Designer Thinking

By Ben Thompson, Senior Editor

When Claudia Kotchka took over as Head of Innovation at P&G, the company was a maze of locked doors and information silos. Now, it’s a paradigm of inter-departmental collaboration, with Kotchka as the catalyst. Ben Thompson meets P&G’s cultural alchemist.

It all starts with a simple measuring cup. It might not look like much – just a small plastic jug of the type found in most modern kitchens today – but as P&G’s Claudia Kotchka is fond of telling colleagues, customers and journalists alike, within its uncomplicated lines lies the key to good design. “It’s about putting the user at the center of your thinking,” she explains.

The story has since entered into Procter & Gamble folklore. When Kotchka first took on the role of P&G’s most senior design executive back in 2001, she was sent to the finance executive assigned to help her put together a budget. “When I told him I was head of design, he said, ‘Design? Isn’t that the first thing we cut when we need money?’” she recalls. “So I laughed and said, ‘Okay, let me show you what design is’.”

The example she used was that of the now-infamous OXO measuring cup. “I first gave him a plain measuring cup and asked him how he would improve it. And he said he didn’t think he could; the functionality was all there, and it worked fine as it was so why improve it? I then showed him the OXO measuring cup. It’s a great little piece of engineering. It’s designed so that you can look down in the cup and see the measurements there on the inside, at an angle, without actually bending over or holding the cup up. You don’t have to move it and you don’t have to move yourself. And so I said ‘That’s what good design does; design watches how consumers use things and improves them based on those observations.’ In this case, what the designers did was make a simple thing easier to use –therefore improving it. I think when people see that they start to understand design. And only when they understand what design is, do they really value it.”

Kotchka is renowned for this type of show-and-tell approach to illustrating the importance of design; the two measuring cups take pride of place on her desk, and she’s been known to wander the corridors of P&G headquarters clutching similar items, always ready to make her point. It’s a strategy she’s pursued relentlessly since stepping into the role at the request of P&G Chairman and CEO AG Lafley with a brief to better engage customers with the company’s brands. The resulting transformation has seen P&G move from functional to fun in the space of a few short years.

“Our history at P&G has always really been about building brands based on technology – we had the first synthetic detergent, the first fluoride toothpaste, the first disposable diaper, and so on,” she explains. “But in 2001, we decided that we weren’t going to be able to win on technology alone. In order to really win with consumers, we had to be able to offer them more than just technology: we had to delight them.”

To achieve this shift in the company’s culture, Kotchka instilled a new focus on the consumer experience as a whole. “We still have great technology and that’s still just as important as it always was, but now we look beyond the technology to the experience the consumer has with our brand – how he or she shops, what the purchase experience is like, the in-home experience, and so on. It’s caused us to look differently at what we offer consumers. It’s also been helpful in getting us to work together more multi-functionally. So we now have our research, product development, marketing and design teams all working together to deliver what we call ‘consumer delight’.”

A big part of this thrust has involved incorporating so-called ‘design thinking’ into the business. It’s something that is close to Kotchka’s heart, and key to what she’s trying to achieve at P&G. “Design thinking is both a process and a mindset, and it always starts with the consumer,” she says. “It comes from how designers are trained to problem-solve in design school. In business schools and even engineering schools, a lot of problem-solving techniques are analytical, but designers are taught to problem-solve differently. They start with the consumer, and the idea of a ‘user-centered’ approach is a key principle in design thinking. The user can be a consumer, an employee – whoever the end-user is of whatever you’re trying to do. And so you start with this deep consumer immersion and you see them in context.”

Design thinking is also very collaborative – again, something Kotchka sees as a significant advantage. “You want diversity of thought working on a problem, because what a designer sees and what an engineer sees will be different and that’s a good thing. You want people from different skill sets and backgrounds working on a solution.”

