For as long as I've been working professionally the visual metaphor for moving customers through an experience has been The Funnel. The idea being that we have the most amount of people engaged at the beginning of an experience and as the experience goes on, fewer and fewer people are still participating in it. You've … Continue reading Metrics Mountain: A realistic visualisation of any customer lifecycle metrics
(Lean UX Canvas V2 is now live) In most of my work these days I don't often use an official canvas. I prefer to pick and choose the assumptions that can be found on the Business Model Canvas, Lean Canvas and others as appropriate for the client, project or initiative I'm working on and weave them together … Continue reading The Lean UX Canvas
There’s an unforgettable scene in my favorite movie, Goodfellas, where Joe Pesci, Robert DeNiro and Ray Liotta pay a late night visit to Pesci’s mom. Despite their best efforts to leave quickly she invites them to eat something. During the late-night meal, they discuss a painting in her kitchen. The painting is of a man … Continue reading Agile vs Lean vs Design Thinking
Yesterday was my last day at Neo Innovation. In the last 3+ years my colleagues and I worked to build a consulting company that did more than just deliver powerpoint decks and spec documents. We created a company that built new digital businesses. Along the way we learned how to provide lean startup, agile delivery and … Continue reading Leaving Neo
I've spent the past 5 years speaking, teaching, coaching and working with teams aspiring to bring a customer-centric point of view to their product development processes. Some have seen great success. Some, despite strong desire and a willingness to adapt have struggled. The challenges the successful teams have overcome have rarely been tactical ones. They've … Continue reading Lean UX in the Enterprise
The other night we had reason to celebrate. Something we'd been waiting on for 2 years had finally come through. We'd worked hard and it paid off. My wife suggested we go out to a steak dinner. Forgetting for a second that I don't eat beef (hey, there's always the "surf" half of "surf n … Continue reading There is no such thing as a killer feature
In 2010 we visited Ireland for the first time. My wife and I made Galway our first stop. This was the first time we'd been this far away from the kids so we wanted to make sure our mobile phones worked properly. Sure enough, as these things have a way of working out, we were … Continue reading The biggest mistake in product discovery: missing the value
My friend Bill Scott once said at a conference, "Agile doesn't have a brain." What he meant by that is due to Agile's software engineering roots many organizations that have adopted Scrum, XP and similar methodologies have done so through their engineering departments. This has led to the creation of amazing software development departments that … Continue reading Agile doesn’t have a brain
Seven years ago I moved back to the East Coast and took a job at an agency. Before accepting my offer I asked my potentially new boss how much support she believed the agency had for interaction design (they were strong on visual design and content). She replied with a note from the President of … Continue reading Do you really have executive buy-in?
I suffer from a chronic condition. It's nothing life-threatening and I am lucky that I have a relatively mild form of it. However, left untreated, it makes day-to-day life quite uncomfortable. I was first diagnosed when I was 22 and for close to 20 years now have been taking one form or another of daily … Continue reading It’s not enough to build a culture your teams can “live with”