Tag: business

16 Sep

Reasons To Build A CRM-Powered Website For Your Business

by TBSCategories: News

Most businesses today rely on simple brochure websites for their online presence. These tend to be static websites with a few pages giving core information about the business and details on products and services offered. Although these are relatively cheap and less complicated to develop than a site that offers more advanced user experiences, a business can lose out on many opportunities to better engage with their customers and close sales.

With more and more businesses coming online and creating brochure websites, shrewd organizations need to stand out from their competitors by providing fluid, memorable, and personalized user experiences on their sites. To convert potential interest in your products and services into actual sales, a business needs to foster relationships with their customers on and off their sites. By integrating CRMs with company websites, a business can substantially upgrade their customers’ experiences on their site as well as modernize their internal processes.

The acronym CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management. CRM software helps you maintain information about and cultivate relationships with your customers and leads. It does this by analyzing what each customer does on your site and maintaining the data in a contact record. It provides several ways for a business to engage with them based on that behavior. It also offers various marketing and sales tools and keeps track of the interactions company representatives have had with each customer and how it’s leading to a particular goal like closing a sale.

CRMs generally help with the organization by grouping customers into lists and sales pipelines that can be used for targeted campaigns. Usually, a CRM ships with (or can later be integrated) a CMS (Content Management System). A CMS can generate a website and allows non-technical teams to create and manage pages and content. However, CMSs by themselves are limited in tracking how visitors interact with the site.

Why Should Websites Be Integrated With A CRM Platform?

By integrating a CRM and CMS, a website can enhance visitors’ experiences through personalization, marketing automation, better customer support, and streamlined internal business processes. In this article, you will learn how CRMs improve experiences not only for customers but across internal company teams. You’ll see how a CRM can provide deeper insights into customer behavior on and off your site, and how to use this information to drive sales. Lastly, you’ll get to discover how a CRM automates and abstracts crucial but work-intense business processes and workflows.

To better illustrate what a CRM and CMS can do together, the examples in this article will reference HubSpot’s platform for both functions. HubSpot’s CRM and CMS provide virtually all the features mentioned above and as such, are a prime model. Although only the base features of a CRM and CMS will be covered here, it’s important to note that HubSpot’s platform offers an extended range of features for marketing, sales, and support.

1. Seamless Digital Experience And Boost In Marketing Efforts

When a customer visits a site, they are usually looking to make a purchase or get information. They may go through several pages on your site before they land on what they’re looking for. They’ll browse through specific products and services. They may fill a form requesting contact with a sales representative, which may take a day or two. They may not find what they’re looking for and need additional help.

If a customer is not able to get immediate or relatively fast help when on your site, they may not make a purchase.

If there is no customer support to help them handle site issues or sales representatives to guide them to complete a purchase, that is a lost opportunity. Those customers are falling through the cracks.

A CRM can enhance a user’s experience by providing help when they need it. Is something not working for them on the site? They could launch a chat window and immediately get in contact with a support agent. Do they need to consult with a sales representative who could give recommendations based on their unique needs? No problem. They just have to leave their contact information in a form. This information is collected by the CRM, a contact is created, and a sales rep is assigned. The rep is notified immediately, views all the customer’s activity, and immediately starts corresponding with them through the CRM.

With a CRM, customers who seek information can get help almost instantaneously and have the support they receive tailored to them based on their history. The CRM can also automate actions based on the customer’s activity like receiving a promotional discount code in a marketing email after they chat with a rep.

Let’s say, for example, a visitor to a motor brand site wants to purchase a car. The customer wants to find out what cars would be a good pick for them. This website was built on HubSpot’s CMS and is natively integrated with HubSpot’s CRM tooling. They see that a chat-with-a-sales-rep option is available.

When they click on it, they provide some contact information and immediately begin chatting with a rep. The rep can make recommendations based on the information the customer gives. A contact is created for the customer on the CRM. The rep can add notes to the contact. The rep can see what other pages the customer has visited. Once they are done with their chat session, the rep can send an email with more information about vehicles they may like based on the conversation they had and what the customer looked at on the site.

All of this is done through the CRM. The customer leaves the site having had an engaging experience and getting the information they needed. The rep and marketing team can then continue staying in contact with the customer through the CRM untill they make a purchase.

2. Advanced Personalization

Without a CRM, website owners tend to miss essential information about how customers use their sites on an individual basis. The information and experience they offer on their site is generic and is usually one size fits all. All customers receive the same information and treatment despite having different needs and interests in the business. If a customer’s specific need is not met by the site, they may turn to a competitor’s site that’s more engaging and useful. Losing customers and sales is bad for business.

CRMs maintain complete profiles for each customer. They contain customer preferences, history, activities, contact details, and other information. You can use it to personalize each customer’s experience on your website to better meet their needs. This can include dynamically changing the messaging and content on a website based on the needs of a specific contact, as well as a range of other things. Marketers can accommodate customer preferences in the marketing material. Salespeople can check customer activity on the site and adapt their pitches to match it. Some personalized outreach can also be automated. Based on what customers do on a site, they can go through automated conditional workflows and sequences behind the scenes, and receive helpful information about what they seek.

For example, a customer visits a magazine subscription site that uses HubSpot CMS. Because the CRM knows they work in the software industry based on a form they filled out on a previous visit, the messaging on the site is dynamically tailored to their interests. Before they continue browsing, they set their language preference to French. As part of an automatic workflow, the customer is added to a mailing list for the French version of the newsletter. Further, when they seek help through support, it is automatically offered to them in French. When marketing creates ads, the customer is served the French versions of the ads.

3. Dynamic Site Pages Are Generated Based On CRM Data

Imagine creating many similar pages for user profiles, company branches, or any other application where page layouts are the same, but the data is different. Doing this manually can be time-intensive and frustrating for both developers and marketers. But with a CMS and CRM integration, the process can be greatly simplified. Developers can create a template for the overall page structure, then data can be pulled from the CRM to dynamically generate all of the pages that are needed. Non-technical users can generate additional pages by simply adding additional records to the CRM.

For example, a real estate company has many property listings in an area. This company has a website built on HubSpot’s CMS and they create records in the CRM for each property they are selling. With this, the company can import listing data and generate individual pages for each property. They’d do this by selecting a template or building a custom one, picking what data to populate it with from the CRM, generating the pages, previewing them, and scheduling when they will go live. Using this data and the CRM, generating individual pages for each listing can be a breeze.

4. Workflows Between Developers And Marketers Are Streamlined

As touched on in the previous point, marketers rely on developers to create websites and other digital assets. If a marketer is running a campaign, they may need developers to create additional pages for it. This usually involves a lot of back and forth as they plan, build, test, and preview the site and assets before launching a campaign. A significant amount of time and effort is spent creating them. Developers sometimes have to code the individual pages and if several of them are needed, work can pile up.

Content management systems provide tools to simplify web page generation. Marketers do not need to rely on developers. If any changes need to be made to a site, marketers can do it using user-friendly drag-and-drop design tools. This leaves developers free to handle more complicated development tasks. These systems can also offer developer tools like bug trackers and alerts, theme builders, CLI support, and more to make development easier.

A marketing department for a clothing brand is planning several campaigns at one time. Their website integrates with HubSpot’s platform. They need some web pages created for each of the campaigns. Instead of having to talk to developers, they can just log onto the CRM, create the page templates using drag-and-drop designers, select the data to use in the templates, preview them, and schedule when it will go live. They did not involve developers. This frees up developers to work on other crucial business tasks and saves everyone time and effort.

Conclusion

Neglecting to cater your business website to your customers is not only detrimental to your sales but can also hurt your team’s productivity and operations. When customers are given a generic experience on your site, they won’t engage with it. Seeking information and help about your products and services will be frustrating.

Without adequate information and proper tools about customers, sales and marketing departments have a harder time doing their job.

Dissatisfaction festers, productivity declines and employee churn may occur. Without a CRM, repetitive and manual tasks have to be done painstakingly one at a time. This type of work takes up valuable time and effort from support, marketing, sales, and engineering teams.

Integrating a CRM with your business website has numerous benefits. For one, you can build a comprehensive profile of your customers and use that to personalize and improve their experiences on your site. You equip various departments within your company with tools to organize and automate work and improve efficiency. CRMs create great experiences for both customers and people in the company that serve them. Most importantly, it allows a business to foster and grow stronger relationships with its customers.

If you’re interested in learning more about the CMS and CRM featured in this article, you’re always welcome to visit the HubSpot website.

Articles on Smashing Magazine — For Web Designers And Developers

17 Aug

How To Develop Your Business’ Technology Roadmap

by TBSCategories: News

When people have an idea for a piece of software or an app, they tend to be pretty energized about getting it to market as quickly as possible. It’s exciting to create an app or piece of software no one’s ever imagined or built before. As software developers, we’re usually right there with them.

At some point, though, we need to sit down with clients and give them a sometimes sobering reality: software development without a business technology roadmap can be a lot like driving aimlessly from point A to point Z. Sure, you get to discover new worlds and experience unexpected adventures, but you also frequently get lost, spend more money, and can lose enthusiasm for the journey.

“Agile” And “Fast” Are Not The Same In Software Development

Many people think an Agile approach to software development discards long-term planning. Perhaps it’s because we so often use the word “sprint” in conversation. In reality, all good software development must flow from a business technology roadmap, as it:

  • Provides context around the development team’s daily work.
  • Responds to shifts in, among other things, the competitive landscape.

So, what is a business technology roadmap, and how can one be developed to support software development? That’s what we’re here to talk about.

What Is A Business Technology Roadmap?

Unlike detailed blueprints that lay out all tasks, deadlines, bug reports, and more along the way, technology roadmaps are high-level visual summaries highlighting a company’s vision or plans.

In an Agile approach, a technology roadmap feeds the sprint and grooming processes, providing insight into how the product will travel from start to finish. It makes it easier for development teams to:

  • Understand how the product will evolve.
  • Make near-term decisions that don’t compromise future work.
  • Gain awareness of which features are or aren’t working.

Companies can use technology roadmaps to review their internal IT, DevOps, infrastructure, architecture, software, internal system, and hardware procurement policies and procedures with innovation and efficiency in mind. The roadmap helps them define how a new IT tool, process, or technology supports their business strategy and growth and aligns projects with short and long-term goals.

There are hundreds of templates companies use for their tech roadmaps. A typical IT roadmap covers everything from requirements to testing and integrations. A dev team’s work dictates software or development roadmaps, highlighting tech initiatives, epics, and features while communicating the team’s primary goals.

For a typical client, a roadmap follows the following structure.

  • We created a list of all the features based on competition and wish list,
  • We narrowed that down based on what we wanted to be and what our beta users wanted,
  • We used that narrowed list to start technical planning and user stories,
  • As new features came up, we ran that through the roadmap to know if it fits in or how it should be prioritized,
  • We adjusted the roadmap if needed every 3-5 months.

The Role A Technology Roadmap Plays In An Agile Approach

In practice, a technology roadmap in Agile software development:

  • Facilitates planning activities by recognizing the journey is just as important as the destination. It forces teams to “come out of the weeds” and think more strategically.

    How this might play out: Your dev team suggests that the product needs built-in calling, meeting scheduling, and multi-layer reporting features. That forces you into planning activities like grooming meetings and getting outside feedback where you dissect each feature and come up with scenarios for setting them up. You might also discuss things like vendor selection for each feature. Conversations tend to follow an “or” pattern, as in “are we going to do this, or this, or that?”

  • Highlights key focus areas and works as a navigational tool to help the entire team succeed.

    How this might play out: Putting a spotlight on the areas the team needs to focus on forces you to decide who you want to be and what you want to become. Put another way, if you’re tailoring your product to a specific group, say inside sales reps, highlighting core features that matter to this narrower group of users helps eliminate tasks that might be used in other projects.

  • Works as a critical communication tool both within the teams and with other key stakeholders.

    How this might play out: As your project progresses and team members remind you about particular features stakeholders said they wanted, you can easily refer back to the roadmap to see if it was there in the first place. You can see where you chose to make certain development decisions, i.e., “we chose to be an inside sales rep tool,” and “we chose to be this or that.” This acts as sort of a forcing function, helping you revise the roadmap and rearrange the order and priority of tasks based on how they affect your schedule and deadline goals.

