Lean User Tests – How to Find the Right Candidates (Part 2 of 7)

TL;DR: Lean User Tests – How to Find the Right Candidates

This part of the Lean User Tests series focuses on acquiring the right candidates for the interviews, answering questions like:

  • How many applicants are required to fill an interview slot?
  • How to reach out to prospective candidates among your user base?
  • How to set up the application form?

There are differences in approaching candidates in the B2B versus the B2C space. However, the following general principles apply to all user interviews.

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Lean User Testing – How to Run User Tests Successfully: The ‘Why’ Question

TL;DR: Lean User Testing – How to Run User Tests Successfully

In a world where data-driven decision making is often prevalent, some people feel uncomfortable with agile methodologies as those provide only a few useful metrics. One of those few, however, is the cycle time from idea to shipping a valuable product increment to your customers.

If you want to optimize this metric for your organization, speeding up your product discovery process is essential. And this requires two things: a) rapid prototyping and b) people to test your prototypes with. That’s the main reason why running user tests continuously is so important.

Learn how to best organize and run user tests in this series of six blog posts. Today, we start with answering the “why” question and what huge benefits user tests will provide to your product discovery and delivery process.

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Product Roadmap Failure: Stop Setting Them Up To Fail

TL;DR: Product Roadmap Failure: Stop Setting Them Up To Fail

When dealing with product roadmap failure, stop debating whether you are doing product roadmaps “right”, or whether roadmaps are evil. Look instead at the job you are hiring your roadmap to achieve. And then ask if the roadmap is the best tool for the job.

TOC

  • 14 Common Product Roadmap Failures
  • A Summary of Almost all Methodology Debates on Twitter
  • Roadmap Needs and Being Awesome

New to Product Management? What is a product roadmap? For a standard definition see here.

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Customer Care as a Litmus Test for Innovation and Agile Change

TL; DR: Customer Care as a Litmus Test for Innovation and Agile Change

Customer care as an entity, its function, and status within a company, can act as a good litmus test for a company’s culture, its product management, and thus its potential for innovation and agile change.

If customer care is regarded solely as a cost center that needs to be outsourced, agile change is unlikely to happen in that organization.

Age of Product: Customer Care as a Litmus Test for Innovation and Agile Change
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Ebookmakr Failure: The Fallacy of Knowing What to Build – The Post Mortem

Executive Summary – Lessons Learned from Ebookmakr’s Failure:

  1. Love the problem more than your solution.
  2. Don’t push too far your dreams of China in your hand.
  3. Use prototyping tools such as Marvel when running user interviews. (More here: Four Lessons Learned From Making Customer Value Your Priority.)
  4. Be careful with the selection process for user interviews: You might end up picking those that will support your vision – it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy trap.
  5. Beware of false positives in user interviews.
  6. Never start writing a single line of code before an appropriate number of customers signed up. (For clarification: Customers are paying users.)
  7. Never spend money on developing a prototype when you’re not working full-time on growing the user-base and increasing customer value.
  8. Be patient and give your product the time it needs.
  9. Always make branded t-shirts and wear them later regularly to preserve the recollection of the disaster. (See below.)
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