Proof is a product innovation studio that combines lean processes with strategy, design and technology. With my fantastic partners Giff Constable and Jeff Gothelf, Proof will work with startups and large companies that want to create new products, enter new markets, and launch new businesses.

I believe that this is the right moment for a studio like Proof. Companies have recognized the value of innovation, and have been at it long enough to recognize the reality: that innovation is hard. At Proof, we think there is a huge amount of promise in using Lean Startup and Lean UX methods to crack this nut. These methods are deeply practical, grounded in making and validating and culture–a real antidote to the fluffy rhetoric of much innovation consulting.
If you’d like to know more about Proof, you’ll find our web site here: www.proof-nyc.com

For me personally, Proof is the result of two years of incredibly rewarding exploration. Since leaving Liquidnet in early 2010, I’ve been working and learning and thinking about where to apply my practice and I’ve been lucky enough to collaborate with some great people along the way.

My close collaborator Lane Halley led me to the Balanced Team community, a group of designers, technologists and product people who are deeply committed to cross-functional approaches to our work. Balanced Team was an opportunity for me to really connect with Jeff Gothelf and to understand the amazing work he’d been doing at The Ladders. And it was through Balanced Team that I met fellow traveler Janice Fraser of LUXr. (I’ve been very happy over the last year to be LUXr’s Program Director in NYC. My intention is to continue that work.) Janice in turn introduced me to the Lean Startup community, which is where I met Giff, through his work at the fantastic NYC Lean Startup Meetup.

I’m still exploring, mostly through conversations and working experiments. If you’d like to start either with me, give me a call. I’m always up for a cup of coffee.

Thanks to the event organizers, especially Ryan MacCarrigan and the NYC Lean Startup Meetup for having me and for hosting such a great event.

And by the way,  if you’ve never been to an Ignite event, you should go. The format is a blast–5 minutes, 20 slides, slides advance automatically every 15 seconds. Lots of nerve-wracking fun. And at Ryan’s events anyway, lots of booze to lubricate the crowd.

Check out the other talks here…

There was some feedback after the event that folks wanted more detail, both from the SnappSchool case study and in terms of connecting these ideas to the tactical concerns of UX practitioners. I think those are fair points. Stay tuned for the next version of the talk in which we’ll push into more detail.

Thanks to all who came out, and for all your feedback.

Robert writes:

Startups are embracing a lean, agile model not just in Silicon Valley, but in Nairobi, Cairo, and Cambodia with small teams working through the design and development of new products and services in real time. Even companies like SAP are adopting agile models that allow them to launch new products in less than 90 days. This is a very exciting period in which product ideas can be developed and launched at warp speed. Small teams are able to engage end users in unprecedented ways as they launch and adapt new services with their user communities in real time.

This wave of “agile innovation” poses a new set of challenges for designers, as many of the tools of design are already in the hands of entrepreneurs and engineers. Designers can’t wait to be “hired” to enhance or improve these offerings. We must be active participants at their inception. If designers are truly skilled at identifying unmet human needs and creating the breakthrough products to address those needs, then, increasingly we will need to prove our value as entrepreneurs. American designers can and should lead the way in showing how you adapt the design process to rapid, real-time product development. And lead the way in demonstrating what can be achieved by designers as entrepreneurs in our own right. Ten years from now I hope to see designers able to attract VC capital at the same rate as MBAs and software engineers. That is the next big mission for American Design.

 Read the whole thing here… 

Balanced team grew out of the first Agile/UX retreat held two years ago at Cooper in San Francisco. Conceived as a kind of summit meeting of Agilistas and User Experience people and attended by well-known thinkers and practitioners including Ward Cunningham and Alan Cooper, the meeting came together to ask why was it that two camps with compatible goals had such a difficult time working together.

The group continued to meet a few times a year, and the meetings evolved beyond their original two-camp focus. As Agile/UX teams started to have success together, they quickly found themselves bristling under the constraints of businesses that didn’t know how to manage these self-organizing teams. Attendees at subsequent meetings found themselves asking each other, how can we get business involved in our collaborations? The question was answered last year when the group found thought partners in the business world who were using Customer Development and Lean Startup methods.

And so we came together this year at Hot Studio in San Francisco to report on the progress we’ve made and the methods we’ve been using. Shawn Crowley of Atomic Object and Johanna Kollmann of EMC Consulting reported on using these approaches at a consulting agencies. Desiree Sy reported on her insights from within a large software company, Autodesk. Janice Fraser, Lane Halley and I reported on our work consulting with early-stage startups at LUXr. Zach Larson and Moses Hohman reported on their experience as startup founders. Dale Larson challenged the group to broaden the focus even more and talk about the collaborations that are possible with Sales and Marketing. The group heard an inspiring presentation from the team at Nordstrom Innovations Lab.

The highlight for me this year was to hear reports from such a wide breadth of contexts. This style of work is spreading, in fact, it’s on it’s way to becoming the new normal. In our closing reflections, one young designer said, I’m afraid I’ll never be able to go back to working any other way.

