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 …
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 …
$9.4M? And Aprizi’s First Pivot
When Liz and I first started Aprizi, it was very different in concept from where we eventually ended up. I had become fascinated with Mint and Gist, and people’s willingness to share rich data in exchange for the right value proposition. I started thinking about other places where valuable data existed, but was relatively hard to get to. This led …
The Enterprise and Lean Startup: outsourcing app development
(aside: I’ve made a promise to myself to try to blog more often. It was tough to find the time over the winter, but I’m going to start with something I meant to write months ago) Big corporations aspire to innovate with web and mobile products, but their end results are too often bloated or uninspiring. The list of common …
MVP is a State of Mind, not a Version Number
I am not the heaviest of Quora users, but last week I saw three game designers I like and respect (Daniel James, Chris Carella, and Adrian Crook) answer the question, “How can we apply the idea of “minimum viable product” to online games? … What and where is the “minimum” of MVP reached for games?” Definitely check out their answers, …
Landmines on the Road to Product Market Fit
On Friday, I gave a 20-minute talk at a product design conference organized by Ty Ahmad-Taylor (CEO of FanFeedr) and Hard Candy Shell (the talk shared the same title as this post). I discussed mistakes and lessons from Aprizi’s journey. I don’t think it was videotaped, so I am going to take advantage of this flight to California to write …
How a blog can help you with customer development
There are many strategies for customer development, and here is another one: start a company blog focused on the problem you hope to solve and the people you hope to solve it for. In this context, your purpose with the blog is not to get vast amounts of traffic, but rather to help you connect with and learn from lots …