Podcasts about uncover compelling insights

Bio   David is known for his ability to deliver inspiring and thought-provoking presentations that challenge audiences to think differently about innovation and product development. His keynotes and workshops are engaging and interactive, with a focus on real-world examples and case studies. David's message is relevant for entrepreneurs, executives, and organizations of all sizes and industries, and he illustrates concepts live on stage to leave attendees with concrete tools and techniques they can use to drive innovation and growth in their own business.   Interview Highlights 02:00 Early Startups 02:45 Dealing with uncertainty 04:25 Testing Business Ideas 07:35 Shifting mindsets 11:00 Transformational leadership 13:00 Desirable, viable, feasible 14:50 Sustainability 17:00 AI 22:50 Jobs, pains and gains 26:30 Extracting your assumptions 27:30 Mapping and prioritisation 28:10 Running experiments   Social Media   LinkedIn:  David Bland on LinkedIn Website:  davidjbland.com Company Website: Precoil YouTube: David Bland on YouTube     Books & Resources   ·         Testing Business Ideas: A Field Guide for Rapid Experimentation (The Strategyzer Series): David J. Bland, Alex Osterwalder ·         Assumptions Mapping Fundamentals Course: https://precoil.teachable.com/p/assumptions-mapping-fundamentals/ ·         The Invincible Company: How to Constantly Reinvent Your Organization with Inspiration From the World's Best Business Models (The Strategyzer Series): Alexander Osterwalder, Yves Pigneur, Alan Smith, Frederic Etiemble ·         Value Proposition Design: How to Create Products and Services Customers Want (The Strategyzer Series): Alexander Osterwalder, Yves Pigneur, Gregory Bernarda, Alan Smith, Trish Papadakos ·         The Lean Startup: How Constant Innovation Creates Radically Successful Businesses: Eric Ries ·         Interviewing Users: How to Uncover Compelling Insights- 2nd Edition, Steve Portigal ·         The Mom Test: How to Talk to Customers & Learn If Your Business Is a Good Idea When Everyone Is Lying to You, Rob Fitzpatrick ·         Business Model Generation: A Handbook for Visionaries, Game Changers, and Challengers (The Strategyzer Series): Alexander Osterwalder, Yves Pigneur ·         The Four Steps to the Epiphany: Successful Strategies for Products that Win: Steve Blank   Episode Transcript Intro: Hello and welcome to the Agile Innovation Leaders podcast. I'm Ula Ojiaku. On this podcast I speak with world-class leaders and doers about themselves and a variety of topics spanning Agile, Lean Innovation, Business, Leadership and much more – with actionable takeaways for you the listener. Ula Ojiaku   Hello everyone. I'm really honoured and pleased to introduce David Bland as my guest for this episode. He is the best-selling author of the book, Testing Business Ideas, and he's also the Founder of Precoil, an organisation that's focused on helping companies to find product market fits using Lean Start-up, Design Thinking and Business Model Innovation. He's not a newcomer to the world of Agile as well. So, David, it's an honour to have you on the Agile Innovation Leaders Podcast. Thank you so much for making the time. David Bland   Yeah, thanks for inviting me on, I'm excited to be here. Ula Ojiaku   Right. So, where I usually start with all my guests, because personally, I am interested in the story behind the person - are there any happenings or experiences that have shaped you into who you are today? David Bland   Yeah, I think through childhood, dealing with a lot of uncertainty and then ended up going to school for design. I thought I was going to go a different career path and then at the last moment I was like, I want to really dig into design and I think people were sort of shocked by that, with the people around me, and so I really dove into that and then I came out of school thinking, oh, I might join a startup and retire in my mid 20s, because this is a .com craze, everyone was making all this money. Obviously, that didn't happen, but I learned a lot at the startups and I was introduced to Agile really early on in my career at startups because we had to go really fast and we were in a heavily regulated industry so we couldn't break stuff and we had to have kind of processes and everything. I did that for a while and then I realised, wow, there were some people that could learn from my mistakes, and so we kind of switched coasts. So we were near Washington DC for a while, and then we moved to the San Francisco Bay Area, and I started working with companies there, and I was like, well, let me see if I can just really dig in, help people learn how to apply stuff and coach them through it, and that was around 2010 or 2011 or so, and I've been doing it ever since, and I think why I love it so much is that it kind of helps people deal with uncertainty, gives them a process to deal with uncertainty, and at the same time, I have a hard time with uncertainty. So maybe it's kind of a little bit therapeutic for me to help others deal with uncertainty as well. So yeah, I just love what I do. Ula Ojiaku   And so you mentioned you don't like uncertainty, but helping other people deal with uncertainty helps you, that's interesting. Do you want to expand on that? David Bland   I mean, I very much like my routines and everything, and I feel like I come at it from a process point of view. So when I'm dealing with uncertainties, like, oh, what kind of process can I apply to that? So I feel a little better about things, even though there's a lot of stuff outside my control, at least I can have kind of a process. So I feel as if, when I'm dealing with people, I feel all of this anxiety, they're working on a new idea, they're not sure if it's going to be any good or not, giving them a process to work through it together, I don't really tell them if their idea is going to be good or not because who am I to judge their ideas most of the time? It's more about, well, here's a process you can apply to all that stuff you're working through and maybe you can come up to some sort of investment decision on whether or not you should go forward with that idea. So I feel as if my demeanour and everything comes off as someone that you're like, oh, I can talk to this guy and he's actually going to respect me, and so I feel like my style plus the uncertainty bit fits together really well. So I have a style where I come into orgs and say, you have a lot of uncertainty, here's a process, you're going to be fine, we're going to work through it together and it tends to work out pretty well. Ula Ojiaku   What comes across to me is that you give them tools or a process to help them hopefully come to an evidence-based conclusion without you having to share your opinion, or hopefully they don't have to have personal opinions imposing on whatever conclusion that is.   David Bland   Yeah, it's just a process.   Ula Ojiaku   And so what put you on the path to writing the book Testing Business Ideas, I was one of your students at the masterclass you and Alex Osterwalder ran during the covid lockdown, and you mentioned during that session, I don't know if you remember, that you probably went for a retreat somewhere, or you went on a hike as part of the writing process and that Alex gave you a hard time or something, so can you share your version of the story? David Bland   Oh yeah, I mean it was a joy writing with him. I think one of the difficult times for me writing that book…So first Alex approached me writing it and eventually, I mean initially it was just going to be me and then I mean he needed to be involved and so he played a big role strategically in helping me kind of think about the book writing process because I've never written a book like this and then also had it published and also did the whole four colour landscape style, very visual book. It's not that you just write an outline and then you start putting in words, it's a very different process. So yeah, he pushed me a little bit during that process, I would say, he would challenge some of my ideas and say like, are you explaining this in a way that where people can understand, you know? And so I feel as if it was a very productive process writing the book with him. It took about a year I would say. I think the way it came about was it was pretty much from my coaching, born out of my coaching, because I was helping companies with a lot of uncertainty, early stage ideas and they would say well we're now going to have interviews and we're going to do surveys and we're to build the whole thing. And it's like, well, there's other things you could do that are beyond interviews and surveys. And so he and I were continuously talking about this, and it's like, well, if people are only comfortable doing interviews and surveys they're not going to address all their risk, they're going to address a part of their risk, but not, you know, there's so much more they can do. And so, we started thinking about, well, is there a book that we could put that together and give people a resource guide? So, it's more like a textbook or almost something you would read in a university. My editor, I just spoke to him a couple weeks ago, he's like, this is required reading at Stanford now, and some other places in the university programs. And so it's very much like a textbook, you know, but the reason we wrote it was, you know, to help people find a path forward, to find a way to go and de-risk what they're working on. And so I felt it was very ambitious to put that all into a book, and of course, it has some flaws, but I think for the most part, it does the job, and that's why it's been really successful.   Ula Ojiaku   It is, in my experience, very well laid out. It takes a lot of work to distill these ideas into something that seems simple and easy to follow. So I do concur, it's been very helpful to me as well and the ideas. In your book, in the flap, it says, okay, the number one job as an innovator, entrepreneur, a corporation, is to test your business ideas to reduce the risk of failure. And I think you've alluded it, you've kind of touched on that in explaining how your career has gotten you where you are today. But what, in your experience, do you find leaders and organisations missing the most when it comes to testing ideas? David Bland   I think it's hard to unwind it all, because it goes back to how do you become a leader. And so, at least in Western, in the United States anyway, where I do some of my work, I feel as if it's very egocentric, it's very about what I can do and what I know. So there's a progression of becoming a leader where you grow up in an organisation because you have the answers, or at least you're able to convince people you know the answers, and then you're promoted and keep being promoted. And so when I'm coming in and saying, well, we might not know the answers, or we might need to test our way through and find the answers, it almost goes against that whole kind of almost like worldview you've built up or someone has built up over the years where it's about me. It has to be more than just about you as a person. It's like how do you enable leaders around you and how do you create more leaders around you and all that. And so I think where there's contradiction is this idea of, okay, I'm promoted to where I am because I have the answers, but now I want to enable people to test their way through things and find answers, and you almost need a feedback loop there of somebody that's