Different development companies and teams use different charts to construct their agile product roadmap, but they all tend to include:

  • A “longer-term strategic theme,” which points teams in a specific direction based on their assigned tasks.
  • A list of quarterly outcomes or objectives and key results (OKR) goals that each team will focus on to achieve the strategic theme. These goals basically answer the question, “what are the things we may build?” The answer lies in how you define success. Each team gives their best guesses as to how they’ll achieve each quarter’s goals.
  • Additional columns contain OKR goals, but with fewer and fewer “things we may build” listings. That’s because teams don’t know what they’ll be working on three or four quarters out so there are fewer best guesses. As the project moves forward and goes through testing, the boxes for the later quarters fill up.

More detailed software roadmaps cover milestones like player launch, product details like user profiles, UX/UI such as desktop icons and wireframes, and dev goals like press-to-play and performance enhancements.

Unlike traditional software development approaches, Agile focuses on the strategy, not the plan. That means outcomes, not outputs, are prioritized; tactical plans are left for backlogs. In a way, they’re designed to communicate uncertainty and provide transparency into what stops along the way are likely to remain as is and which might be in flux. For this reason, it’s crucial to update Agile roadmaps often as priorities shift and change.

How A Technology Roadmap Feeds The Agile Sprint And Grooming Processes

Sprints frequently go off track, which can have a negative effect on downstream operations. A technology roadmap helps teams run more successful sprints by setting a foundation and identifying how work should be organized so activities can be finished in a short time period.

  • A sprint goal refers to what can be delivered in the sprint.
  • A sprint backlog is the list of tasks to be completed during the sprint to achieve the goal.

To illustrate, let’s say you want to develop a new product feature. During the sprint planning meeting, team members need to “groom” the backlog and say which tasks they’ll work on. This is where many teams are led down the wrong path. They assume planning for the next two weeks is easy-peasy. They overlook or forget the work they’re planning must also satisfy the established goal.

A good backlog:

  • Lists each work item in order of importance.
  • Includes full-developed user stories the team can begin to execute on.
  • Has a current estimate for each work item.

Because it’s easy for teams to get bogged down in the details of a project, a technology roadmap helps them stay focused on high-level objectives and true customer needs.

The Role Of A Technology Roadmap In Digital Transformation

Today’s digital transformations focus on three key areas: customer experience, operational processes, and business models. Whether it’s for a small company or multi-national enterprise, a well-developed business technology roadmap helps companies reach short and long-term digital transformation goals by allowing them to:

  • Remain agile enough to accommodate course changes.
  • Build long-term value in the product.
  • Avoid roadblocks and other obstacles.
  • Because digital transformation is a relatively new concept, it’s often a journey filled with blind spots. What does it mean in terms of the scope and intensity of change? What will the repercussions be of pursuing and implementing it?

On the one hand, the digital transformation process is seen as using technologies to create new or modify existing business models. On the other hand, it’s about companies needing to embrace new cultures, structures, and processes that align with their IT architecture. One thing’s for sure: digital transformation is a fundamental change for any company.

A technology roadmap assists overall digital transformation goals by answering some key questions:

  • How is digital changing or poised to change the business and its industry?
  • What new offerings, operating models, and business models can it enable?
  • How is digital affecting the business’s competitive advantage? Where does the company remain well-positioned, and where is it disadvantaged?
  • Which digital opportunities are consistent with a company’s strategy based on value potential? In what order should the business pursue them?
  • What gaps in systems and capabilities need to be filled to succeed?
  • What are the targets, timelines, and accountabilities for individual projects and programs? What steps are needed to finance the journey?

Just about every business can benefit from developing their business technology roadmap as part of their digital transformation plan. New digital advances and the opportunity to improve traditional technologies to change customer relationships and employee experiences put businesses on a clear and rewarding path for turning technology into transformation.

Creating A Technology Roadmap To Drive Successful Innovation

Many businesses already have a technology roadmap. The question is whether that map is pointing to where they want to go, or has it only carried them to the present leg of the journey? Are they focused only on existing projects, or are they anticipating future breakthroughs?

The best technology roadmaps continually evolve, adding new destination points and aligning all resources and capabilities behind long-term goals. It’s not an easy process, but a methodical approach helps.

1. Identify Goals

Technology roadmaps must integrate long-term goals and visions. It’s often best to start at the end and work backward. For instance, in software development, milestones are often thought of as software releases or new versions of a project. But with a business roadmap, goals and initiatives also include things like hitting revenue targets or launching in a new region or market, basically anything that’s a significant result of combined efforts.

2. Seek Input From Stakeholders

For smaller businesses, this often means involving everyone. Including all pertinent stakeholders and decision-makers brings different views and priorities to the table and helps establish a clear direction for where the company’s headed. As collaboration is key to most business success, it also increases the chance of the roadmap being implemented. For specific projects, it weighs all pros and cons and ensures the new technology meets everyone’s particular needs.

3. Evaluate Current Systems And Chart A Course

All business technology roadmaps include negotiating a budget. Now’s the time to question previous decisions to see if they still align with the company’s vision. For example, a company has the goal of doubling customers, so assumes it must increase hardware capacity to meet it. That can cost significant sums of money. Another approach might be to make strategic changes to the software or combine current tools with custom software, typically a far less expensive strategy.

4. Be Open To Change

Clear vision and a revised budget in hand, it’s now possible to view the business landscape with a critical set of eyes looking. Perhaps a company previously developed a custom app because no existing product satisfied its needs — but now that software exists! The custom software could possibly be retired for the new software that will be supported by someone else.

That makes it possible to use in-house staff to develop new, potentially more profitable products. Sometimes bringing in an outside consultant to audit systems, processes, and teams help identify changes a business can make to support improvements and future initiatives.

5. Set Priorities

Up next is determining what’s critical, blocking, or simple. Items should be prioritized, and continuous feedback should be solicited from stakeholders. Project management tools can simplify the process and ensures items are linked to their dependencies and what needs to be done first is clear.

6. Build Out Timelines

Each task or initiative comes with its own level of effort. It’s critical to pull in the right technical people so to get an estimate around each effort. This should not be a long, drawn-out endeavor. Instead, it should be a quick activity that verifies how everyone’s on the same page. Often leadership has items it believes can be implemented quickly, but the team is of the mind it will take much longer to pull off.

7. Devise A Budget

Once there’s a clear view of what can be worked on, when it can be worked on, and how long it might take to implement, there’s enough information to fashion a budget for each item. Each item’s details should be worked through fully to get an as accurate as possible estimate for what’s needed. Budget decisions can also affect how urgent or necessary an item truly is. Some businesses find they’re better off putting something on the back burner or investing in a service that solves the same problem.

8. Visualize The Roadmap

Finally! Project implementation planning can now begin. Each project should be laid out and overlaid with the resources needed for project delivery. If working in an Agile software development environment, there’s no need to write out every detail of every feature. Simply focus on high-level component delivery, marketing dates, and other top-level deadlines. While building out the software, Agile teams can pull in features on a different schedule, but they should always work towards the company’s high-level schedule.

Many businesses find that creating a steering committee or oversight committee helps to see if initiatives are following a steady path or are veering off-course. These committees can be helpful in that they’re not involved in the day-to-day delivery of a product like development teams are.

Doing What’s Best For The Journey And The Destination

Rushed software development projects don’t save time or money, and they often negatively affect quality — the greater a company’s rush to launch, the greater the risk. Before starting any software development project, a business should take the time needed to develop a technology roadmap.

Decades of experience have taught there is a lot of truth in the adage that “prior planning prevents poor performance.” Moving too fast can cause enormous problems for software development, dooming them to failure.

Creating a business technology roadmap gives enterprises the best of all worlds. It drives digital transformation while being agile enough to accommodate course changes. By the time the final destination or launch is reached, long-term value has been built into the product, roadblocks have been avoided, and other obstacles that often run other development projects into a ditch have been overcome.

Articles on Smashing Magazine — For Web Designers And Developers

17 Aug

How To Develop Your Business’ Technology Roadmap

by TBSCategories: News

When people have an idea for a piece of software or an app, they tend to be pretty energized about getting it to market as quickly as possible. It’s exciting to create an app or piece of software no one’s ever imagined or built before. As software developers, we’re usually right there with them.

At some point, though, we need to sit down with clients and give them a sometimes sobering reality: software development without a business technology roadmap can be a lot like driving aimlessly from point A to point Z. Sure, you get to discover new worlds and experience unexpected adventures, but you also frequently get lost, spend more money, and can lose enthusiasm for the journey.

“Agile” And “Fast” Are Not The Same In Software Development

Many people think an Agile approach to software development discards long-term planning. Perhaps it’s because we so often use the word “sprint” in conversation. In reality, all good software development must flow from a business technology roadmap, as it:

  • Provides context around the development team’s daily work.
  • Responds to shifts in, among other things, the competitive landscape.

So, what is a business technology roadmap, and how can one be developed to support software development? That’s what we’re here to talk about.

What Is A Business Technology Roadmap?

Unlike detailed blueprints that lay out all tasks, deadlines, bug reports, and more along the way, technology roadmaps are high-level visual summaries highlighting a company’s vision or plans.

In an Agile approach, a technology roadmap feeds the sprint and grooming processes, providing insight into how the product will travel from start to finish. It makes it easier for development teams to:

  • Understand how the product will evolve.
  • Make near-term decisions that don’t compromise future work.
  • Gain awareness of which features are or aren’t working.

Companies can use technology roadmaps to review their internal IT, DevOps, infrastructure, architecture, software, internal system, and hardware procurement policies and procedures with innovation and efficiency in mind. The roadmap helps them define how a new IT tool, process, or technology supports their business strategy and growth and aligns projects with short and long-term goals.

There are hundreds of templates companies use for their tech roadmaps. A typical IT roadmap covers everything from requirements to testing and integrations. A dev team’s work dictates software or development roadmaps, highlighting tech initiatives, epics, and features while communicating the team’s primary goals.

For a typical client, a roadmap follows the following structure.

  • We created a list of all the features based on competition and wish list,
  • We narrowed that down based on what we wanted to be and what our beta users wanted,
  • We used that narrowed list to start technical planning and user stories,
  • As new features came up, we ran that through the roadmap to know if it fits in or how it should be prioritized,
  • We adjusted the roadmap if needed every 3-5 months.

The Role A Technology Roadmap Plays In An Agile Approach

In practice, a technology roadmap in Agile software development:

  • Facilitates planning activities by recognizing the journey is just as important as the destination. It forces teams to “come out of the weeds” and think more strategically.

    How this might play out: Your dev team suggests that the product needs built-in calling, meeting scheduling, and multi-layer reporting features. That forces you into planning activities like grooming meetings and getting outside feedback where you dissect each feature and come up with scenarios for setting them up. You might also discuss things like vendor selection for each feature. Conversations tend to follow an “or” pattern, as in “are we going to do this, or this, or that?”

  • Highlights key focus areas and works as a navigational tool to help the entire team succeed.

    How this might play out: Putting a spotlight on the areas the team needs to focus on forces you to decide who you want to be and what you want to become. Put another way, if you’re tailoring your product to a specific group, say inside sales reps, highlighting core features that matter to this narrower group of users helps eliminate tasks that might be used in other projects.

  • Works as a critical communication tool both within the teams and with other key stakeholders.

    How this might play out: As your project progresses and team members remind you about particular features stakeholders said they wanted, you can easily refer back to the roadmap to see if it was there in the first place. You can see where you chose to make certain development decisions, i.e., “we chose to be an inside sales rep tool,” and “we chose to be this or that.” This acts as sort of a forcing function, helping you revise the roadmap and rearrange the order and priority of tasks based on how they affect your schedule and deadline goals.

Different development companies and teams use different charts to construct their agile product roadmap, but they all tend to include:

  • A “longer-term strategic theme,” which points teams in a specific direction based on their assigned tasks.
  • A list of quarterly outcomes or objectives and key results (OKR) goals that each team will focus on to achieve the strategic theme. These goals basically answer the question, “what are the things we may build?” The answer lies in how you define success. Each team gives their best guesses as to how they’ll achieve each quarter’s goals.
  • Additional columns contain OKR goals, but with fewer and fewer “things we may build” listings. That’s because teams don’t know what they’ll be working on three or four quarters out so there are fewer best guesses. As the project moves forward and goes through testing, the boxes for the later quarters fill up.

