesn't fit in the size of the screen and you're not limited by just your cursor and your, you know, keyboard and your eyeballs. Like it's a whole physical experience. It can be, it's a paper. I stick to it.
[01:09:06] Omar Mousa: That's my, that's
[01:09:06] Lisa DeBettencourt: my story. And that's your tool
[01:09:08] Omar Mousa: of choice. Normally we ask, do you think product management is a science or an art, but since You are not a product manager. Do you think product design is a science or an art?
[01:09:19] Lisa DeBettencourt: Yes.
[01:09:21] Omar Mousa: Yes. Do I think
[01:09:24] Lisa DeBettencourt: that it is a science or an art? Yes, I do. I think it is both.
[01:09:28] Lisa DeBettencourt: It's both the science part, right? So I have a master's degree in human factors. So there's the whole understanding of cognitive science and understand the human system, you know, human visual system, how we process information, how we are in the world. We are just giant walking sensors, basically processing information all the time.
[01:09:45] Lisa DeBettencourt: So to understand how that works, so you can leverage it and help people design things that serve them. But the art of it is when, how do you know when to apply what, and just your, you know, years of experience and trial and error and, you know, just, Taking in other influences that you have in the world and kind of smashing that all together.
[01:10:06] Lisa DeBettencourt: And you might go to a museum and see a statue. You'd be like, Oh, that inspires me to do this thing that I'm working on in, you know, a project that I have for healthcare.
[01:10:15] Omar Mousa: Do you have any shameless plugs and where can people get in contact with you if they want to reach out to you?
[01:10:21] Lisa DeBettencourt: Um, do I have to? No. Yeah.
[01:10:23] Lisa DeBettencourt: So website forgeharmonic. com. There's no S at the end of harmonic. So forgeharmonic. com. And then I'm on LinkedIn. I'm all over LinkedIn lately. Uh, so you can find me there.
[01:10:34] Omar Mousa: All right. Awesome. Well, Lisa, this has been incredible. Thank you so much for coming onto the show. Our first product designer, leader, trade expert.
[01:10:44] Omar Mousa: Anything, all things product design. So
[01:10:46] Lisa DeBettencourt: my pleasure. Thank you
[01:10:47] Omar Mousa: so much. I'm sure I pissed a
[01:10:48] Lisa DeBettencourt: lot of people off and left a lot of questions unanswered, but no, let's keep the conversation going. So I'm excited to be here and thank you so much for having me.
[01:10:55] Omar Mousa: Awesome. Love it.
[01:10:59] Omar Mousa: Hey, thanks so much for listening to the show. If you liked this episode, don't forget to leave us a rating and a review on your podcast app of choice, and make sure to click the follow button so you never miss a new episode. This episode was produced and edited by Marvin Yue. With research help from a DT Atreya where Angela and Omar, and you've been listening to concept to care.