Increase Collaboration Through Sketching

Giff Constabledesign, UI/UX

“treat nature by means of the cylinder, the sphere, the cone…” – Paul Cezanne, 1904 Effective Agile UX turns product design into a collaborative, cross-functional process. A great way to do this is to pull non-designers into a fast-paced, fun sketching workshop (I’ll post more notes from the Agile UX conference on this soon). One of the first things you …

Startup Hiring Filter: Are you “pre” or “post” product market fit?

Giff ConstableUncategorized

Your startup finally has the financial resources to expand the team. That’s both awesome, and dangerous. So here is one more filter for you to think about as you evaluate each candidate: Is your company “pre” product-market fit*, or “post”? (I’m not talking about your pitch to VCs but your own honest assessment) And has this candidate spent most of …

Lean Experiments 101 (given to IxD program at SVA)

Giff Constablelean, startups

In late January, Gary Chou and Christina Cacioppo asked me to come talk about lean startup ideas to their “Entrepreneurial Design” class in SVA’s Interaction Design masters program. Christina just wrote up some thoughts from the day and they put up the audio file. I have embedded the slides and audio file below: MVP/Experiments talk at SVA IxD program View …

Unhealthy Interpretations of Apple Mythology

Giff Constableinnovation, lean

“And rather than listening to, or asking their customers what they wanted; Apple would solve problems customers didn’t know they had with products they didn’t even realize they wanted.” — Allworth James Allworth over at HBR wrote a nice post on Apple and how their focus on great products, rather than optimizing profitability, helped them beat the Innovator’s Dilemma. But …

My day at Leancamp NYC

Giff Constablelean

I spent yesterday attending Leancamp’s New York session and it was an interesting day. It was my first “unconference” and I liked the democratic, “vote with your feet”, “your day is what you make of it” feel. Photo from Lukas Fittl Here is an overview of my experience

The Zuck Highlights

Giff Constableinnovation, management

Like many, I just read Mark Zuckerberg’s S-1 letter. There are two things I really appreciated: the focus on long-term value, and the results-oriented innovation culture it espoused. The letter states that the company wants to embrace risk and focus on long term value, not “maximizing investor returns” or quarterly performance. I’m glad to see more companies resisting Wall Street’s …

Collaboration vs Individualism is a False Choice

Giff Constableinnovation, management

Susan Cain in the NYTimes wrote a broadside against collaboration, calling it groupthink. Now Cliff Kuang in Design.Co writes “the brainstorming process is BS.” Honestly, I don’t get the fuss. Isn’t it obvious that creativity and innovation is enhanced by both introspective and collaborative time? I’m only a fan of collaborative idea generation sessions *if* people have done their thinking …