TheLadders Blog

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.

The era of the PC is over. Apple has been saying this for a while and they are right. Sales of tablet computers and smartphones combined have overtaken PC sales. The once #1 PC manufacturer in the country, Dell, just announced that they are going private in order to take radical measures necessary to survive the post-PC era without the harsh glare of shareholders. Even Intel has started killing off its own PC business.

Of course, the change in devices owned and used by consumers has a profound impact on millions of other businesses. Big news outlets report that traffic from mobile devices now reaches and exceeds 50% of their overall traffic at certain hours of the day. Facebook is now a mobile company. Latest reports show that 25% of Americans now use their smartphone, not computers, for the majority of their web surfing.

So how has the move to mobile changed your ability to find the right job? In short: Not much…yet.

Yes, there are apps that support searching for jobs, and maybe some of them even let you apply. But in reality, they are just transferring an online (PC) experience to a smaller screen without adapting it to the mobile world. And that is a problem. What works on a big screen doesn’t necessarily work on a small screen. The when, where and how you use a smartphone should define the experience of the job search the same way it defines the experience of, say, consuming media. The fact is that no company has done the mobile job search right…yet.

We know that. We are talking about it. For starters, our new website is optimized for being viewed on any device. No more frustrations when you pick up your iPad and look at your job matches. Checking out the competition with Scout on your mobile phone? A breeze! Yet, as I said before, if you truly want to create a mobile experience, you have to re-think how job seekers will use their mobile devices to find the perfect job. Different platforms fulfill different needs. For example:

• Do you have access to your resume on your mobile phone? Probably not.
• Do you want to compose your cover letter on your iPhone 5? Not really.
• Do you have time to construct search queries on the go to get perfect job matches? I doubt it.

This is why we started 2013 with a new goal: build an iOS app from scratch.

Our goal is to create an app that is tailored to your mobile device that you can use on the go. This means that we have to find new solutions to problems already solved on the web.

So while you are reading this, we have a team at TheLadders working hard to come up with new solutions for your mobile needs. We are talking to job seekers, observing how they use their mobile devices and testing paper prototypes with them. It’s a new and exciting learning experience for all of us. Every day, we are surprised by the new things we discover, and we question things that we once took for granted. In the end there is one goal: to get the mobile job search right! Stay tuned for more to come.

Benjamin Grohé is the Product Manager for new consumer products at TheLadders. When he is not coming up with innovative ideas to delight our customers, he is celebrating his European heritage by cruising the streets of New York City on his new Vespa or playing football (the REAL football).

“You must be the change you wish to see….” -Gandhi

Eight years ago today, I joined TheLadders.

Back in January 2005, we were a small startup with only 25 employees. My first job was working on building a new version of TheLadders.com. At the time, there were only a few hundred lines of code and we spent the next few months working around the clock to deliver a new and improved website. When we were done and the site was launched, I remember my father asking me, “Now what? The site’s done; do you still have work to do?”

We certainly had more work to do then and we still do now. Today, our mission is the same as when we started: finding the right person for the right job. As long as our customers face frustration with their job search, we will be hard at work trying to help job seekers find their next job or employers their perfect candidate.

As we embrace 2013, I am seeing the same kinds of change and excitement that I saw in 2005. Over the past eight years, we’ve learned a lot about the job search, and we’re making big moves to reflect a new way of discovering job opportunities and candidates.

Fundamentally, we have changed the way we work. We threw long backlogs and task-lists out the window, and started working towards shared themes and goals among the whole company; not just technology, not just a single Scrum team. Themes shared by the CEO, marketing, sales, finance, customer service, product, tech and UX groups. With this approach, we have abandoned a traditional team structure previously set by executives and, instead, empowered our staff to determine how best to organize themselves to achieve our shared goals. We try and gather the right people in a room to solve a problem and we know they will make something great.

Have we figured out the magic formula for software-development success? Perhaps. We are closer to being agile with a lowercase ‘a’ than we ever before. We are making better decisions about how to best deploy our collective brainpower and talents. We are shipping value to our users faster. We are learning to say ‘no,’ affording us more time to focus on the work that best serves our users.

