We’ve signed two new books

It’s been a busy week. On top of launching Tomer Sharon’s new book Validating Product Ideas Through Lean User Research and reaching the verge of selling out our Product Management + User Experience Conference, we managed to sign two new books that should come out in early 2017.

Brett Harned, who helps organize the Digital PM Summit, is one of a new breed of project managers that focuses on the human element of getting projects done. In Project Management for Humans, he’ll explains why everyone should have at least some command of project management skills—and how the work itself is as much about understanding and working with people as it’s about managing schedules and scope creep.

Our other new signing—About (Design) Leadership—teams veteran UX managers Russ Unger, author of many popular UX books and now at 18F, and Chris Avore, who runs product design at Nasdaq. They’re chock full of practical advice (just check out the table of contents!) for UX people who are moving into management and leadership roles.

Looking forward to launching these two—and many more great new books—over the coming year.

Whose Job is User Research? An Interview with Tomer Sharon

This is part 2 in the series Whose Job is User Research.

As part of my ongoing series of posts where I try to get to the bottom of who owns user research, I reached out to Tomer Sharon, former Sr. User Experience Researcher for Google Search and now Head of UX at WeWork. He wrote a book called It’s Our Research which addresses this exact topic. His new book, Validating Product Ideas, is also now available. He’ll be speaking at the upcoming Product Management + User Experience hosted by Rosenfeld Media, designed to help teams work together to learn more about their users.

Tomer recently announced that UX at WeWork won’t have a research department and what drove that decision. I took this opportunity to ask Tomer a few questions, and to learn what suggestions he has for creating a team that conducts research well and uses it wisely.

Everybody Owns Research

Possibly the most important lesson you can learn from Tomer is this:  stop asking the question “who owns research?” “Everybody owns research,” he explains. “Research is a team sport. What research is needed is determined based on different sources–decisions the team is trying to make, known knowledge gaps, dilemmas and arguments among and between teams and more.”

Research is a team sport. The team needs to decide what it needs to know together. – Tweet This

He encourages people to use all of these sources to generate research questions. For example, if a team has trouble deciding on development or prioritization of new ideas, then a research question might be “What are the top needs or challenges our users have?”

“Research questions are questions the team needs answers to, not questions that you ask research participants during a study,” he says. That means that the team needs to decide what it needs to know together.

By making research a key part of everybody’s job, it gets rid of the problem many teams have of ignoring research reports. Instead, research becomes a tool everybody can use to answer important questions.

Use Researchers as Facilitators and Coaches

Of course, that all sounds delightful, but it does bring up three important questions:

• What if people just don’t do research?
• Should we really let people who don’t have any experience do research?
• And the most important question (to researchers, anyway) is does this mean we don’t need actual researchers any longer?

There’s good news for researchers among us. We’re still needed, and we’re not just going to let completely untrained people take over our jobs! But instead of being a service organization, Tomer recommends that researchers become mentors, coaches, and facilitators of research. WeWork’s UX team will still have well trained research professionals. In fact, those are some of the first hires that Tomer wants to make. The difference is that they will be embedded with product teams and work with everybody to help make sure research is conducted well instead of working alone in their own silo.

Of course, there are a few types of studies that professionals should lead. “In 90% of the cases,” Tomer says, “I’d prefer a non-researcher doing research, supported by guidance and mentorship of a researcher. The remaining 10% are studies such as ethnography, surveys (yes, surveys), and highly complex quantitative studies, in which I’d prefer a researcher leads the project.”

Other times when you may need to bring in specialized researchers include cross-cultural studies:  where you learn about the behavior and needs of people in a culture very different than yours. If Tomer needs to learn about the needs of WeWork members in China or Indonesia, he partners with a local design research agency (not a market research agency!) to make sure the study runs smoothly and gets insightful results. But even then, all the team stakeholders must be directly involved with the research. Learning about your users isn’t something you should outsource.

Learning about your users isn’t something you should outsource. – Tweet This

Turn Research Directly into Design

Here’s some more good news for those of you who don’t enjoy writing twenty page research reports that are never read (or creating hundred slide Powerpoint decks that colleagues suffer through). Making research an integrated part of the design process gets rid of the deliverables step.

“Research must lead to design that then leads to more research,” Tomer explains. That’s why his favorite method of synthesis and communication is the design studio or design sprint. During a design sprint, the team comes up with a shared understanding of research outcomes and their design implications through sketching, critique, and quick research on team solutions. “The researcher or key decision maker in the team or company can facilitate a discussion in which the answers to the research questions are shared.”