More detailed software roadmaps cover milestones like player launch, product details like user profiles, UX/UI such as desktop icons and wireframes, and dev goals like press-to-play and performance enhancements.

Unlike traditional software development approaches, Agile focuses on the strategy, not the plan. That means outcomes, not outputs, are prioritized; tactical plans are left for backlogs. In a way, they’re designed to communicate uncertainty and provide transparency into what stops along the way are likely to remain as is and which might be in flux. For this reason, it’s crucial to update Agile roadmaps often as priorities shift and change.

How A Technology Roadmap Feeds The Agile Sprint And Grooming Processes

Sprints frequently go off track, which can have a negative effect on downstream operations. A technology roadmap helps teams run more successful sprints by setting a foundation and identifying how work should be organized so activities can be finished in a short time period.

  • A sprint goal refers to what can be delivered in the sprint.
  • A sprint backlog is the list of tasks to be completed during the sprint to achieve the goal.

To illustrate, let’s say you want to develop a new product feature. During the sprint planning meeting, team members need to “groom” the backlog and say which tasks they’ll work on. This is where many teams are led down the wrong path. They assume planning for the next two weeks is easy-peasy. They overlook or forget the work they’re planning must also satisfy the established goal.

A good backlog:

  • Lists each work item in order of importance.
  • Includes full-developed user stories the team can begin to execute on.
  • Has a current estimate for each work item.

Because it’s easy for teams to get bogged down in the details of a project, a technology roadmap helps them stay focused on high-level objectives and true customer needs.

The Role Of A Technology Roadmap In Digital Transformation

Today’s digital transformations focus on three key areas: customer experience, operational processes, and business models. Whether it’s for a small company or multi-national enterprise, a well-developed business technology roadmap helps companies reach short and long-term digital transformation goals by allowing them to:

  • Remain agile enough to accommodate course changes.
  • Build long-term value in the product.
  • Avoid roadblocks and other obstacles.
  • Because digital transformation is a relatively new concept, it’s often a journey filled with blind spots. What does it mean in terms of the scope and intensity of change? What will the repercussions be of pursuing and implementing it?

On the one hand, the digital transformation process is seen as using technologies to create new or modify existing business models. On the other hand, it’s about companies needing to embrace new cultures, structures, and processes that align with their IT architecture. One thing’s for sure: digital transformation is a fundamental change for any company.

A technology roadmap assists overall digital transformation goals by answering some key questions:

  • How is digital changing or poised to change the business and its industry?
  • What new offerings, operating models, and business models can it enable?
  • How is digital affecting the business’s competitive advantage? Where does the company remain well-positioned, and where is it disadvantaged?
  • Which digital opportunities are consistent with a company’s strategy based on value potential? In what order should the business pursue them?
  • What gaps in systems and capabilities need to be filled to succeed?
  • What are the targets, timelines, and accountabilities for individual projects and programs? What steps are needed to finance the journey?

Just about every business can benefit from developing their business technology roadmap as part of their digital transformation plan. New digital advances and the opportunity to improve traditional technologies to change customer relationships and employee experiences put businesses on a clear and rewarding path for turning technology into transformation.

Creating A Technology Roadmap To Drive Successful Innovation

Many businesses already have a technology roadmap. The question is whether that map is pointing to where they want to go, or has it only carried them to the present leg of the journey? Are they focused only on existing projects, or are they anticipating future breakthroughs?

The best technology roadmaps continually evolve, adding new destination points and aligning all resources and capabilities behind long-term goals. It’s not an easy process, but a methodical approach helps.

1. Identify Goals

Technology roadmaps must integrate long-term goals and visions. It’s often best to start at the end and work backward. For instance, in software development, milestones are often thought of as software releases or new versions of a project. But with a business roadmap, goals and initiatives also include things like hitting revenue targets or launching in a new region or market, basically anything that’s a significant result of combined efforts.

2. Seek Input From Stakeholders

For smaller businesses, this often means involving everyone. Including all pertinent stakeholders and decision-makers brings different views and priorities to the table and helps establish a clear direction for where the company’s headed. As collaboration is key to most business success, it also increases the chance of the roadmap being implemented. For specific projects, it weighs all pros and cons and ensures the new technology meets everyone’s particular needs.

3. Evaluate Current Systems And Chart A Course

All business technology roadmaps include negotiating a budget. Now’s the time to question previous decisions to see if they still align with the company’s vision. For example, a company has the goal of doubling customers, so assumes it must increase hardware capacity to meet it. That can cost significant sums of money. Another approach might be to make strategic changes to the software or combine current tools with custom software, typically a far less expensive strategy.

4. Be Open To Change

Clear vision and a revised budget in hand, it’s now possible to view the business landscape with a critical set of eyes looking. Perhaps a company previously developed a custom app because no existing product satisfied its needs — but now that software exists! The custom software could possibly be retired for the new software that will be supported by someone else.

That makes it possible to use in-house staff to develop new, potentially more profitable products. Sometimes bringing in an outside consultant to audit systems, processes, and teams help identify changes a business can make to support improvements and future initiatives.

5. Set Priorities

Up next is determining what’s critical, blocking, or simple. Items should be prioritized, and continuous feedback should be solicited from stakeholders. Project management tools can simplify the process and ensures items are linked to their dependencies and what needs to be done first is clear.

6. Build Out Timelines

Each task or initiative comes with its own level of effort. It’s critical to pull in the right technical people so to get an estimate around each effort. This should not be a long, drawn-out endeavor. Instead, it should be a quick activity that verifies how everyone’s on the same page. Often leadership has items it believes can be implemented quickly, but the team is of the mind it will take much longer to pull off.

7. Devise A Budget

Once there’s a clear view of what can be worked on, when it can be worked on, and how long it might take to implement, there’s enough information to fashion a budget for each item. Each item’s details should be worked through fully to get an as accurate as possible estimate for what’s needed. Budget decisions can also affect how urgent or necessary an item truly is. Some businesses find they’re better off putting something on the back burner or investing in a service that solves the same problem.

8. Visualize The Roadmap

Finally! Project implementation planning can now begin. Each project should be laid out and overlaid with the resources needed for project delivery. If working in an Agile software development environment, there’s no need to write out every detail of every feature. Simply focus on high-level component delivery, marketing dates, and other top-level deadlines. While building out the software, Agile teams can pull in features on a different schedule, but they should always work towards the company’s high-level schedule.

Many businesses find that creating a steering committee or oversight committee helps to see if initiatives are following a steady path or are veering off-course. These committees can be helpful in that they’re not involved in the day-to-day delivery of a product like development teams are.

Doing What’s Best For The Journey And The Destination

Rushed software development projects don’t save time or money, and they often negatively affect quality — the greater a company’s rush to launch, the greater the risk. Before starting any software development project, a business should take the time needed to develop a technology roadmap.

Decades of experience have taught there is a lot of truth in the adage that “prior planning prevents poor performance.” Moving too fast can cause enormous problems for software development, dooming them to failure.

Creating a business technology roadmap gives enterprises the best of all worlds. It drives digital transformation while being agile enough to accommodate course changes. By the time the final destination or launch is reached, long-term value has been built into the product, roadblocks have been avoided, and other obstacles that often run other development projects into a ditch have been overcome.

Articles on Smashing Magazine — For Web Designers And Developers

16 Aug

How To Develop Your Business’ Technology Roadmap

by TBSCategories: News

When people have an idea for a piece of software or an app, they tend to be pretty energized about getting it to market as quickly as possible. It’s exciting to create an app or piece of software no one’s ever imagined or built before. As software developers, we’re usually right there with them.

At some point, though, we need to sit down with clients and give them a sometimes sobering reality: software development without a business technology roadmap can be a lot like driving aimlessly from point A to point Z. Sure, you get to discover new worlds and experience unexpected adventures, but you also frequently get lost, spend more money, and can lose enthusiasm for the journey.

“Agile” And “Fast” Are Not The Same In Software Development

Many people think an Agile approach to software development discards long-term planning. Perhaps it’s because we so often use the word “sprint” in conversation. In reality, all good software development must flow from a business technology roadmap, as it:

  • Provides context around the development team’s daily work.
  • Responds to shifts in, among other things, the competitive landscape.

So, what is a business technology roadmap, and how can one be developed to support software development? That’s what we’re here to talk about.

What Is A Business Technology Roadmap?

Unlike detailed blueprints that lay out all tasks, deadlines, bug reports, and more along the way, technology roadmaps are high-level visual summaries highlighting a company’s vision or plans.

In an Agile approach, a technology roadmap feeds the sprint and grooming processes, providing insight into how the product will travel from start to finish. It makes it easier for development teams to:

  • Understand how the product will evolve.
  • Make near-term decisions that don’t compromise future work.
  • Gain awareness of which features are or aren’t working.

Companies can use technology roadmaps to review their internal IT, DevOps, infrastructure, architecture, software, internal system, and hardware procurement policies and procedures with innovation and efficiency in mind. The roadmap helps them define how a new IT tool, process, or technology supports their business strategy and growth and aligns projects with short and long-term goals.

There are hundreds of templates companies use for their tech roadmaps. A typical IT roadmap covers everything from requirements to testing and integrations. A dev team’s work dictates software or development roadmaps, highlighting tech initiatives, epics, and features while communicating the team’s primary goals.

For a typical client, a roadmap follows the following structure.

  • We created a list of all the features based on competition and wish list,
  • We narrowed that down based on what we wanted to be and what our beta users wanted,
  • We used that narrowed list to start technical planning and user stories,
  • As new features came up, we ran that through the roadmap to know if it fits in or how it should be prioritized,
  • We adjusted the roadmap if needed every 3-5 months.

The Role A Technology Roadmap Plays In An Agile Approach

In practice, a technology roadmap in Agile software development:

  • Facilitates planning activities by recognizing the journey is just as important as the destination. It forces teams to “come out of the weeds” and think more strategically.

    How this might play out: Your dev team suggests that the product needs built-in calling, meeting scheduling, and multi-layer reporting features. That forces you into planning activities like grooming meetings and getting outside feedback where you dissect each feature and come up with scenarios for setting them up. You might also discuss things like vendor selection for each feature. Conversations tend to follow an “or” pattern, as in “are we going to do this, or this, or that?”

  • Highlights key focus areas and works as a navigational tool to help the entire team succeed.

    How this might play out: Putting a spotlight on the areas the team needs to focus on forces you to decide who you want to be and what you want to become. Put another way, if you’re tailoring your product to a specific group, say inside sales reps, highlighting core features that matter to this narrower group of users helps eliminate tasks that might be used in other projects.

  • Works as a critical communication tool both within the teams and with other key stakeholders.

    How this might play out: As your project progresses and team members remind you about particular features stakeholders said they wanted, you can easily refer back to the roadmap to see if it was there in the first place. You can see where you chose to make certain development decisions, i.e., “we chose to be an inside sales rep tool,” and “we chose to be this or that.” This acts as sort of a forcing function, helping you revise the roadmap and rearrange the order and priority of tasks based on how they affect your schedule and deadline goals.

Different development companies and teams use different charts to construct their agile product roadmap, but they all tend to include:

  • A “longer-term strategic theme,” which points teams in a specific direction based on their assigned tasks.
  • A list of quarterly outcomes or objectives and key results (OKR) goals that each team will focus on to achieve the strategic theme. These goals basically answer the question, “what are the things we may build?” The answer lies in how you define success. Each team gives their best guesses as to how they’ll achieve each quarter’s goals.
  • Additional columns contain OKR goals, but with fewer and fewer “things we may build” listings. That’s because teams don’t know what they’ll be working on three or four quarters out so there are fewer best guesses. As the project moves forward and goes through testing, the boxes for the later quarters fill up.

More detailed software roadmaps cover milestones like player launch, product details like user profiles, UX/UI such as desktop icons and wireframes, and dev goals like press-to-play and performance enhancements.

Unlike traditional software development approaches, Agile focuses on the strategy, not the plan. That means outcomes, not outputs, are prioritized; tactical plans are left for backlogs. In a way, they’re designed to communicate uncertainty and provide transparency into what stops along the way are likely to remain as is and which might be in flux. For this reason, it’s crucial to update Agile roadmaps often as priorities shift and change.

