Applying The Lean Product Playbook: A Talk with Dan Olsen

The Lean Product Playbook by Dan Olsen has revolutionized the way start-ups get their products to market. But what if you don’t work in a startup? Dan reveals to Lou Rosenfeld how the lean philosophy can be applied to companies of all shapes and sizes–even enterprises. Learn what the common challenges and solutions are to bringing the lean philosophy into an established company.

The Beautiful Mess of Product Development with John Cutler

Today’s interview is just a taste of what you’ll learn at Rosenfeld’s upcoming Design in Product conference—featuring John Cutler’s closing keynote. John is the senior director of product management at Toast, a doodler, a former band member, a UX researcher, and business analyst. He’s also the prolific writer behind “The Beautiful Mess, a Substack newsletter with over 36,000 subscribers, where he writes about cross-functional product management—especially the messy parts.

As someone who likes “messy, creative endeavors” and building things with other people, John enjoys unpacking the complicated parts of collaboration, getting to the heart of messes, and finding a way forward involves much more than identifying patterns.

John finds that each person’s frame or perspective is only one of many. This is one reason the relationship between product and design is a complicated ecosystem, and the whole system—not just a part—needs to evolve together.
In an effort to reach consensus across teams, John notes that it’s easy to fall into the alignment trap where the so-called alignment is fragile and where consensus becomes more valued than a true solution. John encourages listeners to get comfortable with the complicated mess, to truly listen to multiple frames and perspectives while holding onto their own, and then to roll up their sleeves and explore a way forward together.

What you’ll learn from this episode:
About John’s background and his brief stint in a band that opened for others
About the upcoming Design in Product conference
About the messiness of product development and problem-solving
About avoiding the traps of alignment and over-simplification

Quick Reference Guide
[0:00:24] Introduction of John Cutler and Design in Product 2023, and the back story behind “The Beautiful Mess”
[0:05:01] Patterns in messes
[0:10:23] The relationship between product and design
[0:14:11] Dealing with varying work speeds and perspectives
[0:20:32] Design Ops Summit, October 2-6, 2023
[0:21:45] The alignment trap and the simplification trap
[0:30:50] A new metaphor for looking at teams in organizations
[0:34:04] John’s special words for listeners

Resources and links from today’s episode:
Design in Product 2023 rosenfeldmedia.com/events/
The Beautiful Mess, John Culter’s Substack cutlefish.substack.com/
Images of Organization by Gareth Morgan www.amazon.com/Images-Organizati…an/dp/0761906320/

Donna Lichaw on Leadership Superpowers and Kryptonite

Not too long ago, Donna Lichaw, author of The User’s Journey, was helping companies solve product problems by organizing the experience of a product or service into a narrative arc where the user is the hero.

Then she ran into a question that she couldn’t shake — a question that, once answered, would morph her business from product development to leadership development. The question unveiled a people problem rather than a product problem.

“We don’t have problems bringing products into the world. We have problems getting along with everyone, feeling good about our work, building team morale, dealing with internal fighting. We’ve been helping our customers be heroes. How can I be a hero?”

Over seven years of researching how to help leaders be heroes, she found inspiration in a variety of places, including Gestalt therapy, narrative therapy, and executive and somatic coaching.

Her conclusion can be found in her new book, The Leaders Journey: Transforming Your Leadership to Achieve the Extraordinary. Think of the book as a map for people to become the natural leaders they already are and can be through a process of radical acceptance that leads to real, lasting change. People grow into superhero leaders when they fully embrace themselves — strengths and weaknesses.

Donna’s approach to leadership is a refreshing departure from the typical advice of talk louder, take up more space, and listen more. This is a different — a journey that is unique to each individual.
• Discover your superpowers. When you’re not leveraging your superpowers at work, you’re not as powerful as you could be. When you contain your superpowers, you’ll feel sad, depressed, and restricted.
• Know your kryptonite too. When you understand the “why” behind your weaknesses, you’ll often find a superpower underneath. By embracing your quirks and appreciating how they serve you, you’ll open yourself to insights about how to move forward.