Almost 20% of our traffic is coming from phones and tablets, so the new website for TheLadders is completely responsive. It renders well on desktops, tablets and mobile phones. And, we are not stopping with just some fancy CSS; more is coming on the mobile front in the next few months, so stayed tuned.

Because finding the right job should be less tedious than searching through a database of titles, our team of data scientists and engineers work relentlessly to pair our users with the jobs that suit them best. You can still search if you want, but you do not have to be an expert on crafting keyword searches and filters to find relevant jobs; based on what you tell us, and also what you actually do online, we will find you those jobs.

Matching is easy to say and hard to do well. We have to deal with a host of technical challenges, such as classifying jobs into our taxonomy, and we are employing machine-learning to do that. But, that is a topic for another blog post. If you are one of our more-than 5 million members, you may have noticed some of our job- matching efforts with our new Targeted Hiring Alerts.

Job descriptions are becoming a commodity; everybody’s got them.  So, what data do we have to augment them and provide our users with relevant job information they cannot get anywhere else? We’ve launched TheLadders Scout, an innovative (and addictive) way to get a deeper understanding for the job market and your competition. It is a start towards giving our users the data they need to make faster and more-informed decisions in their job search. Here’s our founder’s take on it.

We’ve grown a lot in the past eight years. With more than 5 million jobseekers and 31,000 recruiters and employers, we have embarked on a large infrastructure rebuild, launched powerful caching with Varnish for our web-services layer, and we are leveraging Storm for processing our long-running match and email tasks. Our move from MySQL to Clustrix continues, and dozens of DB slaves are going offline as we increase our load on the Clustrix database. And, most significantly, we are refactoring away some of the most fiddly bits of our codebase.

Additionally, we are rebuilding our data center with shiny hardware, as well as a new network and level of resource flexibility that gets the bits from us to you, that much faster. Our DevOps team has been busy designing the new data center and ramping up for a smooth transition over the upcoming months.

To celebrate our accomplishments so far, and to share our excitement about what is to come, we are re-launching our development blog, because the best decisions stand up to the harshest light of criticism. There are exceptionally talented people on this team, and you should meet them.

Want more from the product and development team? Visit the Engineering Stories blog!

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.

What a way to kick off 2013: launching a new product, demoing it to thousands of NYC job seekers at Job Central, and receiving invaluable on-the-spot feedback!

Last year, as the online world started to rapidly shift away from PCs and desktops and towards the mobile world of smartphones and tablets, our product and tech teams sat down to examine how well we were serving job seekers in this new era. The answer? Not very well. So, we rolled up our sleeves and revamped the product from the ground up, focusing on three goals:

1. TheLadders should be accessible and usable anytime, anywhere.

2. The platform needs to be efficient and save job seekers’ valuable time.

3. Leveraging the knowledge and data we have about the job search, the product needs to shed light on what happens with job applications. It must reduce the “black hole,” what we’ve come to call the recruiter and company unresponsiveness many job seekers have encountered.

Scores of prototypes, dozens of usability tests, and several releases later, here’s what we are now able to offer:

(1)   Job matches tailored to the desired next step in your career. So much time is wasted running searches over and over, trying to determine how the search interface and algorithms work so you can get it to display the jobs that actually interest you. We wanted to cut out the unnecessary work, and deliver you relevant jobs on a daily basis.

Job Goals, shown in the left column, drive the job matches you will receive. As you use TheLadders, we continuously learn about your preferences, and optimize the matching algorithms to be more relevant to your specific needs.

(2)   TheLadders Scout gives you an unprecedented, behind-the-scenes look into the job market and reveals what happens with job applications. Scout shows you who else is interested in the same job, as well as who already has applied. For each applicant, you can see an anonymous profile, showing you their previous experience and areas of expertise. To better understand how you compare to the other applicants, we also aggregated the information about their current salary, years of experience, and education level, and indicated where you rank within the group. As I spoke with job seekers at Grand Central about this game-changing feature, it was clear this type of information can have many uses:

• See your competition for a position. There may be “50 applicants,” but are they equally as qualified as you? You can use this information to gauge whether you want to apply to the position.
• If you choose to apply, you can use Scout to tailor your application and cover letter to highlight the ways in which you stand out from the competition and confirm why you’re the best fit for the job.
• After you apply, Scout will continue to provide updates with information about other applicants, and will include any feedback they’ve received from recruiters. So again, there may be 50 applicants, but if half of them were told by recruiters that they’re not the best fit, then they’re not competition you have to worry about. And, if you haven’t gotten any feedback yourself, Scout can illuminate why – are there already too many applicants for this opening? Are you perhaps under- or over-qualified compared to other applicants?

