The Building Blocks of Great Product Design
Designing great products is difficult but it doesn't have to be complicated and joyless. Let's see what the humble Lego can teach us about making products that scale.
Not bad! It may not have all of the perfect fine details, but it is super impressive and everyone knows what it is. What does this mean for product design in general?
Suppose I ask a product owner to arrange for their team to build a millennium falcon. What should they do? Buy a purpose built kit or buy a bunch of standard blocks?
The typical product owner would see this as a no brainer. The ask is very clear. The kit, complete with instructions and a true-to-life look and feel is surely the way to go. But is it?
A good product owner knows that product design must be agile. They recognize that clients will often make changes to requirements as the build progresses. They also believe that anticipating those changes ahead of time is a fool’s errand. Following that logic, the makers of the 1958 Lego brick were clearly geniuses due to their ability to anticipate the desire some future builders would have to create the millennium falcon. Right?
Of course not. And this is the key takeaway. Lego designers had no idea what people might ultimately build with their product. What they did know is that, with the right, simple blocks, you can create anything. And so they focused on that. They identified a minimal set of pieces that work beautifully together, that are simple enough and flexible enough to build anything.
This is how product design should work in order to be truly agile. Product teams should look at their world of problems and identify a minimal set of fundamental building blocks that can be used in creative ways to accomplish the task. That way, no matter what requirements come their way and no matter how those requirements change, they are up to the task.
Let's flesh this out a little bit. Imagine we have two teams. One team gets the $15000 kit, and the second team gets $15000 worth of standard bricks...
A facilitator asks each team to build a millennium falcon. The team with the kit moves methodically through each instruction. It takes time for them to organize the pieces. The steps must happen in a very specific order, making it hard for everyone on the team to contribute equally. Mistakes are costly and require going back several steps. But, at the end of the day, they do create a picture perfect model.
The team with standard blocks moves much faster. There is no hunting for the right piece and no learning curve. Parts can be made in parallel. There will be mistakes, but they can adapt and adjust as they go. At the end, they too have a nice model, albeit less perfect than the kit version.
Now, suppose the facilitator takes a look at the ships and says, “you know, I changed my mind, could you add some mean looking laser cannons and make the cockpit large enough for a crew of four instead of two?”
Uh oh, feature creep! Nobody could have anticipated this! The team with the kit is in bad shape. They don’t have pieces for that. They will need to dismantle the original, hack some stuff together, and, at the end, are going to end up with a sorry looking, fragile product that took forever to build.
Guess what though? The team with the standard blocks has no such restrictions. They can keep working with what they have and follow the exact same process they are used to. Will the product be perfect? No. But it will be every bit as sturdy as the original. It will be built quickly. And, it will be just as easy to change when the facilitator changes their mind again and asks for larger thrusters.
This is the secret to scalable product design. Explore your problem space to identify your Legos. Invest in making them simple, flexible, and robust. Teach your engineers to use their Legos in creative and imaginative ways to solve difficult problems.
Specialized tools add complexity, slow you down, and ultimately produce inferior products that are fragile, joyless to build, and tedious to maintain. Having a few simple tools, that work well together, allows you to build products that are easy to construct, easy to divide up among teammates, easy to change, and are only limited by your imagination.
The Lego block, as we know it today, was invented in 1958 and has since become one of the best selling toys in history. As of now, about 400 billion Legos have been sold. If you were to stack them up, it would cover enough distance to go to the moon and back 5 times. That’s a lot of Legos!
There have been many competitors to Lego - Lincoln Logs, Popoids, Tinker Toys, Erector sets, Kinex.. the list goes on and on. Though these products are well known, their success pales in comparison to Lego.
What is it about these humble plastic blocks that made Lego so successful compared to its competitors and what lessons can we take from Lego that apply to product design more broadly? I believe that it boils down to two things: simplicity and flexibility.
Legos are such a simple medium for bringing what we imagine to life that even the youngest among us can build things like this…
They are also flexible enough to capture the hearts and minds of creative adults, allowing them to build awe inspiring sculptures like this…
The key here is that Lego is so simple and flexible that its utility is only limited by our imagination. It is a simple medium that stays out of our way. We don’t have to think about HOW to build with Legos. We don’t have to take classes, go to design meetings, or rely on experts to teach us the tricks of the trade. We just grab a box of bricks and let our imagination do the rest.
But not all Lego sets are created equal.
In recent times, there has been an explosion of pricey, purpose built Lego sets that are designed to construct a particular object. These sets are quite complex, have specialized pieces, and instruction manuals with hundreds of steps. Here is an example of a set, for building the millennium falcon, that costs over $15000.
Compare that to the largest Lego millennium falcon on record, built with standard bricks that clocks in at a similar price.