Perception Is The Experience

Thoughts on design, agility and leadership by Jeff Gothelf

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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. Recently, I was asked by a client to codify some of the product discovery training we had worked on together. As our engagement was winding down I wanted to leave them with a clear, step-by-step guide to product discovery. To that end, I created The Lean UX Canvas.

This canvas codifies the process we first introduced in the Lean UX book. Today, I use this process to help teams frame their work as a business problem to solve (rather than a solution to implement) and then dissect that business problem into its core assumptions. We then weave those assumptions into hypotheses. Finally, we design experiments to test our riskiest hypotheses.

V1 of The Lean UX Canvas
V1 of The Lean UX Canvas

I encourage you to download the PDF or the PNG (above) and try it out. Share it with your colleagues. See if it works for your teams. See where it struggles. I’d be grateful for your feedback either here in the comments or via email.

[Jeff]

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Agile vs Lean vs Design Thinking

I had the pleasure of speaking in London last week at Mind the Product. It’s a twice annual gathering of product managers and their colleagues that attracts nearly 1500 attendees. Given the location, The Barbican, and the audience size, I couldn’t resist taking a selfie from the stage.

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 with two dogs:

After passing the painting around, Pesci utters one of the most memorable lines of the movie when he remarks about the painting, “One dog’s going one way. One dog’s going the other way. And this guy’s saying, ‘Hey, what do you want from me?’”

I recently had a similar, albeit less “Goodfellas”, experience with a client of mine. In a conversation prepping for an upcoming workshop they said to me, “Our tech teams are learning Agile. Our product teams are learning Lean and our design teams are learning Design Thinking. Which one is right?”

The question of which one is “right” came about because the seemingly competing trainings put the various disciplines on different cadences, with different practices targeting different objectives. The collaboration, shared understanding and increased productivity they were all promised was nowhere to be found.

This is not the first company where I’ve come across this challenge and it’s not surprising. The productization of Agile adoption along with increased interest in Lean Startup in the Enterprise and Design Thinking has led various coaches and trainers to focus narrowly on one of these ideas and then market their services to the audience they believed was most likely to buy. Well-meaning managers trained their teams within their discipline and never thought to look beyond because their new coaches never suggested it.

The net result? Confusion at best. Chaos at worst. Teams that were supposed to start building trust through cross-functional collaboration were now at odds about how to start, who does what and what their ultimate goal was. Tech teams were focused on increasing velocity. Product teams focused on reducing waste. Design teams wanted lengthy, up front research and design phases to help discover what the teams should work on. Very quickly they found themselves pulling away from each other, as opposed to collaborating more effectively.

Their managers were left like the Goodfellas painting — one team going one way, one team going another way and the manager in the middle saying, “Hey, what do you want from me? (I trained them in modern methods.)”

There are valuable components of each of the various processes teams are trying out these days. As an organization seeking to leverage the benefits of continuous improvement and a software-based service offering your job is to pick and choose the elements that work well for your teams and the brand values you’re trying to convey. In my practice I’ve found that a few core practices are a good place to start. I recommend:

  1. Working in short cycles — take small steps, try something new and see how it works. If it fails, you’ve invested very little. If it succeeds, keep doing it and improving on it.
  2. Hold regular retrospectives — at the end of each cycle, review what went well, what didn’t go well and vow to improve one or two key things.
  3. Put the customer at the center of everything — if you’re struggling to get alignment as a team, focus on customer value. How do we know we’re shipping something users care about? How do we find out? How does that affect what we prioritize? These are good questions to ask on a regular basis.
  4. Go and see — regularly walk around, talk to your teams, ask them what’s working and where they’re struggling. Bring those learnings back to your management meetings and share with your colleagues. Patterns that yield good outcomes should be amplified. Those that are causing problems should be remedied.

At the end of the day your customers don’t care whether you’re agile, lean or practice design thinking. They care about great products and services that solve meaningful problems for them in effective ways. The more you can focus your teams on these things the better their process will be.