willing to say, look, do you understand how you've unravelled some of this or how you've undermined things by saying, well, I know this is a good idea, so build it anyway. Or, that's not the test I would have ran, I would have done this other thing. You give people almost the benefit of your opinion, but they take it as marching orders, whether you realise it or not, and then it becomes this core of, why am I running tests at all because my leader is essentially going to tell me what to build. And so I think there's just some unpacking a bit of, well, I searched for the right answer in school and I was rewarded for that, and I went into business and I was rewarded for the right answer, and now we're telling you, there might not be a right answer, there are multiple right answers, and different paths and choices. And I think sometimes leaders have a hard time with that because it almost contradicts everything they've done in the past to be successful. Ula Ojiaku   So, what I'm hearing you say David is that in terms of, even before we get testing the ideas, please correct me if I'm wrong, it's that there needs to be a mindset shift, a paradigm shift of, you know, what leadership is all about, it's no longer going to be about the person who knows the way, who knows all the answers and tells people what to do, but moving from that to saying, hey, I recognise I have limits and I may not have all the answers and I empower you all for us to work together to test our way to find what the right path or direction would be. David Bland   Yeah, it's more about your leadership style and accountability. I think you severely limit what an organisation could do if everyone's relying on you for the answers. It's going to be really tough to scale that because if all answers have to come through you, then how do you scale? But also, it goes from transactional to transformational in a way. So transactional is, it's very much like, well, I want you to do something by this date on time, on budget, and on scope, and then basically hold you accountable to doing that, and then there's a very transactional level of leadership there. It's like, I asked you to do this thing, or told you to do this thing, you did this thing, so therefore I trust you. Where I'm trying get a bit deeper is, you know, well can you say, well, how do I empower a team to go find out what needs to be built, or if there's a real problem there, and then have them give me an account of, oh, we're making progress towards that, or you know what, we shouldn't go forward with this because this isn't worth pursuing, nobody has this problem, et cetera, and respecting their wishes or at least having a conversation about that. And so I think it does require a little bit of leadership. Looking at your style, looking at the words you use, looking at how you lead teams through uncertainty, which could be a little different than ‘I need this thing by this date and keep it under this cost and this scope' It's more about, well, we have an idea, we're not sure there's a market for it, can we go test that and see if there is and if it's viable for us and if we can actually do it? And it's a little different leadership style, and I think if you apply a transactional leadership style to trying to lead people through uncertainty, it just backfires, because it's very much like, run these experiments by this date, it doesn't empower the teams to be able to give an account of how they're addressing the risks. It's sort of a learning moment for leaders to say, oh, this leadership style that's worked really well for me in the past may not actually work really well for me here, it may work against me here in trying to drive out the uncertainty of this thing that we're trying to do. Ula Ojiaku   So if I may just build on your response to the question. What, in your experience, has helped, or could help, a leader who's used to, and has been in the past up until now rewarded for that transactional leadership, to make the switch to a transformational leadership? David Bland   I think asking them what they're worried about. I know people try to project confidence like they have the answers, but they don't, and so being able to be open, even if it's just a one-on-one, to say hey we have this thing where we think it might be a new business line or something that we're working on that's relatively new that we haven't done before, which is a lot of my clients, they're trying to do something that they haven't quite done before. It may not be too far away from what they're good at, but far enough away that they're worried, they're worried that it's not going to work. And so I try to get them and talk about what's keeping you up at night, what is worrying you about this, and then usually in the back of my head I'm saying, okay, what can I map that to? So I love the desirable, viable, feasible framing. I use it a lot from design thinking, user centre design. So if they're worried about the customer or there's not enough, you know, there's not really a job to be done there, I map that back to, okay, he's worried about desirability or she's worried about desirability. And if they're talking about, oh, we don't know if people will pay enough for this, or if we can keep costs low enough, you know, that's like I map it back to viability, right? And then if it's more about, I actually don't know if we're organised well enough as a company to do this and really execute on it and I map it back to feasibility. And then from there, it's more like, well how will we go test that since you're worried about it, rather than just build the whole thing and launch and see what happens. And so I try to kind of, I'd be really careful of the words I'm using and I'm trying to coach them into a moment where it's okay, just let's be open and transparent that it's not just about executing a bunch of things and then we're okay. It's more about, you know, what are we worried about and then how do we go address those worries sooner versus later. And so I try not to come at them with a bunch of canvases and a bunch of mapping tools and a bunch of stuff that would make them feel defensive because one, they probably have not had experience with those, and two, it's like, oh, this consultant's more interested in the tools than helping me, you know. So I try to use words that really kind of get at, what are you worried about and then how can we go test that and then kind of back away into the process from there? Ula Ojiaku   Well, it does seem like you apply quite some psychology to the whole approach, because it's really about meeting people where they're at. And I am, just back to your point about viability, desirability and feasibility. There is a school of knowledge, I mean, you are the expert here, so I'm deferring, but there's a school of knowledge that would add also like the sustainability parts to it. Or do you think it's separate from those attributes when you're looking at ideas? David Bland   Yeah. Well, I work on a lot of sustainable projects at the moment. Well, even over the last several years I've been working on companies trying to be more sustainable. So companies are manufacturing phones, they want their phones to be all recyclable materials, they want fully recyclable phones let's say. So I'm working on very cutting edge sustainability projects, but I still don't introduce it as another circle because I'm trying to keep it very simple. And so I know there are different flavours of it. I know some people add sustainability, some people add adaptability, some people add ethics, usability. Before I know it, it's just, you end up with seven circles and different themes, so I really try to keep it very simple. Even Alex and I talk about adaptability, because that was a theme that didn't quite make it into the book, but he talks about it in The Invincible Company, which is the book he wrote immediately after the one we wrote together. So I have ways of addressing those things, but I don't necessarily want to add a bunch of extra themes, because I feel like it's already challenging people with a bunch of ‘ility' words. I noticed they get confused even with the three. No matter how well I explain it, I'll see things like, things that are about building it, and reframed as desirability, and I'm like no, no, that isn't about the customer. I mean yes, of course we have to build what they need, but building it is more about feasibility. So even with the three I see people get confused so I just try to stick to the three as best I can, but basically we go into sustainability projects, still using those three, with sustainability top of mind. So I don't really call it out as a separate theme but I certainly take it into consideration when we're working on those projects.   Ula Ojiaku   Okay, just keeping it simple. Okay, thanks for that, David. So there are some instances where the people will consider probably are outliers to the known proven principles of design thinking, of product development, customer discovery. And I can't remember, I mean, I would have attributed it to the person, but I was just reading a tweet from someone who is known in the product development world and he was saying that if, he wouldn't have guessed that with the advent of or the popularity of Generative AI, that ChatGPT, according to his books, you know, broke all the rules of products, discovery products, development in the sense that there, and I wasn't aware that they were, Open AI was doing lots of market research to say, hey, what do you want from an AI assistant or Generative AI? But within months of releasing it to the public, they gained millions of users. So what's your thought on this? Would you say it was an outlier or is it that there were some principles working in the background that we are not aware of? David Bland   I imagine there's a lot going on we're not aware of. It reminds me of the older conversations about the iPhone. There was this air of, Steve Jobs had this single brilliant idea about the iPhone and then willed it into being and then everyone, it was wildly successful, right? But I look at, even like the first iPhone as, in a way it was kind of a minimum viable product. I mean, the hardware was pretty solid, but the software, the OS was not. I mean, it didn't have really basic stuff that we would expect that we had on other things like Blackberries at the time. You couldn't copy and paste, there were some things that were missing and people viewed it as a toy and they kind of laughed at it, you know, and then they iterated on it. I would say it was about iPhone three or four, by the time they really started to get market fit with it, and then you see, you know, people you wouldn't expect with iPhones with their iPhone. You're like, wait a second, that person has an iPhone. But that took a while, you know. And I think with Open AI, it's kind of a, we're still in the early stages of a lot of this, I feel, and I'm not really sure how it's going to shake out, but I imagine, you know, they seem to be very iterative about how they're going about it, you know. So I don't know how they went about the creation of it at first, but I feel as if at least now they're taking feedback. They're not just building stuff people are asking for, but they're looking at, well these people are asking for this, but why are they asking for it and what are they trying to achieve and how might we achieve that by releasing something that solves for that. And that's kind of your job, right? It's not just to build