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.
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.
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.
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.
Beware of false positives in user interviews.
Never start writing a single line of code before an appropriate number of customers signed up. (For clarification: Customers are paying users.)
Never spend money on developing a prototype when you’re not working full-time on growing the user-base and increasing customer value.
Be patient and give your product the time it needs.
Always make branded t-shirts and wear them later regularly to preserve the recollection of the disaster. (See below.)
TL;DR: Four Lessons Learned From Making Customer Value Your Priority
Building a valuable, usable and feasible product does not happen overnight. These are my four core learnings from focusing on customer value, looking back at the projects I have been pursuing over the years.
🏖 & 📖: Free Download of ‘Lean User Testing’ as a Kindle Ebook
Summer 2019 is coming, and I like to give away two Kindle ebooks you might consider adding to your reading list. From today until next Monday, that is June 20–24th, 2019, ‘Lean User Testing’ will be available for free on Amazon: Download your copy of ‘Lean User Testing’ now. [Advertising.]
📕 Hands-on Agile: Lean User Testing — A Pragmatic Step-by-Step Guide to User Tests
If you believe in agile software development and delivering value to your customers and your company, reading this book is the right decision as it will greatly support your process to identify and create valuable, feasible and usable products.
