Follow the money trail. I learned this during my time steeped in business, the world of high-stakes deals, investor presentations, client proposals and intense due diligence. I’ve watched some of the best professionals in the industry do it and I’ve even been a part of many such meetings myself. It’s when we map out the money relationship amongst the network of stakeholders involved in a deal as a baseline to understand motives and decision-making power of each player. You then layer in your impressions from both direct and indirect accounts of the people to glean the emotional and psychological dynamics at play. The profiles you build determine the deal strategy. This is 101 for business folks and probably seems obvious to the masses but the richness isn’t in the quip but rather in the practice of it. It’s a powerful relationship schematic that I readily employ in my UX work.
Let me share two sides of the same story to illustrate my point.
Side A) It is an easy way to start empathizing with the users.
I once worked on a project designing a web portal for physicians. The timeline of the project required that I start designing before I can validate any assumptions with actual physicians. I needed to start from some educated idea about what it’s like to be a physician so I followed the money trail. I presumed that doctors are incentivized to make as much money as they can make given that they leave medical school with a tremendous amount of student loans and that they invested so much time into completing their studies. I also reasoned that with the traditional fee-for-service structure of paying physicians, they are incentivized to see as many patients as possible. Ever wonder why the wait times at doctors' offices are so long? Back-to-back patient line-ups with little to no extra time for the necessary administrative and counseling work. With this scenario, there seemed to be a small window of opportunity for our portal to be adopted by physicians. We needed them to engage with our product significantly but they were very busy, their time was very expensive, and they had little time to be educated on new products. That led to the thought that doctors may not even be our primary users; It seemed to make more sense that nurses and clinical staff would be our primary users.
Of course, this isn’t the complete picture but following the money trail gave me a set of hypotheses and a necessary level of skepticism. We ultimately validated our hunches through user interviews and consultations from proxies. After codifying everything we learned, we tweaked our prototypes accordingly but we were hesitant to steer significant resources into developing it - we couldn’t just ignore the doubts that we validated.
The other side of the story is that there was pressure from investors to develop a physician facing product, which leads me to my next point about following the money trail.
Side B) It helps you empathize with the business and think like a business, equipping you to arrive at a more balanced design solution.
Investors have a fiduciary responsibility to seek a return on their investments so it is perfectly reasonable that they would want us to create a physician facing portal as most of our competitors offered one in their suite of products. To continue investing in a company that seemingly doesn’t have parity with the competitive market could easily be seen as a red flag. Moreover, it could add to the challenge of appealing to new investors. On the other side of the equation, as a company receiving the said investments, there is motivation to keep the investors comfortable and on our side.
Following the money trail revealed a scenario thick with tension from conflicting interests and viewpoints. What makes it more interesting is that despite what we’ve validated in our design process, there was no clear right answer. We could have subjected our design process to dangerous biases that blinded us from seeing the solution that our competitors seem to have already uncovered. On the other hand, maybe the investors just couldn’t grasp that achieving parity is not the right approach for our product and company. We were unsure. If there is anything that we could agree on, it was that we needed to learn more before making a decision.
We decided to develop a microsite with a prototype “sandbox” environment for users to test and there was an area for users to provide an email if they wished to learn more about the product. The microsite was showcased at conferences and marketed to physicians. The goal was to learn whether the physician portal was viable in the marketplace before we allocated valuable resources away from existing initiatives; this way, we'd have a critical mass of potential users before we start developing the portal.
The Outcome
I can’t say for sure since I wasn’t part of the follow-up discussions but I would imagine that the investors were happy that the initiative was put on our product roadmap and it was cheap to create the microsite. In tandem, the product team continued full-force on existing product goals while also gathering actionable intel on the viability of the physician’s portal.
Disclaimer: I suspect that some people may be offended by this idea and I understand. It was never explicitly stated but this strategy is employed with the presumption that money is a major motivator for many people. But for fairness, I want to state that I know there are many individuals and entities that fly above the influence of money, serving a greater mission or living by different values. This post is to highlight a specific exercise that you can choose to employ as part of your toolkit, and not as a sole blueprint, for understanding relationships that affect your work.