what people ask for. It's more about getting to the need behind what they're asking for, and there might be a more elegant way to solve for what they're asking for. But there's also some backlash with AI. So I see some things happening where a lot of my corporate clients have just banned it at the firewall, they don't want their employees even accessing it. They want to keep it within the company walls, so to speak, which is going to be kind of challenging to do, although there are some solutions they're employing to do that. I also see people taking it and, you know, interviewing fake users and saying, I can validate my idea because they asked OpenAI and it said it was a good idea, so I don't have to talk to customers. And it's like, okay, so they're taking some kind of persona from people and kind of building up a thing where you interact with it, and it seems very confident in it. It seems very confident in its statements. Like, that's the thing that I've noticed with OpenAI and a lot of this ChatGPT stuff is that it can be like really confidently wrong, but you find security in that confidence, right? And so I do see people saying, well I don't have to talk to customers, I just typed in ChatGPT and asked them. And I said, this is the kind of customer, what would that customer want? And it can literally generate personas that can generate canvases. It can do a lot that makes you seem like they are good answers. You could also just click regenerate and then it'll come up with really confident, completely different answers. So I think there's still a way where we can use it to augment what we do, I'm still a big believer in that, because I think it's really hard to scale research sometimes, especially if they have a small team, you're in a Startup. I think we can use AI to help scale it in some ways, but I think we just have to be careful about using it as the single source of truth for things because in the end it's still people and we're still, find all the tech problems, still people problems. And so I think we have to be careful of how we use AI in Agile and research and product development in general. Ula Ojiaku   Completely agree, and the thing about being careful, because the AI or the model is still trained at the end of the day by humans who have their blind spots and conscious or unconscious biases. So the output you're going to get is going to be as good as whatever information or data the person or persons who trained the model would have. So what I'm still hearing from you if I may use Steve Blank's words would be still get out of the building and speak to real customers. I mean, that could be a starting point or that could be something you augment with, but the real validation is in the conversation with the people who use or consume your products. David Bland   I think the conversations are still important. I think where it gets misconstrued a bit is that, well people don't know what they want, so we shouldn't talk to them. I think that's an excuse, you should still talk to them. The teams that I work with talk to customers every week quite often, and so we want that constant contact with customers and we want to understand their world, we want to find new insights, we want to find out what they're trying to do and trying to achieve, because sometimes that can unlock completely new ideas and new ways to make money and new ways to help them. I think this idea of, well, we can't talk to customers because we don't have a solution ready or we can't talk to customers because they don't know what they want, I feel as if those aren't really the reasons you should be talking to customers. With discovery, you're trying to figure out the jobs, pains and gains, test value prop with them, continue to understand them better. And if you pay attention to your customers, there's this great Bezos quote, right. If you pay attention to your customers and your competitors are paying attention to you, you're going to be fine because you are, they're getting lagging information, right? You're really deeply connected to your customers, and so I just think we've somehow built this culture over time where we can't bother customers, we can't confuse them, we can't come to them unless we have a polished solution and I think that's becoming less and less relevant as we go to co-creation. We go more to really deeply understanding them. I think we have to be careful of this culture of we can't bother them unless we have a polished solution to put in front of them, I don't think that's where we're headed with modern product management. Ula Ojiaku   And someone might be saying, listening to, whilst I've gone through your masterclass, I've read your book, but someone might say, well, do you mean by jobs, pains and gains with respect to customers? Could you just expand on those, please? David Bland   Yeah, if you look at the, so my co-author Alex Osterwalder, if you go back to the book before Testing Business Ideas, there's a Value Proposition Design book where we have the value prop canvas. If you look at the circle in that book, so the tool kind of has a square and a circle, and we usually start with a circle side, which is a customer profile. And with the profile, you're really trying to think of a role or even a person, you're not trying to do it at the org level, you're trying to think of an actual human being. And in that, we kind of break it down into three sections. One is customer jobs to be done. So you can think about, you know, one of the functional, usually functional jobs that tasks are trying to do, you could also weave in, you know, social jobs, emotional supporting, it can get really complicated, but I try to keep it simple. But one way to find out those jobs is by talking to customers, right? Then next are the pain points. So what are the pain points that customers are experiencing, usually related to the jobs they're trying to do. So if they're trying to do a task, here's all the stuff that's making it really hard to do that task. Some of it's directly related, some of it's tangential, it's there, it's like these impediments that are really, you know, these pains that they're experiencing. And then the third one is gains. So we're looking for what are the gains that can be created if they're able to either do this task really well, or we're able to remove these pains, like what are some things that they would get out of it. And it's not always a one to one to one kind of relationship. Sometimes it's, oh, I want peer recognition, or I want a promotion, or, you know, there are some things that are tangential that are related to gains, so I love that model because when we go and we start doing discovery with customers, we can start to understand, even in Agile right. If we're doing discovery on our stories, you know, we're trying to figure out what are they trying to achieve? And then is this thing we're about to build going to help them achieve that? You know, what are the pains we're experiencing? Can we have characteristics or features that address these big pain points they're experiencing? And then let's just not solely focus on the pains, let's also think about delighters and gains and things we could do that like kind of make them smile and make them have a good day, right? And so what are some things that we could do to help them with that? And so I love that framing because it kind of checks a lot of the boxes of can they do the task, but also, can we move the pains that they're experiencing trying to do it and then can we can we help create these aha moments, these gains for them? Ula Ojiaku   Thank you, and thanks for going into that and the definitions of those terms. Now, let's just look at designing experiments and of course for the listeners or people if you're watching on YouTube, please get the book, Testing Business Ideas, there's a wealth of information there. But at a high level, David, can you share with us what's the process you would advise for one to go through in designing, OK yes, we have an idea, it's going to change the world, but what's the process you would recommend at a high level for testing this out? David Bland   At a high level, it's really three steps. The first is extracting your assumptions. So that's why I like the desirable, viable, feasible framing. If you have other things you want to use, that's fine, but I use desirable, viable, feasible and I extract. So, what's your risk around the market, the customer, their jobs to be done, the value prop, all that. Viability is what's your risk around revenue, cost, can you keep cost low enough, can you make money with this in some way, make it sustained? And then feasibility is much more, can you do it, can you execute it, are there things that prevent you from just executing on it and delivering it? So that step one is just extracting those, because this stuff is usually inside your head, you're worried about it, some of them might be written down, some of them might not be. If you're in a team, it's good to have perspectives, get people that can talk to each theme together and compromise and come together. The second part of the process is mapping and prioritisation. So we want to map and focus on the assumptions that we've extracted that are the most important, where we have the least amount of evidence. So if we're going to focus experimentation, I want to focus on things that make a big difference and not necessarily play in a space that's kind of fun to play in and we can do a bunch of experiments, but it doesn't really pay down our risk. And so I like focusing on what would be called like a leap of faith assumption, which I know Eric Ries uses in Lean Startup, it also goes back to probably like Kierkegaard or something, and then Riskiest Assumption is another way you can frame it, like what are the Riskiest Assumptions, but basically you're trying to say what are the things that are most important, where we have least amount of evidence. So that's step two, prioritisation with mapping. And then step three is running experiments. And so we choose the top right, because we've extracted using the themes, we have desirable, viable, feasible. We can use that to help match experiments that will help us pay down the risk, and so I always look for mismatch things. Like you're not going to pay down your feasibility risk by running customer interviews, that doesn't help you whether or not you can deliver it. So making sure that you're matching your risk, and that's kind of where the book plays in mostly because we have 44 experiments that are all organised by desirable, viable, feasible, and then we have like cost, setup time, runtime, evidence, strength, capabilities. There's like a bunch of kind of information radiators on there to help you choose, and so we basically run experiments to then go and find out, you know, are these things that have to be true, that we don't have a lot of evidence to prove them out, are they true or not? And so we start then using this process to find out and then we come back and update our maps and update our artefacts, but that's kind of the three step process would be extract, map and then test.   