What you’ll learn from this episode:
• Why Donna felt compelled to transition her business into leadership coaching
• About the two books Donna has written for Rosenfeld Media
• Why one-size-fits-all leadership programs are a dead end
• How appreciating your weaknesses can lead to self-discovery and growth

Quick Reference Guide
[0:00:51] Introduction of Donna Lichaw and a brief summary of her book The User’s Journey
[0:02:23] About the origins of The Leader’s Journey: Transforming Your Leadership to Achieve the Extraordinary, Donna’s new book
[0:03:10] Donna recalls leading a workshop that raised an important question
[0:07:44] Looking for inspiration and resources to answer the question, “How can I be a hero?”
[0:11:24] Finding value in everything, yet recognizing what is less helpful
[0:13:57] Dealing with leadership stereotypes and churn
[0:19:10] Enterprise UX 2023
[0:21:15] All leaders have superpowers and kryptonite
[0:26:06] Leaning into your personal kryptonite
[0:30:25] How the adult film industry and literary smut fit into all of this
[0:35:06] Donna’s gift for listeners – access to her work!

Crafting Metrics for UX Success with Kate Rutter

After a start in digital software, Kate Rutter realized that qualitative definitions of success could, and needed to be, made more quantitative. Years later, she’s Principal at Intelleto, Adjunct Professor in the IXD program at California College of the Arts, and the instructor of our upcoming UX workshop “Crafting Metrics for UX Success.”

In this episode, she reflects on the extraordinary success with qualitative metrics she has observed in the UX field, and the room for growth around numerical metrics, as well as the many challenges companies are faced with when trying to determine which metrics really matter. Kate’s four part workshop (August 6-7 and August 13-14) is intended to help designers gain a numerical understanding of success—and determine what metrics they need to measure in the first place (not just the easy ones!)

Atomizing Research: Trend or Trap

There has been an explosion of interest in atomizing research, where researchers stop writing reports and instead tag individual insights in a database. The theory is that this will unlock your insights, making them findable and reusable. But does it work, and should you be doing the same? At Microsoft we tried it: Five years, 40,000 insights, 20+ research teams, and 17,000 unique users. So what have we learnt? We learnt that a structured insight library can be worth the effort. But we also learnt that atomizing insight can be taken too far. We learnt that context is critical. We learnt that short term efficiency is king, and that the required culture change is hard. And through this journey we’ve begun to discover how to blend atomized insight with your traditional research process.

Diversity In and For Design: Building Conscious Diversity in Design and Research

Enterprises like Compass need to design experiences for an incredibly diverse audience. These customers pose challenges to our ideas about happy paths and edge cases. How do we build tools for customers with such diverse needs and wants? And how do we build the right teams with the broad perspectives that can best serve these customers?

• Learn how research can build diverse perspectives and backgrounds into user testing and other research methods.
• Understand how designing tools for diverse and justifiably demanding customers helps make product design better.
  
• Expand our notions of diversity both within the enterprise and with all the customers that the enterprise serves.
  

The Heart and Brain of the AI Research

As a designer research working on Conversational AI products, I’ve been collaborating with AI Researchers (Computer Scientists) and ML engineers. The cross-pollination of our two research disciplines – i.e., I bring my design thinking, storytelling, qualitative research and thick data analysis lens, while the Computer Scientists bring their logical reasoning, modeling and coding, and big data analysis lens – has resulted in a much smarter and more empathetic AI product, as well as innovations in the Cognitive AI domain. I’ll share three use cases of how we human researchers collaborate with the AI researchers and the lessons learned.

Eye Tracking Gamechanger: Why Smartphone Eye Tracking will Revolutionize Your UX Research

The synergy of smartphone eye-tracking and user experience research allows a combination of behavioral insights and in-depth answers. eye square’s standardized experimental approach provides the ideal setting for large-scale eye-tracking research. This helps to understand how your end-users interact with your product, their mental model, and how information architecture and UI design can be improved.

Repository Retrospective: Learnings from Introducing a Central Place for UX Research

While many researchers see the value of a central research repository, how to introduce one in an organization is still a big question. Today we have the chance to learn from two researchers who have done it.

Taylor Jennings, Senior UX Researcher at Chili Piper, and Joe Nelson, User Experience Researcher at MasterControl, will share their process and experience gained from implementing their research repository. We’ll cover how they realized the need for a repository, how they convinced stakeholders, evaluated solutions, and what they’d do differently in hindsight.

Join us live as we leave plenty of opportunities for the audience to ask questions.

How Atlassian is Operationalizing Respect in Research (Videoconference)

In 2020, the Atlassian Research Operations team is shipping a program of work to deliver respect in research. From gaining informed consent to handling personal data, Theresa Marwah and her team are putting systems and practices in place to respect the privacy of their participants and exceed regulation.