How A Technology Roadmap Feeds The Agile Sprint And Grooming Processes

Sprints frequently go off track, which can have a negative effect on downstream operations. A technology roadmap helps teams run more successful sprints by setting a foundation and identifying how work should be organized so activities can be finished in a short time period.

  • A sprint goal refers to what can be delivered in the sprint.
  • A sprint backlog is the list of tasks to be completed during the sprint to achieve the goal.

To illustrate, let’s say you want to develop a new product feature. During the sprint planning meeting, team members need to “groom” the backlog and say which tasks they’ll work on. This is where many teams are led down the wrong path. They assume planning for the next two weeks is easy-peasy. They overlook or forget the work they’re planning must also satisfy the established goal.

A good backlog:

  • Lists each work item in order of importance.
  • Includes full-developed user stories the team can begin to execute on.
  • Has a current estimate for each work item.

Because it’s easy for teams to get bogged down in the details of a project, a technology roadmap helps them stay focused on high-level objectives and true customer needs.

The Role Of A Technology Roadmap In Digital Transformation

Today’s digital transformations focus on three key areas: customer experience, operational processes, and business models. Whether it’s for a small company or multi-national enterprise, a well-developed business technology roadmap helps companies reach short and long-term digital transformation goals by allowing them to:

  • Remain agile enough to accommodate course changes.
  • Build long-term value in the product.
  • Avoid roadblocks and other obstacles.
  • Because digital transformation is a relatively new concept, it’s often a journey filled with blind spots. What does it mean in terms of the scope and intensity of change? What will the repercussions be of pursuing and implementing it?

On the one hand, the digital transformation process is seen as using technologies to create new or modify existing business models. On the other hand, it’s about companies needing to embrace new cultures, structures, and processes that align with their IT architecture. One thing’s for sure: digital transformation is a fundamental change for any company.

A technology roadmap assists overall digital transformation goals by answering some key questions:

  • How is digital changing or poised to change the business and its industry?
  • What new offerings, operating models, and business models can it enable?
  • How is digital affecting the business’s competitive advantage? Where does the company remain well-positioned, and where is it disadvantaged?
  • Which digital opportunities are consistent with a company’s strategy based on value potential? In what order should the business pursue them?
  • What gaps in systems and capabilities need to be filled to succeed?
  • What are the targets, timelines, and accountabilities for individual projects and programs? What steps are needed to finance the journey?

Just about every business can benefit from developing their business technology roadmap as part of their digital transformation plan. New digital advances and the opportunity to improve traditional technologies to change customer relationships and employee experiences put businesses on a clear and rewarding path for turning technology into transformation.

Creating A Technology Roadmap To Drive Successful Innovation

Many businesses already have a technology roadmap. The question is whether that map is pointing to where they want to go, or has it only carried them to the present leg of the journey? Are they focused only on existing projects, or are they anticipating future breakthroughs?

The best technology roadmaps continually evolve, adding new destination points and aligning all resources and capabilities behind long-term goals. It’s not an easy process, but a methodical approach helps.

1. Identify Goals

Technology roadmaps must integrate long-term goals and visions. It’s often best to start at the end and work backward. For instance, in software development, milestones are often thought of as software releases or new versions of a project. But with a business roadmap, goals and initiatives also include things like hitting revenue targets or launching in a new region or market, basically anything that’s a significant result of combined efforts.

2. Seek Input From Stakeholders

For smaller businesses, this often means involving everyone. Including all pertinent stakeholders and decision-makers brings different views and priorities to the table and helps establish a clear direction for where the company’s headed. As collaboration is key to most business success, it also increases the chance of the roadmap being implemented. For specific projects, it weighs all pros and cons and ensures the new technology meets everyone’s particular needs.

3. Evaluate Current Systems And Chart A Course

All business technology roadmaps include negotiating a budget. Now’s the time to question previous decisions to see if they still align with the company’s vision. For example, a company has the goal of doubling customers, so assumes it must increase hardware capacity to meet it. That can cost significant sums of money. Another approach might be to make strategic changes to the software or combine current tools with custom software, typically a far less expensive strategy.

4. Be Open To Change

Clear vision and a revised budget in hand, it’s now possible to view the business landscape with a critical set of eyes looking. Perhaps a company previously developed a custom app because no existing product satisfied its needs — but now that software exists! The custom software could possibly be retired for the new software that will be supported by someone else.

That makes it possible to use in-house staff to develop new, potentially more profitable products. Sometimes bringing in an outside consultant to audit systems, processes, and teams help identify changes a business can make to support improvements and future initiatives.

5. Set Priorities

Up next is determining what’s critical, blocking, or simple. Items should be prioritized, and continuous feedback should be solicited from stakeholders. Project management tools can simplify the process and ensures items are linked to their dependencies and what needs to be done first is clear.

6. Build Out Timelines

Each task or initiative comes with its own level of effort. It’s critical to pull in the right technical people so to get an estimate around each effort. This should not be a long, drawn-out endeavor. Instead, it should be a quick activity that verifies how everyone’s on the same page. Often leadership has items it believes can be implemented quickly, but the team is of the mind it will take much longer to pull off.

7. Devise A Budget

Once there’s a clear view of what can be worked on, when it can be worked on, and how long it might take to implement, there’s enough information to fashion a budget for each item. Each item’s details should be worked through fully to get an as accurate as possible estimate for what’s needed. Budget decisions can also affect how urgent or necessary an item truly is. Some businesses find they’re better off putting something on the back burner or investing in a service that solves the same problem.

8. Visualize The Roadmap

Finally! Project implementation planning can now begin. Each project should be laid out and overlaid with the resources needed for project delivery. If working in an Agile software development environment, there’s no need to write out every detail of every feature. Simply focus on high-level component delivery, marketing dates, and other top-level deadlines. While building out the software, Agile teams can pull in features on a different schedule, but they should always work towards the company’s high-level schedule.

Many businesses find that creating a steering committee or oversight committee helps to see if initiatives are following a steady path or are veering off-course. These committees can be helpful in that they’re not involved in the day-to-day delivery of a product like development teams are.

Doing What’s Best For The Journey And The Destination

Rushed software development projects don’t save time or money, and they often negatively affect quality — the greater a company’s rush to launch, the greater the risk. Before starting any software development project, a business should take the time needed to develop a technology roadmap.

Decades of experience have taught there is a lot of truth in the adage that “prior planning prevents poor performance.” Moving too fast can cause enormous problems for software development, dooming them to failure.

Creating a business technology roadmap gives enterprises the best of all worlds. It drives digital transformation while being agile enough to accommodate course changes. By the time the final destination or launch is reached, long-term value has been built into the product, roadblocks have been avoided, and other obstacles that often run other development projects into a ditch have been overcome.

Articles on Smashing Magazine — For Web Designers And Developers

16 Aug

How To Develop Your Business’ Technology Roadmap

by TBSCategories: News

When people have an idea for a piece of software or an app, they tend to be pretty energized about getting it to market as quickly as possible. It’s exciting to create an app or piece of software no one’s ever imagined or built before. As software developers, we’re usually right there with them.

At some point, though, we need to sit down with clients and give them a sometimes sobering reality: software development without a business technology roadmap can be a lot like driving aimlessly from point A to point Z. Sure, you get to discover new worlds and experience unexpected adventures, but you also frequently get lost, spend more money, and can lose enthusiasm for the journey.

“Agile” And “Fast” Are Not The Same In Software Development

Many people think an Agile approach to software development discards long-term planning. Perhaps it’s because we so often use the word “sprint” in conversation. In reality, all good software development must flow from a business technology roadmap, as it:

  • Provides context around the development team’s daily work.
  • Responds to shifts in, among other things, the competitive landscape.

So, what is a business technology roadmap, and how can one be developed to support software development? That’s what we’re here to talk about.

What Is A Business Technology Roadmap?

Unlike detailed blueprints that lay out all tasks, deadlines, bug reports, and more along the way, technology roadmaps are high-level visual summaries highlighting a company’s vision or plans.

In an Agile approach, a technology roadmap feeds the sprint and grooming processes, providing insight into how the product will travel from start to finish. It makes it easier for development teams to:

  • Understand how the product will evolve.
  • Make near-term decisions that don’t compromise future work.
  • Gain awareness of which features are or aren’t working.

Companies can use technology roadmaps to review their internal IT, DevOps, infrastructure, architecture, software, internal system, and hardware procurement policies and procedures with innovation and efficiency in mind. The roadmap helps them define how a new IT tool, process, or technology supports their business strategy and growth and aligns projects with short and long-term goals.

There are hundreds of templates companies use for their tech roadmaps. A typical IT roadmap covers everything from requirements to testing and integrations. A dev team’s work dictates software or development roadmaps, highlighting tech initiatives, epics, and features while communicating the team’s primary goals.

For a typical client, a roadmap follows the following structure.

  • We created a list of all the features based on competition and wish list,
  • We narrowed that down based on what we wanted to be and what our beta users wanted,
  • We used that narrowed list to start technical planning and user stories,
  • As new features came up, we ran that through the roadmap to know if it fits in or how it should be prioritized,
  • We adjusted the roadmap if needed every 3-5 months.

The Role A Technology Roadmap Plays In An Agile Approach

In practice, a technology roadmap in Agile software development:

  • Facilitates planning activities by recognizing the journey is just as important as the destination. It forces teams to “come out of the weeds” and think more strategically.

    How this might play out: Your dev team suggests that the product needs built-in calling, meeting scheduling, and multi-layer reporting features. That forces you into planning activities like grooming meetings and getting outside feedback where you dissect each feature and come up with scenarios for setting them up. You might also discuss things like vendor selection for each feature. Conversations tend to follow an “or” pattern, as in “are we going to do this, or this, or that?”

  • Highlights key focus areas and works as a navigational tool to help the entire team succeed.

    How this might play out: Putting a spotlight on the areas the team needs to focus on forces you to decide who you want to be and what you want to become. Put another way, if you’re tailoring your product to a specific group, say inside sales reps, highlighting core features that matter to this narrower group of users helps eliminate tasks that might be used in other projects.

  • Works as a critical communication tool both within the teams and with other key stakeholders.

    How this might play out: As your project progresses and team members remind you about particular features stakeholders said they wanted, you can easily refer back to the roadmap to see if it was there in the first place. You can see where you chose to make certain development decisions, i.e., “we chose to be an inside sales rep tool,” and “we chose to be this or that.” This acts as sort of a forcing function, helping you revise the roadmap and rearrange the order and priority of tasks based on how they affect your schedule and deadline goals.

Different development companies and teams use different charts to construct their agile product roadmap, but they all tend to include:

  • A “longer-term strategic theme,” which points teams in a specific direction based on their assigned tasks.
  • A list of quarterly outcomes or objectives and key results (OKR) goals that each team will focus on to achieve the strategic theme. These goals basically answer the question, “what are the things we may build?” The answer lies in how you define success. Each team gives their best guesses as to how they’ll achieve each quarter’s goals.
  • Additional columns contain OKR goals, but with fewer and fewer “things we may build” listings. That’s because teams don’t know what they’ll be working on three or four quarters out so there are fewer best guesses. As the project moves forward and goes through testing, the boxes for the later quarters fill up.

More detailed software roadmaps cover milestones like player launch, product details like user profiles, UX/UI such as desktop icons and wireframes, and dev goals like press-to-play and performance enhancements.

Unlike traditional software development approaches, Agile focuses on the strategy, not the plan. That means outcomes, not outputs, are prioritized; tactical plans are left for backlogs. In a way, they’re designed to communicate uncertainty and provide transparency into what stops along the way are likely to remain as is and which might be in flux. For this reason, it’s crucial to update Agile roadmaps often as priorities shift and change.

How A Technology Roadmap Feeds The Agile Sprint And Grooming Processes

Sprints frequently go off track, which can have a negative effect on downstream operations. A technology roadmap helps teams run more successful sprints by setting a foundation and identifying how work should be organized so activities can be finished in a short time period.

  • A sprint goal refers to what can be delivered in the sprint.
  • A sprint backlog is the list of tasks to be completed during the sprint to achieve the goal.

To illustrate, let’s say you want to develop a new product feature. During the sprint planning meeting, team members need to “groom” the backlog and say which tasks they’ll work on. This is where many teams are led down the wrong path. They assume planning for the next two weeks is easy-peasy. They overlook or forget the work they’re planning must also satisfy the established goal.

