Truly agile teams enjoy the ability, desire and safety to respond to change over following a plan.
The Lean UX Canvas
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 to form testable hypotheses and experimentation plans. … Continue reading The Lean UX Canvas
Agile vs Lean vs Design Thinking
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
Maintaining the winds of change
I’m often asked how to get executives on board with cultural and process change. It seems that product teams buy into the ideas of lean and agile relatively quickly but convincing management is an order of magnitude more difficult. We’ve discussed several reasons for this in previous newsletters. But let’s just assume that you’ve … Continue reading Maintaining the winds of change
Lean UX in the Enterprise
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
Agile is not a substitution for vision
In his blog post from 2011, Mike Cottmeyer, an agile consultant and coach, listed off the 13 most common reasons his clients began their agile transformation. The list contains reasons like, “faster time to market”, “early ROI” and “risk reduction and predictability.” My sense is that this spectrum of drivers falls along a timeline … Continue reading Agile is not a substitution for vision
7 Steps to Giving the Best Presentation of Your Life
I give a lot of talks. I’d like to think I’m pretty good at it at this point. But it hasn’t always been this way. Sure, years of playing in bands gave me a level of stage comfort that many must overcome but I was the keyboard player – a sideman. When you’re giving … Continue reading 7 Steps to Giving the Best Presentation of Your Life
The biggest mistake in product discovery: missing the value
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
Agile doesn’t have a brain
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
Clients don’t want to buy experiments
When Josh Seiden, Giff Constable and I first launched Proof (now Neo NYC) we had a vision for a studio that designed and built meaningful, successful digital businesses for our clients. We would work with agile methodologies and incorporate lean thinking into our process focusing heavily on early experimentation, validation and course correction before committing … Continue reading Clients don’t want to buy experiments