Ula Ojiaku   Thank you. Would you say that there is a time when the testing stops? David Bland   I would say it never completely stops, or at least hopefully it doesn't completely stop. Even if you're using discovery and delivery, I find that usually in the beginning there's a lot of discovery and maybe a little bit of delivery or almost no delivery, and then as you de-risk you have kind of like more delivery and then a little bit less discovery. And then maybe if you're in a kind of repeatable mode where you're trying to scale something there's a lot of delivery and a little bit of discovery, but where I get really nervous are teams that kind of have a phase or a switch and they say, okay, we've done all the discovery now we're just going to build and deliver. I feel as if that constant contact with customers, being able to constantly understand them, their needs are going to change over time as you scale, it's going to change things, and so I get really nervous when teams want to just kind of act like it's a phase and we're done with our testing, right, we're done with our discovery. And I feel great organisations are always discovering to an extent. So it's just really finding the balance with your teams and with your orgs, like how much delivery do you have to do? How much discovery do you need to kind of inform that delivery? So ideally it doesn't stop, but the percentage of discovery you're doing in testing will most likely change over time. Ula Ojiaku   So in the world of Agile, Agile with a capital A in terms of the frameworks that originated from software development, the role of the Product Owner/Product Manager is typically associated with ensuring that this sort of continuous exploration and discovery is carried out throughout the product's lifecycle. Do you have any thoughts on this notion or idea? David Bland   I think there's always some level of risk and uncertainty in your backlog and in your roadmaps. So people in charge of product should be helping reduce that uncertainty. Now, it's usually not on their own, they'll pair with a researcher, maybe a designer. They might even be pairing with software developers to take notes during interviews and things like that to socialise how they're paying down the risk. But I think if you look at your backlog, you're kind of looking at middle to bottom and saying, oh, there's a lot of uncertainty here, I'm not really sure if you should even be working on these. So part of that process should be running discovery on it, and so I try to socialise it. So if you're in your Standups, talk about some of the discovery work you're doing, if you're in planning, plan out some of the discovery work you're doing, it's just going to help you build this overall cohesive idea of, well, I'm seeing something come in that I have to work on, but it's not the first time I've seen it, and I kind of understand the why, I understand that we did discovery on it to better understand and inform this thing and shape what I'm about to work on, and so I think it helps create those like touch points with your team. Ula Ojiaku   Thank you for that, David. So let's go on. There is, of course, your really, really helpful book,  personally I have used it and I've taken, I've not done all the experiments there, but definitely some of the experiments I have coached teams or leaders and organisations on how to use that. But apart from Testing Business Ideas, are there other books that you have found yourself recommending to people on this topic? David Bland   Yeah, I think there's some that go deeper, right, on a specific subject. So for example, interviews, that can be a tool book itself, right, and so there's some great books out there. Steve Portigal has some great books on understanding how to conduct interviews. I also like The Mom Test, well I don't like the title of the book, the content is pretty good, which is basically how to really do a customer interview well and not ask like, closed-ended leading bias questions that just get the answers you want so you can just jump to build, you know. So there are some books I keep coming back to as well. And then there's still some older books that, you know, we built on, foundationally as part of Testing Business Ideas, right? So if you look at Business Model Generation from Alex Osterwalder, Value Prop Design, the Testing Business Ideas book fits really well in that framework. And while I reference Business Model Canvas and Value Prop Canvas in Testing Business Ideas, I don't deep dive on it because there's literally two books that dive into that. A lot of the work we've built upon is Steve Blank's work from Four Steps to the Epiphany and I think people think that that book's dated for some reason now, but it's very applicable, especially B2B discovery. And so I constantly with my B2B startups and B2B corporations, I'm constantly referring them back to that book as a model for looking at how you go about this process from customer discovery to customer validation. So yeah, there are some ones I keep coming back to. Some of the newer ones, there are some books on scaling because I don't, I'm usually working up until product market fit, you know, and I don't have a lot of growth experiments in there. So there are some books now starting to come out about scaling, but I think if you're looking at Testing Business Ideas and saying, oh, there's something here and it kind of covers it, but I want to go a lot deeper, then it's finding complimentary books that help you go deeper on a specific thing, because Testing Business Ideas are more like a library and a reference guide and a process of how to go through it. It would have been like two or three times in length if we'd gone really, really deep on everything, so I think 200 pages of experiments was a pretty good quantity there. And so I'm often, I'm referring books that go deeper on a specific thing where people want to learn more.   Ula Ojiaku   Thank you for that. So if the audience, they've listened to what you have to say and they're like, I think I need to speak with David, how can they reach you? David Bland   Yeah, I mean, davidjbland.com is a great place to go, that's me, you can read about me, you can watch videos on me presenting. I have, you know, videos of me presenting at conferences, but also, there's a YouTube channel you can go to where I have some of my webinars that are free to watch as well, and just little coaching videos I make where I'm like, hey, I have a team that's really struggling with this concept and I just kind of make a quick YouTube video helping people out to say this is how I'm addressing this with, you know, with a team. Also Precoil, P-R-E-C-O-I-L, that's my company, and so there's a lot of great content there as well. And then just in general social media, although I have to say I'm pulling back on social media a little bit. So, I would say for the most part LinkedIn is a great place to find me, I'm usually posting memes about customer discovery and videos and things just trying to help people, like make you laugh and educate you, and so LinkedIn, surprisingly, I don't think I'd ever say like, oh, come check me out on LinkedIn, you know, five or ten years ago, but now that's where I spend a lot of my time, and I feel like that's where my customers are and that's where I can help them, so yeah, I end up spending a lot of time on LinkedIn too.   Ula Ojiaku   Yeah, some of your memes there like, I mean, how do I put it, just gets me up in stitches. Yeah, I don't know how you find them or do you commission actors to do some of them, but yeah, it's good. So yeah, so LinkedIn, social media is the main place, and your websites, those would be in the show notes. I also heard you do have a course, an online course. Can you tell us about that? David Bland   Yeah, this summer, I finally found some space to put together my thoughts into an Assumptions Mapping Course. So that is on Teachable. I'm going to be building it out with more courses, but I've just had enough people look at that two by two and read the book and say, I think I know how to facilitate this, but I'm not sure, and so I literally just went like step by step with a with a case study and it has some exercises as well where you can see how to set up the agenda, how to do the pre work for it, who you need in the room for it, how to facilitate it, what traps to look out for because sometimes, you know, you're trying to facilitate this priority sort of exercise and then things go wry. So I talked about some of the things I've learned over the years facilitating it and then what to do a little bit after. So yeah, it's a pretty just like bite-sized hands-on oh, I want to learn this and I want to go try with the team or do it myself. So yeah, I do have a new course that I launched that just walks people step by step like I would be coaching them. Ula Ojiaku OK, and do you mind mentioning out loud the website, is it precoil.teachable.com and they can find your Assumptions Mapping Fundamentals Course there?   David Bland   Correct. It's on precoil.teachable.com   Ula Ojiaku   OK, and search for Assumptions Mapping Fundamentals by David Bland. Right, so are there any final words of wisdom that you have for the audience, David. David Bland   Try to keen an open mind when you're going through a lot of this work. I feel as if the mindset is so important, you know. So if you're taking this checkbox mentality, you're not going to get the results out of following any of these processes, right. So, I think being able this idea of, oh, I'm opening myself to the idea that there's some assumptions here that may not be true, that I should probably test. It shouldn't be an exercise where you're just checking the box saying, yep, I wrote down my assumption and then, yeah, I ran an experiment that validated that and then move on, you know. It's more about the process of trying to, because your uncertainty and risk kind of move around. So, this idea of mindset, I can't stress enough that try and keep an open mind and then be willing to learn things that maybe you weren't expected to learn, and I think all these great businesses we look at over the years, they started off as something else, or some form of something else, and then they happened upon something that was an aha moment during the process, and I think that's, we have to be careful of rewriting history and saying it was somebody, it was a genius and he had a single brilliant idea, and then just built the thing and made millions. Very rarely does that ever occur. And so I think when you start really unwinding and it's about having an open mind, being willing to learn things that maybe you didn't anticipate, and I think just that mindset is so important. Ula Ojiaku   Thanks. I don't mean to detract from what you've said, but what I'm hearing from you as well is that it's not a linear process. So whilst you might have, in the book and the ideas you've shared, you know, kind of simplifying it, there are steps, but sometimes there might be loops to it too, so having an open mind to know that's something that worked today or something you got a positive result from, might not necessarily work tomorrow, it's, there's always more and it's an iterative journey.   David Bland   It's quite iterative.   Ula Ojiaku   Yeah. Well thank you so much David for this, making the time for this conversation. I really learned a lot and I enjoyed the conversation. Many thanks.   David Bland   Thanks for having me. Ula Ojiaku   My pleasure. That's all we have for now. Thanks for listening. If you liked this show, do subscribe at www.agileinnovationleaders.com or your favourite podcast provider. Also share with friends and do leave a review on iTunes. This would help others find this show. I'd also love to hear from you, so please drop me an email at ula@agileinnovationleaders.com Take care and God bless!   