A good backlog:

  • Lists each work item in order of importance.
  • Includes full-developed user stories the team can begin to execute on.
  • Has a current estimate for each work item.

Because it’s easy for teams to get bogged down in the details of a project, a technology roadmap helps them stay focused on high-level objectives and true customer needs.

The Role Of A Technology Roadmap In Digital Transformation

Today’s digital transformations focus on three key areas: customer experience, operational processes, and business models. Whether it’s for a small company or multi-national enterprise, a well-developed business technology roadmap helps companies reach short and long-term digital transformation goals by allowing them to:

  • Remain agile enough to accommodate course changes.
  • Build long-term value in the product.
  • Avoid roadblocks and other obstacles.
  • Because digital transformation is a relatively new concept, it’s often a journey filled with blind spots. What does it mean in terms of the scope and intensity of change? What will the repercussions be of pursuing and implementing it?

On the one hand, the digital transformation process is seen as using technologies to create new or modify existing business models. On the other hand, it’s about companies needing to embrace new cultures, structures, and processes that align with their IT architecture. One thing’s for sure: digital transformation is a fundamental change for any company.

A technology roadmap assists overall digital transformation goals by answering some key questions:

  • How is digital changing or poised to change the business and its industry?
  • What new offerings, operating models, and business models can it enable?
  • How is digital affecting the business’s competitive advantage? Where does the company remain well-positioned, and where is it disadvantaged?
  • Which digital opportunities are consistent with a company’s strategy based on value potential? In what order should the business pursue them?
  • What gaps in systems and capabilities need to be filled to succeed?
  • What are the targets, timelines, and accountabilities for individual projects and programs? What steps are needed to finance the journey?

Just about every business can benefit from developing their business technology roadmap as part of their digital transformation plan. New digital advances and the opportunity to improve traditional technologies to change customer relationships and employee experiences put businesses on a clear and rewarding path for turning technology into transformation.

Creating A Technology Roadmap To Drive Successful Innovation

Many businesses already have a technology roadmap. The question is whether that map is pointing to where they want to go, or has it only carried them to the present leg of the journey? Are they focused only on existing projects, or are they anticipating future breakthroughs?

The best technology roadmaps continually evolve, adding new destination points and aligning all resources and capabilities behind long-term goals. It’s not an easy process, but a methodical approach helps.

1. Identify Goals

Technology roadmaps must integrate long-term goals and visions. It’s often best to start at the end and work backward. For instance, in software development, milestones are often thought of as software releases or new versions of a project. But with a business roadmap, goals and initiatives also include things like hitting revenue targets or launching in a new region or market, basically anything that’s a significant result of combined efforts.

2. Seek Input From Stakeholders

For smaller businesses, this often means involving everyone. Including all pertinent stakeholders and decision-makers brings different views and priorities to the table and helps establish a clear direction for where the company’s headed. As collaboration is key to most business success, it also increases the chance of the roadmap being implemented. For specific projects, it weighs all pros and cons and ensures the new technology meets everyone’s particular needs.

3. Evaluate Current Systems And Chart A Course

All business technology roadmaps include negotiating a budget. Now’s the time to question previous decisions to see if they still align with the company’s vision. For example, a company has the goal of doubling customers, so assumes it must increase hardware capacity to meet it. That can cost significant sums of money. Another approach might be to make strategic changes to the software or combine current tools with custom software, typically a far less expensive strategy.

4. Be Open To Change

Clear vision and a revised budget in hand, it’s now possible to view the business landscape with a critical set of eyes looking. Perhaps a company previously developed a custom app because no existing product satisfied its needs — but now that software exists! The custom software could possibly be retired for the new software that will be supported by someone else.

That makes it possible to use in-house staff to develop new, potentially more profitable products. Sometimes bringing in an outside consultant to audit systems, processes, and teams help identify changes a business can make to support improvements and future initiatives.

5. Set Priorities

Up next is determining what’s critical, blocking, or simple. Items should be prioritized, and continuous feedback should be solicited from stakeholders. Project management tools can simplify the process and ensures items are linked to their dependencies and what needs to be done first is clear.

6. Build Out Timelines

Each task or initiative comes with its own level of effort. It’s critical to pull in the right technical people so to get an estimate around each effort. This should not be a long, drawn-out endeavor. Instead, it should be a quick activity that verifies how everyone’s on the same page. Often leadership has items it believes can be implemented quickly, but the team is of the mind it will take much longer to pull off.

7. Devise A Budget

Once there’s a clear view of what can be worked on, when it can be worked on, and how long it might take to implement, there’s enough information to fashion a budget for each item. Each item’s details should be worked through fully to get an as accurate as possible estimate for what’s needed. Budget decisions can also affect how urgent or necessary an item truly is. Some businesses find they’re better off putting something on the back burner or investing in a service that solves the same problem.

8. Visualize The Roadmap

Finally! Project implementation planning can now begin. Each project should be laid out and overlaid with the resources needed for project delivery. If working in an Agile software development environment, there’s no need to write out every detail of every feature. Simply focus on high-level component delivery, marketing dates, and other top-level deadlines. While building out the software, Agile teams can pull in features on a different schedule, but they should always work towards the company’s high-level schedule.

Many businesses find that creating a steering committee or oversight committee helps to see if initiatives are following a steady path or are veering off-course. These committees can be helpful in that they’re not involved in the day-to-day delivery of a product like development teams are.

Doing What’s Best For The Journey And The Destination

Rushed software development projects don’t save time or money, and they often negatively affect quality — the greater a company’s rush to launch, the greater the risk. Before starting any software development project, a business should take the time needed to develop a technology roadmap.

Decades of experience have taught there is a lot of truth in the adage that “prior planning prevents poor performance.” Moving too fast can cause enormous problems for software development, dooming them to failure.

Creating a business technology roadmap gives enterprises the best of all worlds. It drives digital transformation while being agile enough to accommodate course changes. By the time the final destination or launch is reached, long-term value has been built into the product, roadblocks have been avoided, and other obstacles that often run other development projects into a ditch have been overcome.

Articles on Smashing Magazine — For Web Designers And Developers

13 Mar

Make Honest Design Work For Digital Business, With “Ethical Design Handbook”

by TBSCategories: News

Make Honest Design Work For Digital Business, With “Ethical Design Handbook”

Make Honest Design Work For Digital Business, With “Ethical Design Handbook”

Vitaly Friedman

Many business models thrive on ingeniously deceptive and manipulative digital products. Not because they have to; mostly because dark patterns have become such an accepted norm. But what happens when ad-blockers, cross-browser tracking protection and data regulation (e.g. GDPR & CCPA) become a norm, too? That’s when an honest, ethical design could be a competitive advantage.

To grow a sustainable business, we need to learn how to leave dark patterns behind. We also need to figure out how to make honest digital products financially viable. Products that enable and respect customer choices and are built and designed with ethics in mind. That’s exactly why we created a new book. Jump to the table of contents ↓

Meet Ethical Design Handbook, our new book with practical techniques and blueprints on how companies ridden with questionable practices can shift towards better, sustainable design. Download a free PDF excerpt (5 MB).

Print + eBook

$ 39.00

Quality hardcover. Free worldwide shipping. 100 days money-back-guarantee.

eBook

$ 19.00

DRM-free, of course. ePUB, Kindle, PDF.
Included with Smashing Membership.

About The Book

When we set out to write this book, we wanted to develop a new type of working framework to empower people to practice ethical design in their business, in their teams, and with their products. The reason was simple: too many products we use today have become machines for tricking customers into decisions they never intended to make. That’s not quite the web we want to see around us.

The cover of the Ethical Design Handbook

It’s not just the poor state of the web that brings us here though. It’s the lack of alternatives that companies can rely on. In light of new data regulation and tracking protection, there are some critical questions that only few companies have addressed yet:

  • What happens if you can’t get access to personal data that’s been feeding the machine all this time?
  • What if your competitors discover an alternative business model way before you do?
  • What if you can’t track and target customers wandering from one website to another?
  • What happens when ad-blocking becomes mainstream and your advertising scripts are dismissed by crafty blockers?
  • How should the work of marketing teams change with new regulations, such as GDPR and CCPA?
  • What competitive advantages can your business gain by focusing on privacy and transparency?

Ethical Design Handbook explores alternative, sustainable business models and shows how businesses can move towards ethical design and become more profitable as a result. It’s a very practical and tactical guide for designers, developers and management, with case studies and techniques applicable to every digital product.

The book features interface design examples that take ethical design principles into the account. Large preview.

Table Of Contents

In the book, you’ll learn how to:

  1. Help companies understand ethical design,
  2. Justify and prove a business case,
  3. Grow a sustainable business based on transparency and honesty,
  4. Balance data collection and privacy,
  5. Work within new legislation (GDPR/CCPA),
  6. Evaluate and improve design decisions,
  7. Embed ethical design into your workflow,
  8. Gradually transform your organization.

368 pages. Free shipping worldwide. The eBook is available as PDF, ePUB, and Amazon Kindle. Written by Trine Falbe, Martin Michael Frederiksen and Kim Andersen. Get the book now.

Print + eBook

$ 39.00

Quality hardcover. Free worldwide shipping. 100 days money-back-guarantee.

eBook

$ 19.00

DRM-free, of course. ePUB, Kindle, PDF.
Included with Smashing Membership.

About The Authors

Trine FalbeTrine Falbe is a human-centered UX strategist, designer and teacher who works in the intersection between people and business. Trine is deeply passionate about ethical design and designing for children, and she is also a keynote speaker at conferences and a UX advisor in strategic projects.

Martin Michael FrederiksenAs a serial entrepreneur since the very first browser, Martin Michael Frederiksen was born with a practical appreciation for the crossroads between business and digital development. He has published the books Cross Channel and the CEO’s Guide to IT Projects That Cannot Fail. He works as an independent consultant for businesses that need a devil’s advocate when trying out new strategies and ideas.

Kim AndersenAfter training at an international advertising agency, Kim Andersen quickly left print media for digital design. Owing to his amazing memory he always leaves design meetings with an empty notebook, only to attend the following meeting armed with drawings where nothing has been forgotten and everything is drawn in great detail. He owns the digital design studio Onkel Kim, and he prefers difficult and complex design tasks where the brain is working overtime.

Technical Details

  • ISBN: 978-3-945749-83-8 (print)
  • Quality hardcover, stitched binding, ribbon page marker.
  • Free shipping worldwide, airmail from Germany.
    (Check your delivery times.)
  • 100-days-money-back-guarantee: no ifs or buts.
  • The eBook is available as PDF, ePUB, and Amazon Kindle.
  • Get the book right away.
A quality hardcover, with a dark ribbon, thick paper and a glossy effect on the cover. Photo by Drew McLellan. Large view.

Testimonials

Helle Martens“This is the book designers have all been missing: A practical reference book on how to work ethically in design. Starting with the why – what does “Ethical Design” mean, and why is this book even necessary or important, the book easily morphs into the business value of ethical design, best practices in ethical design, and how you can influence positive change.”

— Helle Martens, UX consultant

Heather Burns“It’s easy to feel like we’ve lost the web we used to love. The Ethical Design Handbook is an essential guide to reclaiming it. Packed with practical resources and guidance for designers, developers, and project managers, it will help you to integrate a higher standard of professionalism into your work on the web. Refreshingly, this book contains no inspirational waffle, public shaming, or lectures on morality. What it does contain is proven techniques, standards, and strategies for getting the job done while protecting your users.

That matters more than you think. As policymakers seek to crack down on the tech giants who have diminished the web for us all, adopting the techniques in this book can be an essential way of defending our craft from heavy-handed regulation.”

— Heather Burns, Tech policy consultant

Per Axbom“I’ve just finished reading The Ethical Design Handbook and am both brimming with new ideas and am more hopeful about the future. The authors bring new tools to the table, and also do a good job of reminding designers how many of our current tools already help us contribute to positive impact. The trick is that we have to make sure to actually put in the effort, and have some cake to keep us going.”

— Per Axbom, Commmunication theorist

Stephen Hay“The Ethical Design Handbook is exactly what its title implies: a gentle, persuasive, perspective-giving guide to how you can become a better designer without selling your soul.”

— Stephen Hay, Creative Director, Rabobank

Bruce Lawson“The Ethical Design Handbook should probably be compulsory reading for all tech workers.”

— Bruce Lawson, Web standards advocate

The book features scorecards and blueprints (Excel spreadsheets), applicable to your work right away. Large view.

