In Praise of Ultra-Low-Fidelity Prototyping Oh, Ultra-Low-Fidelity Prototype, how I love thee, in all thy junky glory! We love our minimum viable products, our scale models, our proofs of concept,even our lowly paper prototypes. They are wonderful and important. But they are not everything. Ultra-Low Fi Pro, you are ugly…

This afternoon, I was logging a receipt in my financial tool and — Hey look! The invoice icon reminded me that I had an invoice to create. So I jumped to email to find the client’s email address, and — Hey look! A new email! And — Hey look! It’s…

For years, I’ve been telling people to get out of their comfort zones, sending them out into the streets of San Jose or Sydney or Raleigh to talk to strangers about a challenge. Recently someone led me to a new insight that hit me hard: comfort zones come in different…

I’ve heard some version of this story over and over again in my discovery interviews with potential clients: “I hired the number one student from <internationally famous university> into <high-responsibility role> and the guy keeps asking me what he should be doing! I need him to figure out what to…

In his article The Perils of Empathy, Paul Bloom characterizes empathy as “a moral train wreck” that “makes the world worse.” We tend to empathize with the saddest and most familiar story, abandoning reason. He asserts that we’d be much better people if we used reason and compassion as an…

I love this simple tool that draws together Desirability, Viability and Feasibility. I learned about it from IDEO and Lime Design a few years ago, and I see everywhere on the ‘net these days. The DVF framework, well exploited, is incredibly powerful for innovators looking for a product at the…

Well, I’ve gone and done it now. I gave up a lovely, fun, interesting job working with terrific colleagues for a great leader in a mission-driven company. To be an entrepreneur. Bye-bye benefits, bye-bye corporate IT department, bye-bye routine. Why am I doing this to myself? Reason number one: I’m…

Illustrations by @schhen. Captions on the left are clickable.

What a week! Olga Trusova (@olga_t ) and I recently returned from Boston where we attended a design thinking bootcamp in Fidelity’s amazing ThinkSpace. For the last year I’ve been working at Citrix, running an learning program for innovators — design thinking is our backbone and the driver that’s begun…