I find myself thinking about this morning about sources of learning, and how and where one challenges oneself to learn. Are you satisfied with your expertise in your domain, or are you constantly pushing to improve? As I wrote the other week, are you looking outside of your domain? I watched an experienced market researcher do a customer interview the …
It’s really hard to interview product designers and product managers. The most effective step I added to my cycles several years ago is a design challenge. The challenges themselves are a 2-hour take-home challenge, and then a 1-hour presentation with cross-functional members of the team. Because of the time commitment, it is best saved for late in the interview cycle. …
Yesterday I was asked how a designer differs from a product manager. I found the answer surprisingly hard to give. Everyone designs, but not everyone is a “designer,” which encompasses both a skill set and a mindset. I look for designers who bleed into product management and product managers who bleed into design. The venn diagram overlaps significantly in terms …
As an entrepreneur pitching VCs, I learned the hard way how important the first words out of my mouth could be. You couldn’t get those first few seconds back. The start of every conversation outside your inner team is no different for a product manager (or UX designer). How you set context impacts everything you do. It sets you up …
We’re always thinking about “minimum viable process” — i.e. what’s the least process that gets the job done. The answer to that changes as your team size scales, but I think it’s always worthwhile to fight a running battle for no more prescriptive process than you need. This impacts everything from how you treat agile, how you approach research, how you interleave …
Why do we like working with our hands so much? What is it about making something tactile, that gets the brain engaged? Whenever there is a complex decision to be made, and usually nothing is more hairy than prioritization debates, I like writing things out on index cards (one item per card, bonus if I have time to draw icons …
(Note: I’m going to leave the original post as-is, but I don’t think I wrote it very well, so see the addendums to prevent misunderstandings. Maybe. This is the Internet after all.) I read a blog post today that shocked me. A design agency taking credit for their client’s success. Which was surprising unto itself but what was more surprising …
David Bland has a funny, and painful, graphic called the Product Death Cycle. It clearly illustrates one of the more dangerous parts of customer development: taking customer ideas literally. The famous line attributed to Henry Ford goes, “If I had asked my customers what they wanted, they would have asked for a faster horse.” Some people take that as an …
“Research is the process by which we understand problems. Design is the process for which we solve problems.” Yes! Watch this video of Farrah Bostic’s talk at Lean Day West on how to improve the world of qualitative research.
While we don’t dictate tools in the Neo NYC office, a large number of us have long moved to using Sketch, the vector design app from Bohemian Coding. One struggle has been sharing Sketch files. Dropbox handles them OK, but last time we tried, Google Drive and Box.net did not. But given the way Sketch saves, with Dropbox it can …