Community Matters ❤️

With The Ethical Design Handbook, we’ve tried to create a very focused handbook with applicable, long-living solutions to introduce a positive change in companies ridden with dark patterns and questionable practices.

There is quite a bit of work to do on the web, but our hope is that with this book, you will be equipped with enough tooling to slowly move a company towards a more sustainable and healthy digital footprint.

Producing a book takes quite a bit of time, and we couldn’t pull it off without the support of our wonderful community. A huge shout-out to Smashing Members for their ongoing support in our adventures. As a result, the eBook is and always will be free for Smashing Members. Plus, Members get a friendly discount when purchasing their printed copy.

Stay smashing, and thank you for your ongoing support, everyone!

Smashing Cat on a bicycle with The Ethical Design Handbook in its bike basket.

Print + eBook

$ 39.00

Quality hardcover. Free worldwide shipping. 100 days money-back-guarantee.

eBook

$ 19.00

DRM-free, of course. ePUB, Kindle, PDF.
Included with Smashing Membership.

More Smashing Books

Promoting best practices and providing you with practical tips to master your daily coding and design challenges has always been (and will be) at the core of everything we do at Smashing. In the past few years, we were very lucky to have worked together with some talented, caring people from the web community to publish their wealth of experience as printed books that stand the test of time. Alla, Adam and Heydon are some of these people. Have you checked out their books already?

Design Systems

Design Systems

A practical guide to creating design languages for digital products.

Add to cart $ 39

Inclusive Components

Inclusive Components

A handbook for building robust, fully accessible interfaces.

Add to cart $ 39

Form Design Patterns

Form Design Patterns

A practical guide to designing and coding simple and inclusive forms.

Add to cart $ 39

The Ethical Design Handbook.
The Ethical Design Handbook.
The Ethical Design Handbook.
The Ethical Design Handbook.
The Ethical Design Handbook.
The Ethical Design Handbook.
The Ethical Design Handbook.
The Ethical Design Handbook.
The Ethical Design Handbook.
The Ethical Design Handbook.
The Ethical Design Handbook.
The Ethical Design Handbook.
The Ethical Design Handbook.
The Ethical Design Handbook.
The Ethical Design Handbook.
The Ethical Design Handbook.


Articles on Smashing Magazine — For Web Designers And Developers

12 Mar

Make Honest Design Work For Digital Business, With “Ethical Design Handbook”

by TBSCategories: News

Make Honest Design Work For Digital Business, With “Ethical Design Handbook”

Make Honest Design Work For Digital Business, With “Ethical Design Handbook”

Vitaly Friedman

Many business models thrive on ingeniously deceptive and manipulative digital products. Not because they have to; mostly because dark patterns have become such an accepted norm. But what happens when ad-blockers, cross-browser tracking protection and data regulation (e.g. GDPR & CCPA) become a norm, too? That’s when an honest, ethical design could be a competitive advantage.

To grow a sustainable business, we need to learn how to leave dark patterns behind. We also need to figure out how to make honest digital products financially viable. Products that enable and respect customer choices and are built and designed with ethics in mind. That’s exactly why we created a new book. Jump to the table of contents ↓

Meet Ethical Design Handbook, our new book with practical techniques and blueprints on how companies ridden with questionable practices can shift towards better, sustainable design. Download a free PDF excerpt (5 MB).

Print + eBook

$ 39.00

Quality hardcover. Free worldwide shipping. 100 days money-back-guarantee.

eBook

$ 19.00

DRM-free, of course. ePUB, Kindle, PDF.
Included with Smashing Membership.

About The Book

When we set out to write this book, we wanted to develop a new type of working framework to empower people to practice ethical design in their business, in their teams, and with their products. The reason was simple: too many products we use today have become machines for tricking customers into decisions they never intended to make. That’s not quite the web we want to see around us.

The cover of the Ethical Design Handbook

It’s not just the poor state of the web that brings us here though. It’s the lack of alternatives that companies can rely on. In light of new data regulation and tracking protection, there are some critical questions that only few companies have addressed yet:

  • What happens if you can’t get access to personal data that’s been feeding the machine all this time?
  • What if your competitors discover an alternative business model way before you do?
  • What if you can’t track and target customers wandering from one website to another?
  • What happens when ad-blocking becomes mainstream and your advertising scripts are dismissed by crafty blockers?
  • How should the work of marketing teams change with new regulations, such as GDPR and CCPA?
  • What competitive advantages can your business gain by focusing on privacy and transparency?

Ethical Design Handbook explores alternative, sustainable business models and shows how businesses can move towards ethical design and become more profitable as a result. It’s a very practical and tactical guide for designers, developers and management, with case studies and techniques applicable to every digital product.

The book features interface design examples that take ethical design principles into the account. Large preview.

Table Of Contents

In the book, you’ll learn how to:

  1. Help companies understand ethical design,
  2. Justify and prove a business case,
  3. Grow a sustainable business based on transparency and honesty,
  4. Balance data collection and privacy,
  5. Work within new legislation (GDPR/CCPA),
  6. Evaluate and improve design decisions,
  7. Embed ethical design into your workflow,
  8. Gradually transform your organization.

368 pages. Free shipping worldwide. The eBook is available as PDF, ePUB, and Amazon Kindle. Written by Trine Falbe, Martin Michael Frederiksen and Kim Andersen. Get the book now.

Print + eBook

$ 39.00

Quality hardcover. Free worldwide shipping. 100 days money-back-guarantee.

eBook

$ 19.00

DRM-free, of course. ePUB, Kindle, PDF.
Included with Smashing Membership.

About The Authors

Trine FalbeTrine Falbe is a human-centered UX strategist, designer and teacher who works in the intersection between people and business. Trine is deeply passionate about ethical design and designing for children, and she is also a keynote speaker at conferences and a UX advisor in strategic projects.

Martin Michael FrederiksenAs a serial entrepreneur since the very first browser, Martin Michael Frederiksen was born with a practical appreciation for the crossroads between business and digital development. He has published the books Cross Channel and the CEO’s Guide to IT Projects That Cannot Fail. He works as an independent consultant for businesses that need a devil’s advocate when trying out new strategies and ideas.

Kim AndersenAfter training at an international advertising agency, Kim Andersen quickly left print media for digital design. Owing to his amazing memory he always leaves design meetings with an empty notebook, only to attend the following meeting armed with drawings where nothing has been forgotten and everything is drawn in great detail. He owns the digital design studio Onkel Kim, and he prefers difficult and complex design tasks where the brain is working overtime.

Technical Details

  • ISBN: 978-3-945749-83-8 (print)
  • Quality hardcover, stitched binding, ribbon page marker.
  • Free shipping worldwide, airmail from Germany.
    (Check your delivery times.)
  • 100-days-money-back-guarantee: no ifs or buts.
  • The eBook is available as PDF, ePUB, and Amazon Kindle.
  • Get the book right away.
A quality hardcover, with a dark ribbon, thick paper and a glossy effect on the cover. Photo by Drew McLellan. Large view.

Testimonials

Helle Martens“This is the book designers have all been missing: A practical reference book on how to work ethically in design. Starting with the why – what does “Ethical Design” mean, and why is this book even necessary or important, the book easily morphs into the business value of ethical design, best practices in ethical design, and how you can influence positive change.”

— Helle Martens, UX consultant

Heather Burns“It’s easy to feel like we’ve lost the web we used to love. The Ethical Design Handbook is an essential guide to reclaiming it. Packed with practical resources and guidance for designers, developers, and project managers, it will help you to integrate a higher standard of professionalism into your work on the web. Refreshingly, this book contains no inspirational waffle, public shaming, or lectures on morality. What it does contain is proven techniques, standards, and strategies for getting the job done while protecting your users.

That matters more than you think. As policymakers seek to crack down on the tech giants who have diminished the web for us all, adopting the techniques in this book can be an essential way of defending our craft from heavy-handed regulation.”

— Heather Burns, Tech policy consultant

Per Axbom“I’ve just finished reading The Ethical Design Handbook and am both brimming with new ideas and am more hopeful about the future. The authors bring new tools to the table, and also do a good job of reminding designers how many of our current tools already help us contribute to positive impact. The trick is that we have to make sure to actually put in the effort, and have some cake to keep us going.”

— Per Axbom, Commmunication theorist

Stephen Hay“The Ethical Design Handbook is exactly what its title implies: a gentle, persuasive, perspective-giving guide to how you can become a better designer without selling your soul.”

— Stephen Hay, Creative Director, Rabobank

Bruce Lawson“The Ethical Design Handbook should probably be compulsory reading for all tech workers.”

— Bruce Lawson, Web standards advocate

The book features scorecards and blueprints (Excel spreadsheets), applicable to your work right away. Large view.

Community Matters ❤️

With The Ethical Design Handbook, we’ve tried to create a very focused handbook with applicable, long-living solutions to introduce a positive change in companies ridden with dark patterns and questionable practices.

There is quite a bit of work to do on the web, but our hope is that with this book, you will be equipped with enough tooling to slowly move a company towards a more sustainable and healthy digital footprint.

Producing a book takes quite a bit of time, and we couldn’t pull it off without the support of our wonderful community. A huge shout-out to Smashing Members for their ongoing support in our adventures. As a result, the eBook is and always will be free for Smashing Members. Plus, Members get a friendly discount when purchasing their printed copy.

Stay smashing, and thank you for your ongoing support, everyone!

Smashing Cat on a bicycle with The Ethical Design Handbook in its bike basket.

Print + eBook

$ 39.00

Quality hardcover. Free worldwide shipping. 100 days money-back-guarantee.

eBook

$ 19.00

DRM-free, of course. ePUB, Kindle, PDF.
Included with Smashing Membership.

More Smashing Books

Promoting best practices and providing you with practical tips to master your daily coding and design challenges has always been (and will be) at the core of everything we do at Smashing. In the past few years, we were very lucky to have worked together with some talented, caring people from the web community to publish their wealth of experience as printed books that stand the test of time. Alla, Adam and Heydon are some of these people. Have you checked out their books already?

Design Systems

Design Systems

A practical guide to creating design languages for digital products.

Add to cart $ 39

Inclusive Components

Inclusive Components

A handbook for building robust, fully accessible interfaces.

Add to cart $ 39

Form Design Patterns

Form Design Patterns

A practical guide to designing and coding simple and inclusive forms.

Add to cart $ 39

The Ethical Design Handbook.
The Ethical Design Handbook.
The Ethical Design Handbook.
The Ethical Design Handbook.
The Ethical Design Handbook.
The Ethical Design Handbook.
The Ethical Design Handbook.
The Ethical Design Handbook.
The Ethical Design Handbook.
The Ethical Design Handbook.
The Ethical Design Handbook.
The Ethical Design Handbook.
The Ethical Design Handbook.
The Ethical Design Handbook.
The Ethical Design Handbook.
The Ethical Design Handbook.


Articles on Smashing Magazine — For Web Designers And Developers

12 Mar

Make Honest Design Work For Digital Business, With “Ethical Design Handbook”

by TBSCategories: News

Make Honest Design Work For Digital Business, With “Ethical Design Handbook”

Make Honest Design Work For Digital Business, With “Ethical Design Handbook”

Vitaly Friedman

Many business models thrive on ingeniously deceptive and manipulative digital products. Not because they have to; mostly because dark patterns have become such an accepted norm. But what happens when ad-blockers, cross-browser tracking protection and data regulation (e.g. GDPR & CCPA) become a norm, too? That’s when an honest, ethical design could be a competitive advantage.

To grow a sustainable business, we need to learn how to leave dark patterns behind. We also need to figure out how to make honest digital products financially viable. Products that enable and respect customer choices and are built and designed with ethics in mind. That’s exactly why we created a new book. Jump to the table of contents ↓

Meet Ethical Design Handbook, our new book with practical techniques and blueprints on how companies ridden with questionable practices can shift towards better, sustainable design. Download a free PDF excerpt (5 MB).

Print + eBook

$ 39.00

Quality hardcover. Free worldwide shipping. 100 days money-back-guarantee.

eBook

$ 19.00

DRM-free, of course. ePUB, Kindle, PDF.
Included with Smashing Membership.

