Mind the product conference— what I took home with me
My first time at the conference. Meeting people, talking and bonding over similar problems we are all facing and learning from the seniors that walked the path many times. These are my learnings that I’m taking from the conference that stuck with me the most.
Watch the elbow
Sometimes we focus on one problem at “hand”, but never think if the problem is the last joint in a bigger issue. Think “Do we need to go a level deeper from hand to the elbow?”
Agile loops are never the same fixed length
Using true agility and design sprints to do 2–3 iterative tests and then build. The loops in agile development don’t have the same timespan.
Example:
2 weeks to build and test prototype, 1 week to adapt and retest a prototype, 1 week to again adapt and test the prototype, 3 months to build the product and launch it, 4days to prototype solutions for problems found after launch and test them, 1day to do additional improvements after testing and retesting; 3week implementation of an improvement.
Map the product customer touch points — improve one point at the time
Select one point in the customer’s journey and work on it. This is a base in Jake Knapp’s design sprint process after you have already established what your product is. To my question weather or not it could be used for product discovery Jake said: “It could work but you would probably need to adapt it. Can’t promise but if you try it, let me know.”
My learning from the talk of Jake Knapp.
Use Product development checklist
- Identify needs
- Research and look at analogies
- Stakeholder analysis
- Operational research — limitations
- Hazard analysis -the bad things
- Specification creation — Not too detailed and not too vague — inspire great vision for the far future so your team has orientation when making decisions on details
- Creative design
- Conceptual design
- Prototype design
- Verification — testing the idea
My learning from the talk of Blade Kotelly.
Use Jobs to be done
Need to better understand what that is.
Add Agile delivery coach to your team
What are his jobs?
- Keeps people accountable and supports them in delivering their promises.
- Makes sure product delivery will happen on agreed time.
- Makes sure team is happy, helps resolve issues and is as a neutral person keeping the team spirit up.
- Makes sure the process is followed, checklists are checked, …
My learning from the talk of Jane Austin.
Advice for building future of technology
- All masterpieces begin as experiments.
- Don’t overcomplicate where you don’t need to. Use common sense. To turn on a light don’t put a server in between. Some things should just stay stupid or at least always have stupid mode as a fallback.
- Build technology that doesn’t consume all of our attention all the time. Take attention only when needed. Don’t be greedy. Technology should help us spend more time being human.
- Make better user of ambient information transportation mediums. Simple sound and light signals can take minimal amount of our attention and communicate the crucial information using only a few signal variations. Leave it up to the user to then ignore it or actively engage and receive more information if needed. — www.calmtechnology.com
- When designing the future be aware of the social norm. Test for the question “Will this go with the social norm? If not, how many iterations will it take to become accepted?” There is only limited amount of change wide population of the world is willing to accept. Perfect example is Google glass that failed because it was too much at the same time.
My learning from the talk of Amber Case.
Empower your employees to take ownership of their workplace
Workplace should make us feel comfortable and as we are all different, new fancy toys and sofas won’t solve the problem. Management should empower teams to collaborate, propose and be scrappy about creating their workplace. It might not be the tidiest place anymore, but employee satisfaction is worth it.
My learning from the talk of Sarah Nelson.
Computers can be unsure — and they should tell us that and ask for help
In the age of data and AI computers are getting smarter and smarter but many times they can be uncertain and they know it. The problem is that most of the time we as users are not aware of that uncertainty. As creators of new technologies we should implement reliability indicacators and ask users to provide feedback. This way machines will be able to receive feedback and do corrections. As they say garbage in, garbage out.
With great power of data comes great data responsibility or lack of it. Be honest with your users, trust broken is hard to fix — www.Unroll.me was put as an example.
My learning from the talk of Josh Clark.
Company culture starts with everyday actions
Every Day actions determine the culture not the other way around. You are what you do. Example of that was a story of a Nissan factory going from the least efficient to the most efficient and no one could copy it. If a worker found an error on the running belt and couldn’t fix it, he could pull the string above him, stop the production. Lead of the operation would then congratulate the worker for spotting the error and help him solve it. Be the change you want to see in your company.
Set vision and trust others to fill in the details
If you are in a position of a high level stakeholder like CEO, set the vision of what we wand to target. Set measures by which your employees will be able to navigate and know when they are at the finish line or close to it.
My learning from the talk of Barry O'Reilly.
Have fun with your team
Have fun with your team members and life will be easier. Thanks guys for a great conference trip. D.Labs product team in the element.