Research must lead to design that then leads to more research. – Tweet This

In other words, get rid of the Powerpoint, and focus on rapid synthesis of research results. Immediately turn them into ideas and designs. This can save you weeks of report writing, and it also means that your team gets a clearer idea of the problems that you’re trying to solve.

Break Down Silos (even if it’s not your job)

Obviously this is all easy for Tomer to say. He gets to build the WeWork UX team from the ground up. But what about those of us who work in companies where research is off in its own silo? Do we have to wait until we’re in charge so that we can change the rules?

Tomer offers insight on this_having spent a lot of his career working at a very large company with a very large research group. “Talk!” he says, “Approach new hires and help them with something not related to research. Teach them how to find the best parking spot or how to change their profile picture on the intranet. The key here is trust and relationship building. From there, mountains can be moved and silos can be brought down.”

Even if we’re put in silos by management, all of us, whether we’re researchers, designers, product managers, or anything else, can reach out to our coworkers and build teams that transcend silos. It’s not easy, but the results are worth it, since we end up with better team communication and products that solve a need for our users.

Learn More

Check out Tomer’s book Validating Product Ideas: Through Lean Research. Or join us on October 11 for our one-day remote conference User Research for Everyone, featuring 8 of the most respected experts in the field.

Laura Klein is a Lean UX and Research expert in Silicon Valley who teaches companies how to get to know their users and build products people will love. She’s a Rosenfeld Media expert and author of UX for Lean Startups (O’Reilly). Her newest book, Build Better Products, is set for release later in 2016. Follow her on Twitter or subscribe to her blog and podcast at Users Know.

New book: Tomer Sharon’s Validating Product Ideas

One thing that you’ll immediately notice about our newest book—Tomer Sharon’s Validating Product Ideas Through Lean User Research—is that it’s so danged practical. To create the book, Tomer used a radically simple (and practical) recipe:

1. Interview hundreds of startup founders and project managers about the questions that keep them up at night
2. Group them into nine critical questions (e.g., “Do people want the product?” and “Which design generates better results?”)
3. Guide readers through a few quick and inexpensive user research methods that actually answer each of those critical questions

The results are fantastically useful for anyone who is struggling to reduce risk and increase product success.

In other words, lean user research meets product management.

BOOM!

In some respects, this book—our 24th!—is a return to our practical, “here’s how you do it” roots. In another sense, it wasn’t written for UX people at all. Tomer, like so many of us, wants to democratize what many UX people already know. So if you’re a product manager or developer, this book is most definitely for you. But if you’re steeped in user research methods, you’ll still appreciate Tomer’s help in doing what you’ve already been doing: sharing the UX good news with the people you work with.

Like every Rosenfeld Media book, Validating Product Ideas comes in four-color paperback and four DRM-free ebook formats (ePUB, MOBI, PDF, and DAISY). Enjoy!

Whose Job is User Research? An Interview with Jeff Gothelf

While doing research for the upcoming PM+UX Conference, several respondents requested guidance around how user research should managed. In fact, it was the most common write-in answer on our survey, and a question that comes up repeatedly whenever I give talks. Apparently, there seems to be very little consensus about who on a product team should own research. This makes it a lot harder to get user insights and make good product decisions.  

In a way, this is good news. Five or ten years ago, there would have been more questions like, “How do I get my boss to consider doing user research?” and “What is user research good for?” Those still come up, but far more frequently, I’m hearing things like, “How do we make sure that everybody on the team understands the research?” and “Who is in charge of making sure research happens and deciding what to do about it?” Research, these days, is assumed. It’s just not very well managed.

To answer these questions, I interviewed several very smart people who know a thing or two about research and building products. I’ll share some of their suggestions in a series of blog posts.

First, I spoke with Jeff Gothelf, the author of Lean UX (O’Reilly, 2013) and Sense and Respond (Harvard, 2016).

Jeff spends most of his time training companies around the world on how to build usable products using Lean user experience design techniques. He’s seen his share of different organizations, and has an excellent sense of which ones are building the right things. So I asked him to help me figure out the best way to incorporate user research into the development process.

User Research is Owned by the Team

Companies that are functioning well and building great products are doing user research. And they’re doing it together. “Research is owned by the team,” Jeff says. “It is as important as design or writing code. That said, in most organizations, it’s the UX person who typically drives the research or, in their absence, the PM. It’s not necessarily the best approach, but it’s what I see most often.”

