As I’ve mentioned in my previous post on a DIY JTBD Workshop, there are a lot of great resources freely available on the web about Jobs-to-be-Done interviews. However, I’ve found a surprising lack of material on the analysis steps that ensue after that round of interviews. The Disruptive Voice podcast has an episode in which […]
Author Archives: David
There’s No Needle in the Haystack
If there’s one thing that’s stuck with me from attending a JTBD interview workshop with Bob Moesta and Greg Engle, it’s this mindset of how to approach customer interviews: You’re trying to uncover patterns across different stories – and not to find the needle in a haystack!
Our COVID-19 Schedule as Working Parents with a Toddler
As daycare centres are closed due to the ongoing pandemic, our 19 month old toddler has been spending the past 4+ weeks at home with my wife and I. We knew pretty soon that we needed a strict routine for all of us to stay sane in these unprecedented times. The daily rhythm that a […]
A DIY Jobs-to-be-Done Workshop
Two weeks ago I participated in a digital JTBD workshop with Bob Moesta and Greg Engle. The workshop was designed for JTBD practitioners who’d had some experience doing this kind of research and wanted to up their interviewing skills. After discovering Bob’s flavour of Jobs-to-be-Done during my parental leave in 2018, I had become enthusiastic […]
Your Time Is A Finite Resource
On the face of it, Shape Up is a framework for IT project management. It talks about backlogs, how developers and designers should slice projects and about stubbing an interface to figure out affordances before a complete visual design. Beneath that surface, though, lie basic truths about work and project management that I believe could […]
I ♥ Trade-Offs
I’ve recently asked several internal stakeholders for feedback on a new product idea pitch, to build a first version of something that potentially has a high return, but also contains a lot of unknowns for us (in terms of business value). A classic bet. As our team is using Shape Up to build products, the […]
Implementing Shape Up: A Case Study
There was a time in late 2018 where we were having real trouble shipping the things we had planned to ship within the timeframe we’d estimated. I remember a particularly gnarly project where we wanted to enable our users to book multiple spaces within a given location – instead of being able to book just […]
(Not) Learning by Googling
If you don’t know something today, you google it. That’s great for a lot of things, for example if one of your biggest concerns is settling dinner-table arguments around “Who played X in the movie Y again?” or “When exactly did Z happen?”. Googling has become such a knee-jerk reaction to any question for my […]
Wavelengths of Product Discovery and Delivery
While working on an internal document on the progress that we’ve been making in moving towards continuous product discovery, I came across The Place of UX by Ryan Singer of Basecamp. A thing he wrote in the comments stood out to me in particular: [W]hen we work on entirely new products … [it’s better to […]