Steve Neiderhauser

How to Write a Thriller

The Writing Mastery Academy has crafted an article that gives tips on how to write a thriller.

These are actionable tips that will level up your writing. I especially like starting with a high-concept idea and using plot twists and red herrings.

Agile and AI

How do you see Agile and AI working together? I imagine there are many different takes on this.

Henrik Kniberg wrote Agile in the Age of AI. Here are some key points.

1. Team size is much smaller: Two people plus AI.

2. Sprint iterations shift from 2 weeks to a day or less. Like Design Thinking, embrace and use timeboxes. 

3. Embrace rapid development so coding is no longer the bottleneck.

AI is a rapid development approach which is what object-oriented languages were always intended to be.  

I feel that Design Thinking is an approach that dovetails nicely with AI because Design Thinking loves prototypes and ferociously fast feedback loops.

The Magic Of Assumption Testing

In her Assumption Testing class, Teresa Torres unlocks the magic of assumption testing. Why do I call it magic?

Any time you can accelerate customer learning by 10X or more, that’s magic.

You see, most teams test ideas instead of testing assumptions. Here’s an idea: A new mobile app will increase revenue by 21 percent. For the next three months, the team wrote software and deployed the app to find out that no one even touched the app. Yes, the team learned a lesson: “The biggest waste is building something no one wants."

Instead of an idea, the team could have reframed the problem and identified several assumptions to test. Testing an assumption takes a fraction of the time to build an idea. 

There’s no need for me to write more because Teresa has written, Assumption Testing: Everything You Need to Know to Get Started.

Project vs Product

Ever since the hype of project to product, when I mention the word “project” there will be someone who yells at me for saying, “project.” :)

Guess what? We still have projects. It’s that we want to use product management approaches to manage projects. We replace ineffective project management concepts with long-lived teams, product platforms, periodic prototypes, and other product approaches.

Long before agile, I learned of periodic prototypes in the book Revolutionizing Product Development. Understand how Motorola used periodic prototypes with their pager project and you will gain a deeper understanding of how the Sprint Demo (Review) should work. Deepen the learning to forward the action.

What is a Demo Story

When you can’t show how your product or service works, you could create a story that shows the benefits. Here’s an example of a demo story that I wrote:

***

One sunny Tuesday in April, after Ed Wilson finished his morning meeting with senior management, he shook his head and said, “You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him think.” 

Management had shot down another one of Ed’s ideas. We traded horse stories for several minutes until a commotion in the main conference room ended our fun. 

Our boss stepped from the room and motioned for us. In the meeting, we discovered that the hardware group purchased the wrong computers for the NeXT Operating System; NeXT needed a fast disk drive and quality graphics card. The specs were available in manuals, available in books, and available in brochures. Someone overlooked the obvious. 

What’s more, last week the hardware group told management there wasn’t a problem in sight. 

Surprise! 

Cathy Cooper, the Vice President of Technology, glared at the hardware team and said, “You all lied to me!” Ed nudged me in time to see the vein in her neck throb as if it would burst. Cathy ranted for five furious minutes, then stormed out. 

The storm rocked the good ship hardware. Helpless and adrift, her crew grumbled that they didn’t get a chance to tell their story. A chance to spin their tale of confusion with silky-smooth buzz words — NextStep, OpenStep, distributed object, enterprise object…

The answer was simple enough. Would management, however, see the value of the solution through the muddy waters, stirred by the endless ramblings of technology people? Probably not. Ed and I mused a minute and quick as lightning it dawned upon us. 

We called our contact at a local vendor and asked about hardware for NeXT. Having received our help with a sale two weeks earlier, the salesperson was eager to assist. 

At 4:07 PM, he delivered a NeXT workstation. We configured it within the hour and positioned the machine in a common work area. We made sure the standard applications were visible and compiled a software demo: The bouncing-red-ball demo. Its eye-catching graphics begged us to let the software run overnight. How could we resist?  

The following morning, we noticed several people hovering over our workstation. One influential fellow named Pete (some executives wouldn't make a technology move without him) asked, “Who owns this sleek machine?” 

“Oh... that’s ours,” said Ed. “If it’s bothering you, we can move it to another room.” 

“That’s okay,” said Pete waiting his turn to test drive the machine. If you looked into Pete’s eyes, you could see the wheels spinning in his head. 

After playing with NeXT’s sparkling user interface and gazing upon the bouncing ball demo, employees called their friends and spread the word. 

Word spread like wildfire, jumping from cubicle top to cubicle top. Soon the entire company was ablaze with the idea that a NeXT solution was delivered within twelve hours. Like a show under the big top, you knew NeXT’s performance thrilled people by the sounds that filled the air — “Ooh, aah.” 

By mid-afternoon, Cathy Cooper had heard enough. She needed to see for herself. She waded through the sea of people lapping against the workstation edges and watched as Pete put the software through its paces. 

