The Jobs To Be Done Playbook

These days, consumers have real power: they can research companies, compare ratings, and find alternatives with a simple tap. Focusing on customer needs isn’t a nice-to-have, it’s a strategic imperative.

The Jobs To Be Done Playbook helps organizations turn market insight into action. This book shows you techniques to make offerings people want, as well as make people want your offering.

Who this book is for

Change makers and transformation agents inside of companies looking to shift focus towards a customer-centric perspective. It’s suited for managers and thought leaders seeking internal alignment around solving customer problems and addressing unmet needs. More specifically, this book is for people who have limited resources and would like to use JTBD in a lightweight manner.

Key takeaway

A new way of seeing your customers and their desired outcomes

Available from Audible and other major audiobook sellers.

Changemakers

Today’s radically complex problems require people to lead with design. Changemakers is an essential playbook for designers and nondesigners who want to drive change at work, at home, and in their communities. Groundbreaking designers Maria Giudice and Christopher Ireland—armed with insights from some of today’s top minds in business, tech, and social justice—offer a pragmatic, people-centered approach to change.

Who Should Read This Book?

Changemakers can be designers, leaders, CEOs, tech people, project managers, product people—virtually anyone who wants to embrace and address change. This book will show them how to do it by clearly defining, studying, and addressing change as a design problem to be solved.

Takeaways

• A new approach to change is emerging, and design is at the forefront of responding and provoking change.
• Purpose and passion are essential changemaker qualities.
• Change involves choosing the right problem and finding an entity open to change.
• This book will be your guide for creating and maintaining change in your organization—for you, your team, and your stakeholders.
• Leaders can design change and affect the world—this book will show them how to become that kind of leader.
• Each chapter has critical takeaways at the end of the chapter, summarizing important points.
• Each chapter gives the reader a list of extra sources to gain further knowledge.

Available from Audible and other major audiobook sellers.

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Service Design

Service Design is an eminently practical guide to designing services that work for people. It offers powerful insights, methods, and case studies to help you design, implement, and measure multichannel service experiences with greater impact for customers, businesses, and society.

Why We Fail

Just as pilots and doctors improve by studying crash reports and postmortems, experience designers can improve by learning how customer experience failures cause products to fail in the marketplace. Rather than proselytizing a particular approach to design, Why We Fail holistically explores what teams actually built, why the products failed, and how we can learn from the past to avoid failure ourselves.

Living in Information

Websites and apps are places where critical parts of our lives happen. We shop, bank, learn, gossip, and select our leaders there. But many of these places weren’t intended to support these activities. Instead, they’re designed to capture your attention and sell it to the highest bidder. Living in Information draws upon architecture as a way to design information environments that serve our humanity.

Design Is the Problem

Product design can have a tremendous impact on the world in terms of usability, waste, and resources. In Design Is the Problem, Nathan Shedroff examines how the endemic culture of design often creates unsustainable solutions, and shows how to ensure that design processes lead to more sustainable products and services.

The Leader’s Journey

No one gives you a manual for how to be a great leader. Enter Donna Lichaw. Her step-by-step book draws on psychology, neuroscience, design thinking, and years of coaching experience to help you activate your superpowers and achieve your mission. You’ll transform yourself, your team, and your business into a league of superheroes poised for success. Follow her blueprint to:

• Figure out your core story of who you are as a leader.
• Identify your superpowers and use them for good.
• Map your mission as a leader in order to achieve your goals and make an impact.
• Develop your strategic roadmap by thinking like a storyteller.
• Learn how to handle tough decisions and move forward with purpose.
• Transform your fears from impediments to assets.
• Engage your superfriends, allies, and even your supervillains so that you can all be super together.
• Reflect back on your journey and build energy for your next mission.

Available from Audible and other major audiobook sellers.

Ethan Marcotte on the Tech Industry, Unions, and AI

In a time of massive layoffs across the tech industry, and with the inevitable advancement of AI, is it time for tech workers to organize — as in, unionize? I know, I know. You thought unions were for 1950’s factory workers. Not so. Ethan Marcotte, author of You Deserve a Tech Union (and coiner of the term “responsive web design”) thinks it’s high time for tech workers to protect themselves by coming together and deciding what’s most important to them as a collective.

Certainly tech workers don’t face the same kind of potential life-threatening working conditions of industrial America, but they still deserve a seat at the table when important decisions about their work are being discussed. With issues related to equality, transparency, workplace harassment, and how AI is shifting roles and affecting how work gets done, there’s a lot to talk about.

Ethan will bring his perspective on tech workers and how they’re being impacted by AI to the upcoming Designing with AI virtual conference in June.

What You’ll Learn from this Episode:

• What’s attractive about unionizing for tech workers of the 2020s
• What tech workers would change if they could
• About tech walkouts and unions that have already happened
• Helpful resources for starting conversations with coworkers
• The potential relationship among AI, reskilling, and worker unions

Quick Reference Guide:
0:20 – Introduction of Ethan
3:35 – How Ethan became interested in the idea of tech unions
6:04 – “Weren’t unions for the manufacturing industry in the 1950s?”
9:32 – The things tech workers would change if they could
11:14 – Conversations among employees – are they safe? Are they protected?
13:28 – On organizing for the greater good of humanity
17:11 – Plug for Managing Priorities: How to Create Better Plans and Make Smarter Decisions by Harry Max
19:06 – How we should feel about AI
22:36 – AI, reskilling, and when workers don’t want to leave mundane tasks behind
31:08 – Employees “voting with their feet” is costly for organizations
33:24 – How future workers may organize as it relates to AI
36:30 – Ethan’s gift for listeners

Anticipating Risk, Regulating Tech: A Playbook for Ethical Technology Governance

IFTF’s Ethical OS Toolkit has been used by many organizations and agencies across the civic sector, including the California state legislature, the United States Conference of Mayors, and other local governments, to bring more foresight and long-term thinking to policy decisions about new technologies. In response to high demand from government entities, and with support from the Tingari-Silverton Foundation, the IFTF Governance Futures Lab has developed this Playbook for Ethical Tech Governance. Adapted from the original Ethical OS, the Playbook will equip civil servants with the skills and tools to proactively resolve ethical dilemmas emerging from the constantly evolving landscape of new technology and new social and political dynamics. It’s intended to help those working in government, or leaders in the public sector, to make better long-term decisions by increasing their foresight capacity, allowing them to develop future-facing regulatory structures that help them anticipate the worst consequences of technology before they happen.

In this session, Ilana Lipsett will present Institute for the Future’s Playbook for Ethical Tech Governance, a decision-making guide for governments and leaders who are charged with regulating change and mitigating risk, all while encouraging innovation. The guide was designed to help safeguard against both intended and unintended consequences of techno-social shifts. This session will include an overview of the Playbook, along with a live demo of how to apply these principles and put them into action using a Decision Tree worksheet that accompanies the guide.