What have you seen work? Where have you seen challenges like this? Leave a response in the comments.

[Jeff]

@jboogie
jeff@gothelf.co

Book News

Lean UX 2nd Edition is now out and available

 

Sense & Respond will be out on Harvard Business Press in Feb 2017

The 2nd edition of Lean UX is now available on Amazon and, as of today, is the #1 new release in UX and Usability books. Sense & Respond is our follow-up for the leaders looking to build companies and teams that support the approaches we advocate for in Lean UX. It is available for pre-order now. If you end up reading one or both of the books, we’d be grateful for your reviews on Amazon.

Upcoming Workshops

Sticking to my plan to travel less in the second half of 2016, here’s where I’ll be for the rest of the year:

Graz, Austria — October 17–1-day Lean UX in the Enterprise workshop as part of the World Usability Congress.

Linkoping, Sweden — October 21–1-day Lean UX in the Enterprise workshop as part of DevLin conference.

Lean Startup Week, San Francisco, California, USA — Oct 31 — Nov 6 — super excited to be back at Eric Ries’ premiere Lean Startup event. I’ll be giving a talk on the main stage. Click/tap this link for $200 off the price of a ticket.

Budapest, Hungary — Stretch Leadership Conference — Dec 1–2, 2016 — I visited Budapest earlier this year for Craft conference. This event, produced by the same folks, is focused on building better teams and companies. Very excited to be a part.

New York City — Feb 7–8, 2017 — Jeff Patton and I sold out our first, 2-day Certified Scrum Product Owner course in NYC last month. We’re planning another one next February back in NYC. Early bird tickets are on sale now.

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As always, if you want me to work directly with your company on training, coaching or workshops, don’t hesitate to reach out.

This post was originally published to my newsletter subscribers (10k of them now). If you’d like to get these updates via email sign up here.

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Moving To A Continuous World. This Changes Everything.

Thunderbirds
I went to the New York Air Show at Stewart Airport over Labor Day weekend. I brought my camera. This is the best photo I captured. These are the Thunderbirds F16 demonstration team from the US Air Force. I’ve never seen anything move as fast as these jets.

 

Hey folks –

 

I, for one, choose not to give up on summer just yet. Technically we’ve got until the 21st of September and I’m soaking up every day of sun until such time as I have to break out the fall sweaters and jackets (which given the forecast here in metro NYC, is no time soon). This month’s newsletter focuses on one word:continuous.

 

This relatively small word has fundamentally shifted the way we build products & services as well as how we design the organizations that manage them. It’s being widely used in a variety of contexts and, like many buzz phrases, risks becoming meaningless if not divisive without a clear definition and understanding of the impact it has. Because this continuous reality is shifting how we do everything from writing code to staffing our teams, I thought it was worthwhile to dig deeper into the term.

 

I want to focus on three specific concepts:

 

  1. Continuous delivery  — In the last 5 years we’ve seen the meteoric rise of the DevOps movement. The combination of development and operations efforts, historically siloed and separate functions, has given our digital product teams the ability to test, deploy, roll back and update bits of code as often as the organization needs to. The value here? A fundamental shift in the malleability of digital products giving teams endless “swings” at launching and improving their services. The big bang release is headed for extinction.
  2. Continuous learning — “So what?” you may ask yourself (or me). Just because we can ship code faster doesn’t mean we should or want to. I would respond with this: the sooner you get your ideas into the hands of your customers, the sooner you can find out how accurate your product choices have been. Continuous delivery is the engine that drives continuous learning — the ability to assess how well our products are meeting the needs of our customers. When measured quantitatively, this learning tells us what our customers are doing with the product. Coupled with regular and frequent qualitative conversations we get a 360 degree view of, not only, what is happening but why it’s happening as well.
  3. Continuous improvement — Traditionally, improving our product AND the way we worked on it was left to the postmortems that took place after product launch. By building a continuous learning loop into every product release cycle we can now improve, you guessed it, continuously. Each time new insight comes in we have the option to use that information to make our product better along with the way our teams worked to deliver it. In essence, the organization is sensing how well it’s working together and responding in real time. I can’t overstate how powerful this is. At the core of organizational agility and responsiveness is continuous improvement. The cultures we create for our teams must view this type of growth as critical and not only allow it, but encourage it.