Finally, it’s very visual. “After you observe consumers and get a feel for possible solutions to whatever problem you are working on, you immediately start developing prototypes. And these prototypes are made of cardboard and duct tape and are really very rough, because the idea behind a prototype isn’t about trying to mock up what you plan to make; it’s about providing a visual basis for a dialogue with the user. Design is an iterative process – build a prototype, get consumer input, change the prototype, take it back, get more input and just keep iterating with the consumer until the consumer says, ‘Wow, I love that’.”

Indeed, the iterative nature of the design process forms a neat analogy for Kotchka’s career progression to date. It’s been something of an interesting journey – from accountant to one of the highest-ranking design executives in the country – but with no formal training as a designer, it’s not been without its challenges. “When I started out, I had to learn on the job,” she says. “For my first assignment at P&G in the early 1990s, I was charged with leading – and fixing – the art department. It was a fascinating role because that was the group that was doing all our packaging at the time. And when I first came in, I felt pretty good about myself; I thought, well, they’ve asked me to do this job because I’m good at this type of thing.” It only took a few days for her new team to strip her of any illusions she might be under. “The designers in the group basically told me that they were not the art department, they were the design department and that I didn’t know anything about design,” she smirks. “That was a real wake-up call for me.”

So what do you do if your team members don’t think you belong? If you’re Kotchka, you go back to school. “I started studying design and learning about what it is,” she says. “I studied a lot of other companies. I went to conferences and really started looking at how other companies used design so I could get an understanding of what design is and does. I spent a fair amount of time with designers really trying to understand what makes them tick. And I spent time understanding how design schools teach, what they teach and how they work so that I could really begin to understand how to implement the principles of good design.”

Now she claims she can tell good design from bad design (something she’s “actually pretty good at”) largely through application of the principles of design thinking. “Using a consumer-focused methodology to solve problems means you don’t really have to be a trained designer to be successful at that. I use design thinking a lot in terms of problem solving. I’m not a technically trained designer, but to me the concept of design is really much broader than just the technical aspect.”

So successful has she been in recognizing the value of design and identifying what works and what doesn’t that the company has now decided to introduce elements of her approach across the organization. “We are now teaching design thinking to all of the other functions of the business, including them in the process of design thinking so that they can participate and become design thinkers themselves,” she explains. “Once they really start to understand it, they realize that it’s something that can be immensely valuable.”

One such initiative is the P&G Design Board, something the company started to help bring an external perspective to its work. “It’s made up of experts in design from different fields and industries outside of our own,” elaborates Kotchka. “They come in three times a year, we share projects with them – particularly things that we’re stuck on – and they give us advice and ideas. They are amazingly insightful because they give a perspective from outside our own world; sometimes we can get too close to something, and the Design Board can really step back and look at things differently.”

A similar scheme is the company’s Clay Street Project, which uses design thinking to solve what Kotchka calls “wicked” business problems. The project takes 10 people from different functions within P&G and brings them together to try and solve some of the company’s trickiest challenges using the design thinking process. “We get them together for anywhere from two to 10 weeks and have them come up with a solution,” she says. “First, we help them understand the design thinking process, then we let them loose to figure out solutions to really tough problems. We have folks who are trained on how to help the teams be effective, and it’s been very successful at helping us work better together and come up with out-of-the-box solutions.”

And it’s this element that Kotchka sees as the most important aspect of her role: to build design thinking into the very fabric of the company. “We want to incorporate good design principles into our DNA, and a big piece of that is building design thinking into the company across all business functions. It’s really about making the practice of design more multi-disciplinary, and it’s probably the most important thing we’re working on right now.”

A P&G success story: the Venus razor
“This is a great example of how to implement design thinking effectively,” says Kotchka. “Historically, women’s razors were men’s razors colored pink. But when the designers really studied how women shave, they realized that first of all, they shaved in the shower and they changed their blades in the shower. They also discovered that women hold the razor differently to men because of the different angle of approach. So when Venus was designed, it was designed with different ergonomics to the men’s razors, and it was designed with individually wrapped blades so that they could be kept in the shower without getting ruined because of the wet conditions. That’s an example of designing specifically for the consumer, and Venus has been hugely successful.”