Summary
There is nothing more frustrating than dedicating your blood, sweat, and tears to developing a product, only to see it shut down for no particular reason. We still lack standards for measuring potential opportunities and solutions—so leadership continues to base decisions on intuition, personal experience, and other factors that often barely correlate with success. Organizations large and small need agreed-upon measures of potential product-market fit for their concepts and solutions, ones that help establish unmet needs and lead to designs that users understand and want to use. The DesignOps team at Athenahealth has solved this problem by creating a standardized measurement framework—including qualitative and quantitative instruments—that helps product teams measure their concepts and solutions early and often. These are measures that leaders can use to make informed investment decisions across the larger portfolio, and that free product teams to be awesome at what they do: designing, managing, and developing products that lead to better experiences for users.
Key Insights
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Scaling design impact is about quality and meaningful organizational outcomes, not just quantity or presence.
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Lack of clear decision rationale causes teams to lose agency, leading to poor behaviors like skunkworks and cutting corners.
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Government-subsidized demand in healthcare allows poor software to succeed despite low user satisfaction.
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Users in enterprise healthcare software often feel trapped with high switching costs and limited influence on purchasing.
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Proving design’s impact through correlation between user perception data and business outcomes drives investment.
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Creating a shared design language using Nielsen’s heuristics helps cross-disciplinary teams evaluate and improve workflows.
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Regular scoring sessions with product, design, and subject experts help calibrate understanding and prioritize issues.
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Redesigning product decision-making to empower autonomy improves pivot/shelve choices and team engagement.
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Concept validation surveys that test perceived usefulness and intent to use prevent investment in unwanted features.
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Enterprise software delusion occurs when companies mistake market dynamics for successful product experience.
Notable Quotes
"Scale isn’t just about quantity, it’s about the quality and impact you have on the outcomes of the organization."
"When teams lose a sense of agency, they act strange, cutting corners and racing to get something out the door."
"Doctors hate using EHRs because it turns them into clerks, interacting more with machines than patients."
"You’re born on third base but think you hit a triple — that’s the enterprise software delusion."
"If design didn’t move the needle, we wouldn’t be having this conversation."
"Users’ perception predicts attrition and paid referrals — design absolutely matters when people decide to buy or go."
"Teaching product managers heuristics took 15 minutes, and now they use that shared language to articulate design."
"We want teams to have autonomy and power to make pivot, shelve, and proceed decisions, not leadership dictating."
"Concept validation lets us objectively decide which features to build based on perceived usefulness and intent to use."
"There’s never enough attention you can give to change management in scaling design impact — don’t do it alone."
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