There are lots of buzz words flying around in product development these days, but what they are and how they are applied can be hard to grasp. I’d like to pull the curtain back and share how we’ve been applying “Lean UX” in product development at TheLadders.

My team has been working on an iPhone application for our job seekers, which is due to launch in the coming months. As Lead User Experience Designer on the project, I have collaborated closely with my team, applying a “Lean UX” approach – which TheLadders is known for, thanks to the great work of Jeff Gothelf and Will Evans, my predecessors here. In this multi-part series, I’ll share with you how we got through the early, foggy stages of product definition quickly; how we built out the guts of our app while constantly testing with users; and a cutting-edge long-term study we’re running with real users for the last two months of development, while we refine the last set of features.

First: What is this “Lean UX” you speak of? 

Inspired by Eric Reis’s Lean Startup, in a nutshell, “Lean UX” is an approach to design that emphasizes cutting waste by experimenting your way toward results as quickly as possible. “Results” are often defined by some indicator of business viability or customer satisfaction – so this often means getting something in front of customers that we can learn from. In traditional (“waterfall”) design, a problem is defined, then a solution is thoroughly designed and specified before anything is built. With Lean UX, the problem is defined, reduced to its core, and then we sketch, talk, and prototype in quick succession to make something to get in front of customers for feedback. We bring these learnings back to the shop, retool what we need to, then put it out there again, iterating like this until we have enough information to go back and take a real stab at the larger solution.

WEEK 1

The Foundation

We began with a hypothesis, an understanding of constraints, and some overall design principles.

Our hypotheses were simple: we thought that users want to know when new, relevant jobs become available, regardless of where they are. We also thought that once they find a good job, they want to reach out to the employer or recruiter – from their phone – with ease.

Because any good app is usable within the first 30 seconds – and it can be hard to get people to come back once they put it down – we identified other important problems we’d encounter, and broke the entire problem into 3 parts: First use by a new member, core functionality, and re-engagement. We decided to focus first on the core of the application – discovering jobs and taking action on them – and created some ideas.

Creating Ideas

Design studio is a (fun!) team exercise, where everyone in your cross-functional team (in our case: engineers, product managers, designers, and stakeholders) generates ideas in the form of sketches of the actual interface. The process is preceded by declaration of the problem you are solving, who you’re solving it for, and any guardrails, or constraints, you must work with.

In our case, we drew ideas for Rashad, a “proto-persona,” or sketch based on institutional knowledge from years of customer outreach, who we felt may reflect real user needs. We painted a picture of Rashad using the app: he was in his car at lunch time, scanning the list for new jobs. He finds some he sort of likes and wants to look more closely at later. But he sees one in particular that he wanted to get a lead on now, so he takes action.

Before starting, we also reflected on the advantages and disadvantages of the designing for the iPhone:

Advantages

• Users are often interrupted, and must complete tasks in short bits
• It’s easier (and preferred) to consume than create
• Instead of keyboard/mouse, users have other ways to input information:
  • Gestures + Multi-touch
  • Location information (compass, gps, accelerometer, gyroscope)
  • Bluetooth
  • Still + video capture
  • Microphone/speaker (speech to text)
  • Integration with native apps – contacts, email, calendar, reminders, iCloud, phone, text messaging, twitter, passbook, maps, voice memos

Disadvantages

• Small processor size
• Small screen size (difficult for older folks and fat fingers)
• Lack of tactile feedback (another reason typing is hard)
• May not have internet – (users can be offline i.e., in a subway tunnel)

With this, we drew. And we created lots of ideas.

We reviewed them all, and selected a few, which, thanks to POP app, we were able to photograph and organize into a simple, tappable prototype to share with users on a phone.

TheLadders was conducting a public event the next day, so we had a great opportunity to do exactly that. We wanted to know: (1) Do job seekers need to know about jobs on the go, and if so, what sort of support do they need? and (2) Would reaching out to a recruiter about a job they’re interested in, on their phone, solve a need they have?

Learnings

Through conversations with a handful of users, we learned a few things. First, both of our hypotheses were true – users were pretty excited about the possibilities of learning about new job matches on the go, and most of them said they would expect to be able to reach out to the job poster via phone. However, we also learned that they had a high level of skepticism that they’d actually hear from anyone, and that their most desired feature would be an ability to save the jobs.