In this episode of The Optimal Path, Ash Oliver discusses the future of user research with expert Dave Hora. From his beginnings in research back in 2011 to his key roles at companies like Plangrid and Instacart, Dave has been at the forefront of driving innovation through research. Now, he's here to share his thoughts on what's next for user research—discussing the growing demand for user insights, how to integrate research practices throughout the product lifecycle, and the opportunities of AI tools.Tune in to uncover how we can seize the moment and define what's next. About Dave:Dave Hora is the founder of Dave's Research Co., where he helps product leaders launch new product lines with the right mix of data, insight, and common sense. He began professional research work in 2011, eventually starting the practice as the first research hire at six companies, including PlanGrid and Instacart. He now works with companies across the globe and writes extensively on the topic of research and its co-evolution with the product practice. Connect with Dave:You can connect with Dave on LinkedIn Resources:The Future of User Research Report by MazeUser Research and Its Inevitable Evolution by Dave HoraWhither UX Research? by Peter MerholzThe UX Research Reckoning is Here by Judd AntinEmpathy: The importance of how we speak about ourselves, Maze Disco Conf presentation by Kyle OsborneThe next frontier for research: Building organizations that learn by Behzod SirjaniJust Enough Research by Erika HallBad research doesn't stink by Carl Pearson, PhDThe Mistake Almost Everyone Makes When Doing User Research by Behzod SirjaniFostering a culture of organizational learning with Roy Opata OlendeThe Democratization of User Research is a Red Herring by Peter MerholzThe Nature of Order by Christopher W. AlexanderThe Timeless Way of Building by Christopher W. AlexanderA Pattern Language by Christopher AlexanderInterviewing Users: How to Uncover Compelling Insights by Steve Portigal Follow Maze on Social Media:X: @mazedesignHQInstagram: @mazedesignHQLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/mazedesignTo get notified when new episodes come out, subscribe at maze.co/podcast.See you next time!

