Creative Product Management: Lessons from Creative Legends
Paula Scher
I am interested in the intersection of creativity and product management: a role that I call the “Creative Product Manager”. I seek to take lessons from creative legends and apply them to the field. In this article, I look to designer Paula Scher.
Creative legend: Paula Scher
Paula Scher is a self-described “visual identity designer”. Her experience includes layout artist, designer, art director, and, most recently, partner with the renowned, international design consultancy Pentagram. Prior to Pentagram, Scher’s resume includes Random House, CBS Records, and Atlantic Records. This experience and breadth of skill make her a creative legend. I believe that creativity is about making mental connections to generate novel ideas that are useful. An example of Paula Scher’s creative power is reviving historic typefaces and design styles by utilizing them in modern environments. For example, when designing the visual identity for Shake Shack’s launch Scher, inspired by the moderne influence of their prefab flagship restaurant in Madison Square Park, revived the Neutra typeface for Shake Shack’s logo. Using her taste and knowledge of typefaces to connect the style of the architecture to a mid-century typeface influenced by the principles of architect and designer Richard Neutra, Scher generated an identity for Shake Shack that resulted in an internationally recognized brand and a leader in its industry of “fast casual restaurants” making over $450M in revenue in 2018 alone with an average store revenue more than twice that of McDonald’s.
Creative lessons from Paul Scher
Scher is often generating novel things. When she wins a project with a new client, she is creating for them an entirely new brand identity. This often involves helping the client figure out what they actually need and then convincing them of a concept. In the field of product management, we also encounter moments where we need to get a group of individuals to agree on a concept or decision. We refer to this as the skill of consensus building within the area of stakeholder management. This occurs during the discovery phase when we tune into an idea, experiment with it against our objective, and now need to convince our stakeholders to proceed with the idea. This occurs during the prioritization phase when we determine a list of ideas to build, assemble them into a roadmap, and now need our stakeholders to agree on the roadmap. When selecting a method for consensus building, Scher optimizes for comfort and personality type. She says to find the style that’s most comfortable for you. For example, Paula takes the approach of a schoolteacher talking through a concept and explaining why one thing works and other things don’t. Her colleagues at Pentagram have found other methods that are comfortable for them and work for their personalities: one uses sports analogies to explain a concept while another takes an analytical approach using succinct diagrams. The outcome is the same: Paula and her stakeholders have surveyed the various ideas and honed in on one concept.
As an aside, Scher notes differences that she has experienced between digital work (e.g. graphic design) and physical work (e.g. environmental design). In physical work, the prototype is often exactly what gets built because the duration to build is much longer and there is less flexibility to make changes leading to less desire for constant alignment. She has found that digital work involves more frequent alignment as the work periods are shorter and there is more flexibility during the process of producing the graphic.
Follow-up: How do you know when someone is aligned?
In addition to consensus building, Scher has another tool for stakeholder management. When starting with a new client, Scher found the most important task is to identify the key decision-maker and learn how to show and explain work to them, i.e. a top-down approach. This is an alternative approach to working bottom-up where one works with the team to come to consensus on a decision and then moves that decision up the chain of influence until a key decision-maker is reached who ultimately greenlights or shelves the idea. For example, when working on the brand identity for Shake Shack, Paula presented her concept directly to founder Danny Meyer who indicated that he wanted a neon element which led to the brand’s iconic neon hamburger logo. Had Paula started at the bottom, they could have spent time coming up with dozens of concepts and forming consensus on a couple only to receive that same feedback. This blends well with our Stakeholder Diagram where we identify the various stakeholders and assign them to rings of influence over the project. The key decision-makers in our Stakeholder Diagram are those within the Core ring.
Follow-up: How to identify key decision-makers?
Once Paula has identified the key decision-makers there is the process of actually making the decisions. Paula’s decision-making philosophy is to present the key decision-makers with three options: a safe option that is “more classic to the area it’s in and may be more expected but done better”, an edgy option that is “pushing a boundary and can be a little bit scary”, and an option that is somewhere between the two. Interestingly, she has found that most choose an option on either side of the spectrum and rarely the middle option. This philosophy resonates with Rick Rubin’s tool from the Creative Act to present two options, i.e. A/B testing. Product management is full of decisions particularly during the discovery phase of the product development process where we make decisions like:
- Decide what are our objectives
- Decide which ideas to pursue
- Decide how we will manifest the selected idea
- Decide what we will build now and what we may build later
- Decide whether to build the idea ourselves or to partner with a third-party
We can craft an approach to these product development decisions using our creative legend as a guide. First, we create two or three options, i.e. proposals. Then we assemble our Core stakeholders, present the options, and use our consensus building skills to agree on one. If we find it difficult to reach agreement, we can leverage another consensus building tool used by game designer Justin Gray to nudge the process along. In his interview with Tim Ferriss, Gray advocates for deadlines. For example, we can set a deadline where we close the product spec for new input and only focus on clearly defining existing decisions; new input is automatically backlogged for a future iteration.