To be honest, these weren’t mind-blowing learnings; we had anticipated these needs. But hearing them from users helped us understand the severity of the needs, and unified the team around empathy for the user, rather than seeing these as simply features in a backlog.

Within a week, we had defined our problem, created a common understanding of possible solutions (and heard everyone’s voice), validated our hypotheses, and gained valuable insight that would help us prioritize and focus the development of our app.

We took this information back to the office and imagined what the recruiter side of things would look like – after all, we work in an ecosystem, where what happens on one side affects the other.

In the next part, I’ll share how we explored this part of the problem, and then took all these early experiments into higher-fidelity product development.

Michelle Zassenhaus is a Lead User Experience Designer at TheLadders.  When it comes to design and photography, her eye for detail and artistic talent make her a natural.

Last Thursday, I presented at the Clustrix NYC roadshow. Technical executives and leaders from two of the world’s largest database groups on Meetup, New York City’s MySQL and NewSQL groups, were treated to an in-depth presentation about our direct experience with Clustrix, a leading scale-out database. The event, hosted at our SoHo office, drew attendees from companies like SMBC Capital Markets, Getty Images, Pythian, Pixable, M-Square, and ACES.

Historically, databases were the bottleneck in any system, and in the web world, often the primary cause of website downtime and bad user experience. We wanted to keep the downtime as low as possible, so we looked for different ways to scale our database. We also wanted our developers to focus on adding value to our product, rather than spending time working on a database layer. The goal was to scale the system smoothly and economically as requirements increased. A new database system would be able to handle large numbers of concurrent users, provide continuous availability, and process extremely large data sets.

We had several options to scale our database: break it to smaller databases called shards, migrate to a simple key-value or a document store, buy a big iron database, or adopt a modern internet-scale database solution called NewSQL.

The term NewSQL was first introduced by The 451 Group analyst Matthew Aslett in a 2011 research paper discussing the rise of new database systems as challengers to established vendors.

“NewSQL is used to describe… new relational database products and services designed to bring the benefits of the relational model to distributed architectures, or to improve the performance of relational databases to the extent that horizontal scalability is no longer a necessity.” - The 451 Group

TheLadders became one of the first adopters of NewSQL database technology, which is why I was invited to present at the Clustrix NYC Roadshow. I spoke about scalable database solutions, costs and benefits, comparison, selection, implementation process, and a little bit about the future of the NewSQL database market.

The presentation explained the rigorous evaluation and decision-making processes my team undertook to choose a scale-out primary database and captured the audience’s attention right away. Clearly, we understood how critical it was to put the right database solution in place to help power our business. And we left no stone unturned in our evaluation of alternatives. Several attendees mentioned that the depth and detail of the evaluation were highlights for them. The audience walked away with first-hand insight about the strengths and weaknesses of the many alternative products and approaches evaluated by my team.

Of course, what they ultimately wanted to know was why TheLadders chose Clustrix and what results we experienced. Several attendees took notes as I walked through the specific, detailed criteria and performance results that led to Clustrix as the clear choice. Wrapping up with details about the implementation process brought it all home for attendees, as there’s nothing like learning from real-world implementation experience.

Sergei Tsarev, Clustrix CTO and founder, followed up with an overview of the Clustrix solution, use cases, and architecture. He then closed the session with a live demo of Clustrix on Amazon Cloud (AWS), demonstrating the simplicity of starting up the Clustrix scale-out SQL database on AWS in 6 easy steps, and under 10 minutes.

As expected with the technical experts in the crowd, the Q&A session got fairly deep on the inner workings of Clustrix and how it has performed and evolved at TheLadders. The informal networking after the presentations prompted even more thought-provoking questions and insightful discussions.

Overall, it was a great event and the Clustrix team was grateful to TheLadders for hosting and presenting our story. Perhaps the clearest sign of the event’s impact was that multiple attendees stated that they were “convinced,” and wanted to start testing Clustrix right away. I think that speaks volumes to the clarity of the presentation and the credibility of the Clustrix database solution.

Dmitri Mikhailov is the Principal Database Architect for TheLadders. Prior to TheLadders, Dmitri worked for Fortune Global 500 companies in Europe and the United States. He’s worked with big data for over two decades, designing and developing efficient solutions on every major database platform.

