AIGA-Gain: How do you make your boss put his money where his mouth is”

As reported earlier last week “AIGA-Gain: Journal of Business and Design” is running a lively discussion list fed by weekly topics. Each Monday Jeff Lash designs a different scenario most of us are familiar with ;-)

This week’s discussion is assembled around the question on “How do you make your boss put his money where his mouth is” and Jeff’s briefing reads as follows:

“You and your boss are new to the company. You are introducing the practice of user-centered design and building a design foundation. He is helping the company fix the broken processes that prevents innovation and good user advocacy during product design. He incentivates what you do and agrees with all your ideas, but doesn’t commit a budget to user research or testing, and always wants to “fast track” his projects (aka his design is good enough and doesn’t need to go through “the process”). You know this is preventing you from building a practice and his attitude doesn’t help you educate the company about designing based on factual user needs and using an iterative designing approach. You can also tell that his position is not going to help him fix the innovation and product development issues. You’ve confronted your boss on the issue and he keeps agreeing, but still not committing. How do you deal? How do you make him put his money where his mouth is? How do you transform his intention into a firm commitment?”

You can subscribe to AIGA-Gain mailing list at: http://lists.aiga.org/mailman/listinfo/aiga-gain

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