Product Innovation, Agile Transformation, Development
Delivering a great customer experience starts with insightful understanding of customer needs and the customer’s point of view. Voice of the Customer (VoC) is the process of understanding the customer’s expectations and validating the outcomes of your product through customer feedback. Instead of looking at customers through a lens that too often relies only upon analytics, business metrics, and secondary
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
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,
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
The idea behind Design Sprints is to put together a team’s creative ideas around a specific problem during a limited time-frame. They are a great way to bring together methodologies from Design Thinking and Agile and ideate solutions in just a few days, rather than weeks or months. Design Sprints run between 2 and 5 days, with the goal of
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
A few months ago I was giving a speech on MVPs at an Agile conference and a developer approached me saying: “I wish I had known this a year ago!” He later explained that about a year before he had been contracted by a company to build a new complex system, and do it all at once. The company gave