Blog.
Group Customer Interviewing Practice
TL;DR: Building the muscles for doing customer interviewing can be a fun group exercise.
A Minimal Viable Change Readiness Assessment
TL;DR: Look for people expecting a Long-Term Change to address a Problem. Avoid people demanding a Quick-Fix Additive Solution.
Don't Track Tasks. Track Interruptions.
TL;DR: Instead of tracking your time, try tracking the interruptions instead.
The Surface Area of Grief
TL;DR: The people in my life who've died with a large digital/networked footprint appear in my life so much more often without me prompting it. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but sometimes it can feel intrusive.
Bad People Do The Thing You Love
TL;DR: If you think My Discipline is Good, and Other Discipline is Bad then you are fooling yourself — and avoiding the work that needs to be done to make things better.
Scrum Doesn't Say…
TL;DR: Scrum, at its core, is a really minimal process improvement framework. Understanding how that framework is put together will help you deal with the ghastly stretch-goal, velocity tracking, eighty-hour-work-week monstrosity that’s often labelled Scrum.
One Approach to Beating Conference Stage Fright
TL;DR: Attack the stage-fright separately from the presenting
Two Useful Prompts to Explore Intent & Behaviour
TL;DR: Asking "What other possible explanations could there be?" followed up by "How could we find out whether those explanations are true or false?" is a better approach than "assume positive intent".
Facilitating Your First Wardley Mapping Session
TL;DR: Get alignment on the anchor for the value chain. Independently generate value chain components to get as many perspectives as possible. Merge components and align on a final value chain. Then align components relatively along the commoditisation dimension.
Why I Dislike Maturity Models
TL;DR: There isn't a single linear path from immature to mature. Immature does not mean bad. Cause and effect get confused. Maturity is not an end point.
Reflecting on Fourteen Years of Journaling
TL;DR: Having a journal is a great way for Past Adrian and Present Adrian to point at each other and go "FFS. Idiot. Get a grip."
The Self-Service Research Sweet Spot
TL;DR: Low risk and high cadence activities are the best fit for self-service user research — and sometimes that means you need to change your organisation's approach to research work.
Three Questions to Help Triage Your Dashboards
TL;DR: Is it visible at the right time? Is it actionable? Is it used? If the answer to any of these questions is "no" the value of the dashboard vanishes and you need to probe further.
Turn It Up or Turn It Down
TL;DR: Instead of selling an activity, sell the triggers and cues that show the _need_ for that activity. Help the organisation see when they need to turn it up. Or turn it down.
How Do Candidates Describe Your Hiring Process?
TL;DR: Please understand what you're recruiting for and why.
You Have a Performance Problem
A little story about addressing performance problems. May contain an angry metaphor.
Overlap and Glue
I've been having some conversations with clients recently around, for want of better terms, glue and overlap approaches to integrating different communities/disciplines/groups within an organisation.
A Brief Story About Pizza (and Agile)
A story about pizza, pizza recipes, and agile that I have found useful on occasion.
Dumb Hiring Shibboleths
You don't have a pipeline problem. You have a "don't realise people can be good at the same thing you are without having an identical background to you" problem.
Pointless Job Requirements
Putting requirements in your job advert that the job doesn't absolutely require gets you a less qualified pool of applicants.
Vitamins and Painkillers
Remember that "vitamin" products can have "painkiller" customers.
A Spotter’s Guide to Good Retrospectives
So how do you know when a team is good at retrospectives? It's a "I know it when I see it" thing for me — but I couldn't easily articulate what I was looking for. So I wrote a list off the top of my head…
A Story for Engineers Hiring Their First UX Person
This is a metaphor I use a lot when talking with engineers, or ex-engineers, when they're hiring UX people — often their first UX people.
Guys, Guv, & Luv
How I (mostly) broke a thirty year habit of saying something stupid.
Facilitating Failure Swap Shops
Failure Swap Shops are a great group exercise to celebrate learning from failure — here are some tips on how to facilitate a session.
Taking Your First Steps as a Director of UX
At the director level your job is not product design. It’s organisational design. Your product is now the design capability of your organisation. Your end-users are the people inside your organisation.
Revisiting Agile/UX from 2012 in 2019
TL;DR: We keep talking about UX and Agile and Product Management (and whatever) as if they're monolithic things with fixed definitions. They're not.
Faster Horses
TL;DR: Henry Ford did not say "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses". He pretty much said the exact opposite.
The Four Categories of Asshole
TL;DR: Everybody is an asshole some of the time. Try and be one of the ones that listens to feedback and acts on it.
Maslow's Hierarchy of Nicolas Cage
Inspired by David Bland's Nicolas Cage based explanation of Cynefin I wasted 30m last night coming up with the equivalent for Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs
Can You Do a Shitty First Draft?
This is a place I'm going to give permission for dumb, ugly, and somewhat 💩 first drafts to live. Spewling mystooks and terrible grammar is to be expected. Along with huge logical errors and general stupidity.
