Engineering with Patience

I’ve been finding the process of building our brand very creative.

And also, increasingly, like engineering with patience.

There’s this big thing called “building a brand”. But once we break it down, each piece is manageable.

What problem are we trying to solve? What needs to exist for the next bit to happen? How good does this part need to be before something else can use it?

Get that part done well enough. Use it in the next part. Keep going.

That’s the feeling I’ve been having across the whole process. Something that sounds enormous becomes a series of things we can work through. Learn what we need to learn. Get feedback where it can help. Correct things before too much else depends on them.

It requires patience. There are quite a lot of pieces.

The bit I’m curious about is how much of the judgement can be broken down too.

We can describe what needs to be made. Can we describe how to tell whether it’s any good?

Some of that seems possible to make explicit. We could say what a piece is supposed to do, find examples to compare it with, and decide what needs to be there before we use it in the next step.

Even giving something a score out of ten raises another question: what exactly are we scoring?

A number is easy to produce. I’d like to know what makes it a useful number.

We could also put something in front of people, get their responses, change it and try again. But we still have to work out what those responses mean.

If we ask whether people like a design, have we learned what we need to know about whether it helps them understand what we sell?

I can imagine having a process for that too. Being clearer about whose responses matter for a particular question. Deciding what evidence would make us change something, instead of changing it every time a new opinion arrives.

Separating signal from noise, fairly systematically. Including noticing when we’ve asked the wrong question.

That’s where I start wondering how much of the specialist’s judgement could be made explicit too.

With common sense, the ability to learn quickly and a process that keeps getting corrected, how much specialist knowledge do we need to bring in? I’d think differently about legal or financial work. But even within making a brand, I don’t know where the boundary is.

Some of the expertise might be in knowing how to break the work down in the first place. Or knowing when the process has missed something.

For now, building the brand feels like engineering with patience. I’d like to see how much of judging the work we can break down, test and improve as we go too.