A couple of weekends ago, I headed down to Wharton Business School to attend their Startup Unconference.  A former colleague of mine, Ware Skyes, CEO of NoWait, invited me to run a workshop with him called, “How to Write the Perfect Product Spec,” which made me smile. Over the years, I’ve seen many product specifications, none of them perfect, and the idea that on day zero you would know exactly what you want on day 100, 200, and 365 is, in my opinion, fundamentally flawed. However, I wanted to participate regardless, if only to drive that point home.

A big theme of the conference was managing business and technology interaction, a timely topic considering the number of young entrepreneurs I see just looking for people to execute their winning idea. In a keynote from Steve Welch of Dreamit Ventures, he cautioned about becoming too enamored with ideas, “The best idea ever at Dreamit Ventures never made it out into the market.” He observed that teams that executed well together had the most success at Dreamit, whereas the idea is secondary to the team that is executing it.

He is right, and young entrepreneurs should be focusing on finding good partners in technology, sales, as well as in marketing. I like to say, “Five dollars and an idea will get you a cup of Starbucks coffee.” The idea will absolutely change and evolve from when you get that first funding to when you have something customers will love and pay for. The team you pick will thrive with that change or they will not, and a good team that executes together is critical in all companies, especially in early-stage startups.

In 2003 at TheLadders, our big idea was a newsletter of hand-picked jobs sent weekly to sales professionals. In the 10 years since, our idea has changed countless ways; some things we’ve tried worked, while some have not. Our founder Marc Cenedella still sends his weekly newsletter, the largest and longest-running newsletters of its type in the world, but it’s just one part of a much larger and growing business. We have more ideas than time, and how we execute on them has proven to be the most important thing we do.

Therefore, we told the workshop of Wharton MBA candidates that we were not going to show them how to write a perfect product spec; that is an impossible and futile task. In fact, it is not the primary job of the entrepreneur to provide solutions, but rather to identify a need in the market:  “Potential User X has this pain; let us try to address it.”

The problems faced by young MBA founders are amplified when they have no experience in the technological and/or UX domains of the solution space. Not fully understanding a platform’s affordances and capabilities will, at worst, lead to a subpar product and, at best, a long slog of trial and error. Too often, money runs out before anything is launched.

What’s a fresh MBA graduate with a great idea to do? First, he or she should invest in finding great partners who can bring missing functional expertise to the table and then put those partners to work.

We offered the conference attendees a tool to use with their partners, a way to include them in devising solutions. Captain Picard says it best:

The entrepreneur sets the course and the team, as a whole, figures out how best to execute.

One technique to solve this is to start projects by including the whole team in devising solutions via a UX Design Studio. At TheLadders, we start all of our bigger two- to 10-week initiatives with this process. All functional groups are represented, including the CEO, marketing, product, development, and support.

Going back to the Startup Unconference, we spent the majority of the workshop running the MBA candidates through a mini, hands-on design studio. Using a little-known problem statement/scenario from NoWait, they did quick five-minute iterations of solo design and team review. The exercise gave them a process they could immediately take back to their projects, a basis for including their entire team in the problem-solving process.

UX Design Studios will not solve all problems of business and technology/product relations, but it’s a good start and relatively easy for small teams to try.

For more information about design studios and how to run them in detail, please see the following articles from Will Evans, who brought the practice to TheLadders:

http://uxmag.com/articles/introduction-to-design-studio-methodology

http://uxmag.com/articles/the-design-of-design-studio

Kyri Sarantakos is Vice President of Engineering at TheLadders.  When he’s not playing around with iOS development, he can be found hacking all things radio-controlled.

A few weeks ago, I had the opportunity to travel out to beautiful San Francisco for the CouchConf World Tour. The one-day, three-track event was presented by Couchbase, a Silicon Valley-based enterprise software company that offers NoSQL products for mission-critical systems.

More than 400 architects and software engineers from the United States, Europe and Asia convened at Bently Reserve, the West Coast’s premier destination for technology-based social gatherings, to learn about the recently released beta of Couchbase Server 2.0. Additionally, speakers from world-renowned companies including Orbitz, McGraw-Hill, IBM, Reuters, LinkedIn and of course, TheLadders, led fact-packed sessions about real-world applications of NoSQL technology.

After a morning of thought-provoking presentations, I used my lunch break to take pictures of historical buildings and landmarks in downtown San Francisco. When I returned to the conference, it was my turn to do the talking. I sat alongside developers from Reuters and XO group in a panel discussion on caching, led by Matt Ingenthron of Couchbase.

