About a year before I left Zondervan, I sat down with two vice presidents: mine, who was responsible for B2B, and the VP over IT. I had brought an interface. My earlier concepts for selling directly to readers had been met with suspicion and skepticism, and this was my chance to answer it. This time I brought diagrams and clickable prototypes.
It was a fine line to walk. A publisher’s business runs through bookstores and retailers. Going direct to consumers could look like competing with the customers who pay the bills.
What I saw when I stepped back
This was early in Web 2.0. Readers wanted more frequent, more direct access to the authors they cared about. They wanted to hear from them, find their blogs, follow them on Twitter or Facebook, and watch their videos. My consumer research kept saying the same thing: readers wanted that access, and the publisher was in a unique spot to provide it, because the publisher already had strong relationships with its authors.
At the same time, online shopping was becoming ordinary, and readers were more willing to buy from a publisher than they had been. The publisher could act as a trusted broker between the person buying a book and the author who wrote it.
The bookstores needed the same thing. Most resellers don’t have direct access to authors. A single place to learn about an author and find the resources available for promoting their books would help a store sell its in-store copies.
The logistics fit too. Zondervan still ran its own distribution and warehousing then, so shipping to individuals was a relatively straight-forward addition.
How I framed the experience
The design question was how to serve readers without undercutting the bookstores. I positioned the buying experience through a rubric that put getting to know the author first.
A reader arrived at an author-first experience. It introduced them to the breadth of that author’s material and pointed them to where they could buy each title from the online retailers who were the publisher’s primary customers. The product information itself was organized for resellers, with their product codes leading. A reader could still find a product for themselves, and as a much lower option they could buy directly from the publisher. It was clear that selling direct wasn’t the priority. A consumer had to work for it. The author focus was the draw.
That framing satisfied the business’s priorities and its current customers by building on a need they all shared: authors connecting with booksellers, and authors connecting with their readers. What I showed those VPs was that system: the interface, and how it answered each of their specific concerns about the B2B and B2C relationships. Once they could see how the pieces fit, they could start to see how it might succeed, and how it put the publisher in a position to show its value to the market and to its authors.
That is what I mean by systems thinking: seeing how the pieces fit, stepping back far enough to take in the whole picture, and then showing it to people in a way that changes their perspective. I didn’t learn it from the places the product world usually looks.
How I learned to see it
“Because the purpose of business is to create a customer, the business enterprise has two—and only two—basic functions: marketing and innovation.” — Peter Drucker, The Practice of Management
My career walked through Drucker’s two halves in that order.
From 1998 to 2006 I worked on the go-to-market side: RBC Ministries (now Our Daily Bread), Cornerstone University, the University of Tampa, and The Crossing Church. I built dozens of digital properties, from admissions and enrollment to course schedules, and most of my attention went to how the things I made landed in the market. Did they resonate? How did they set us apart? How did people perceive them?
At Zondervan I was the only UX designer and served as product owner for the web redesign. I was also part of a skunkworks innovation team that a mentor, Neil, Zondervan’s VP of innovation, pulled together from people across the company. Neil had spent 13 years at IDEO’s UK office. He pointed me to Michael Porter’s Competitive Strategy and Competitive Advantage, and I bought both and devoured them. Porter’s five forces and his work on differentiation shaped how I framed the B2B and B2C problem. In Competitive Advantage, Porter describes a company as a chain of linked activities, where advantage comes from how each one is performed and from the links between them. Years later, in “What Is Strategy?”, he put it more bluntly: strategy is creating fit among a company’s activities.
That push led me to a graduate certificate in Design and Innovation Management at Kendall College of Art and Design of Ferris State University. That’s where I began to see how all these pieces fit together.
More than a decade later, business design and then a formal strategy role widened the frame again: Roger Martin’s where-to-play and how-to-win choices, and the capabilities and management systems those choices require. Without those, the choices are one more set of criteria that gets you onto the playing field. The Strategyzer business model books filled in the rest.
What product teams mean by systems thinking
In digital product circles, systems thinking usually points inward. It means design systems, platforms, and the operations disciplines that keep a team shipping. Much of the vocabulary comes from Donella Meadows and Peter Senge: feedback loops, leverage points, mental models. I came at it from a different direction. My lineage is Drucker, Porter, and Martin.
The inward systems matter. A team that can’t ship consistently can’t do much else. But they are systems for producing the product. The system that decides whether the product matters sits around it: the customers, the market, the competitors, the partners, and the choices and capabilities that connect a company to all of them.
Product teams practice systems thinking on the craft that builds the product, and they are rarely asked to look at the system that decides whether the product fits.
No design system would have told me that readers wanted access to authors, or that bookstores lacked that same access.
Show the whole thing
Since Zondervan, showing colleagues and leaders the fuller picture has been one of the most useful things I do. When they can see how the pieces fit, their perspective changes.
So the next time a leader pushes back on your idea, show them the system around it before you defend the idea itself. At Zondervan, that meant putting the readers, the authors, and the bookstores in the same picture.
Once I showed the future state of the system—how bookstores and authors fit, and how the changing market shaped customer expectations—we were finally looking at the same thing.