Ever wondered what it takes to unearth the most compelling insights from a user interview?In this episode, Hannah Clark is joined by Steve Portigal—User Research Consultant & Author of Interviewing Users: How to Uncover Compelling Insights (2nd Edition)—to discuss the nuance involved in conducting user interviews, how to ask follow-up questions, and tips to manage unexpected responses.

Steve Portigal of Portigal Consulting has been doing User Research since the days our software all came in a box. He has written a seminal book on the topic, “Interviewing Users: How to Uncover Compelling Insights,” recently released in a 2nd edition available through Rosenfeld Media.Steve shares his journey from the nascent years of user research through today and his take on where user research is headed. We discuss his book and how studying creative writing has informed his approach. Steve also tells the story of building a community of Rolling Stones enthusiasts – pre-World Wide Web! - that is still alive and kicking (just like Keith Richards).[Visit rosenfeldmedia.com to find Steve's book and use the code ‘rocknroll' for a 20% discount m/]

Global Product Management Talk is pleased to bring you the next episode of... Product Mastery Now with host Chad McAllister, PhD. The podcast is all about helping people involved in innovation and managing products become more successful, grow their careers, and STANDOUT from their peers. About the Episode:  As a product person, you know or at least have heard how important it is to talk with customers. Also, if you are not a complete newb, you also know you can't simply ask the customer what they want. Instead, what do you ask them—how do you conduct a customer interview? We are about to find out from the go-to person on customer interviews, Steve Portigal. Rich Mironov, past guest and CPO of CPOs, said that Steve is the go-to veteran for field research and interviewing users. Steve is an experienced user researcher and consultant who helps organizations to build more mature user research practices. He's also the host of the Dollars to Donuts podcast, where he interviews people who lead user research in their organizations. His work has informed the development of professional audio gear, wine packaging, medical information systems, design systems, video-conferencing technology, and music streaming services. You may already be familiar with Steve's highly regarded book Interviewing Users: How to Uncover Compelling Insights. He has recently updated this book, creating the second edition.

What does it take to turn conversations into compelling user insights?In this engaging episode of the Greenbook Podcast, esteemed user researcher and author Steve Portigal joins us to discuss his book "Interviewing Users: How to Uncover Compelling Insights." He delves into the evolution of user research, highlighting the critical distinction between business challenges and research questions, and the importance of adapting to societal shifts such as the rise of remote user research. Steve shares invaluable insights and practical tools from his book that aid researchers in effectively capturing and analyzing data, and emphasizes the significance of driving impactful research across organizations. Use the code Greenbook for 20% off of your copy of his book!You can reach out to Steve on LinkedIn. Many thanks to Steve for being our guest. Thanks also to our producer, Natalie Pusch; and our editor, Big Bad Audio.Mentioned in this episode:Free registration for IIEX Health here: https://hubs.ly/Q02fNTWC0

In this episode, Darren talks shop with Steve Portigal, a noted UX consultant and the author of Interviewing Users: How to Uncover Compelling Insights and Doorbells, Danger, and Dead Batteries: User Research War Stories. During the session, Steve also provided a discount code for his book when purchased through Rosenfeld Media.Check out the new World of UX website at https://www.worldoux.com.Visit the UX Uncensored blog at https://uxuncensored.medium.com. #ux#podcasts#cxofmradio#cxofm#realuxtalk#worldofux#worldoux#talkinshop

Steve Portigal is an independent user research consultant. He is the author of Interviewing Users and Doorbells, Danger, and Dead Batteries. Steve and I both have new books, so we thought it'd be fun to compare notes on writing non-fiction. In this, the second of two episodes on the subject, we focus on the process of writing. If you haven't done so already, listen to our previous conversation, which focused on our motivations.Show notesSteve PortigalSteve Portigal - LinkedInPortigal ConsultingInterviewing Users: How to Uncover Compelling Insights (2nd edition) by Steve PortigalDoorbells, Danger, and Dead Batteries: User Research War Stories by Steve PortigalDuly Noted: Extend Your Mind Through Connected Notes by Jorge ArangoLiving in Information: Responsible Design for Digital Places by Jorge ArangoInformation Architecture for the Web and Beyond by Louis Rosenfeld, Peter Morville, and Jorge ArangoScrivenerTinderboxThe Informed Life episode 99: Mark Bernstein on TinderboxFreeform on the App StoreShitty First Drafts by Anne Lamott (PDF)Jack Kerouac - WikipediaThe Informed Life episode 2: Gretchen Anderson on WritingShow notes include Amazon affiliate links. We get a small commission for purchases made through these links.If you're enjoying the show, please rate or review us in Apple's podcast directory:https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-informed-life/id1450117117?itsct=podcast_box&itscg=30200

Steve Portigal is an independent user research consultant. He is the author of Interviewing Users and Doorbells, Danger, and Dead Batteries. Steve was previously on the show last year, talking about research skills. This conversation is a bit different: both of us have written new books, and we thought it'd be fun to compare notes about the process. We decided to split our conversation into two parts. This episode focuses on the motivations for writing, and the second part will focus on processes.Show NotesSteve PortigalSteve Portigal - LinkedInPortigal ConsultingInterviewing Users: How to Uncover Compelling Insights (2nd edition) by Steve PortigalDoorbells, Danger, and Dead Batteries: User Research War Stories by Steve PortigalThe Informed Life ep. 92 - Steve Portigal on Research SkillsLouis RosenfeldInformation Architecture for the Web and Beyond by Louis Rosenfeld, Peter Morville, and Jorge ArangoBloggerThe Informed Life ep. 118 — Maggie Appleton on Digital GardeningMaggie AppletonAbout Face: The Essentials of Interaction Design (4th edition) by Alan Cooper, Robert Reimann, David Cronin, and Christopher NoesselWrite Useful Books by Rob FitzpatrickObsidianBuilding a Personal Knowledge Garden (Information Architecture Conference 2022 workshop)Show notes include Amazon affiliate links. We get a small commission for purchases made through these links.If you're enjoying the show, please rate or review us in Apple's podcast directory:https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-informed-life/id1450117117?itsct=podcast_box&itscg=30200

To conduct a good research-focused interview, you need to cultivate a professional interviewing mindset. Steve Portigal has been doing this for years, and he has written a book to help other researchers and designers conduct better interviews. Now in its second edition, Interviewing Users: How to Uncover Compelling Insights, covers interviewing techniques, of course, but also research best practices, how to document your work, and how to make sense of your discoveries. https://ellessmedia.com/csi/steve-portigal/

Steve Portigal is a consultant who helps organizations build more mature user research practices. He's the author of Interviewing Users: How to Uncover Compelling Insights and Doorbells, Danger, and Dead Batteries: User Research War Stories. He's also the host of the Dollar to Donuts podcast about research leadership. In this conversation, we discuss the skills required for conducting successful interviews with users.Show notesSteve Portigal (portigal.com)Steve Portigal (linkedin.com)Portigal ConsultingInterviewing Users: How to Uncover Compelling Insights by Steve PortigalDoorbells, Danger, and Dead Batteries: User Research War Stories by Steve PortigalDollars to Donuts podcastDale CarnegieDunning-Kruger effectShow notes include Amazon affiliate links. I get a small commission for purchases made through these links.