In this model, the person responsible for making sure that the research happens doesn’t own performing or communicating the research. What this means is that the product manager or UX designer will request that some specific research will be done.

Unfortunately, this often translates into the PM asking for research and a researcher who is completely unaffiliated with the team or even hired from outside going off and interviewing users and then coming back six weeks later with a report, by which time the team has almost certainly moved on. This generally means that the results of the study will never be used by the team, since the results will be out of date and irrelevant.

Create a Better Scenario

Rather than seeing research as something that is simply requested by someone on the team and then delivered, Jeff suggests a more collaborative approach. The best case involves the PM or UX designer sharing a specific business or user need that requires some research, and then having that turn into a shared activity where members of the team are involved in performing the research. “I’ve found it rare that a team can’t execute their own research,” Jeff says.

“I’ve found it rare that a team can’t execute their own research.” – Jeff Gothelf – Tweet This

There’s still a place for experts in Jeff’s model too. “There may be some situations where getting to the participants or communicating with them may prove challenging (language barriers, cultural differences, etc.) in which case an expert can help,” Jeff explains. “Also, if nobody on the team has research experience, bringing in an expert to train the team is helpful. If you already have some researchers in the company, they can train and deputize others to start collecting user insights.”

Never Outsource Research

Jeff is also not a fan of having outside researchers conduct studies, since it takes time and can lead to a one and done mentality. “I advise teams to never outsource their research. Letting someone else do your research means waiting for them to do it, synthesize it and write it up. Also, outsourcing the research typically means it’s a singular or at least a finite event. I believe research should be continuous.”

When teams bring outside people in to conduct studies and simply hand off results, they’re missing out on a huge opportunity to build skills within the team. Outsourced studies, even relatively simple ones, can cost thousands of dollars. If you’re making that budget decision every time you want to learn something, it’s going to keep you from doing all the research you should be doing. On the other hand, if members of your team can find ways to learn constantly from users, that price comes down considerably, as does the time it takes to run a study.

Finding ways to learn constantly from users brings the price of research down considerably. – Tweet This

There are a lot of options for getting your team up to speed: outside experts can come in and facilitate training sessions or work with the team to do the research rather than perform everything for them. Jeff also recommends Steve Portigal’s book, Interviewing Users, Giff Constable’s Book, Talking to Humans, and my own book (Thanks, Jeff!), UX for Lean Startups.

Get Out of Silos

Cross functional teams make many Lean UX practices possible. It’s easier to have “the team” be responsible for customer discovery if the team exists as a persistent entity throughout the life of the product. But the reality is that many companies still don’t work that way. Research, product, design, and engineering are often in their own silos, communicating only through deliverables, if at all.

The best approach is to get rid of silos entirely, but very few of us have the option to restructure how our companies work in order to make research more effective. If you’re in an organization where research has its own silo, Jeff has several suggestions for making those silos less restrictive.

“Brown bags, demos, ride-alongs, workshops – these are all good tools to show how to do research and what to make of your findings,” he explains. “At the same time, the PM/UX folks should seek this out from their researcher colleagues if it’s not offered up.” Even when your company is divided up by practice instead of by product team, there’s no reason why you can’t reach out to other people working on similar things and build bridges between the silos.

Learning what other people do and how to do it and teaching them what you do and how you do it can be a wonderful way of creating respect and unity within the team. It has the added bonus of making the product better because everybody ends up working together rather than stepping all over each other and ignoring real customer needs.

Learn More

Interested in helping your teams collaborate to create better research outcomes? Check out Jeff’s book Lean UX (O’Reily, 2013) or join us this October for a one-day remote conference User Research for Everyone, featuring 8 of the most respected experts in the field.

Laura Klein is a Lean UX and Research expert in Silicon Valley who teaches companies how to get to know their users and build products people will love. She’s a Rosenfeld Media expert and author of UX for Lean Startups (O’Reilly). Her newest book, Build Better Products, is set for release later in 2016. Follow her on Twitter or subscribe to her blog and podcast at Users Know.

Announcing the Program for Product Management + UX Conference

The Product Management + User Experience virtual conference program is live! Thanks to the 150+ people who sent in feedback to help inform the final program content. Our six speakers will tackle your most top of mind questions. Register yourself or your whole team so you can better tap product management to design successful products.

The Program Lineup

Good to Great

The market competition is fierce these days. Users can choose from thousands of apps and products. So what questions do you need to ask to make well-designed products that are widely adopted in the world? Marty Cagan will share insights on how to smartly use design and product management to make and launch successful products.

