The project is cool on so many levels, and the video is a fantastic illustration of many of the Lean Startup principles that I’ve been teaching over the last few years. So much so that I often show it during classes and workshops. One question that frequently comes up as teams discuss the video: What happened to the sunglasses app after the video ends? Did it end up being a successful product for Nordstrom?

I recently emailed Jeremy Lightsmith, the development lead on the project, to find out. Here’s what he told me:

So, as you might imagine, there is way more to the story…. The short version is that we left [the app] running as an experiment. The way we approached experiments back then, we didn’t return to it for a few months. When we did return, we found that our experiment had failed. It took several rounds of interviews and actually observing people “using” it to find out that salespeople were using the regular camera app, not knowing that it was different . Over the next couple months, we did a couple more experiments on it (all short < 3 day jobs) with a few weeks in between each. Finally we got it to a place where it was useful and salespeople were using it, and we rolled it out to sunglass departments across Nordstrom about a year ago.

As for that particular experiment, I talk about it at some length in this talk.

I find Jeremy’s response interesting for a couple of reasons. First, I’m glad to hear the positive outcome. It’s always good to hear success stories coming from innovation teams, especially those who are taking this kind of approach. More interesting to me though is the story this tells about process learning.

One of the amazing things about our current moment in software is that we can move so quickly: the team was able to build (and iterate) a full-featured iPad app in a week. That speed is seductive, and sometimes misleading. I’m hearing more and more stories like this one. Even though you can get an app finished quickly, it is likely to take you more time to get through the learning cycle. I love that the Nordstrom Innovation Lab team was able to go back into the field and use additional cycles of observation and experiment to continue the learning cycle to the point where they arrived at something successful. It will be interesting to see how well the sunglasses app is faring a year from now.

I also really appreciate that Jeremy and the Nordstrom Innovation Lab team are so willing to share their process and learning. I’ve been spending a lot of time these days talking with and working with folks who are putting Lean Startup ideas into action at big companies. From these conversations, some interesting principles are starting to emerge. I’ll share a first take on these in an upcoming post.

I admit that I sometimes worry if the term “Lean” has jumped the shark, as it makes such a handy prefix for so many practices. (I am certainly guilty of this, having just published a book called “Lean UX.”) I gasped a bit when I the phrase “Lean Branding” appeared on screen in a conference deck yesterday. But Oonie Chase and Cindy Gallop did a great job linking the creative brand explorations of the ad agency world to the practical “make it work” side of UX practice. One of the knocks on the Lean approach is that it’s iterative approach doesn’t explicitly encourage visionary work. But Gallop is clearly cut from visionary cloth, and you could see from their presentation  how Chase and Gallop and the rest of the MakeLoveNotPorn team have built a cross-functional collaboration to manifest that vision.

That cross-functional collaboration is at the heart of Lean approaches, I think. That’s why I think we’re seeing so many “Lean [X]” discussions. If you’re a specialist in X, it should be easy to see that there’s a place for you on a Lean team. Tomer Sharon’s research presentation showed how that works for researchers. Melissa Perri showed how it works for Product Managers. Johanna Kollman showed how it works for early-stage startup consulting. Virginia Cagwin and Ariadna Font Llitjos showed how enterprise specialists approach it. So even though I worry about jumping the shark, at the end of the day, I think the label is apt.

I wanted to give a shout out to Grace Ng, who gave a really honest presentation about her personal learning journey with Lean. To me, the best part of Lean is the orientation towards continuous learning. I am always impressed by folks who are willing to stand up on stage and say, “This is what I did. This is what worked and what didn’t. Here’s what I learned.”

Finally, I wish I didn’t have to comment on the laudable gender diversity of  the presenters, but it’s important to call out success in this area: congrats to the organizers for gathering such a high-quality and diverse panel of speakers.

If you’re in NYC and can get to the conference for the remaining two days, I would encourage you all to go.

Josh Seiden: A Designer’s Introduction to Lean Startup from Interaction Design Association on Vimeo.

Josh Seiden It’s Our Research interview from Tomer Sharon on Vimeo.

In 2010, I was introduced to the Lean Startup movement, and was excited by the way these ideas aligned with the way my design practice was evolving: it was becoming more agile, more collaborative, more focused on solving problems beyond the user interface level. I began to apply Lean Startup ideas in my work.

At about the same time, I began working with (and ultimately started a company with) Jeff Gothelf. As we traveled the world to teach these methods, we met entrepreneurs, designers, engineers and managers who shared our enthusiasm for Lean Startup. We observed that they all asked a similar question: “How do we put these ideas into practice?”  This book is our answer to that question. It’s designed to be a very practical, tactical guide to putting Lean Startup ideas into motion within your product teams. It explains how to:

I hope you’ll pick up a copy. And after you’ve read it, please do share your feedback with us.

