Product Innovation, Agile Transformation, Design Thinking
I’d like to share a few tips for making customer interviews effective. Why is this important? Because delivering a great customer experience starts with insightful understanding of customer needs and the customer’s point of view. We call it listening for the Voice of the Customer (VoC) which is the process of understanding the customer’s expectations and validating the outcomes of
I have worked in a variety of organizations across different industries, helping my teams or my clients build successful products. From Cisco to Capital One, from my startup Goozex.com to clients I have advised, from private organizations to the military, I have found three common elements that successful teams must have to deliver great products. These elements are the three
A developer approached me at a recent Agile conference where I was presenting a topic on building great products with small iterations, and he said, “I wish I had known this a year ago….” He had taken on a new project from a company that provided a full document of requirements upfront. They wanted to build a new system and
BookingBug (now Jrni) faced a near death event due to technical debt and saved itself by adopting the right engineering practices. Bookingbug is a company that provides scheduling and appointment-setting capabilities across a variety of industries. Founded in 2008 in the UK, in recent years it has built a strong reputation among enterprise customers around the world for its powerful
The meeting with the customer did not go well. The prototype was not yet finished, and the customer wasn’t able to grasp the qualities of the idea he was presenting. This project was already over budget, and there was no clear line of sight on its completion. By all measures, it was taking too long to put together, and the
We have become increasingly good at building products. Agile, DevOps, Lean Startup methodologies have reduced the time to market and the complexity of deploying a new set of features, while improving the quality and shortening the feedback loop with customers. Armed with these methodologies, product managers can ideate, design and build products in shorter times, deploy them in the marketplace,
It is said that change is constant and the entropy in the universe can only increase. How can companies and organization best prepare for change? The question is not if change will happen, but when it will happen. Any company, in any industry, is at risk of being challenged, disrupted, and maybe completely forgotten by market changes and powerful forces.
If you are in business today, you likely either want to innovate, or you are being asked to innovate. You need a way to get to workable innovation reliably. The brilliant thoughts in the shower are rare. We cannot rely on that to generate innovative ideas for our business. We need something more reliable, a process that helps us find
In many areas around the world, billions of trees have been clear-cut in the last few decades, leaving soils exposed, depleted and incapable of supporting land-based or marine life. For example, in Madagascar, the vast mangrove coastal areas that once supported a thriving community of fishermen, have been eroded for lumber or for industrial farms. The lack of soil-control, water-filtering
Buy-A-Feature is a great tool to source interest from your end-users about a set of features, and understand how they make trade-offs between them. It’s effective at providing a high-level prioritization based on your customers’ preferences, perceived value, and expectations. There are many versions of this tool, and many ways it can be used. This method can be used to