Steve Blank just shared an interesting anecdote from his days in marketing, where he created what he thought was the ultimate data sheet, only to find his CEO and VP of sales literally setting it on fire. The VP of Sales had an insightful quote: “the only thing your datasheet will do is give a prospective customer a reason for …
Free Your Mind
A core concept in “lean startup” is that validated learning needs to be your initial measure of progress, not deliverables of other kinds. However, I suspect that many people struggle to internalize this and fully put it to work. Learning doesn’t feel like traditional measures of success. It’s not a line up and to the right; it’s not a successfully …
Lean Wireframing
Will Evans, who does UX design at The Ladders with agile-UX champion Jeff Gothelf, recently wrote a tweet that caught my eye: The hi-fidelity vs. lo-fidelity wireframe debate is silly. You use the weapons you need based on the war you face. (link) A wireframe is meant to communicate and test. You want to do the least amount of work …
12 Tips for Customer Development Interviews (revised)
UPDATE: CLICK HERE FOR A REVISED LIST OF 12 TIPS A year ago, I gave a talk at the very first Lean Startup Machine about giving customer development interviews. Tomorrow, I am doing the same with a new batch of LSM warriors and I have revised and updated my list (and accompanying text) as follows: 1. One person at …
A Product-Person Continuum
Since we ceased work on Aprizi in April, I have taken on some interesting UX-centric consulting projects and started to interview for “head of product” roles here in New York. I’m still on the hunt for the right fit. One silver lining to interviewing is you get asked interesting questions that can increase self-awareness. For example, the head of one …
Turntable.fm – can they solve synchronous?
When I first discovered Turntable.fm last month, I didn’t get a damn bit of work done for 3 hours. After that evening I banned myself from DJing. I’ve since gone back in to the Dubstep room as a fun, serendipitous “radio”, but concluded that 8tracks is a simpler solution for that use case. That said, quite a few people are …
Failing Lean (Lean Ignite NYC talk)
How to talk about failure without killing the mood of a room? That was my dilemma leading up to last night’s amazing Lean Startup Ignite event (and I loved the Ignite format!). Lane Halley suggested that focusing on what I would do differently next time would keep it positive, and I hoped that my drawings could help lighten the subject …
Making Ad Agencies Lean
I was intrigued by the article “Why Ad Agencies Should Act More Like Tech Startups” that was just on FastCompany. Now, before I go on, let me just state that I’ve never worked within an ad agency, but I’ve sold plenty of projects/services to them and their brand clients while with The Electric Sheep Company. I like the general premise …
Choosing your most important metrics
Matt Meeker, co-founder of Meetup and now with Polaris running Dogpatch NYC, gave a Skillshare class tonight on metrics. He stressed the need to combine and balance quantitative data, qualitative sources and entrepreneurial gut/judgement. My favorite tidbit came when he was discussing how to prioritize your top metrics. His advice for picking your “driving metric”, as he called it, was …
Problem > UX > UI
Jason Cohen’s recent post got me thinking about the difference between UX and UI and the order in which I think about design when coming up with something new. Here is my rough order (and tomorrow I will post a concrete example): 1. The Problem Understand the customer’s problem and ask yourself if you are solving the right problem Example …