Consistent terminology that Scher uses is “elevating the profession” and “stretching the form”; she considers this her ultimate goal. Other sources would refer to this concept as “honing the craft”. For example, while working with record companies Scher listened to the musicians’ music to inform the covers she designed. She also has extensive expertise in typefaces, i.e. a design for letters, numbers, and symbols including variations in size, weight, slope, and width. She leveraged this expertise in creating the brand identity for Shake Shack. Getting extensive exposure to elements in her field like knowledge of her client or methods to visually convey information, e.g. typefaces, builds her taste. Taste is described by nearly all creative legends and thus seems critical in the creative world. The practices of honing craft and developing taste have a corollary in the field of product management in the skill area we call domain expertise. Developing domain expertise could mean getting exposure to different user experiences to create the best experience to meet our goals (i.e. UX research). It could mean interacting with a lot of people who match our desired user type (i.e. user research). This could mean using various competing products to learn how others are approaching this problem (i.e. competitive research).
Follow-up: Are there more ways to build taste as a product manager?
Case study: Pentagram
Aside from creative tools, I’m also interested in Pentagram and in exploring the concept for Creative Product Managers. Starting with some backgound, in 1991 Scher, having gained 20 years of design experience, was invited to be a partner in Pentagram: an international design consultancy with offices in design hubs like New York, London, Berlin, and Austin. The structure for Pentagram is unique. It is a hierarchically flat group of partners who own and manage the firm, often working collaboratively, and share in profits and decision-making. Each partner is a leader in their individual field like architecture, graphic design, and product design. New partners are added through invitation typically through a few channels: either Scher and her partners have been watching their work and then they meet socially at a design conference where the partners get to know the potential recruit personally, or one of the partners will have worked with them on a project, or the potential recruit has held senior roles with recognized brands like Matt Willey who joined Pentagram in 2020 after five years as the art director of The New York Times Magazine. In Pentagram’s business model each partner takes on their own projects and then shares the profits earned from those projects with the rest of the partners. This protects all partners in the event that one industry has a setback through a “diversified portfolio” concept. They have an ownership model for the business also developed stock in the business so the partners continue to see upside from the business after they retire. Additionally, this structure affords Scher and her partners a lot of independence and autonomy in their work. She can run business where you take on enough work to be profitable and control work you do and do pro bono work, e.g. Matt Willey has made seven typefaces available where all profits go to Cancer Research UK and Macmillan Cancer Support. and grow your visual vocabulary (i.e. the skill of describing a concept in images rather than words) and do things that elevate the profession. The risks of working in a declining industry, becoming an expert in a dying field, and losing a source of income when you leave a company are not unique to the design profession. A business with this structure is beneficial to most and it would be interesting to explore a similar consultancy for Creative Product Managers. From my research, the demand for product consultant expertise is primarily needed in many of the areas that I’ve discussed: developing product strategy, doing product discovery, and performing SWOT analyses including capability assessments and market research.
Final thoughts
Paula Scher is a successful and prodigious creative legend, and I found a few of her comments to be especially insightful, so I wanted to share them as final thoughts.
When asked how her relationship with design changed throughout the course of her life Scher replied, “I started out not knowing what being a designer meant, and I learned it on the job. And I began to find my own method of communicating building a language that people respond to and use.” Not only did Scher learn by doing, but she also did what many successful individuals do: she defined her role herself. As she says, there is no definition for her role so she learned by doing and eventually she went from “designer” to “visual identity designer”.
When asked about the importance of newness Scher replied, “I think you move things forward and you make discoveries usually through mistakes. You’re doing something and you’ve make a terrible mistake and you stop and then you realize that there’s a possibility and then you can play with it and move it forward and sometimes you stretch a form…I’m always trying to stretch the form”. In practice, a “mistake” is just an attempt where the objective is not achieved so what Scher is ultimately describing is experimentation. From her perspective, the path to create anything new is to experiment. Despite this, many product development conversations revolve around how not to make mistakes. This is because the process requires an experimental mindset. Developing this mindset means developing a few skills: objective setting to be able to form a hypothesis, hypothesis testing to test if there is a relationship between our idea and the objective, and planning small to build the necessary flexibility for what our tests reveal.
In an interview with Rick Rubin, Scher makes a closing remark that “all of our best work actually should seem so easy…almost as if it designed itself.” This is a reminder to not forget to question the assumption that the idea we are developing is actually a good idea. If we find it excessively challenging to determine the value and feasibility of an idea then perhaps it is not the time for that idea. There are great ideas all around us, Rick Rubin calls this “the source”. And as we’ve seen so much of the Creative Product Manager role is to scan through the source tuning into particular ideas. Tuning is a lot of work: objective setting, consensus building, decision-making, hypothesis testing, and planning. Scher cautions against this and implies a mindfulness practice of detachment and developing the skill of planning small to support it. If an idea is not designing itself then it’s best to bank this idea until such a time when the world is ready.
Paula Scher is a creative legend with an impressive history of design work. While the output appears different, the tools she uses in her work have applications in the field of product management. As Creative Product Managers, we must learn to work with these tools to develop our skills. When a decision must be made, we can practice Scher’s top-down approach and three options philosophy. When the team can’t agree on how to move forward, we can practice Scher’s schoolteacher approach talking through a concept and explaining why one thing works and other things don’t to build consensus. And when we are trying to stretch the form and build something new, we can implement an experimental mindset like Scher and plan small so that we remain detached from specific ideas allowing the work to design itself.