In your first meeting with every client, you’re going to have a moment where you instantly see the solution to the client’s problem. Don’t say anything! Write it down in your notebook. Circle it. Mark it with a special symbol. This way, you won’t be worried about losing your idea. Then forget about it. Once you’ve been working with the client for a while, go back and look at what you wrote. 99 times out of 100, you will find you were wrong. And you’ll be glad you kept your mouth shut.

A couple of notable quotes from the NY Times coverage:

The Defense Department says that the way the system was conceived was flawed. “We started with a Big Bang approach and put every possible requirement into the program, which made it very large and very complex,” says Elizabeth McGrath, the department’s deputy chief management officer.

Agilistas, need I really comment?

And how about this one from Grover Dunn, the Air Force director of transformation:

“We’ve never tried to change all the processes, tools and languages of all 250,000 people in our business at once, and that’s essentially what we’re about to do.”

Finally, there’s this:

Pat Phelan, a research vice president at Gartner, the information technology research company, also calls attention to the difficult and time-consuming nature of decision-making within the department. She advocates empowering small groups to make necessary decisions, as is done in the private sector, but she does not expect the department to change. “That mind-set, that cultural shift, is not something I expect to happen in my lifetime,” she said.

For teams attempting to put Lean Startup methods into place in the enterprise, that is a chilling assessment.

If all this sounds bleak, let me point out that there is hope. Jeff Sutherland points us to the relatively recent changes in IT policy and software procurement processes at DoD. And with people like US CTO Todd Park leading the charge for leaner approaches to technology development, perhaps we have cause for some optimism? Check out Park’s recent talk (talk starts at 19:30 into the recording) at the Lean Startup Conference if you’d like a little inspiration.

1. Is there an opportunity in the marketplace?
2. Do people value the thing I’m putting in the marketplace in response to that opportunity?
3. Does my solution work? Can people use it?

Traditional design research has a long history of answering Question 1 and Question 3. The design community has good tools and techniques for these questions: we use ethnographic research to uncover needs and opportunities; we use usability testing to see if people can use our product.

For years, my usability clients have asked me to answer Question 2, the question that really matters to entrepreneurs: is there a business here? And for years, I’ve explained patiently that we couldn’t answer that question with design research. For Question 2, I explained, you need to turn to market research. And I always hated this answer–feeling like it was a cop-out, a hole in my toolkit.

It wasn’t until I came across the Lean Startup community that I found the tools to answer Question 2. Here were entrepreneurs who were using lightweight experiments designed specifically to answer the question, will people pay for this? That they adopted a user-centric attitude towards understanding and assessing value made it easy to mistake what they were doing as UX research in a new package rather than something new they were bringing to the party.

Why does all of this matter? Because increasingly, we’re working in a cross-functional environment, working across discipline borders. Having access to the right tool to answer the right question will make us better researchers, better designers, better entrepreneurs, and more valuable collaborators.

In future posts (and this is really a note to myself), I’ll break down some methods for answering each of the questions above.

Even more pervasive is the line erroneously attributed to Henry Ford: If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses. (Nevermind Patrick Vlaskovits’s excellent debunking.)

The reason these arguments are so persistent is that there is a kernel of truth in them. People are bad at expressing their needs. But that’s not the whole story–and it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t talk to you customers. Instead, you can think about customer needs using this framework:

Customer have three categories of needs:

• expressed needs (“faster horses!”)
• implied needs (Model T’s)
• latent needs (to travel longer distances with greater speed.)

Your job as a product designer or entrepreneur is to uncover (and then serve) the deeper needs in the stack.

There’s no one true method to do that. Intuition works for some. But more commonly, folks use more structured methods to get beyond expressed needs. The classic methods typically involve interviews, observations and interpretation. (Sometimes, observation and interpretation are mistaken for intuition.) This is why designers and researchers talk about ethnography.

As I said, intuition works for some. But the next time a customer asks you for a faster horse, will your intuition recognize the request for what it is? And will you know what to do to get down the stack? You can use the famous 5 Whys method. Or use my friend Lane Halley’s magic question, “If you had that [faster horse], what would it let you do?” You’ll be on the path to the deeper understanding you seek. And perhaps, if you’re very clever, on the way to a breakthrough worthy of Jobs or Ford.

This merger is a result of the journey I’ve been on over the last few years. Since my early days working on product teams at Kensington, I’ve been interested in how businesses create great products. Over the years, I’ve come to understand the role that design plays in the process, and I’ve been lucky to work as a designer and design manager in lots of businesses. And I’ve come to understand how important cross-functional collaboration is in this process.

At Proof, we’ve been helping clients build cross-fuctional product teams and helping those teams create new products. Now, by joining forces with the world-class software developers at New Context, we’ve created a deeply cross-functional consulting company. Our mission is the same, to help companies launch new digital businesses. Now we have an amazing new set of tools to bring to bear on the problem.