Steve Portigal helps companies to think and act strategically when innovating with user insights. Over the course of his career, he has interviewed hundreds of people and helped many organisations to understand their users. He’s also the Dollars to Donuts podcast host, where he interviews people who lead user research in their organizations. He is also the author of two famous titles - Interviewing Users: How to Uncover Compelling Insights & Doorbells, Danger, and Dead Batteries: User Research War Stories. He has been a keynote speaker on various occasion like CHI, IxDA, Lift, SXSW, UIE, UPA, UX Australia, UX Hong Kong, UX Lisbon, and WebVisions. In this episode, Steve shared wonderful insights on user interviews and why we do user interviews in design; we then discussed the framework of interviews using which we can gain great insights from users and few tips on actively listening and note-taking during interviews. In the latter part, steve recommended five do's and don'ts that designers/researchers must avoid while doing user interviews. We then concluded the show by steve recommending few tips on how could we combine all the insights and convey them into a narrative across teams that can create an impact. Takeaways - What are user interviews, Meaning of insights, Combining insights to narrate a story. Books by Steve - https://portigal.com/books Dollars to Donuts - https://portigal.com/podcast Resources shared by Steve Portigal The organization’s design research maturity model-Chris Avore The Secret Life of Groceries: The Dark Miracle of the American Supermarket - Benjamin Lorr It Chooses You - Miranda July Communicating the New: Methods to Shape and Accelerate Innovation - Kim Erwin Thank you for listening to this episode of Nodes of Design. We hope you enjoy the Nodes of Design Podcast on your favourite podcast platforms- Apple Podcast, Spotify, Google Podcasts and many more. If this episode helped you understand and learn something new, please share and be a part of the knowledge-sharing community #Spreadknowledge. This podcast aims to make design education accessible to all. Nodes of Design is a non-profit and self-sponsored initiative by Tejj.

Understanding user’s needs continues to be one of the top challenges for enterprise and industrial product leaders. And although the practice of user research has been around for a while, most of the information out there seems to focus on B2C products. This is why I’m very excited to be joined by Steve Portigal joining us on the show today! My guest today is Steve Portigal, an experienced user researcher, author, and consultant who helps organizations build more mature user research practices. In our conversation, Steve shares how he approaches B2B research and we discuss the complexities of doing user research in a B2B context, the challenges of getting access to users, the need to focus on understanding customers’ pain (as opposed to only focusing on usability), and how to influence your organization to conduct more research. Steve also shares his advice on how to build a practice that encourages ongoing user research. This is a very important episode that no product leader should miss!   Episode Details: Build more mature user-research practices with Steve Portigal: “If you’re just testing the usability and not the desirability or the usefulness, then you’re not going to uncover the fundamentals flaws that may exist in those initial assumptions.” — Steve Portigal   About Steve Portigal: Steve Portigal is a consultant who helps organizations to build more mature user research practices. Over the past 20 years, he has interviewed hundreds of people, including families eating breakfast, hotel maintenance staff, architects, radiologists, home-automation enthusiasts, credit-default swap traders, and rock musicians. His work has informed the development of mobile devices, medical information systems, music gear, wine packaging, financial services, corporate intranets, videoconferencing systems, and music accessories.   Steve is the author of two books, Interviewing Users: How to Uncover Compelling Insights and Doorbells, Danger, and Dead Batteries: User Research War Stories. Additionally, he is the host of the podcast, Dollars to Donuts.   Topics We Discuss in this Episode: Steve’s career background and the work he does today as an experienced user researcher What a user researcher does and why it is important Invaluable tips for user researchers Why companies struggle to understand their customers’ challenges How a company can become more user-centered How to enable a culture that empowers everyone Why you may want to bring on a user researcher or an external expert The nuances of being a team player and contributing to the success of the company How to challenge baseline assumptions in order to move forward and grow as a company The differences between B2C and B2B user research The challenges of user research (and how to overcome them) Why user research is not only incredibly invaluable but needs to be figured out for your company Why culture is critical to research How to support leaders in helping transform the organization’s mindset into a customer-centric culture Proactive vs. reactive research   Product Leader Tip of the Week: Keep in mind, user research is a skill. You can read about it, take classes, listen to podcasts, but you also have to practice.   Practice can include: knowing when to do research, knowing what research to do, how to go about actually doing the research, learning how to leverage the research that you’ve done, and learning how to help others understand the research.   And be sure to give yourself the chance to get better. All of this takes time. Be compassionate and understand that research is not just binary; there are many, many facets of it.   To Learn More About Rob Tiffany: Steve Portigal’s Website Podcast: Dollars to Donuts Interviewing Users: How to Uncover Compelling Insights, by Steve Portigal Doorbells, Danger, and Dead Batteries: User Research War Stories, by Steve Portigal   Related Resources: com/Template — Download Daniel’s free IoT Product Strategy Template here!   Want to Learn More? Sign up for my newsletter atcom/Join for weekly advice and best practices directly to your inbox! Visit com/Podcast for additional information, show notes, and episodes. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts so you don’t miss out on any of my conversations with product and thought leaders!

