I spent my evenings this weekend tinkering with the beta of a new service called Firebase, a Y-combinator company which is now trying to become the back-end infrastructure for real-time applications. I was attracted by the idea that one could whip together fast prototypes to test out ideas/MVPs. I’m not (yet) very back-end savvy, so am still trying to digest …
You can’t skip over early adopters
I recently ran across yet another situation where an entrepreneur was reluctant to launch early. He had two urges. He wanted to continue polishing the UX to make it more mainstream-ready. He also wanted to add more features and options to appeal to a broader range of customers. Here was my advice: 1. Face the fact that you are guessing …
Don’t be that guy
We needed a design for a t-shirt, and we needed it fast. It’s early 1995 at Trilogy, a 90-person enterprise software company. I’m in product marketing for Conquer (a new initiative which got renamed the slightly less hubristic “pcOrder.com”). We had just made a snap decision to buy a booth at a conference that was literally about to happen. We …
My Journey to Code Literacy
On March 30th, I gave a 5-min Ignite talk at the Product Insights conference. This time around, I shared a personal story about my winding journey to become more code literate. I am including the slides and basic story here. (p.s. I love Ignite talks, not just for the speed and discipline it brings, but because they give me an excuse to …
Increase Collaboration Through Sketching
“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 …
The Missing Agile Principle (Agile UX 2012 talk)
Earlier today I gave a talk called “The Missing Agile Principle”, which was all about the need to focus on value, and not get lost in process or consider the job done at shipping the product. I touched on why I thought UX was up for the task, how I thought UX should learn to communicate in terms of results, …
Startup Hiring Filter: Are you “pre” or “post” product market fit?
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)
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
“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
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