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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
Excuses, Excuses, Excuses (on customer development)
For our last Lean Ignite here in New York, I decided to have a little fun and rant about all the excuses I hear from teams as to why they are *not* doing customer development. Below is the 5-minute video for those who are interested (link). And yes, now I finally understand why people tell me I sound like Jerry …
Strategic UX vs Tactical UX
There are strategic UX leaders, and then there are tactical UX implementers. To be a strategic leader, one needs to broaden thinking beyond design and usability, and start thinking holistically about critical business goals and risks. As the broader UX profession moves from being artifact-based to results-based, this is going to be critical. However, I see the online UX community …
Failure Is…
Failure is not a catch phrase Failure is measurable – you set a goal, and you fail to reach it Failure is a great teacher, if you are a good student Little failures mean you are innovating Big messy failures mean you are innovating poorly Failure does not equate giving up Failure does not equate rejecting your vision, although it …