“But we have to ship features!”

At this point every organization and product team knows they should be talking to their customers, testing ideas early, collecting feedback and improving their products and services continuously. And yet, nearly every team we work with struggles to make this happen. Combine this with the ever-present drive to increase the team’s velocity (thanks Scrum!) and you end with an impossible dilemma — how do we ensure we’re meeting the needs of our customers, learning from them and making our agile ways of working successful?

Enter Lean UX.

You’ve heard of Lean UX. You’ve read the book. No better way to learn how to make it work in your Scrum teams than from the authors themselves.

(This course is also available for private in-house teams. Just ask.)

Scrum + UX = chaos? It doesn’t have to be that way.

One of the main reasons we have this conflict of processes is the belief that they are radically different ways of working devised by different disciplines. Agile is for engineers right? Lean Startup is for product managers? Design thinking, lean ux and product discovery are for designers only, no? Nope.

Jeff Gothelf and Josh Seiden, authors of Lean UX, Sense & Respond and Steely Dan aficionados (don’t hold that against us) have been teaching Lean UX and product discovery to agile teams for over 10 years. About a year ago we teamed up to create this hands-on, highly-interactive live online course. We had no idea the world would shift to online learning only and we were lucky to get a head start on figuring out just how to make this way of learning engaging, effective and most importantly fun (you never know when Joey, Josh’s dog will show up on camera).

This course was specifically designed and tested for online and remote learning (because we’re designers).

What have we done to ensure this is the best online class you’ve ever taken? Check it out:

• Class size is strictly limited to ensure high levels of attention for each student
• We’ve offloaded all the lectures to video…so you can watch it at your own pace and time
• Class time is reserved for group work, discussion, sharing and feedback on each topic
• You’ll work with a diverse group of folks from all over the world
• We keep live class time short, compared to other classes — 2 hours for each session

Sound good? But wait! There’s more…

• Each class has its own cohort group on Slack where you can engage with each other and us (Josh & Jeff) to check in on your work, ask questions, discuss challenges
• Every student that has ever taken this course — close to 500 now — is part of a broader forum group of Lean UX and Product Discovery practitioners you can learn from
• All class videos, Murals are available for an extended period of time beyond the class
• We continue to test out new tools, tech and facilitation techniques to keep you focused, energized and learning
• A super short commute (bedroom to your work desk via the kitchen for a coffee)
• No dress code. Come as you are. Heck, we’ve even had one or two folks vaping during class (hey, it’s your house 🙂

UX Designers? Yes. Product Mangers? Of course! Scrum masters? Naturally. Who else should take this course?

This course was designed for user experience (UX) designers, product managers, product owners, project managers, agile coaches and engineering leads who know there’s a better way to build products and services but haven’t seen it done well, yet. You’ve probably tried and kept running into things like HIPPOs (the highest paid person’s opinion), sprint deadlines that didn’t allow for UX, design and research work to take place and the ever-present drive to make sure that, god forbid, an engineer doesn’t have something to code. The horror!

If you’re interested in building a more customer-centric, evidence-driven agile product development process for your team or your business, sign up for this class.

We’ve had folks bring their entire team to the class as well. Why not take the class together? We’ll even give you a group discount. Just ask.

OK, I’m interested but let’s get specific. What will I learn?

In 4, 2-hour classes supplemented with pre-recorded video lectures, asynchronous and real-time discussions and hands-on group exercises you can apply immediately at work, we will teach you the answers to the following questions:

• What is product discovery?
• How can I use it to help my team design and build better products?
• What is Lean UX — is it like Lean Startup but we have to wear black turtlenecks (no) —  and how can we apply it to build a customer-centric approach to our work? (rather than a feature first appraoch)
• How can I frame my work as a business problem so that I can create the bandwidth for design, research and Lean UX to take place?
• How can we use the Lean UX canvas to build broader shared understanding with our teams, peers and stakeholders?
• What is an outcome and does it have something to do with OKRs? (Hint: yes)
• What’s the best way to write good, testable hypotheses?
• Should I keep saying the word MVP? (hint: probably not)
• Research is cool! Now what do we do with all that insight?
• Isn’t this Lean Startup? (yes) and Design Thinking (yes) and Agile (also, yes)? Why is it so hard then to make it all work together?
• I’ve heard about dual-track agile. Will you teach me how that works in real life as opposed to fancy diagrams? (yes, our dual-track agile diagram is anything but fancy)
• Remote collaboration skills? Yes, because we kinda have to these days. :-/

Real people have taken the course (not deep fakes). Here’s what they have to say about it…

Class sounds awesome but what else do I get?

We’re glad you asked. In addition to taking the course live with us every week also gets:

• All the videos and slides presented throughout the class
• Access to all the templates, examples and guides used during the course
• A dedicated Slack channel for your class cohort to discuss course assignments during class and maintain beyond class. We will join this channel and continue to stay active in it and accessible to you so that after class ends and you put this to work in the real world, we can help coach you
• You can email us. Anytime. About (almost) anything. Ask Josh about his amazing bread-making skills. And ask Jeff about his nearly infinite knowledge of vintage electric pianos.
• Digital copies of Jeff’s book, Lean vs Agile vs Design Thinking and Josh’s book, Outcomes over Output
• A certificate of completion of the course (see photo above)
• Did we mention no dress code?

How will it work?

• There will be one weekly session that runs 2 hours
• The course takes place over four weeks
• Start date for this cohort is September 15, 2020 at 12:00 EST / 18:00 CET
  
• Subsequent sessions will be on September 22, 29 and October 6.
• Each session will run 2 hours
• No surprise, these will be Zoom calls.
• We will also use Slack, Google Docs, Mural and perhaps some as-of-yet-to-be-determined other remote facilitation tools.
• Each class will be divided into working groups. We do our best to align you by time zones (or if you’re a whole team, we’ll keep you together)
• Each working group will have an assignment to complete between sessions. These usually take no more than an hour.
• There will be videos to watch in advance of each session. We anticipate that, at most, this will be an hour of prep in advance of each class.
• We will deliver the content together, live via Zoom during each of the weekly sessions.
• There will be breakout groups, pair discussions, sharing back, screen sharing, discussions, etc.
• Perhaps it goes without saying but we’re going to say it, to participate successfully you will need a computer with a webcam, microphone, headphones and good internet connection
  

Who are you guys?

We are Jeff Gothelf and Josh Seiden. We wrote the award-winning book Lean UX and the Harvard Business Review Press book, Sense & Respond. We’re both veteran designers, product managers and team leaders with a combined 45 years of experience between us building successful products, agile teams and organizations. We’ve traveled the world together, spoken on various stages, seen a million faces and, as you can imagine, rocked them all.

Most importantly for this class — we’ve done the work. We’ve been there. In the trenches. Designing, testing, learning, building, shipping, rolling back (ha!) and again, learning how to make sure that your designers, researchers, engineers, product managers, scrum masters, testers, marketers, and everyone else who makes a digital product or service successful works in harmony towards making your customers successful. We’ve been fortunate to work in a variety of industries in hands-on roles and we share all of that knowledge — good, bad and the ugly — with you in this course.

Here’s a video of us on stage together talking about tractors:

Still have questions? We’d love to hear them. Just ask. You can also leave a comment on this event and we will answer it publicly.