What a New-Business Team's Planner Should Do

Lately, in-house ventures and new-business initiatives have been getting a lot of attention.
I think this is because existing markets are overripe and, contrary to what the media says, the market is actually getting better. Of course, the gap between the haves and the have-nots is just as stark in the corporate world as in everyday life, but especially in convergence areas like O2O and IoT.


Ironically, though, the people drawing up these plans are usually non-experts in the field. Roughly 80% of them are people who are good at organizing and communicating customer requirements, 15% define and flesh out requirements their team dreamed up themselves, and the remaining 5% are people turning what they personally want to do, or think should be done, into concrete plans. So roughly three groups.

Go to a job listing or a forum and you'll see lots of people introduced as "veterans with long experience," but most of them aren't experts in the field. If you think they are, it's 100% bluff.
It feels just like the early 2010s when smartphones had just come out and job ads were already looking for "experienced mobile professionals." The market itself was new, barely out of the womb. As an aside, in terms of timing, we're just now barely catching the last train of market validation. (I need to hurry and hop on...)

In convergence fields like this, what the planners or service designers or strategic planners or team leaders or CEOs - the so-called "picture-drawers" - should care about most, I think, is just one thing.


Before I get to that, a brief detour.
My college major was clothing and fashion design. I put my major to use and started out as a materials intern at a domestic women's fashion brand, worked as a merchandiser, and eventually opened my own shop and spent my 20s as a "model-list."
For reference, a model-list is someone who does both design and patternmaking.
For reference x2, outside of brand companies, individual designers are people who handle model-list work AND sewing, all by themselves.

And I've spent my 30s in IT. At age 30 I got hired as a 3D modeling designer, did publishing, then web planning, then mobile planning (the so-called UI/UX), got hooked on service design, and ran a somewhat in-house-venture new-business team for about a year and a half. Then I "wrapped up" everything and for the last 10 months I've been studying development.


You might wonder why all the self-introduction, but it's because through my career I've experienced just how structurally similar the fashion industry and the IT industry are.

A designer in fashion is like a planner in IT.
They make things that didn't exist before, or come up with and express improvements to what already exists. But in both cases, they can't actually build it themselves.

A patternmaker in fashion is like a back-end developer in IT.
They hold the universal, stable, hard-won base technology. You could even call it the company's core competency.

And a sewer in fashion feels similar to a front-end developer in IT. They take the accumulated skills and scattered technologies and turn them into tangible output.


Fashion designers and IT planners, as I said, take on the role of creating something new or improving what exists, but without patternmakers - or developers in IT - all of it can literally dissolve into empty clouds.


When someone without the technical chops wants to convey requirements to a technical expert, they must first be able to explain "what is needed, and how," rather than saying "do this thing."

If you give them the "why" as motivation, the technical solution or implementation approach is something they (the patternmaker or developer) will figure out on their own.
Otherwise, you end up with a service that has no bugs but nobody can use. It's like a garment that is meticulously sewn but nobody has any reason to buy and wear.

You see a lot of these absurd mashup situations at public institutions. For example, RFPs for "multimedia content projects using AR/VR." If I were to draw an analogy, it might be like making your everyday dress shirt out of Gore-Tex that can handle a Himalayan expedition.


(I'm writing this half-asleep as the idea popped into my head, so there are probably a lot of typos and context errors. My apologies to everyone.)