About The Book

When we set out to write this book, we wanted to develop a new type of working framework to empower people to practice ethical design in their business, in their teams, and with their products. The reason was simple: too many products we use today have become machines for tricking customers into decisions they never intended to make. That’s not quite the web we want to see around us.

The cover of the Ethical Design Handbook

It’s not just the poor state of the web that brings us here though. It’s the lack of alternatives that companies can rely on. In light of new data regulation and tracking protection, there are some critical questions that only few companies have addressed yet:

  • What happens if you can’t get access to personal data that’s been feeding the machine all this time?
  • What if your competitors discover an alternative business model way before you do?
  • What if you can’t track and target customers wandering from one website to another?
  • What happens when ad-blocking becomes mainstream and your advertising scripts are dismissed by crafty blockers?
  • How should the work of marketing teams change with new regulations, such as GDPR and CCPA?
  • What competitive advantages can your business gain by focusing on privacy and transparency?

Ethical Design Handbook explores alternative, sustainable business models and shows how businesses can move towards ethical design and become more profitable as a result. It’s a very practical and tactical guide for designers, developers and management, with case studies and techniques applicable to every digital product.

The book features interface design examples that take ethical design principles into the account. Large preview.

Table Of Contents

In the book, you’ll learn how to:

  1. Help companies understand ethical design,
  2. Justify and prove a business case,
  3. Grow a sustainable business based on transparency and honesty,
  4. Balance data collection and privacy,
  5. Work within new legislation (GDPR/CCPA),
  6. Evaluate and improve design decisions,
  7. Embed ethical design into your workflow,
  8. Gradually transform your organization.

368 pages. Free shipping worldwide. The eBook is available as PDF, ePUB, and Amazon Kindle. Written by Trine Falbe, Martin Michael Frederiksen and Kim Andersen. Get the book now.

Print + eBook

$ 39.00

Quality hardcover. Free worldwide shipping. 100 days money-back-guarantee.

eBook

$ 19.00

DRM-free, of course. ePUB, Kindle, PDF.
Included with Smashing Membership.

About The Authors

Trine FalbeTrine Falbe is a human-centered UX strategist, designer and teacher who works in the intersection between people and business. Trine is deeply passionate about ethical design and designing for children, and she is also a keynote speaker at conferences and a UX advisor in strategic projects.

Martin Michael FrederiksenAs a serial entrepreneur since the very first browser, Martin Michael Frederiksen was born with a practical appreciation for the crossroads between business and digital development. He has published the books Cross Channel and the CEO’s Guide to IT Projects That Cannot Fail. He works as an independent consultant for businesses that need a devil’s advocate when trying out new strategies and ideas.

Kim AndersenAfter training at an international advertising agency, Kim Andersen quickly left print media for digital design. Owing to his amazing memory he always leaves design meetings with an empty notebook, only to attend the following meeting armed with drawings where nothing has been forgotten and everything is drawn in great detail. He owns the digital design studio Onkel Kim, and he prefers difficult and complex design tasks where the brain is working overtime.

Technical Details

  • ISBN: 978-3-945749-83-8 (print)
  • Quality hardcover, stitched binding, ribbon page marker.
  • Free shipping worldwide, airmail from Germany.
    (Check your delivery times.)
  • 100-days-money-back-guarantee: no ifs or buts.
  • The eBook is available as PDF, ePUB, and Amazon Kindle.
  • Get the book right away.
A quality hardcover, with a dark ribbon, thick paper and a glossy effect on the cover. Photo by Drew McLellan. Large view.

Testimonials

Helle Martens“This is the book designers have all been missing: A practical reference book on how to work ethically in design. Starting with the why – what does “Ethical Design” mean, and why is this book even necessary or important, the book easily morphs into the business value of ethical design, best practices in ethical design, and how you can influence positive change.”

— Helle Martens, UX consultant

Heather Burns“It’s easy to feel like we’ve lost the web we used to love. The Ethical Design Handbook is an essential guide to reclaiming it. Packed with practical resources and guidance for designers, developers, and project managers, it will help you to integrate a higher standard of professionalism into your work on the web. Refreshingly, this book contains no inspirational waffle, public shaming, or lectures on morality. What it does contain is proven techniques, standards, and strategies for getting the job done while protecting your users.

That matters more than you think. As policymakers seek to crack down on the tech giants who have diminished the web for us all, adopting the techniques in this book can be an essential way of defending our craft from heavy-handed regulation.”

— Heather Burns, Tech policy consultant

Per Axbom“I’ve just finished reading The Ethical Design Handbook and am both brimming with new ideas and am more hopeful about the future. The authors bring new tools to the table, and also do a good job of reminding designers how many of our current tools already help us contribute to positive impact. The trick is that we have to make sure to actually put in the effort, and have some cake to keep us going.”

— Per Axbom, Commmunication theorist

Stephen Hay“The Ethical Design Handbook is exactly what its title implies: a gentle, persuasive, perspective-giving guide to how you can become a better designer without selling your soul.”

— Stephen Hay, Creative Director, Rabobank

Bruce Lawson“The Ethical Design Handbook should probably be compulsory reading for all tech workers.”

— Bruce Lawson, Web standards advocate

The book features scorecards and blueprints (Excel spreadsheets), applicable to your work right away. Large view.

Community Matters ❤️

With The Ethical Design Handbook, we’ve tried to create a very focused handbook with applicable, long-living solutions to introduce a positive change in companies ridden with dark patterns and questionable practices.

There is quite a bit of work to do on the web, but our hope is that with this book, you will be equipped with enough tooling to slowly move a company towards a more sustainable and healthy digital footprint.

Producing a book takes quite a bit of time, and we couldn’t pull it off without the support of our wonderful community. A huge shout-out to Smashing Members for their ongoing support in our adventures. As a result, the eBook is and always will be free for Smashing Members. Plus, Members get a friendly discount when purchasing their printed copy.

Stay smashing, and thank you for your ongoing support, everyone!

Smashing Cat on a bicycle with The Ethical Design Handbook in its bike basket.

Print + eBook

$ 39.00

Quality hardcover. Free worldwide shipping. 100 days money-back-guarantee.

eBook

$ 19.00

DRM-free, of course. ePUB, Kindle, PDF.
Included with Smashing Membership.

More Smashing Books

Promoting best practices and providing you with practical tips to master your daily coding and design challenges has always been (and will be) at the core of everything we do at Smashing. In the past few years, we were very lucky to have worked together with some talented, caring people from the web community to publish their wealth of experience as printed books that stand the test of time. Alla, Adam and Heydon are some of these people. Have you checked out their books already?

Design Systems

Design Systems

A practical guide to creating design languages for digital products.

Add to cart $ 39

Inclusive Components

Inclusive Components

A handbook for building robust, fully accessible interfaces.

Add to cart $ 39

Form Design Patterns

Form Design Patterns

A practical guide to designing and coding simple and inclusive forms.

Add to cart $ 39

The Ethical Design Handbook.
The Ethical Design Handbook.
The Ethical Design Handbook.
The Ethical Design Handbook.
The Ethical Design Handbook.
The Ethical Design Handbook.
The Ethical Design Handbook.
The Ethical Design Handbook.
The Ethical Design Handbook.
The Ethical Design Handbook.
The Ethical Design Handbook.
The Ethical Design Handbook.
The Ethical Design Handbook.
The Ethical Design Handbook.
The Ethical Design Handbook.
The Ethical Design Handbook.


Articles on Smashing Magazine — For Web Designers And Developers

12 Mar

Make Honest Design Work For Digital Business, With “Ethical Design Handbook”

by TBSCategories: News

Make Honest Design Work For Digital Business, With “Ethical Design Handbook”

Make Honest Design Work For Digital Business, With “Ethical Design Handbook”

Vitaly Friedman

Many business models thrive on ingeniously deceptive and manipulative digital products. Not because they have to; mostly because dark patterns have become such an accepted norm. But what happens when ad-blockers, cross-browser tracking protection and data regulation (e.g. GDPR & CCPA) become a norm, too? That’s when an honest, ethical design could be a competitive advantage.

To grow a sustainable business, we need to learn how to leave dark patterns behind. We also need to figure out how to make honest digital products financially viable. Products that enable and respect customer choices and are built and designed with ethics in mind. That’s exactly why we created a new book. Jump to the table of contents ↓

Meet Ethical Design Handbook, our new book with practical techniques and blueprints on how companies ridden with questionable practices can shift towards better, sustainable design. Download a free PDF excerpt (5 MB).

Print + eBook

$ 39.00

Quality hardcover. Free worldwide shipping. 100 days money-back-guarantee.

eBook

$ 19.00

DRM-free, of course. ePUB, Kindle, PDF.
Included with Smashing Membership.

About The Book

When we set out to write this book, we wanted to develop a new type of working framework to empower people to practice ethical design in their business, in their teams, and with their products. The reason was simple: too many products we use today have become machines for tricking customers into decisions they never intended to make. That’s not quite the web we want to see around us.

The cover of the Ethical Design Handbook

It’s not just the poor state of the web that brings us here though. It’s the lack of alternatives that companies can rely on. In light of new data regulation and tracking protection, there are some critical questions that only few companies have addressed yet:

  • What happens if you can’t get access to personal data that’s been feeding the machine all this time?
  • What if your competitors discover an alternative business model way before you do?
  • What if you can’t track and target customers wandering from one website to another?
  • What happens when ad-blocking becomes mainstream and your advertising scripts are dismissed by crafty blockers?
  • How should the work of marketing teams change with new regulations, such as GDPR and CCPA?
  • What competitive advantages can your business gain by focusing on privacy and transparency?

Ethical Design Handbook explores alternative, sustainable business models and shows how businesses can move towards ethical design and become more profitable as a result. It’s a very practical and tactical guide for designers, developers and management, with case studies and techniques applicable to every digital product.

The book features interface design examples that take ethical design principles into the account. Large preview.

Table Of Contents

In the book, you’ll learn how to:

  1. Help companies understand ethical design,
  2. Justify and prove a business case,
  3. Grow a sustainable business based on transparency and honesty,
  4. Balance data collection and privacy,
  5. Work within new legislation (GDPR/CCPA),
  6. Evaluate and improve design decisions,
  7. Embed ethical design into your workflow,
  8. Gradually transform your organization.

368 pages. Free shipping worldwide. The eBook is available as PDF, ePUB, and Amazon Kindle. Written by Trine Falbe, Martin Michael Frederiksen and Kim Andersen. Get the book now.

Print + eBook

$ 39.00

Quality hardcover. Free worldwide shipping. 100 days money-back-guarantee.

eBook

$ 19.00

DRM-free, of course. ePUB, Kindle, PDF.
Included with Smashing Membership.

About The Authors

Trine FalbeTrine Falbe is a human-centered UX strategist, designer and teacher who works in the intersection between people and business. Trine is deeply passionate about ethical design and designing for children, and she is also a keynote speaker at conferences and a UX advisor in strategic projects.

Martin Michael FrederiksenAs a serial entrepreneur since the very first browser, Martin Michael Frederiksen was born with a practical appreciation for the crossroads between business and digital development. He has published the books Cross Channel and the CEO’s Guide to IT Projects That Cannot Fail. He works as an independent consultant for businesses that need a devil’s advocate when trying out new strategies and ideas.

Kim AndersenAfter training at an international advertising agency, Kim Andersen quickly left print media for digital design. Owing to his amazing memory he always leaves design meetings with an empty notebook, only to attend the following meeting armed with drawings where nothing has been forgotten and everything is drawn in great detail. He owns the digital design studio Onkel Kim, and he prefers difficult and complex design tasks where the brain is working overtime.

Technical Details

  • ISBN: 978-3-945749-83-8 (print)
  • Quality hardcover, stitched binding, ribbon page marker.
  • Free shipping worldwide, airmail from Germany.
    (Check your delivery times.)
  • 100-days-money-back-guarantee: no ifs or buts.
  • The eBook is available as PDF, ePUB, and Amazon Kindle.
  • Get the book right away.
A quality hardcover, with a dark ribbon, thick paper and a glossy effect on the cover. Photo by Drew McLellan. Large view.

Testimonials

Helle Martens“This is the book designers have all been missing: A practical reference book on how to work ethically in design. Starting with the why – what does “Ethical Design” mean, and why is this book even necessary or important, the book easily morphs into the business value of ethical design, best practices in ethical design, and how you can influence positive change.”