Balancing Continuous Discovery and Delivery

Many product design teams struggle to balance research and discovery with production. How do you cross this imaginary line? Jeff Patton will help you identify a clear set of measures to improve this balance. By incorporating discovery in ways that are lean and meaningful, you can take advantage of missed opportunities and improve product performance.

Whose Job Is It?

When designers and managers are too constrained by title, talented people get underutilized. And in turn, the product suffers. Laura Klein knows a better way. By organizing work around people’s strengths, everybody can deliver value to the customer. Laura shares this exciting line of thinking that you can use to transform your own team’s work.

There is No Such Thing As UX Strategy. There is Only Product Strategy.

Most companies have yet to realize that UX strategy and product strategy are the same thing. By focusing too much on differences, you create silos and impede collaboration. And ultimately, miss important opportunities in the market. Jeff Gothelf will share new ways designers and product managers can rethink this relationship. And tap the best thinking from each approach.

UX <3 PM: 6 Ways To Learn Better Together

Designers and managers can work at cross-purposes because each can so easily lose sight of the other’s unique value. Tomer Sharon will elaborate on how to tap the rare gifts designers and product managers offer each other. And how to articulate an agenda that brings them together after all.

Get to Radical Focus with OKRs

Few things rally an organization to life like a monumental goal. But it has to be well considered and clearly delineated. Christina Wodtke will share the advantages of using objectives and key results (OKRs) to create a high level of zeal and discipline for your entire organization.

Taking the Next Step

If you’re ready to improve collaboration between your designers and product managers, join us on February 3! Hear from these six thought leaders from anywhere in the world. You can use this day as an opportunity for your teams to break silos and learn together. Both individual and meeting rooms ticket give you access to unlimited replays and surprise perks. Register now.

User Research for Developing a Conference Program

We’re working hard to prove that even tiny companies—like Rosenfeld Media—have no excuses when it comes to doing user research (we wrote about it here). We’re at it here, doing the research to develop the program for our next virtual conference. Laura Klein, author of UX for Lean Startups and the forthcoming Build Better Products, helped us with the research and analysis (she’ll be speaking at the event too). Here’s her description of what we did and what we learned.

Product managers and UX designers understand the need for user research when building a product. Good product managers and UX designers actually DO user research when building a product.

Rosenfeld Media cares deeply about good product management and UX design, so when they started talking about doing an online conference on February 3, 2016—about the intersection of product management and UX design—they decided to reach out to potential attendees first in order to understand what people want to know. They also recruited some top people working in product management and UX as speakers: Christina Wodtke, Jeff Gothelf, Jeff Patton, Marty Cagan, and Tomer Sharon (and me too!). We all worked together to gain insights into questions people have about product management, UX, and how we can all work better together.

We all worked together to gain insights into questions people have about product management, UX, and how we can all work better together. (Tweet this)

Let’s take a look at what we did and what we learned.

The Qualitative

First, we had to understand who the users (conference attendees) were hopefully going to be. Too many conferences choose “anybody who will buy a ticket” as their target customers, but frankly that’s what leads to unfocused, boring conferences where very few people learn anything of actual value to them.

If you try to build a product that works for everybody from students to CEOs, you’ll likely end up not providing much value to at least some of your users, and the same thing is true for conferences. That wasn’t something we were cool with.  We knew we wanted to create a conference that was useful and actionable for people who are currently building things or managing people who build things—working product managers, UX designers, researchers, and their bosses.  

Armed with a couple of quick, provisional personas, we set out to get some qualitative feedback. A few of us spent some time talking to PMs and UXers we knew who fit the personas, and then we started analyzing the most common questions and problems they had about working together and building products.

The Quantitative

Patterns started to emerge pretty quickly; we used them to put together a short survey with questions that were representative of what we’d been hearing. We wanted to know whether the respondents spent more time doing UX design, product management, or something else. We wanted to know their job titles. And we wanted to know which questions or topics they found most interesting.

We asked them to choose from a set of questions that ranged from “How should Product Managers and UX Designers coordinate and manage discovery work?” to “What does a great Product Manager do?” to “How should UX Designers work with engineering?”

We heard from over 150 of you. Most were UX designers, but we also got a good collection of product managers and a few people who listed themselves as “other.” Somebody listed himself as a “troublemaker.” We know who you are, Steve, and we’re watching you.