 

Do you have a good story about a company that has adopted a continuous mindset? I’d love to hear it.

 

[Jeff]

@jboogie
jeff@gothelf.co

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Book News

Both Sense & Respond and the 2nd edition of Lean UX are now available for pre-order on Amazon. Lean UX 2nd edition is coming out this month (3.5 years since Lean UX first came out). Sense & Respond is our follow-up for the leaders looking to build companies and teams that support the approaches we advocate for in Lean UX. If you end up reading one or both of the books, we’d be grateful for your reviews on Amazon.

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Upcoming Workshops

Sticking to my plan to travel less in the second half of 2016, here’s where I’ll be for the rest of the year:

 

Graz, Austria – October 17 – 1-day Lean UX in the Enterprise workshop as part of the World Usability Congress.

 

Linkoping, Sweden – October 21 – 1-day Lean UX in the Enterprise workshop as part of DevLin conference.

 

Lean Startup Week, San Francisco, California, USA – Oct 31 – Nov 6 – super excited to be back at Eric Ries’ premiere Lean Startup event. I’ll be teaching a short workshop and giving a talk.

 

Budapest, Hungary – Stretch Leadership Conference – Dec 1-2, 2016 – I visited Budapest earlier this year for Craft conference. This event, produced by the same folks, is focused on building better teams and companies. Very excited to be a part.

 

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As always, if you want me to work directly with your company on training, coaching or workshops, don’t hesitate to reach out. 

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Maintaining the winds of change

Badass Dutch Goat
Here’s a picture of a badass goat I saw in the Dutch town of Bergen this month in July. The honey badger has nothing on this goat.

 

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 made your case to management. You were compelling. You collected evidence and proved the value of continuous improvement and customer centricity and management listened. Great, right? It is until the inevitable backlash occurs.

We’re watching this scenario play out in real time and in public with the teams at the UK’s Government Digital Service (GDS). For years now, GDS has served as an inspiration to complex bureaucracies, in government and beyond, in the fields of digital transformation, agility, continuous learning and customer (constituent) centricity. If you don’t know the story of GDS, it’s worth digging into it. There’s no shortage of material but if you don’t have a lot of time, this recent summary by Bob Gower at Inc. magazine is a good start.

GDS has transformed how the citizens of the UK connect and interact with their government. In the process they’ve brought previously outsourced services in house giving large swathes of autonomy to dozens of product teams across the country. Sounds amazing, right? You can’t get more bureaucratic than government and if a country on the scale of the UK can change the way they do business, surely any organization can. Except, not everybody’s thrilled. In recent days, an effort has surfaced to dismantle GDS and return the work they’ve been doing back to the consulting companies who’ve been cut out of the loop thanks to GDS’s success.

Change is difficult. And with any change there are winners and losers. We expect the “losers” to take defeat gracefully, evolve and join us in the new reality. This is, unfortunately, an overly optimistic point of view. What then, can a fledgling transformation effort do to ensure its momentum continues and that those displaced by the change eventually join in the transition?

Here are 3 things:

  1. Don’t stop evangelizing — Once change takes hold it’s easy to get complacent about maintaining momentum for it. Change scares many people and as soon as momentum seems to die down for it, those folks may push back. Ensure that the tactics that got your revolution going are maintained even after transformation takes hold.
  2. Ensure a place for those displaced by the change — The biggest fear people have against change is not seeing themselves in the new reality. Where will my job go? What will I be doing? I don’t know how to do that. Reach out to colleagues impacted by digital transformation. Explain to them how their roles will evolve and what training opportunities are available to get up to speed on that change. Make it clear that this training is not just relevant to the current workplace but will be valuable in their future endeavors as well.
  3. Be even more transparent — Lack of transparency kills momentum. Showing off what you were doing and how it was working got your digital transformation underway. Not that it’s rolling, turn up the transparency. Broadcast your activities, wins, losses and plans to the entire company. Let everyone know what’s coming. No one likes surprises, especially ones that feel like they threaten careers. Continue to prove — through showcasing of evidence — why this way of working is better and how it benefits your customers, your company and your colleagues.

