How do you know you’re making the right bets with your ideas? Which bets do your ideas hinge on? These are our riskiest assumptions. They need to be tested before you spend your valuable time and money. With the ‘problem’ in mind, map out the customer journey to identify the riskiest assumption. Armed with a … Read more
“There is a flaw at the heart of the term Minimum Viable Product: it’s not a product. It’s a way of testing whether you’ve found a problem worth solving. A way to reduce risk and quickly test your biggest assumption. Instead of building an MVP identify your Riskiest Assumption and Test it.” – Rik Higham, … Read more
A common misconception is that a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) consists of the minimum set of features deemed necessary for a working software product, with the goal of bringing it to market quickly. This is incorrect as there is an over-emphasis on speedy delivery and time to market, as opposed to focusing on customer and … Read more
Markets are changing faster than ever. Driven by expediential changes in technology, customers want more personalized experiences and they want it now. How do you keep up with the ever-changing market landscape and deliver high-quality products and services? No matter how deep our up-front understanding is of our market, we really cannot predict our customers’ … Read more
We held our first product camp in San Diego in October of 2018. It was a great event. I was impressed by the turnout and quality of discussions. A product camp is an “unconference” for product marketing, management, design, development or related topics. An unconference is a participant-driven meeting. Modern unconferences have been around since … Read more
Brand Asset Valuator (BAV) is a metric applied for the measurement of brand value of an entity. BAV was developed by Young and Rubicam. BAV measures a brand under the two broad categories: Brand Vitality and Brand Stature. Brand Vitality refers to the growth potential of the brand. Brand Vitality is sub-divided into Differentiation and … Read more
A Forrester Total Economic Impact Study found that Design Thinking practiced across diverse portfolios of products and services helped clients reduce costs, increase speed, and design better solutions. The purpose of the study was to evaluate design thinking’s financial impact for both individual projects and a grander organizational transformation. Forrester interviewed over 60 executives who … Read more
In a small organization, one person may be responsible for the success of the product and the experience design. But even in some of the smallest companies, you see these as different roles. The person responsible for the product success is usually focused on defining the product – sometimes referred to as the Product Manager … Read more
Your products and services are delivering an experience to your customers regardless if you are consciously managing them. A good experience delights customers and generates a steady revenue stream while a poor experience sends customers to the competition and can be the demise of an organization. Savvy organizations understand their experience design maturity, invest in … Read more
The term “Lean” was first coined by John Krafcik in his 1988 article, “Triumph of the Lean Production System” based on his experience as a quality engineer in the Toyota-GM NUMMI joint venture in California. Adapting the principles from Lean manufacturing, Mary & Tom Poppendieck wrote Lean Software Development: An Agile Toolkit (May 18, 2003). … Read more
Markets are changing faster than ever. We are living Moore’s Law. In 1965, Intel co-founder, Gordon Moore, noticed that the number of transistors per square inch on integrated circuits had doubled every year since their invention. Moore predicted that this trend will continue into the foreseeable future. Although the pace has slowed (the number of … Read more
Prototype your ideas before you develop them. Use prototypes to solicit feedbacks from subject matter experts to ensure you are solving the right problem, to inform stakeholders, get feedback from your customers, and collaborate with development. Before you write your requirements, create a “prototype.” This could be a sketch – or sketches – on a … Read more