Product Roadmaps Relaunched: How to Set Direction while Embracing Uncertainty
C. Todd Lombardo - 2017
In fact, this one document can steer an entire organization when it comes to delivering on company strategy.
This practical guide teaches you how to create an effective product roadmap, and demonstrates how to use the roadmap to align stakeholders and prioritize ideas and requests. With it, you’ll learn to communicate how your products will make your customers and organization successful.
Whether you're a product manager, product owner, business analyst, program manager, project manager, scrum master, lead developer, designer, development manager, entrepreneur, or business owner, this book will show you how to:
Articulate an inspiring vision and goals for your product
Prioritize ruthlessly and scientifically
Protect against pursuing seemingly good ideas without evaluation and prioritization
Ensure alignment with stakeholders
Inspire loyalty and over-delivery from your team
Get your sales team working with you instead of against you
Bring a user and buyer-centric approach to planning and decision-making
Anticipate opportunities and stay ahead of the game
Publish a comprehensive roadmap without overcommitting
Design Justice: Community-Led Practices to Build the Worlds We Need
Sasha Costanza-Chock - 2020
It has emerged from a growing community of designers in various fields who work closely with social movements and community-based organizations around the world.This book explores the theory and practice of design justice, demonstrates how universalist design principles and practices erase certain groups of people—specifically, those who are intersectionally disadvantaged or multiply burdened under the matrix of domination (white supremacist heteropatriarchy, ableism, capitalism, and settler colonialism)—and invites readers to “build a better world, a world where many worlds fit; linked worlds of collective liberation and ecological sustainability.” Along the way, the book documents a multitude of real-world community-led design practices, each grounded in a particular social movement. Design Justice goes beyond recent calls for design for good, user-centered design, and employment diversity in the technology and design professions; it connects design to larger struggles for collective liberation and ecological survival.
The Experience Economy: Work Is Theater & Every Business a Stage
B. Joseph Pine II - 1999
We are on the threshold, say authors Pine and Gilmore, of the Experience Economy, a new economic era in which all businesses must orchestrate memorable events for their customers. The Experience Economy offers a creative, highly original, and yet eminently practical strategy for companies to script and stage the experiences that will transform the value of what they produce. From America Online to Walt Disney, the authors draw from a rich and varied mix of examples that showcase businesses in the midst of creating personal experiences for both consumers and businesses. The authors urge managers to look beyond traditional pricing factors like time and cost, and consider charging for the value of the transformation that an experience offers. Goods and services, say Pine and Gilmore, are no longer enough. Experiences and transformations are the basis for future economic growth, and The Experience Economy is the script from which managers can begin to direct their own transformations.
Why We Fail: Learning From Experience Design Failures
Victor Lombardi - 2013
But this book offers more. It provides important insights into both what can go right and what can go wrong in a product offering. To make great products, we need to understand what makes some fail and others succeed. To all the aspiring, young entrepreneurs who are reading this: take heed. Embrace failure to learn from failure. Learn from failure to avoid failure." —Don Norman Co-founder, Nielsen Norman Group Author of The Design of Everyday Things (Revised and Expanded) 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.Why We Fail will help you:1. Understand the key mistakes other teams have made so you don't repeat them2. Turn unavoidable failures into building blocks to be successful3. Create a team environment where failures are controlled and valuable
Design Like Apple: Seven Principles for Creating Insanely Great Products, Services, and Experiences
John Edson - 2012
And all of these capabilities are founded in a deep and rich embrace of what it means to be a designer.Design Like Apple uncovers the lessons from Apple's unique approach to product creation, manufacturing, delivery, and customer experience.Offers behind-the-scenes stories from current and recent Apple insiders Draws on case studies from other companies that have mastered the creative application of design to create outrageous business results Delivers how-to lessons across design, marketing, and business strategy Bridging creativity and commerce, this book will show you to how to truly Design Like Apple.
Subject To Change: Creating Great Products & Services for an Uncertain World
Peter Merholz - 2008
Instead of approaching new product development from the inside out, companies have to begin by looking at the process from the outside in, beginning with the customer experience. It's a new way of thinking-and working-that can transform companies struggling to adapt to today's environment into innovative, agile, and commercially successful organizations.Companies must develop a new set of organizational competencies: qualitative customer research to better understand customer behaviors and motivations; an open design process to reframe possibilities and translate new ideas into great customer experiences; and agile technological implementation to quickly prototype ideas, getting them from the whiteboard out into the world where people can respond to them.In Subject to Change: Creating Great Products and Services for an Uncertain World, Adaptive Path, a leading experience strategy and design company, demonstrates how successful businesses can-and should-use customer experiences to inform and shape the product development process, from start to finish.