Unlike yesterday's tempest, Cathy looked calm on the surface, although inside, she felt nervous. She asked several questions. You could see her eyes grow wider with each answer like a light had been turned on in a dark room. 

Awakened by the glowing workstation, Cathy pounced on it like a cat on a field mouse. Before the day ended, she ordered fifty-seven new workstations.

Seven days later, when the software got off the ground, beaming faces were seen all around. 

 

How to avoid experiment traps

David Bland explains how to avoid eight experiment traps.

One trap I hope companies avoid is outsourcing testing. This is never a good idea and there’s no real way to justify the practice. This practice leads to handoffs and slows the learning process.

Instead, develop internal skills and teach people how to run rapid business experiments.

Key to Assumptions Testing

Teresa Torres writes that teams can test most assumptions with a combination of prototypes, one-question surveys, or data mining. The appeal of her assumptions testing approach is that it’s agnostic.

You can use any experiment type to simulate a customer event. Embrace the simple assumption-simulate-evaluate model and you'll become a talented assumptions tester.

Prototype Definition

IDEOU offers the definition of a prototype:

A prototype is anything that gets the idea in your head into an artifact people can experience and offer feedback on.

As much as possible, make your ideas tangible, visible, and experimental.

IDEO does a nice job of describing the benefits of a prototype, and I can’t emphasize enough how important it is to use prototypes.

How to Present Your Product

In the book Presenting Virtually, I discovered this effective approach for telling an audience what your product is about. 

Here’s the approach:

1. Provide an example or analogy to describe your product.
2. Share a diagram of the product’s architecture. 
3. Give a live demo of the product.
4. Have a customer provide a testimonial.

How to Prototype Your Story

The ability to break your story into pieces and prototype the experience is a rather rare and valuable talent.

Storytelling helps prototype your story with these incredible tools:

• Logline
• Step Outline
• Treatment 

The Design Squiggle

You’ve probably seen the design squiggle in numerous books or articles about Design or Design Thinking. What is the squiggle about? Well, it shows the design process. The process starts with chaos and a great deal of uncertainty and moves toward certainty.

The illustration and the origin of the squiggle can be found here.

Testing Assumptions

Testing assumptions is a great way to accelerate learning about your customer and derisk projects. For example, a company may believe that most of their customers would want to take a certain class they offer. And yet, when the company runs an experiment they discover that only a couple people show any interest in the class offering.

Learning first how to map assumptions will help teams organize their assumptions so they test assumptions that truly matter.

How do you learn about mapping assumptions. David Bland created this webinar on assumptions mapping.

Lots of great content in this webinar, including facilitation and design thinking techniques.

Inputs for assumptions mapping include:

• Business model canvas
• Product Roadmap
• Product backlog
• Opportunity Solution Tree
• User story map...

Key concept from the webinar: Defer building as long as possible.

The concepts in David’s webinar are extremely helpful and can stop you from wasting months of development time. 

The skill to write brief summaries of key ideas and concepts is rare and coveted.

Review of Empowered Workshop

Tim Woods provides an excellent review of Marty Cagan’s Empowered Workshop.

What’s the most valuable part of the review?

Tim provides a list of pre-reading material for the workshop, so if you can’t attend you still have the opportunity to learn deeply.

The Sketch, Craft, Refine Cycle

In this article, Josh Kerievsky leads us through the artistic process for a poster.

• Rapid, inexpensive sketch creation.
• Elimination and selection of a sketch.
• Elaboration of the sketch.
• Crafting the poster.
• Refining the poster.

Sketch, craft, and refine. These are the steps artists take to create great works.

How Product Managers can Speed Up Development

Some years ago I worked at a product company where the VP of Product had an epiphany late one night and added the role of project manager to his product managers long list of duties.

As you might guess, this approach didn’t turn out well.

The product managers were new to their product role and struggling to master it so how could they possibly learn the project manager role with no training or prior skills in project management.

In addition, the teams were using Scrum, a framework with only three roles and where project management is split among the three roles. Note: there’s research that shows the fewer roles in a company the more profitable the company so please refrain from adding more roles.

By adding the project manager role, the VP created chaos. Work was late even though the team was working longer hours and several of the developers left the company.

Fact is, it’s more about designing an environment for success.

Rich Mironov writes a post that shows how product managers can make design decisions that boosts the team’s ability to deliver.

Here’s three of his tips:

• Forcing slack into the plan so the team has room to adjust to changes.
• Manage interrupts. Most interrupts can wait until the next sprint planning session.
• Don’t prioritize the entire backlog. Leave room for emergent learning.

Opportunity Solution Tree

This article by Teresa Torres, explains the Opportunity Solution Tree; how it helps teams see the big picture and understand the next steps in Product Discovery.

The Opportunity Solution Tree is a mental model that acts like Velcro for your mind. The seemingly small, trivial details stick to your mind because of the Velcro-like mental model.