François-Marie Arouet
I went to a Lean UX workshop in Paris, it was sweet. Below is the video from the work shop.
Jeff Gothelf lead the session at Numa in Paris. We spent the whole day work-shopping and listened in as Jeff gave his LEAN UX presentation.
You come out of these work shops often thinking, ah I knew all that already. But upon deeper retrospective while much of that might be true, enough repetition cements in these learnings.
I’m going to recall the main things that really stuck with me since the workshop.
What if a company doesn’t want to embrace User Experience?
Quite a poinient one to me right now, but in short Jeff said find another place that does. While I would say try to evangelise it first sometimes it takes someone of great influence to achieve this in a group of people who think they know it all.
How should we measure a product?
Products can be measured in:
- Output
- Outcome
- Impact
Each has a very different metric and they can’t all be used everywhere. Jeff suggests a product team aim to deliver changes at the outcome level. In fact his talk speaks a lot about outcomes, more on that later.
Competence over Roles
In small cross functional teams we all need to wear multiple hats and it is important that everyone is adept at what they do but also able to show a competence to allow them to overcome unforeseen challenges, gaps in the team and to not stifle peoples ability to contribute in any area of the product.
Focus on outcomes
So many products die from feature bloat. It becomes un-maintainable, complex and difficult to use. At Microsoft they have legacy in their code thats so old they don’t know why it is there so they continue to port it from one version to the next! Madness you’ll agree. But with such a huge audience they can’t find out who it is for and why it is there.
Jeff say that by building features for outcomes you can focus more on what is really most important and manage your feature set better.
If you haven’t already I would suggest reading his book, it goes into a lot more detail. If the output, outcome, impact thing confused you all would be explain there.