The anonymous profile on the left provides a sense of other applicants. On the right, you can see the aggregate information, with the orange carrot indicating where you rank.

(3)   Last but not least, TheLadders is now accessible anytime, anywhere. In the screenshots below, you can see how Scout can be as easily accessed and consumed on your smartphone or tablet as on your desktop.

iPhone 4S

iPad 2

Selena Hadzibabic heads up the Product team at TheLadders. Having worked on both the job seeker and recruiter side of the product, she is no longer cheer-leading either side: she just wants to put the right people in touch with each other.

At TheLadders, we currently have a greater UX goal to incorporate our design process more dynamically and efficiently, so when my boss asked me if I wanted to attend an HTML & CSS workshop at a collaborative workspace called General Assembly, I jumped at the opportunity.

General Assembly is a global network of campuses for people seeking opportunity and education in technology, business, and design. It has locations in most major cities, both nationally and internationally, and its memberships provide private desk space to individuals, along with office space for deserving organizations. Partnerships with major philanthropic companies and corporations help to keep its engine going. They also offer a variety of workshops, covering topics from effective project management to powerful social media techniques, that incorporate hands-on education.

This particular workshop took place over a weekend – five hours on Saturday, and five hours on Sunday.  The instructor, Chris Castiglione, focused on what he called the good parts vs. the bad parts of the language.  He then educated us about the elements were expected to work with, mainly Front-end Web Development:

Front-end Web Development (FEWD): the process of writing code to provide the layout of a site, and how things look and behave in the browser. At its core, there are only three front-end languages: HTML, CSS and JavaS.

• HTML is the STRUCTURE of our page 
• CSS is the PRESENTATION (or style) of our page 
• JS is often referred to as the BEHAVIOR of a web page

We then went into Sublime Text and began to code like crazy!  By the end of the workshop, we were able to create basic sites that ran completely on HTML & CSS. It was a fantastic experience, and I highly recommend General Assembly as a valuable resource for all technology professionals!

Tesia Kosmalski is a User Experience Designer at TheLadders. When she’s not ensuring high quality and meaningful user experiences online, she makes art with wacky things like electronics, sound and sometimes textiles even. 

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.

When I learned that the two agencies on the June 3^rd episode of AMC’s The Pitch were both located in Manhattan and were vying for a women’s fashion retailer, I knew that this was a unique opportunity that we just had to capture. We headed to Times Square to the offices of Womenkind, a marketing and communications company, which was “built by women to engage women the way women really want to be engaged.”

Sitting down with co-founders Sandy Sabean, Chief Creative Officer, and Kristi Faulkner, President, we listened to what these two women knew about who controls 85% of all purchases in the United States: women. They discussed how their agency translates the findings gleaned from their research into innovative solutions for their clients who want to understand and motivate women. In fact, they frequently tap into their “muses” of dynamic influencers for their insight about what will inspire women to buy – and talk about — brands.

Womenkind will be competing against DIGO, a 14 year-old agency focusing on small to mid-sized companies, which was co-founded by two men, Mark DiMassimo, CEO and Chief Creative Officer, and Lee Goldstein, President. With female co-founders against male co-founders, Sunday’s episode will no doubt be a battle of the sexes on multiple levels: the client, C. Wonder, is owned by Chris Burch, ex-husband of designer Tory Burch and co-founder of her namesake brand. Did you catch all that?

Who will Chris Burch pick as his right-hand (wo)man to represent his concept boutique? Tune in this Sunday, June 3^rd, at 11pm ET to find out. An hour beforehand, I’ll be watching Mad Men, my favorite battle of the sexes!

Lisa Hagendorf is the Vice President of Public Relations for TheLadders where she is a huge ambassador of the brand in the office. At the gym. And on the street. She just can’t stop talking about TheLadders. Ever.