Jeff Gothelf

Shared understanding allows our teams to make decisions faster and empowers us to engage in more strategic conversations

the first question is always what is the most important thing we need to learn next?

In other words, what’s the biggest risk currently associated with this approach?

Like most skills, the more you practice, the better you become at doing it.

For example, the team at Amazon behind the Echo ran a Wizard of Oz MVP as part of their initial testing to understand the types of queries people would ask and how quickly they would expect a response. In one room, a user would ask “Alexa” questions and in another room, a human typed queries into Google, got answers, and replied back. The test users were not aware that they were not using software. The rest of the team was able to observe users and understand how they would use this new product—before significant engineering effort had been invested.

If something doesn’t fall into a pattern, it is likely an outlier.
Place your outliers in a “parking lot”
Tempting as it is to ignore outliers (or try to serve them in your solution), don’t do it. Instead, create a parking lot or backlog. As your research progresses over time (remember: you’re doing this every week), you might discover other outliers that match the pattern. Be patient.

Nonclickable mockups still don’t let your customers interact naturally with the design or experience the workflow of your solution.

Falling in love with the problem, not the solution

Speed first, aesthetics second

Teams that enjoy working together produce better work.