We shared our production deployments with the audience, and spoke about challenges of scaling websites and caching tier implementations. I had an opportunity to present our cache invalidation solution based on Clustrix/MySQL binary logs processing, and the audience was quite receptive to my advice about solving cache coherence problems. My hope is that they walked away with some practical guidance that will help them solve real-time complications.

After the session I hung out in the Couchbase Lounge and provided curious attendees with more detail on our database solution.

No doubt about it, the conference was a great success and I would like give a big “thanks” to Couchbase folks who organized it. Kudos!

Dmitri Mikhailov is the Principal Database Architect for TheLadders. Prior to TheLadders, Dmitri worked for Fortune Global 500 companies in Europe and the United States. He’s worked with big data for over two decades, designing and developing efficient solutions on every major database platform.

At TheLadders, we have been a pioneering, lean UX Agile shop for a few years. As we continue to optimize the job seeker’s online experience by ramping up our mobile efforts, my team and I recently completed a comprehensive review of our product performance. I seized this opportunity to re-read the insights from thought leaders of the Agile Lean UX community…and then it hit me: there is an Achilles’ heel to the Lean Agile UX methodology.

Before I go on, please don’t misunderstand my epiphany. I am not dropping the axe on the entire methodology nor start a holy war on the UX community. Rather, my goal is to share my experience and learnings with other CEOs, entrepreneurs, heads of engineering, design and product development, so that they can extract the best value from Agile.

Here is an abbreviated list of my recommended reading:

• slideshare.net/pathf/lean-ux-agile-putting-it-all-together
• andersramsay.com/2012/04/24/agile-ux-vs-lean-ux
• jeffgothelf.com/blog/
• theleanstartup.com/
• slideshare.net/venturehacks/the-lean-startup-2

What becomes apparent is the absence of the following principles:

• Goal-setting
• Commitment
• Leadership

Even in this presentation, unfortunately, there is only slight attention devoted to these principles.

You may argue that these presentations simply attempt to educate the community about the process and you may say, “Of course you need goal-setting, commitment and strong leadership. That is obvious, so there is no need to mention it.” However, I would counter-argue that if one really understands goal-setting, commitment and leadership, that it is imperative to include these principles in any presentation.

For example, I recently read a great conversation on Quora about what makes a good engineering culture. Lau hits the nail on the head when he discusses optimizing interaction speed:

“Team-wise, fast iteration speed means having a set of strong leaders to help coordinate and drive team efforts. Key stakeholders in a decision need to decide effectively and commit to their choices. To borrow a phrase from Bill Walsh, a leader who coached the 49ers to three Super Bowls, strong leaders need to ‘commit, explode, recover,’ which means committing to a plan of attack, executing it, and then reacting to the results. A team crippled with indecisiveness will just cause individual efforts to flounder.”

In one paragraph, he covered all three principles.

As Colin Powell said, “Leadership is the art of accomplishing more than the science of management says is possible.”

Without strong leadership, how did a team of 11 at Instagram take on the mighty Facebook and its 5,000 employees in the mobile photo war?

In my recent post on TheLadders Blog, Chief Executive or Ironman?, I explain how to build a successful start-up and convert it into a lasting enterprise.

My friend Dave Carvajal, CEO & founder of Dave Partners, a premier executive search and advisory firm, has hired the best in New York City, and is a three-time successful entrepreneur and a two-time Ironman. He also talks about these principles in a recent blog post:

Goal Setting, Discipline, Performance Metrics, and Achievement:

Peter Drucker said, “What gets measured gets managed.” We need goals in life, big and small, to move forward. Measuring and training in specific heart-rate zones is the fastest way to athletically increase your VO2 max and lactate threshold. Both in business and athletics, being data-driven in your goals and execution is the best way to measure your progress and increase performance. The most successful entrepreneurs and athletes are masterful at setting and achieving performance metrics.

Last month, I was at a gallery opening in New York City, the first for the featured artist. Twenty beautiful landscape oil paintings were displayed, most of which sold by the end of the evening. You can imagine my surprise when I heard the artist’s husband say something that made me think about the Agile UX process. He asked, “Can you believe that she created most of the 20 paintings during the two weeks leading up to the show?”

