Solutions design FTW
/It’s the big value unlock
In years past, marketing agencies offered services. Services paid the bills because the number of services required by clients was more limited than it is today. There were easier handoffs, smaller teams, less complicated matrixes, and fewer audience touchpoints. Life wasn’t easy. There just weren’t as many dependent variables that could be predictably modeled.
Cut to 2025: Everything is related to everything else, a preface to a next move, increasingly automated, driven by data, and executed with precision.
These deeper interrelationships mean competitive advantage is in design. Solutions design, specifically. The end-to-end connections and leverage points between ideas and execution. Powered by a system. Master systems and you’ll master solutions. Master your solutions and you’ll be on the path to delivering value. Deliver value and growth will follow.
Today’s illustration:
Comprehensive solutions require more bullets before they can use fewer. Most evolve and sometimes rapidly (and with AI). Featured below is a graphic that employs a broad range of considerations and no shortage of small-font points. I consult it when asked how to think about relationships across tasks and where they can be improved. Sometimes I do a deep dive on a single capability or bullet; at others I fly at higher altitude. Each bullet point is a way in, a handle to a door that may unlock an idea that connects to another idea that might help solve a problem, then another problem. And eventually reveal a solution.
We all want to be a solution for something, don’t we? Design and assemble yours within a system, scale it, refine it, and you will win. It doesn’t have to be all solutions for all problems, just a solution with a positive impact that exists beyond itself. A solution with ripple effects like a stone dropped into a pond. 🧘
In summary: Be design-first. It pays.