On the Sofa with Josh Seiden
Josh Seiden is a designer, author and coach who works with teams to create great products and services and help companies create the culture, processes and practices to do great work. He helps teams solve real problems for customers and create value for businesses.
He also works as a coach to help teams improve the way they work, build more effective collaborations, and enjoy the journey of product development.
He’s a co-founder of Sense & Respond Press, a micro-publisher that creates short, focused books on innovation, digital transformation, and product management.
And he’s the author of “Outcomes Over Output” (S&R Press) and the co-author of two books: “Sense & Respond” (from Harvard Business Publishing) and “Lean UX” (from O’Reilly).
Josh joined us on the sofa before his up and coming talk at SofaConf.
Can you briefly explain how your career led you to being a consultant and book author.
Consulting was an accident. I’d been working in-house, first as a product manager at a tech company, then as a designer at a consultancy. When the first dot-com bubble burst in 2000, I found myself out of work. I was lucky though, because my former clients no longer wanted to pay agency rates, and I was able to get freelance work from them. I discovered that I liked working for myself, and working from home. Over the years since then, I’ve worked in-house and at agencies and for myself. I like them all — they offer different benefits and tradeoffs — but at this point in my career, the freelance consultant arrangement is the best fit for me personally.
In some ways, being an author was an accident too, though I guess it’s a case of “chance favors the prepared mind.” I studied writing in college, but I didn’t seriously pursue writing as a profession. In 2011 or so, Jeff Gothelf approached me to help write Lean UX. We were already business partners by then, and we’d been teaching Lean UX together for over a year, so it made sense to join the project. I feel very grateful both for the collaborative partnership with Jeff and for the book’s success.
Lean UX: Designing Great Products with Agile Teams is a staple read for any UX designer and it is often quoted in many articles. It has been out for seven years now and has been very successful within the design community.
If you were to do a revision of the book would you change or adapt any of the content? If so, why?
A well-timed question! We’re actually planning the next edition of Lean UX. Since we published the second edition in 2017, we’ve seen so much change in the UX world: Design Systems, DesignOps, Design Sprints — all of these have made an impact on the field. We’ve seen new tools emerge and new practices that come with managing these tools. At the same time, the Agile world has advanced — frameworks like SAFe claim to incorporate Lean UX, for example. And we’ve seen the growth of Product Management as a user-centric practice.
In our work, both Jeff and I have worked with countless companies and practitioners who are applying Lean UX in today’s environment, so we’ll be sharing what we’ve learned since the last edition came out.
One last point: I’d love to hear from the community on this — what would you like to see in the next edition of Lean UX? What’s challenging for you? Do you have a case study you’d like to share? We’d love to hear from you!
What are the most common challenges your clients face and why do you think it’s so frequent?
In some ways, the challenges have been remarkably stable over the years: silo’d organizations that have trouble collaborating across design, technology, product management, sales, etc. So much of my work is about creating real teams, then creating a shared understanding across the team.
Another challenge that seems really basic but is really hard: teams have a hard time getting and using end-user feedback. This starts with limited access to users at the start of the process, and continues to understanding what happens after we ship. Teams struggle to understand what users are doing with their products and to feed that insight back into their work. So many teams are “one and done.” They ship a feature and never come back to revisit it.
Related to this: teams struggle to implement Agile well. So often, Agile is used as a machine to pump out features relentlessly. (Melissa Perri calls this The Build Trap. John Cutler calls it the Feature Factory.) Regardless of what you call it, the problem is that it misunderstands the core idea of agile: the ability to respond to change as you learn. In concept, this value is deeply compatible with user-centric design work. In practice, companies really struggle to get this right. When they do though, it’s magic.
On a podcast, he mentioned his time working at Cooper and interactions with Alan Cooper.
Alan Cooper is the co-founder of Cooper and a pioneer of the modern computing era. He created the programming language Visual Basic and wrote industry-standard books on design practice like “About Face.”
“ I would say that the big thing that Alan taught me was to understand the constraints that you were given on a problem, and that a lot of times the sort of big wins come from seeing unspoken constraints and removing them.”
What does this mean and how can designers apply this learning to their own work?
There is no spoon!
Designers often get asked to do things like “fix this screen” or “re-design this report.” Too often, we accept these briefs without question. The problem is that these briefs have hidden constraints in them. “Fix this screen” implies that the screen needs to exist. What would happen if you could remove the screen entirely? “Re-design the report,” implies that the report needs to exist so that a human can make a decision. But what if you could automate that decision making so people didn’t need to look at the report?
These are the kinds of questions designers need to ask.
With three very successful books and countless valuable articles. You are seen as an expert in the field, where do you go to educate yourself?
Most of my learning comes from practice, and from conversations with clients and other practitioners. I also belong to a small community of trusted peers — I work with them when I get stuck. They are a terrific source of ideas and perspectives, and function a bit as a study group — recommending books and articles.
What do you see as the biggest opportunity for designers right now?
Let’s just say that the world is a target-rich environment right now. There are so many big, systemic issues facing society today. Design promises a way to work on these things. These are not easy, quick-fix issues, but they are the defining issues of our time. As a designer, you can get involved.
There have been many book clubs that have arisen over the last few weeks. If you had to select 5 books for a book club, what would they be and why?
Well, my wife and I have been re-reading Moby Dick, which is amazing, and is great for people facing the prospect of a long time at home. We read out loud to one another, which is a really lovely way to read a book like this. When that’s done, we may move on to something else big. Ulysses? War & Peace?
I also just picked up Blood, Bones and Butter, by Gabrielle Hamilton. Her recent essay in the NY Times was heartbreaking — the story of shuttering her NYC restaurant in the face of this crisis — and I wanted to go back and read more from her.
Professionally, some great new books to check out: David Bland’s “Testing Business Ideas” is fantastic.
If you haven’t already read Melissa Perri’s “Escaping the Build Trap”, you should. And Barry O’Reilly’s “Unlearn” is terrific. Daniel Stillman’s new “Good Talk” is on my list too.
Lastly, I’ll put in two plugs: one is for Jeff Gothelf’s new book, “Forever Employable”, a book about how to build your career. The second is for the books from Sense & Respond Press, the publishing company Jeff and I run. These are short, practical books, designed to be read in a single sitting — and many of them would be great for your next book club!
What are you going to be talking about at SofaConf?
I’ll be talking about how to plan work more effectively using the idea of Outcomes. Teams often want to get more outcome-driven, but in reality, this can be difficult. I’ll be discussing a simple but powerful way to align your work around outcomes.
