Product development has been my focus (more like obsession) for the last few years. I have read all the books and experimented with many of the approaches from lean canvas to impact mapping to the 100 different ways of framing an MVP.
While experimenting I had some success, many failures but in general I have been left with an after taste of something missing. Sometimes I failed to engage by using the wrong language, some other times I failed to even get started because some people just don’t want to hear that they might be wrong and are threatened by experiments that might just show that.
I had the fortune to attend the workshop “Lean UX in the enterprise” with Jeff Gothelf in Stockholm yesterday and I think I might have found a simple tool that can help me frame the conversations and get results.
Jeff is an excellent facilitator. During the workshop he gets teams of people to design a product. I was really impressed by the simplicity of the approach and the universality of the language used. But most importantly, at the end of the exercise, making decisions on what to build first becomes trivial.
His approach is linear, simple, easy to reproduce and will resonate with anybody with some understanding of lean and agile. I have to say this is a breath of fresh air in this space where some of the authors sometimes feel they are not great if they don’t introduce some new unnecessary term that creates ambiguity and confusion (but also a lot of discussion and website hits for them).
I am going to experiment with Jeff’s approach for the next product I see, I really look forward to it. Thanks Jeff!
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