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
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 …
Goals not Features; Patience for Speed
Laura Klein has a thoughtful post up about validating problems and needs and behavior before product. I agree with her. It still doesn’t mean that you’ll get things right but you can prevent a lot of wasted effort. It again made me think about the liberating power of deciding to focus on learning goals, rather than production goals. In startup …
Fear of the False Negative
I used to worry about false negatives, or killing a good idea too early. “Startups are not instant hits,” I would tell myself. That’s a true statement. All startups are a hard fight. Almost all startups take far longer than the “overnight-success” articles imply. But after years of creating new products and companies, I would rather kill a good idea …
We test to uncover clues, not facts
I’ve been hearing an excuse lately for avoiding experiments and “getting out of the building”: It boils down to this: “if the results don’t have clarity and repeatability then why test in the first place?” Or put another way, “if you can’t perfectly design the experiment and isolate a single variable, and if you can’t have absolute confidence in your …
We need a startup-friendly lobbying organization
Members of Congress, particularly Republicans, like to talk about how over-regulation strangles growth businesses in this country, which makes it particularly ironic that the SOPA/PIPA bills got this far. If you want to let entrepreneurship flourish, get government out of the way. Don’t legislate protections for old industries that would prefer to manipulate government rather than adjust their business models …
My Next Step: Proof
2012 is going to be an awesome year. Here’s my news: I’m joining forces with two of my favorite people in the lean/agileUX scene, Jeff Gothelf and Josh Seiden, to create a consulting company called Proof. In short, Proof is an product innovation and design studio that (not surprisingly given our team) delivers a lean/agile, cross-functional, results-oriented approach. Our goal …
Pride and the Pressure Cooker
Last night I watched Morning Glory, a cute movie about a plucky, underdog tv producer who makes her dreams come true. All in all, it is not a terrible metaphor for innovating new products. She succeeds by applying creative thinking, willingness to take risks, good management, metrics-driven feedback loops, and sheer hard work. However, she doesn’t step up her game …
Experiments (what are MVPs?)
I recently gave a talk to LUXr New York about MVPs, or really about running experiments. Instead of using the term “MVP”, I find myself using the word experiment for a few different reasons: less jargon; a clearer connotation of lightweight, learning, and not necessarily tied to digital product, and a clearer signal that this is about bringing the scientific …
Business Assumptions Exercise
I recently updated my “startup assumptions” deck to the below version (link), and took the team involved with my current project through the exercise. It was a great way to get hypotheses on the table and see if people are on the same page. The next phase is prioritizing the assumptions and starting to run experiments to de-risk the important …