This is the second post in a series. If you missed the start you can read it here.
This post series is about the design and development process of a product that will solve a problem. Through this journey, I will share the decisions I took and those that I ignored or postponed for later.
In doing this post series I hope to help you learn about the digital product design and development process and, with your feedback and questions, learn about my process as well. The world needs more people that understand how to build digital products.
This post series is about the design and development process of a product that will solve a problem. Through this journey, I will share the decisions I took and those that I ignored or postponed for later.
In doing this post series I hope to help you learn about the digital product design and development process and, with your feedback and questions, learn about my process as well. The world needs more people that understand how to build digital products.
The product
One thing I want to do better in the future is to keep track of ideas, insights, achievements. To capture these ideas I need to reflect and somewhere to store them. I wish I had a camera for my ideas and, like with photos, look back at them over the years, share them with friends and family and rediscover situations and lessons in my life that I might have not thought about in a long time.
The inspiration for this product came from “memento mori”, remember that you [have to] die.
The @stoicreflections instagram advertises a “life calendar”, a grid of boxes you tick off to remind you how time is passing by and how much time you still have. Steve Jobs also said the that thought of death was a great motivator and helpful to identify the important.
Sometimes pressure and time constraints lead to some interesting ideas. In September, with very short notice I prepared and ran a Design Thinking workshop for my team that paid for itself three times: my team learned a few new things, we worked on our product and we had a lot of fun.
Here is the recipe for the workshop
Consider each of the user groups of your product
Create a team for each user group (two people can be a group)
Each team goes through the design thinking process for their user group
My team of eight was split into four groups of two, each team with the task of going through the design thinking process with one user group of the product we are building together. All resources where prepared so that the workshop could be done remotely.
If you cringed when you read the title, then this article is for you. I was in your shoes when I did my first design thinking workshop, skeptical. Eight years later I can say that the design thinking process and the skills you develop by using the process have been invaluable at work and my personal life.
Here are my top three reasons why you might want to take another look at design thinking and incorporate it into everything you do.
In agile methodologies, the story point is used as a way to estimate the effort it would take to complete a piece of work. The inputs to estimate story points are the complexity of the task and the amount of times that the task must be executed.
During agile rituals (sometimes called meetings), the number of story points for a task is estimated by all the members of an agile team. The value of this estimation process is two fold.
Blockchain nodes connect and gossip with each other. Redundancy leads to a robust system, and perhaps higher requirements on the network. Photo by Clint Adair on Unsplash
Blockchain technology can help the C-suite implement robust digital systems that reduce fraud and increase data reliability. But preventing scandals is secondary to meeting revenue and EBIT targets. With enterprises still busy switching from paper to bytes (read digitization), the enterprise blockchain can use this phase to polish its technology and demonstrate its value added.
The user story is a great way to put yourself in the “user” seat and do a reality check for whether what you are planning to build is something the “user” really needs or wants. The user story formula goes
As a [user description]
I [want, need, wish] to [some goal]
so that [some benefit].
Though this formula appears simple, I often see it applied in the wrong way.
A hackathon is to coding what a marathon is to running. Hackathons bring together coders and designers to work on a problem, or challenge, and produce some result, usually presented in a pitch slam at the end of the event. I have completed three different hackathons with three different teams and won a total of four prizes with them. This post is about how my teams did it.
In a small business, it is often the case that a single employee can play a critical role in boosting (or sinking) the business’s brand. And so it is important that at every touchpoint a potential customer receives a consistent message. In today’s world we focus a lot on the digital realm but I want to explain how to do this across both the digital and analog worlds in a way that showcases a business’s values.
