Process fads roll through and it is easy to roll your eyes. They come with business books with one good chapter and 9 chapters of filler. But they can serve a purpose. I have found over the years that it is incredibly easy for human beings to get lost in the weeds, blinding themselves in the process. New packaging provides …
Take control of your startup’s destiny, or someone else will
Mark Suster recently wrote one of his most important posts for entrepreneurs (and he has written many good ones): Why You Need to Ring the Freaking Cash Register. All startups are vulnerable, but if you are over-reliant on external capital, you are especially fragile when the winds change. I thought I would illustrate it with a personal story. In 2004/5 …
Lift’s Process
A colleague forwarded me Lift’s designer job posting and I really liked their process section: Process We work some variant of Lean + Agile + IDEO’s design thinking. Wow, buzzwords. The things that we believe in most strongly are small batches, validation, and revisions. On the small batch side, we practice continuous deployment. Every code commit gets pushed to product …
The Truth Curve
(updated version from Testing with Humans) I wanted to share one of the slides from my talk at QCon last week. I call it the truth curve. On the X-axis is your product sophistication. On the Y-axis is how much you can believe your learnings versus having to strongly filter your results through your judgement and vision. Different types of …
Bill Scott’s (Paypal) QCon Talk: Putting a Brain on Agile
Bill Scott is the Senior Director of UI Engineering at PayPal, and he is in the middle of transforming Paypal from a bloated, slow beast to an agile, lean, learning team. His talk last week at QCon in NYC was awesome, and since the video is not yet up, I wanted to share my raw notes (emphasis below are my …
11 Customer Development Anti-Patterns
Update: check out my book on customer development Talking to Humans Steve Blank always liked to say, “In a startup, no facts exist inside the building, only opinions.” The lean startup movement encourages that you get out of the building with a mixture of experiments and qualitative research. Doing qualitative work gives you several benefits. It helps you learn …
Group sketching, yes! Groupthink, no!
I am a big believer in the necessity of sketching for good product design and product-team interaction. So, I was nodding my head vehemently when it came to Joshua Porter’s latest post, “The importance of sketching in product design“. Group sketching allows a team to get on the same page very quickly. In addition to preventing confusion or conflict, group …
The Intrapreneur’s Team
Neo spends a lot of time working with large companies on new product innovation. One question we often get is how to best structure roles and teams. Here are a few high-level bullets: Senior Executive’s Role: define the vision and desired outcomes allow the team to explore and define the solution create funding structure and timing “gates” provide physical infrastructure …
Aging into Obsolescence
The structure of modern business forces people to become stale as they age. The economic incentives of most creative industries, including tech, all point in this direction. When you are young, you *make* stuff. You code, you design, you write, you execute. You constantly get to practice and improve your making skills. The normal definition of success implies moving up …
Product Theory, a curated software “making” zine
I’ve started curating a “zine” called Product Theory which covers my favorite articles on the broad topic of making great software products (design, management, coding, business models, lean / agile, etc). Product Theory began life as a Flipboard magazine, but thanks to the magic of IFTTT, you can also access the links at http://ProductTheory.com and Twitter.