Deadlines create urgency, as well as provide a map. I designed my 30-week training program for Ironman knowing that the deadline was August 11, 2012. It was an Agile process, not a waterfall.

If you allow your scrum team to perform staggered, two-week sprints without a map or a deadline, where do you land? Without proper leadership how do you ensure that you won’t end up with an aggregation of half-baked features?

What applies to artists, entrepreneurs, and athletes also applies to engineering, Agile, and Lean UX.

Applying the above principles of the Agile Lean UX methodology will avoid process for the sake of a process, while maximizing ROI.

Alex Douzet is Co-Founder and COO of TheLadders. In this role, Alex is responsible for the company strategy, global business operations, and product development.

We live in a mobile world where business never stops. Most of us read emails, send texts, and engage with coworkers, friends and family on our mobile devices. It’s easy. It’s fast. It’s makes us more productive wherever we are.

So why are recruiters still reduced to staring at their monitors as they try to find the perfect candidate?

We asked our product and development teams that same question. During a “hackathon,” a few of them answered it: Recruiters can go mobile, too. With a lot of hard work, a mobile app was born.

Today, TheLadders is proud to launch our first mobile app for recruiters: “Recruitable™.”

TheLadders Recruitable mobile app will instantly connect recruiters to fresh “recruitable” candidates that match their job posts, so recruiters can contact great candidates instantly, wherever they are.

This is great for TheLadders recruiters and job seekers alike. It means more frequent—and faster—connections.

(For now, Recruitable is only for recruiters on TheLadders who have a full RecruiterLicense, and only available for the iPhone. Download Recruitable from the app store now.)

So what does Recruitable bring to the table for recruiters?

Instant notification of great candidates.
We spend a great deal of time away from our desk: waiting for the next train, buying special order lattes, or jumping between meetings. Recruitable aims to make these moments more useful.

Recruitable compares every new candidate who joins TheLadders to a recruiter’s existing job posts, and immediately sends the recruiter a push notification when there’s a match. Recruiters don’t need to keep checking email or even run a search. Recruitable simply hands them great candidates.

Key candidate info.
Recruitable provides the candidate’s name, location, title, company, and dates of current and previous roles. According to our recent eye-tracking study, that’s what recruiters need to make a decision on whether or not to connect with a candidate.

Recruiters quickly see new matches for their open positions, and job seekers are given a jump start on a job. Win, win.

Instant communication.
First impressions are important, but being first is more important. Recruitable gives recruiters the chance to send a personalized message to matching candidates at the moment they join TheLadders. That means both the job seeker and recruiter have a competitive edge.

We’re excited about Recruitable. We can’t wait to help both recruiters and job seekers find the right match, at any time.

Download Recruitable from the app store now or read the press release.

Dan Logan is a Product Marketing Manager at TheLadders. As a frequent host of company meetings, he’s used to answering questions and keeping up with industry trends. He also lives in Brooklyn… and loves it.

How do recruiters and hiring managers actually make decisions about candidates?

One thing we know they use is your resume. But how? What is it about one resume that gives a recruiter the information they need to make the right call?

In order to find out, we needed to see how recruiters reviewed resumes. To do this, we conducted a comprehensive eye-tracking study of recruiters while they reviewed resumes.

If you’re not familiar with eye tracking, it’s a line of research that uses technology to record and analyze where and how long someone focuses when digesting a piece of information or completing a task.

We brought in recruiters and recorded them as they viewed online profiles, different types of resumes, and other forms of candidate information.

Here’s some of what we discovered:

How much time does a recruiter spend reviewing a resume?

Unfortunately, not much. Most job seekers think recruiters spend 4 to 5 minutes reviewing a resume. The truth: recruiters spend about 6 seconds before they make the initial “fit/no fit” decision. That means prioritizing information is essential.

Does a professionally written resume make a difference in what a recruiter learns about the candidate?

The results of the study revealed that the recruiters were able to easily find and focus on the important information they were looking for in a professional resume much faster than regular resumes or an online profile.

Are online profiles effective?

No. Online profiles have pictures, and unfortunately, recruiters tended to focus on them for the simple reason that pictures naturally draw the eye. We found they kept recruiters from locating the most relevant information, like skills and experience.

There are many more interesting results in the complete study, including the charts. Download the full research study.

Learn more about TheLadders resume re-writing services.