The Results

About two thirds of the respondents said that their jobs mostly involved UX, but job titles included everything from user researcher to product designer to innovation catalyst to CEO. We’re taking that as a good sign that people from all parts of organizations are starting to care about user experience design!

The top three questions people had, by quite a large margin, were:

• How should product managers and UX designers coordinate and manage discovery work? Over 77% of respondents were interested in that one.
• How should product managers and UX designers split up the work of product development? That was 65%.
• How to balance discovery work on new ideas with the demands of supporting teams doing delivery work? 60% of people wanted to know the answer to that.

But it got interesting when we looked at some of the differences between UX designers and product managers. Over 70% of people who identified with UX were interested in knowing how to split up work, while only 50% of PMs and 41% of “others” cared. Maybe the UX designers are feeling like they’re doing too much of the heavy lifting?

Over 70% of people who identified with UX were interested in knowing how to split up work, while only 50% of PMs and 41% of “others” cared. (Tweet this)

Only about 35% of product managers and UX designers are interested in learning how to work better together and only about 12% of people wanted to know how to work better with engineering, so maybe that means everybody’s getting along just fine. Although, 20% of the UX designers wanted to know how they can move into product management, so we’ll see how long everybody likes each other when the designers try to steal the all the product jobs.

Of course, one thing that always happens when you run a survey is that you realize you left out the most important question. My two favorite write-ins were, “What’s so hard about a UX designer’s work?” and “Why do we need Product Managers?” I think we’d all like to know those answers.

Favorite (and snarky) write-in questions: “What’s so hard about a UX designer’s work?” and “Why do we need Product Managers?” (Tweet this)

Some of the other great questions we got asked were around getting both UX and Product to work better with research, including one asking for a session called, “User Research—Why it’s not scary.” I would totally watch that session.

The submitted questions that didn’t address research often focused on coordination, communication, and collaboration, including a lot of great questions about decision making and setting priorities. Oh, and, somebody just asked for “as much Marty as we can get”, which is perfectly understandable, because we’re pretty excited that Marty Cagan will be speaking too.

The Conference

We’re now hard at work preparing talks and discussions that focus on the things you care about. Creating great product development organizations takes a tremendous amount of work and coordination, and we’re excited about helping you do it.

So that we can reach as many people as possible, we’re running the conference online. That means that you can watch all six talks from the comfort of your own desk, and I can give my talk while wearing bunny slippers.

We’ll be sharing the titles and descriptions of the talks as they’re finished, but you might not want to wait, since the early bird prices end on December 18. We hope you’ll join us for the Product Management + User Experience Conference on February 3.

Laura Klein is a Lean UX and Research expert in Silicon Valley, where she teaches companies how to get to know their users and build products people will love. She’s a Rosenfeld Media expert and author. Her newest book, Build Better Products, is set for release later in 2016. She’s also the author of UX for Lean Startups (O’Reilly) and blogs about UX at Users Know. Follow her on Twitter.

Join us at The Advance Retreat

How can we foster an effective, open, enduring culture of design in our organizations?

One of the coolest things about my job is that I get to engage in constant conversations with design people about what’s interesting and important. Whether it’s books, events, or consulting services, people love to tell us what topics they want us to cover.

From those many conversations, I’ve concluded that one of the things UX people need most is… well, more conversations. Acquiring and refining nuts-and-bolts skills are important too, but how-to information is increasingly easy to come by. Productive conversation with peers isn’t.

So we’re trying something new: we’re launching the very first Advance Retreat. It’ll focus on answering a single question—one that more and more design leaders are struggling with: How can we foster an effective, open, enduring culture of design in our organizations?

That conversation oughta fill two days easy.

We’re producing the Advance Retreat with Marc Rettig and Hannah du Plessis of Fit Associates; they’re hugely experienced with this particular challenge. AND they are really, really good at facilitating conversations that lead to co-learning and co-creation. In other words, real outcomes. (I speak from experience; Fit’s help has moved Rosenfeld Media forward.)

The Advance Retreat is limited to 50 mid-late career design leaders, and you can apply to participate here. The Retreat may not be for you, but if your organization is larger than a startup, I’ll bet dollars to donuts that someone you work with could benefit greatly from participating. (Feel free to forward this PDF brochure their way.)

We’ll be meeting February 11-12 in Palm Springs. The very cool Ace Hotel is the ideal setting—both inside and out—for the kind of conversations we all need.

Questions or comments? Post them below. Or just go ahead and apply to be part of the conversation in the desert this February.