Videos, presentation, audio and slides are all available here. 

The talk outlines a method we use at LUXr to frame requirements in terms of assumptions. I wrote about why you might want to do this here. If you find it interesting, I’d love to hear from you.

Lean UX is not some essential form of UX.

Some have suggested that Lean UX is about reducing UX work to its essence–that by taking a minimalist approach to our work, we can trim our work down to its essential elements–and that doing this makes our work “Lean.” While I believe there is great value in reducing our work to its essential elements, I don’t think this justifies the name Lean: it doesn’t capture the sense of the word evoked by Lean Startup, which is the connection to Lean Manufacturing and the Toyota Production System

At LUXr, we talk about the 9 Principles of Lean UX. And while they’re all important, for me, #8, “Recognize your hypotheses and validate them,” is the keystone, the one that makes the whole system stand up.

The keystone principle: recognize your hypotheses.

Lean UX replaces requirements statements with testable statements of assumptions. Instead of writing a requirement that says, the site shall incorporate shopping cart functionality, Lean UX teams might say, we assume that a shopping cart is the best way to structure the e-commerce flow on our site. Instead of solutions then, requirements are transformed into questions that teams can ask (and must answer) about their business. Progress is measured in terms of validated learning, rather than features implemented.

The process looks like this:

• First, you declare your assumptions, and express them as a testable hypothesis.
• Then, you write your test–what signal will you get back from the market that will let you know if your hypothesis is true?
• Finally, you ask the question, “what’s the smallest thing I can do or make to test this hypothesis? The answer to this question is your minimum via product, or MVP.

By changing the way requirements are handed to the team, indeed by eliminating them, Lean UX pushes upstream, beyond the traditional realm of technology and design and into business. This forces teams using Lean UX approaches to become more deeply cross-disciplinary. By forcing the requirements process to change in this way, it requires the full participation of the business owners. These folks are no longer handing off requirements. Instead, they become integrated team members who participate in the learning and validation process.

Why Lean?

This approach is embodies the principles of waste reduction and going to the source, key elements of Lean thinking.

• Waste reduction: Lean manufacturing seeks to reduce inventory–but this isn’t manufacturing, it’s design. What’s the inventory in a design sense? In Lean UX, it’s your backlog of untested assumptions–design decisions that you’ve made but haven’t validated. By expressing your design decisions as hypotheses, you express them in a form that is testable–and forces the team to be honest with itself about the material it’s dealing with. And by testing assumptions via an MVP, you are reducing cycle time. You can test hypotheses in hours and days rather than months and years.
• Going to the source: Lean teaches practitioners to look for the root cause of problems–to seek the source of the problem rather than the surface manifestation of the problem. In a design context going to the source means going beyond software requirements generated inside a business. It means engaging with the customer and end user to understand their essential needs, goals and desires. By writing your test in terms of the behaviors you expect to see in your users, you are forced to go to the source for your answers.

Who cares? Why is this a good way to work?

There are lots of benefits to using this system–it’s not a cure-all, and it’s not right for every context–but it’s very good for startup teams. As noted above, by reframing the requirements process into an hypothesis/MVP process, it naturally brings requirements writers into collaboration with designers and technologists, helping to create a more unified team. By providing a structure for evidence-based decision-making, it can take some of the interpersonal thrash out of the decision-making process. By focusing the team around assumptions, it offers a way for teams to get out of their own heads–to stop fantasizing and start getting real.

Surely there’s more?

So yes, Lean UX is collaborative, principled, lightweight and informal, but so are many other approaches to doing UX. It isn’t until you add the hypothesis, test, MVP combination that you get something new–and that merits the associate with Lean.

[Cross-posted on the LUXr.co blog]

Key points:

• The dominant service offered by designers is changing: from narratives about products to the design of products themselves.
• The nature of product design is changing: from one-shot efforts to ongoing involvement.
• As businesses increasingly become digital businesses, the ability to design, develop and maintain one’s own products becomes a critical internal capability.

With these forces at work, the traditional working relationship between outside designers and internal capabilities has broken. The results we’re seeing are a myriad of deeply collaborative approaches to the design of digital products, embodied in movements like Design Thinking, Lean Startup, Lean UX, Agile UX, Balanced Team, etc.

I urge you to read the whole thing.

Design is not a form of art, not a form of science, and not a form of management. Design is not applied art, not applied science, and not the same as business practice. It is not the same as invention or creativity in general. Design is not a simple change in practical step-by-step procedures or the use of particular tools. Design is the activity we humans engage in when we are not satisfied with our reality and we decide to intentionally change it. It is an approach that deals with overwhelming complexity, that [relies] on judgment as its logic, and that is focused on the creation of the ultimate particular.

The intensive is a two-day hands-on workshop for startup teams who want to improve the user experience of their product and for individuals who want to work more effectively by using lean user experience methods.

More details here. Space is limited: sign up now!