Wired to Care: How Companies Prosper When They Create Widespread Empathy
Dev Patnaik - 2008
When people inside a company develop a shared sense of what's going on in the world, they see new opportunities faster than their competitors. They have the courage to take a risk on something new. And they have the gut-level certitude to stick with an idea that doesn't take off right away. People are Wired to Care, and many of the world's best organizations are, too. In pursuit of this idea, Patnaik takes readers inside big companies like IBM, Target, and Intel to see widespread empathy in action. But he also goes to farmers' markets and a conference on world religions. He dives deep into the catacombs of the human brain to find the biological sources of empathy. And he spends time on both sides of the political aisle, with James Carville, the Ragin' Cajun, and John McCain, a national hero, to show how empathy can give you the acuity to cut through a morass of contradictory information. Wired to Care is a compelling tale of the power that people have to see the world through each other's eyes, told with passion for the possibilities that lie ahead if leaders learn to stop worrying about their own problems and start caring about the world around them. As Patnaik notes, in addition to its considerable economic benefits, increasing empathy for the people you serve can have a personal impact, as well: It just might help you to have a better day at work.
Designing for People
Henry Dreyfuss - 1967
Dreyfuss have shaped the cultural landscape of the 20th century. Written in a robust, fresh style, this book offers an inviting mix of professional advice, case studies, and design history along with historical black-and-white photos and the author's whimsical drawings. In addition, the author's uncompromising commitment to public service, ethics, and design responsibility makes this masterful guide a timely read for today's designers.
In the Bubble
John Thackara - 2005
These are tough questions for the pushers of technology to answer. Our economic system is centered on technology, so it would be no small matter if tech ceased to be an end-in-itself in our daily lives. Technology is not going to go away, but the time to discuss the end it will serve is before we deploy it, not after. We need to ask what purpose will be served by the broadband communications, smart materials, wearable computing, and connected appliances that we're unleashing upon the world. We need to ask what impact all this stuff will have on our daily lives. Who will look after it, and how?In the Bubble is about a world based less on stuff and more on people. Thackara describes a transformation that is taking place now--not in a remote science fiction future; it's not about, as he puts it, the schlock of the new but about radical innovation already emerging in daily life. We are regaining respect for what people can do that technology can't. In the Bubble describes services designed to help people carry out daily activities in new ways. Many of these services involve technology--ranging from body implants to wide-bodied jets. But objects and systems play a supporting role in a people-centered world. The design focus is on services, not things. And new principles--above all, lightness--inform the way these services are designed and used. At the heart of In the Bubble is a belief, informed by a wealth of real-world examples, that ethics and responsibility can inform design decisions without impeding social and technical innovation.
Get Agile!: Scrum for UX, Design & Development
Pieter Jongerius - 2013
This manual is aimed at everyone who works on interactive products in a design and development environment. It contains all of the basic information required for getting started with the project management method Scrum, but also offers a number of in-depth chapters looking at topics which even the most experienced Scrummers have trouble with on a daily basis. If you are experienced, you will find the advanced tips and tricks useful. If you are just considering Scrum, this book will most certainly get you enthusiastic.
Different: Escaping the Competitive Herd
Youngme Moon - 2010
Bill Bryson’s A Walk in the Woods is one example. Richard Feynman’s “Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!” is another. Now comes Youngme Moon’s Different, a book for “people who don’t read business books.” Actually, it’s more like a personal conversation with a friend who has thought deeply about how the world works … and who gets you to see that world in a completely new light. If there is one strain of conventional wisdom pervading every company in every industry, it’s the absolute importance of “competing like crazy.” Youngme Moon’s message is simply “Get off this treadmill that’s taking you nowhere. Going tit for tat and adding features, augmentations, and gimmicks to beat the competition has the perverse result of making you like everyone else.” Different provides a highly original perspective on what it means to offer something that is meaningfully different—different in a manner that is both fundamental and comprehensive. Youngme Moon identifies the outliers, the mavericks, the iconoclasts—the players who have thoughtfully rejected orthodoxy in favor of an approach that is more adventurous. Some are even “hostile,” almost daring you to buy what they are selling. The MINI Cooper was launched with fearless abandon: “Worried that this car is too small? Look here. It’s even smaller than you think.” These are players that strike a genuine chord with even the most jaded consumers. In fact, almost every success story of the past two decades has been an exception to the rule. Simply go to your computer and compare AOL and Yahoo! with Google. The former pile on feature upon feature to their home pages, while Google is like an austere boutique, dominating a category filled with “extras.” Different shows how to succeed in a world where conformity reigns…but exceptions rule.