Have you run into a situation where a nascent organizational transformation encountered severe backlash? Reply here and let me know.

[Jeff]

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Book News

Both Sense & Respond and the 2nd edition of Lean UX are now available for pre-order on Amazon. Josh Seiden and I have been busy this summer ensuring both of these books supply your teams with clear tactics and your managers with proven methods for building organizational responsiveness and agility.

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Upcoming Workshops

The second half of 2016 will be a lot lighter on public events. Here’s where I’ll be for the rest of the year:

Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA – August 23 – I’m super excited to visit David Hussman’s DevJam in MSP for a 1-day Lean UX in the Enterprise workshop. We’re halfway sold out with 3 weeks to go. Don’t miss out on my last 1-day event this year in the US.

New York City, New York, USA – Sep 15-16 – This 2-day class is a partnership with my friend Jeff Patton. Jeff is one of the most respected leaders in product discovery and agility and I couldn’t be happier to collaborate with him. You’ll receive your Certified Scrum Product Owner certification from Jeff in this class as well.

Graz, Austria – October 17 – 1-day Lean UX in the Enterprise workshop as part of the World Usability Congress.

Linkoping, Sweden – October 21 – 1-day Lean UX in the Enterprise workshop as part of DevLin conference.

Lean Startup Week, San Francisco, California, USA – Oct 31 – Nov 6 – after several years absence, I’m thrilled to be back at Eric Ries’ premiere Lean Startup event. I’ll be teaching a short workshop and giving a talk.

As always, if you want me to work directly with your company on training, coaching or workshops, don’t hesitate to reach out.

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You are in the software business. Whether you like it or not.

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In recent months I’ve begun a new executive coaching engagement with a large financial institution. The work has been intense and fascinating and has taught me as much as I hope I’ve managed to convey to my clients so far. In thinking about the two biggest takeaways to date with that engagement, I keep coming back to the foundational principles in our new book, Sense and Respond. 

  1. You are in the software business — Regardless of what your actual industry or domain is, if you are an organization at scale or one that seeks to scale, you are first and foremost in the software business. This is the only way to grow and compete on a global level in the 21st century. What’s fascinating to me is how many executives still don’t truly believe this statement. It’s easy to think that because you produce a non-digital service (e.g., selling cars) or are in a “traditional” industry (e.g., insurance) software is secondary to the core product and can be relegated to an “IT department.”
  2. Managing a software business is different than traditional “industrial era” management — When the production of your service is low risk, well understood and consumer needs and expectations don’t fluctuate you can optimize production efforts. Unfortunately, software has none of those qualities. It is, by its nature, complex and unpredictable — not just in scope but also in how it will look, function and perhaps most importantly what your customers will do with it. Managing this type of work requires a holistic, collaborative, agile approach that leverages technology’s unique capability to provide your organization with a constant stream of real-time insight about those unknowns. It is then, of course, up to you and your team to use that insight to adjust course towards the best possible solution for your customers and your business.
if you are an organization at scale or one that seeks to scale, you are first and foremost in the…

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I’ve witnessed first-hand when an organization truly “gets” this. It’s obvious in their team structures, management practices and most importantly how they charter work for their teams and determine their success. For those organizations not yet on board with these two principles, I urge you to consider them seriously. As Dr. Rita McGrath shared in her book, competitive advantage, barriers to entry and other obstacles that once kept startups out of “traditional industries” have disappeared. These smaller, more nimble competitors now have access to many of the same tools as incumbents. Change is the only way to survive.

Have you seen companies embrace these principles? How?