About time. And product. And being more deliberate.
“This sounds like part of an idea. It’s the smoke, and we still need a fire-breathing dragon.” This statement was exclaimed by one of the students I’m working with in my involvement with MCAD‘s Visualization program. I was leading the team through a ideation evaluation exercise – culling down their large number of brainstormed concepts …
Continue reading “The Smoke in Need of a Fire-Breathing Dragon”
This semester I’m one of the coaches in the excellent Visualization program at the Minneapolis College of Art & Design. As part of that involvement, I attended their recent new faculty orientation. I’ve culled 5 organizational tips from that meeting. Have a Warning Sign for Poor Customer Relationships: Each faculty member is asked to contact …
The earlier collaboration techniques post (Stop Asking Questions) was based a key to successful improvisation. This post digs further into the relationship between improv and collaboration. Good improvisational comedy teams believe a group of individuals working together can start with nothing and quickly create something engaging, desireable, useful, and valuable. From this perspective, the keys …
Any time someone in your organization has any contact with your clients or prospects, they are performing a marketing function. Thanks to John Jantsch for this timeless thought.
I’m reviewing an excellent presentation [pdf] on the agile software development landscape when two bullet points on Scrum’s daily meetings stopped me: Chickens and Pigs are invited. Only Pigs can talk. It took Googling to decipher the metaphor. Though it goes against my earlier stifling team work post, identifying who’s involved and who’s committed is …
He bought a strong industrial electric fan and pointed it at the assembly line. He switched the fan on, and as each soap box passed the fan, it simply blew the empty boxes out of the line. This exerpt from The Case of the Empty Soap Box at Jon Strandes’ Storyblog is an excellent example …
Even today, with all the Internet offers, shopping is often purchasing a product without first-hand experience with it. Our customer research has proven time and time again that if the product can be handled – it’s more likely to be sold. Until now, it was nearly impossible for customers to actually try out a product …
Government agencies are some of the most notorious change resistors. In 1999, the Mint started to change that reputation – receiving a customer satisfaction rating second only to Mercedes Benz. “In the old days, we shipped fewer than 50% of our orders within eight weeks. Today, if it takes two weeks for customers to receive …
To create a to-do list reflecting your ultimate goal, we highly recommend taking the advice descibed in Recipes Instead of Lists from Nerdherding for Beginners: “A recipe will include infrastructure work and ‘planned re-work’ that might otherwise be forgotten the alternative is simpliy a list of ingredients.”
Conventional wisdom states that websites and other new products should be evaluated with non-tech savvy participants. With 63% of American adults accessing the Internet regularly, 83% of teens, and 20% of adults actively avoiding the online world we are a nation of tech-savvy or tech-avoidant. Conventional recruiting strategies not longer apply. Rather than pursue an …