The Non-Designer's Design Book
Robin P. Williams - 2003
Not to worry: This book is the one place you can turn to find quick, non-intimidating, excellent design help. In The Non-Designer's Design Book, 2nd Edition, best-selling author Robin Williams turns her attention to the basic principles of good design and typography. All you have to do is follow her clearly explained concepts, and you'll begin producing more sophisticated, professional, and interesting pages immediately. Humor-infused, jargon-free prose interspersed with design exercises, quizzes, illustrations, and dozens of examples make learning a snap—which is just what audiences have come to expect from this best-selling author.
Future Ethics
Cennydd Bowles - 2018
Technology was never neutral; its social, political, and moral impacts have become painfully clear. But the stakes will only get higher as connected cameras will watch over the city, algorithms oversee society’s most critical decisions, and transport, jobs, and even war will become automated. The tech industry hasn’t yet earned the trust these technologies demand. Based on Cennydd’s years of research and consulting, Future Ethics transforms modern ethical theory into practical advice for designers, product managers, and software engineers alike. Cennydd uses the three lenses of modern ethics to focus on some of the tech industry’s biggest challenges: unintended consequences and algorithmic bias, the troubling power of persuasive technology, and the dystopias of surveillance, autonomous war, and a post-work future. Future Ethics is an intelligent, quietly provocative book that challenges technologists to stand up for change, and teaches essential ethical principles and methods for building a fairer future. Cennydd Bowles is a London-based designer and writer with fifteen years of experience and clients including Twitter, Ford, Cisco, and the BBC. His focus today is the ethics of emerging technology. He has lectured on the topic at Carnegie Mellon University, Google, and New York’s School of Visual Arts, and is a sought-after speaker at technology and design events worldwide.
The Effortless Experience: Conquering the New Battleground for Customer Loyalty
Matthew Dixon - 2013
But what if everyone is wrong?In their acclaimed bestseller The Challenger Sale, Matthew Dixon and his colleagues at CEB busted longstanding myths about sales. Now they've turned to a new vital business subject - customer loyalty - with a book that turns conventional wisdom on its head.Companies devote untold time and resources trying to dazzle customers. Yet CEB's careful research proves that is wildly overrated: loyalty has a lot more to do with how well companies deliver on their basic promises than on how dazzling the service experience might be. Forget bells and whistles and just solve your customer's problems. The Effortless Experience lays out the four pillars of a low-effort customer experience, with robust data, insights and profiles. Here are tools and templates you can start applying right away to improve service, reduce costs, and ultimately generate the elusive loyalty that the 'dazzle factor' fails to deliver.The rewards are there for the taking, and the pathway to achieving them is now clearly marked.'A business detective story, in which cherished truths are systematically investigated-and frequently debunked' -Dan Heath, coauthor of Decisive, Switch, and Made to StickMatt Dixon is Executive Director of the Sales & Service Practice at CEB. He is a frequent contributor to the Harvard Business Review, and his previous book, The Challenger Sale, was a Wall Street Journal bestsellerNick Toman is Senior Director of Research for CEB's Sales & Services Practice and is a frequent contributor to the Harvard Business Review.Rick DeLisi is Senior Director of Advisory Services for CEB's Sales & Service Practice and a noted public speaker and facilitator.
Lean Analytics: Use Data to Build a Better Startup Faster
Alistair Croll - 2013
Lean Analytics steers you in the right direction.This book shows you how to validate your initial idea, find the right customers, decide what to build, how to monetize your business, and how to spread the word. Packed with more than thirty case studies and insights from over a hundred business experts, Lean Analytics provides you with hard-won, real-world information no entrepreneur can afford to go without.Understand Lean Startup, analytics fundamentals, and the data-driven mindsetLook at six sample business models and how they map to new ventures of all sizesFind the One Metric That Matters to youLearn how to draw a line in the sand, so you’ll know it’s time to move forwardApply Lean Analytics principles to large enterprises and established products