Will Evans is Manager, Experience Design for TheLadders in New York City with 15 years industry experience in interaction design, information architecture, and user experience strategy.

At TheLadders, we like to give employees every opportunity to grow.

Recently, my fellow Associate Creative Director, Jennifer Gergen, had an amazing opportunity come her way: She was accepted to participate in the Startup Bus.

The Startup bus is a really unique event. Designers and Developers in different cities board buses and travel to South by Southwest Interactive (SXSW) in Austin. They’re formed into small teams and tasked with launching a new startup by the time they arrive.

The teams then compete by means of a social game based on investing in (fake) company stock.

This meant that Jen would have to take off work for a week, on very short notice. But when she asked our boss (Creative Director Todd Hoza) if she could go, he didn’t hesitate. He realized what a fantastic opportunity this would be for Jen personally and professionally.

Think of the skills she’d be honing: design, development, coordination, teamwork, project management… the list is nearly endless. Todd also realized that there was potential for Jen’s to win—and maybe not come back to work if her startup was funded!—but he was willing to take that chance because he knew what it meant to her.

It’s that kind of freedom that you get at TheLadders that you really can’t get anywhere else. The freedom to grow and to take advantage of unique opportunities.

For what it’s worth, Jen’s team did a fantastic job, making the final group with their startup, Happstr. Happstr is a social sharing site whose goal is to spread global happiness, an idea I think we can all get behind in these cynical times.

We wanted to congratulate her and her team on a great run! We’re sorry she didn’t win, but I have to admit: I’ll be posting on Happstr and sharing how happy I am when I see Jen walk in the door later this week. We can’t wait to have her back!

(You’ll be hearing from Jen about her experience when she gets back, don’t worry.)

Follow Happstr: @happstr

Follow Jen: @b9punk

Follow Bill: @wrbeard

Follow Todd: @hoza

 Bill Beard is the Associate Creative Director of Copy for TheLadders. He loves to travel, always has ESPN.com open, and always takes the cheese option when it’s offered. You can follow him on twitter: @wrbeard

This past Saturday, the first Agile User Experience (AgileUX) conference, sponsored by TheLadders, was held at the SVA Theater in Manhattan. The conference brought together leading voices from within the New York City design and technology community to discuss strategy and tactics for delivering world class software products.

The conference was organized by Jeff Gothelf, formerly the Director of User Experience at TheLadders, and myself, current head of UX at TheLadders. Todd Hoza, who is the Creative Director for TheLadders, provided creative leadership for the conference.

The speakers we chose came from a cross-section of disciplines including product, venture capital, customer research, and consulting. Speakers representing TheLadders included Eric Burd, VP of Product, who discussed organization change to align the entire business — from sales, marketing, finance and customer support — to an agile mindset.

Eric Burd - VP Product at TheLadders

Also representing TheLadders was Jennifer Gergen, Associate Creative Director, who discussed strategies for better integrating design into an Agile process. I spoke about the importance of continuous, rapid-cadence customer research and usability testing and delved into the details of how to conduct that research and feed it back into product delivery. Finally, Jeff Gothelf argued for demystifying design and the importance of transparency for greater team collaboration.

Will Evans, Manager, User Experience Design at TheLadders

The event drew close to 400 attendees, some from as far away as Japan, who gathered to learn and share ideas for designing greater product experiences faster. The general consensus was that it was a great learning experience exploring the most recent thinking in product design, and many people left energized and excited to bring those ideas back to their organizations. TheLadders was proud to sponsor such an event and continues to be an active member of the New York City Technology and Design community.

Will Evans is Manager, Experience Design for TheLadders in New York City with 15 years industry experience in interaction design, information architecture, and user experience strategy.

AgileUX NYC 2012 — How to create great design experiences in an Agile development environment.

Saturday, February 25th from 8:00 AM to 5:30 PM (ET)
School of Visual Arts Theater, 333 West 23 Street, New York NY 10011

This conference is for stakeholders, product managers and user experience designers passionate about building products that delight their customers, whether you work for a lean startup or a large organization. You’ll learn from the thought leaders in the AgileUX community about the entire lifecycle of software development, including:

• Organization and cultural change
• Team building
• Process design
• Customer research
• Design studios
• Transparent design
• User story writing
• Mid-stream rapid cadence usability testing
• Getting a seat at the table