Explore the intersection of Product Management and UX

Product Management and User Experience are practices that—more and more—involve and depend upon each other. But it’s not always clear how they should intersect. Who should be responsible for what? How might Product Managers and UX practitioners best support each other?

To explore the UX/PM intersection, we’re trying an experiment. Rosenfeld Media is organizing a one-day virtual conference—creatively titled Product Management + User Experience —that takes place February 3. We’ve lined up an absolutely fantastic speaker line-up that balances both UX and PM perspectives: Marty Cagan, Jeff Gothelf, Laura Klein, Jeff Patton, Tomer Sharon, and Christina Wodtke.

If you look at the event site, you’ll see that there are no sessions listed. That’s by design: we’re asking you to weigh in on what PM/UX questions are most important to you. Just let us know. The results will help the speakers understand what to cover in their talks (and we’ll let you know when their sessions are announced).

If you do this by EOD Wednesday, December 2, we’ll enter you in a drawing to win one of ten advance copies of our next book, Tomer Sharon’s Validating Product Ideas Through Lean User Research. (Tomer is one of our speakers.)

You can also just go ahead and register now (early bird rate ends December 18). Either way, please weigh in: what would you like to learn about the intersection of Product Management + User Experience?

Our new editorial advisory board

Sometimes I feel that my one and only superpower is convincing smart but busy people to take on yet more responsibilities.

Well, I’ve struck again!

I’ve pulled together a new crew of advisors to help develop the editorial agenda for our UX books—and to review our proposals: Abby Covert, Andy Polaine, Boon Sheridan, Dave Malouf, Sara Wachter-Boettcher, Steve Krug, and Whitney Quesenbery. You can read their bios here.

This rag-tag bunch is a mix of past RM authors with people who’ve written for other publishers and—gasp!—have self-published. (Another gasp: some aren’t authors at all.) They work solo, at agencies, and at large organizations. They represent many, if not most, facets of UX. All, at some point in their careers, have been crack UX practitioners. And, dammit, they’re smart and helpful and nice.

Over the coming years, we’ll continue to publish UX books that will help you do better work and, by extension, impact the experiences of millions of people; thanks in advance to our new advisors for helping us help you. And endless gratitude to our emeritus editorial advisors, whose thoughtful and generous assistance continues to benefit us all: Andrew Dillon, Dan Szuc, Dave Gray, Dirk Knemeyer, Ginny Redish, Harry Max, Irene Au, Jared Spool, Josh Clark, Kim Goodwin, Kristian Simsarian, Marc Rettig, Mike Kuniavsky, Nathan Shedroff, Peter Bogaards, Peter Morville, and Tony Byrne.

Radical Books from Prodigal Authors

Happy news: we’ve recently signed authors to write these three exciting new books, all likely to be published in 2016:

1. Epic Fail: Design Research War Stories by Steve Portigal
2. The Dawn of Agentive Technology: From Good Tools to Good Rules by Chris Noessel
3. Blindspot: Illuminating the Hidden Value of Business by Steven Diller, Nathan Shedroff, and Sean Sauber

Steve has been compiling war stories—some written by you—for years. In Epic Fail, he’ll knit them together in ways that lead to new conclusions, lessons, and maybe even something grander. A design research framework for the next century, perhaps? We’ll see.

Chris’s book will be a wild ride; not surprising, given the scope of Make It So, his last book. Technologies like AI typically outpace our abilities to humanize them; I’m hopeful that Chris’s book helps designers to dramatically narrow that gap.

And a book on the hidden value of business from Rosenfeld Media? Well, there’s some incredibly exciting stuff happening at the intersection of business and design, and we’ll have some interesting news on this to report on later this fall. Please stay tuned.

In honor of these new books, here’s a discount code that will get you 25% off any Rosenfeld Media book until Saturday, 9/26: PRODIGAL.

More happy news: this is Steve’s second book with Rosenfeld Media. Chris’s too. And Nathan’s third. Indi Young and Whitney Quesenbery have also worked with us on more than one book. That means we’re doing something right. Normally I’d give credit to taking a UX-infused approach to how we do business. But when it comes to writing books, I can’t overemphasize the very old school approach of providing authors with great support from a human editor. As one of our authors put it just yesterday:

I’m not sure why so many other publishers are axing their developmental editors; I don’t see any other way to ensure an experience that’s good for an author and, ultimately, readers. So a huge tip of the hat to Marta Justak, who has edited most of our books.