(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 …
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 …
You fail until you succeed
Innovation fails until it succeeds and, if you are running a corporate innovation team, you have to let that process happen. While there is a huge desire to measure *everything* these days, I don’t think that corporate innovation programs can be judged based on short-term metrics. Their ideas and the progress of those ideas should be judged, but not the …
The humble approach to product design
Great quote on the creation of gmail: Buchheit later called Gmail’s development process “the humble approach to product design.” “What’s the right attitude? Humility,” he wrote on his blog. “It doesn’t matter how smart and successful and qualified you are, you simply don’t know what you’re doing. The good news is that nobody else does, either, though some are foolish …
The Paradox of Patience
Lean is all about speeding up cycle times, reducing waste, compressing the hunt for product-market fit. So at face value it seems like it should be all about going fast fast fast. Ironically I find that lean often requires a great deal of patience, sometimes uncomfortably so. You need to give yourself time to gather data and let experiments run. …
Einstein
I’m kicking off 2013 with a few quotes from, or commonly attributed to, Albert Einstein: “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.” “Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world, stimulating progress, giving birth to evolution. It is, strictly speaking, a real factor in scientific research.” “If you …
from The Innovator’s Solution
I’ve been spending much of the last several months working with a Fortune 100 company, helping them design and create an internal innovation / incubator practice. To that end, I’ve been going back and re-reading some of the better books on the topic. Here is a quote that will resonate with those who believe in agile/lean techniques: “In searching for …
When to ship?
Last week, I helped organize a small roundtable of product and design leaders across several successful NYC startups. One question we discussed was “how do you know when to ship?” There was clear consensus that one should split when you *market* vs when you start letting users touch a working piece of software. The rule of thumb on starting to …