— Helle Martens, UX consultant

Heather Burns“It’s easy to feel like we’ve lost the web we used to love. The Ethical Design Handbook is an essential guide to reclaiming it. Packed with practical resources and guidance for designers, developers, and project managers, it will help you to integrate a higher standard of professionalism into your work on the web. Refreshingly, this book contains no inspirational waffle, public shaming, or lectures on morality. What it does contain is proven techniques, standards, and strategies for getting the job done while protecting your users.

That matters more than you think. As policymakers seek to crack down on the tech giants who have diminished the web for us all, adopting the techniques in this book can be an essential way of defending our craft from heavy-handed regulation.”

— Heather Burns, Tech policy consultant

Per Axbom“I’ve just finished reading The Ethical Design Handbook and am both brimming with new ideas and am more hopeful about the future. The authors bring new tools to the table, and also do a good job of reminding designers how many of our current tools already help us contribute to positive impact. The trick is that we have to make sure to actually put in the effort, and have some cake to keep us going.”

— Per Axbom, Commmunication theorist

Stephen Hay“The Ethical Design Handbook is exactly what its title implies: a gentle, persuasive, perspective-giving guide to how you can become a better designer without selling your soul.”

— Stephen Hay, Creative Director, Rabobank

Bruce Lawson“The Ethical Design Handbook should probably be compulsory reading for all tech workers.”

— Bruce Lawson, Web standards advocate

The book features scorecards and blueprints (Excel spreadsheets), applicable to your work right away. Large view.

Community Matters ❤️

With The Ethical Design Handbook, we’ve tried to create a very focused handbook with applicable, long-living solutions to introduce a positive change in companies ridden with dark patterns and questionable practices.

There is quite a bit of work to do on the web, but our hope is that with this book, you will be equipped with enough tooling to slowly move a company towards a more sustainable and healthy digital footprint.

Producing a book takes quite a bit of time, and we couldn’t pull it off without the support of our wonderful community. A huge shout-out to Smashing Members for their ongoing support in our adventures. As a result, the eBook is and always will be free for Smashing Members. Plus, Members get a friendly discount when purchasing their printed copy.

Stay smashing, and thank you for your ongoing support, everyone!

Smashing Cat on a bicycle with The Ethical Design Handbook in its bike basket.

Print + eBook

$ 39.00

Quality hardcover. Free worldwide shipping. 100 days money-back-guarantee.

eBook

$ 19.00

DRM-free, of course. ePUB, Kindle, PDF.
Included with Smashing Membership.

More Smashing Books

Promoting best practices and providing you with practical tips to master your daily coding and design challenges has always been (and will be) at the core of everything we do at Smashing. In the past few years, we were very lucky to have worked together with some talented, caring people from the web community to publish their wealth of experience as printed books that stand the test of time. Alla, Adam and Heydon are some of these people. Have you checked out their books already?

Design Systems

Design Systems

A practical guide to creating design languages for digital products.

Add to cart $ 39

Inclusive Components

Inclusive Components

A handbook for building robust, fully accessible interfaces.

Add to cart $ 39

Form Design Patterns

Form Design Patterns

A practical guide to designing and coding simple and inclusive forms.

Add to cart $ 39

The Ethical Design Handbook.
The Ethical Design Handbook.
The Ethical Design Handbook.
The Ethical Design Handbook.
The Ethical Design Handbook.
The Ethical Design Handbook.
The Ethical Design Handbook.
The Ethical Design Handbook.
The Ethical Design Handbook.
The Ethical Design Handbook.
The Ethical Design Handbook.
The Ethical Design Handbook.
The Ethical Design Handbook.
The Ethical Design Handbook.
The Ethical Design Handbook.
The Ethical Design Handbook.


Articles on Smashing Magazine — For Web Designers And Developers

11 Mar

Make Honest Design Work For Digital Business, With “Ethical Design Handbook”

by TBSCategories: News

Make Honest Design Work For Digital Business, With “Ethical Design Handbook”

Make Honest Design Work For Digital Business, With “Ethical Design Handbook”

Vitaly Friedman

Many business models thrive on ingeniously deceptive and manipulative digital products. Not because they have to; mostly because dark patterns have become such an accepted norm. But what happens when ad-blockers, cross-browser tracking protection and data regulation (e.g. GDPR & CCPA) become a norm, too? That’s when an honest, ethical design could be a competitive advantage.

To grow a sustainable business, we need to learn how to leave dark patterns behind. We also need to figure out how to make honest digital products financially viable. Products that enable and respect customer choices and are built and designed with ethics in mind. That’s exactly why we created a new book. Jump to the table of contents ↓

Meet Ethical Design Handbook, our new book with practical techniques and blueprints on how companies ridden with questionable practices can shift towards better, sustainable design. Download a free PDF excerpt (5 MB).

Print + eBook

$ 39.00

Quality hardcover. Free worldwide shipping. 100 days money-back-guarantee.

eBook

$ 19.00

DRM-free, of course. ePUB, Kindle, PDF.
Included with Smashing Membership.

About The Book

When we set out to write this book, we wanted to develop a new type of working framework to empower people to practice ethical design in their business, in their teams, and with their products. The reason was simple: too many products we use today have become machines for tricking customers into decisions they never intended to make. That’s not quite the web we want to see around us.

The cover of the Ethical Design Handbook

It’s not just the poor state of the web that brings us here though. It’s the lack of alternatives that companies can rely on. In light of new data regulation and tracking protection, there are some critical questions that only few companies have addressed yet:

  • What happens if you can’t get access to personal data that’s been feeding the machine all this time?
  • What if your competitors discover an alternative business model way before you do?
  • What if you can’t track and target customers wandering from one website to another?
  • What happens when ad-blocking becomes mainstream and your advertising scripts are dismissed by crafty blockers?
  • How should the work of marketing teams change with new regulations, such as GDPR and CCPA?
  • What competitive advantages can your business gain by focusing on privacy and transparency?

Ethical Design Handbook explores alternative, sustainable business models and shows how businesses can move towards ethical design and become more profitable as a result. It’s a very practical and tactical guide for designers, developers and management, with case studies and techniques applicable to every digital product.

The book features interface design examples that take ethical design principles into the account. Large preview.

Table Of Contents

In the book, you’ll learn how to:

  1. Help companies understand ethical design,
  2. Justify and prove a business case,
  3. Grow a sustainable business based on transparency and honesty,
  4. Balance data collection and privacy,
  5. Work within new legislation (GDPR/CCPA),
  6. Evaluate and improve design decisions,
  7. Embed ethical design into your workflow,
  8. Gradually transform your organization.

368 pages. Free shipping worldwide. The eBook is available as PDF, ePUB, and Amazon Kindle. Written by Trine Falbe, Martin Michael Frederiksen and Kim Andersen. Get the book now.

Print + eBook

$ 39.00

Quality hardcover. Free worldwide shipping. 100 days money-back-guarantee.

eBook

$ 19.00

DRM-free, of course. ePUB, Kindle, PDF.
Included with Smashing Membership.

About The Authors

Trine FalbeTrine Falbe is a human-centered UX strategist, designer and teacher who works in the intersection between people and business. Trine is deeply passionate about ethical design and designing for children, and she is also a keynote speaker at conferences and a UX advisor in strategic projects.

Martin Michael FrederiksenAs a serial entrepreneur since the very first browser, Martin Michael Frederiksen was born with a practical appreciation for the crossroads between business and digital development. He has published the books Cross Channel and the CEO’s Guide to IT Projects That Cannot Fail. He works as an independent consultant for businesses that need a devil’s advocate when trying out new strategies and ideas.

Kim AndersenAfter training at an international advertising agency, Kim Andersen quickly left print media for digital design. Owing to his amazing memory he always leaves design meetings with an empty notebook, only to attend the following meeting armed with drawings where nothing has been forgotten and everything is drawn in great detail. He owns the digital design studio Onkel Kim, and he prefers difficult and complex design tasks where the brain is working overtime.

Technical Details

  • ISBN: 978-3-945749-83-8 (print)
  • Quality hardcover, stitched binding, ribbon page marker.
  • Free shipping worldwide, airmail from Germany.
    (Check your delivery times.)
  • 100-days-money-back-guarantee: no ifs or buts.
  • The eBook is available as PDF, ePUB, and Amazon Kindle.
  • Get the book right away.
A quality hardcover, with a dark ribbon, thick paper and a glossy effect on the cover. Photo by Drew McLellan. Large view.

Testimonials

Helle Martens“This is the book designers have all been missing: A practical reference book on how to work ethically in design. Starting with the why – what does “Ethical Design” mean, and why is this book even necessary or important, the book easily morphs into the business value of ethical design, best practices in ethical design, and how you can influence positive change.”

— Helle Martens, UX consultant

Heather Burns“It’s easy to feel like we’ve lost the web we used to love. The Ethical Design Handbook is an essential guide to reclaiming it. Packed with practical resources and guidance for designers, developers, and project managers, it will help you to integrate a higher standard of professionalism into your work on the web. Refreshingly, this book contains no inspirational waffle, public shaming, or lectures on morality. What it does contain is proven techniques, standards, and strategies for getting the job done while protecting your users.

That matters more than you think. As policymakers seek to crack down on the tech giants who have diminished the web for us all, adopting the techniques in this book can be an essential way of defending our craft from heavy-handed regulation.”

— Heather Burns, Tech policy consultant

Per Axbom“I’ve just finished reading The Ethical Design Handbook and am both brimming with new ideas and am more hopeful about the future. The authors bring new tools to the table, and also do a good job of reminding designers how many of our current tools already help us contribute to positive impact. The trick is that we have to make sure to actually put in the effort, and have some cake to keep us going.”

— Per Axbom, Commmunication theorist

Stephen Hay“The Ethical Design Handbook is exactly what its title implies: a gentle, persuasive, perspective-giving guide to how you can become a better designer without selling your soul.”

— Stephen Hay, Creative Director, Rabobank

Bruce Lawson“The Ethical Design Handbook should probably be compulsory reading for all tech workers.”

— Bruce Lawson, Web standards advocate

The book features scorecards and blueprints (Excel spreadsheets), applicable to your work right away. Large view.

Community Matters ❤️

With The Ethical Design Handbook, we’ve tried to create a very focused handbook with applicable, long-living solutions to introduce a positive change in companies ridden with dark patterns and questionable practices.

There is quite a bit of work to do on the web, but our hope is that with this book, you will be equipped with enough tooling to slowly move a company towards a more sustainable and healthy digital footprint.

Producing a book takes quite a bit of time, and we couldn’t pull it off without the support of our wonderful community. A huge shout-out to Smashing Members for their ongoing support in our adventures. As a result, the eBook is and always will be free for Smashing Members. Plus, Members get a friendly discount when purchasing their printed copy.

Stay smashing, and thank you for your ongoing support, everyone!

Smashing Cat on a bicycle with The Ethical Design Handbook in its bike basket.

Print + eBook

$ 39.00

Quality hardcover. Free worldwide shipping. 100 days money-back-guarantee.

eBook

$ 19.00

DRM-free, of course. ePUB, Kindle, PDF.
Included with Smashing Membership.

More Smashing Books

Promoting best practices and providing you with practical tips to master your daily coding and design challenges has always been (and will be) at the core of everything we do at Smashing. In the past few years, we were very lucky to have worked together with some talented, caring people from the web community to publish their wealth of experience as printed books that stand the test of time. Alla, Adam and Heydon are some of these people. Have you checked out their books already?

Design Systems

Design Systems

A practical guide to creating design languages for digital products.

Add to cart $ 39

Inclusive Components

Inclusive Components

A handbook for building robust, fully accessible interfaces.

Add to cart $ 39

Form Design Patterns

Form Design Patterns

A practical guide to designing and coding simple and inclusive forms.

Add to cart $ 39

The Ethical Design Handbook.
The Ethical Design Handbook.
The Ethical Design Handbook.
The Ethical Design Handbook.
The Ethical Design Handbook.
The Ethical Design Handbook.
The Ethical Design Handbook.
The Ethical Design Handbook.
The Ethical Design Handbook.
The Ethical Design Handbook.
The Ethical Design Handbook.
The Ethical Design Handbook.
The Ethical Design Handbook.
The Ethical Design Handbook.
The Ethical Design Handbook.
The Ethical Design Handbook.


Articles on Smashing Magazine — For Web Designers And Developers

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