Steve Portigal is the Principal of Portigal Consulting and an experienced user researcher who helps companies harness the strategic power of insights. He is the author of Interviewing Users: How to Uncover Compelling Insights. He also wrote Doorbells, Danger, and Dead Batteries: User Research War Stories. We talk about interviewing people, customer research, and storytelling with Dawan Stanford, your podcast host. Show Summary Steve started out in Human Computer Interaction (HCI), in the days before the World Wide Web and before the formal idea of user experience (UX) existed. He had a brief exposure to design as a profession through an article about industrial product design, and to the idea of bringing together people from many different disciplines to collaborate and create solutions to problems via another article about a project trying to determine how best to find a way to demarcate dangerous locations, like nuclear waste sites. These ideas planted seeds leading to his interest in design. Steve graduated with his Masters in HCI, had a summer internship in Silicon Valley, and eventually found a job in an industrial design consultancy to work on what was essentially proto-UX design with their software. At the same time, this company was exploring ideas surrounding ethnographic research and the idea of uncovering product opportunities, and Steve managed to apprentice himself with the team, where he learned about organizing and finding connections within data. He also had the opportunity to develop his initial interviewing skills, which he continued to hone as he started his own consultancy focused on user research. Steve was one of the first people in the early 90's to develop design processes for user experience and research. We talk about Steve's excitement for and interest in spending more time with stakeholders within a client's organization. He has learned why a stakeholder's perspective is essential in relation to the success of a project. He talks about creating “learning-ready” moments, how he helps people have these moments, and how learning and sharing the journey of learning affect learning retention. Listen in to learn: How Steve and others developed the design processes in the early stages of user experience and research  How Steve's skills, interests, and the work he does for his clients has evolved over the years When Steve knows he's found a great client Why he believes that learning together is when change can happen Why understanding stakeholders gives better results with clients Being able to embrace realistic expectations of what you can accomplish    Our Guest's Bio Steve Portigal is an experienced user researcher who helps companies to think and act strategically when innovating with user insights. Based in the San Francisco Bay Area, he is principal of Portigal Consulting and the author of two books: the classic Interviewing Users: How To Uncover Compelling Insights and, Doorbells, Danger, and Dead Batteries: User Research War Stories.   He's also the host of the Dollars to Donuts podcast, where he interviews people who lead user research in their organizations. Steve is an accomplished presenter who speaks about culture, innovation, and design at companies and conferences across the globe.   Show Highlights  [02:09] Steve talks about his origin story and his introduction to the ideas of design and user experience.  [06:15] Steve's first job at an industrial design consultancy. [08:15] Steve's apprenticeship with the team exploring a nascent practice in what was basically user experience.  [09:58] Many companies were exploring and experimenting with these new ideas around user research in the 90s, and how that led to the development of best practices and processes around the work. [13:05] Steve's litmus test for a new client. [13:37] How Steve's role and work started to shift and change. [15:40] The way in which Steve sets up expectations with new clients and spending time with the stakeholders in a client's organization. [16:20] The value in spending as much time with stakeholders as with users to gain a deep understanding of their motivations and perceptions. [19:03] Repetitive patterns and questions Steve sees with clients. [22:28] Using storytelling to help explain concepts and share information, and to help move clients through shared experiences and discussions. [24:04] Separating the value of the research from any action that may take place. [28:15] The importance of the “Why” of user research. [30:39] How Steve's practice has evolved and the scope of his work today, now that many companies have in-house user research and design teams. [35:05] Steve's specialized “master classes” for design teams. [38:52] What Steve wishes everyone knew about user research and what you can do with it, both personally and organizationally. [41:24] Steve's reflections on a few of his learning experiences. [44:55] His experience with one of the experts he used in his consulting work. [48:35] What Steve might add to a new book about interviewing users and UX, should he decide to write one. [54:00] Where you can find out more about Steve and his work.   Links Portigal Consulting Steve Portigal on LinkedIn Steve Portigal on Medium Steve Portigal on Twitter Find Out More About Steve's Books Dollars to Donuts Episode 30: Laith Ulaby of Udemy Dollars to Donuts Episode 27: Colin MacArthur of the Canadian Digital Service         Other Design Thinking 101 Episodes You Might Like   Problem Spaces, Understanding How People Think, and Practical Empathy with Indi Young — DT101 E6   Public Sector Design + Outcome Chains + Prototyping for Impact with Boris Divjak — DT101 E26   The Evolution of Teaching and Learning Design with Bruce Hanington — DT101 E39         ________________   Thank you for listening to the show and looking at the show notes. Send your questions, suggestions, and guest ideas to Dawan and the Fluid Hive team. Cheers ~ Dawan   Free Download — Design Driven Innovation: Avoid Innovation Traps with These 9 Steps   Innovation Smart Start Webinar — Take your innovation projects from frantic to focused!

Steve Portigal is the Principal of Portigal Consulting and an experienced user researcher who helps companies harness the strategic power of insights. He is the author of Interviewing Users: How to Uncover Compelling Insights. He also wrote Doorbells, Danger, and Dead Batteries: User Research War Stories. We talk about interviewing people, customer research, and storytelling with Dawan Stanford, your podcast host. Show Summary Steve started out in Human Computer Interaction (HCI), in the days before the World Wide Web and before the formal idea of user experience (UX) existed. He had a brief exposure to design as a profession through an article about industrial product design, and to the idea of bringing together people from many different disciplines to collaborate and create solutions to problems via another article about a project trying to determine how best to find a way to demarcate dangerous locations, like nuclear waste sites. These ideas planted seeds leading to his interest in design. Steve graduated with his Masters in HCI, had a summer internship in Silicon Valley, and eventually found a job in an industrial design consultancy to work on what was essentially proto-UX design with their software. At the same time, this company was exploring ideas surrounding ethnographic research and the idea of uncovering product opportunities, and Steve managed to apprentice himself with the team, where he learned about organizing and finding connections within data. He also had the opportunity to develop his initial interviewing skills, which he continued to hone as he started his own consultancy focused on user research. Steve was one of the first people in the early 90’s to develop design processes for user experience and research. We talk about Steve’s excitement for and interest in spending more time with stakeholders within a client’s organization. He has learned why a stakeholder’s perspective is essential in relation to the success of a project. He talks about creating “learning-ready” moments, how he helps people have these moments, and how learning and sharing the journey of learning affect learning retention. Listen in to learn: How Steve and others developed the design processes in the early stages of user experience and research  How Steve’s skills, interests, and the work he does for his clients has evolved over the years When Steve knows he’s found a great client Why he believes that learning together is when change can happen Why understanding stakeholders gives better results with clients Being able to embrace realistic expectations of what you can accomplish    Our Guest’s Bio Steve Portigal is an experienced user researcher who helps companies to think and act strategically when innovating with user insights. Based in the San Francisco Bay Area, he is principal of Portigal Consulting and the author of two books: the classic Interviewing Users: How To Uncover Compelling Insights and, Doorbells, Danger, and Dead Batteries: User Research War Stories.   He's also the host of the Dollars to Donuts podcast, where he interviews people who lead user research in their organizations. Steve is an accomplished presenter who speaks about culture, innovation, and design at companies and conferences across the globe.   Show Highlights  [02:09] Steve talks about his origin story and his introduction to the ideas of design and user experience.  [06:15] Steve’s first job at an industrial design consultancy. [08:15] Steve’s apprenticeship with the team exploring a nascent practice in what was basically user experience.  [09:58] Many companies were exploring and experimenting with these new ideas around user research in the 90s, and how that led to the development of best practices and processes around the work. [13:05] Steve’s litmus test for a new client. [13:37] How Steve’s role and work started to shift and change. [15:40] The way in which Steve sets up expectations with new clients and spending time with the stakeholders in a client’s organization. [16:20] The value in spending as much time with stakeholders as with users to gain a deep understanding of their motivations and perceptions. [19:03] Repetitive patterns and questions Steve sees with clients. [22:28] Using storytelling to help explain concepts and share information, and to help move clients through shared experiences and discussions. [24:04] Separating the value of the research from any action that may take place. [28:15] The importance of the “Why” of user research. [30:39] How Steve’s practice has evolved and the scope of his work today, now that many companies have in-house user research and design teams. [35:05] Steve’s specialized “master classes” for design teams. [38:52] What Steve wishes everyone knew about user research and what you can do with it, both personally and organizationally. [41:24] Steve’s reflections on a few of his learning experiences. [44:55] His experience with one of the experts he used in his consulting work. [48:35] What Steve might add to a new book about interviewing users and UX, should he decide to write one. [54:00] Where you can find out more about Steve and his work.   Links Portigal Consulting Steve Portigal on LinkedIn Steve Portigal on Medium Steve Portigal on Twitter Find Out More About Steve’s Books Dollars to Donuts Episode 30: Laith Ulaby of Udemy Dollars to Donuts Episode 27: Colin MacArthur of the Canadian Digital Service         Other Design Thinking 101 Episodes You Might Like   Problem Spaces, Understanding How People Think, and Practical Empathy with Indi Young — DT101 E6   Public Sector Design + Outcome Chains + Prototyping for Impact with Boris Divjak — DT101 E26   The Evolution of Teaching and Learning Design with Bruce Hanington — DT101 E39         ________________   Thank you for listening to the show and looking at the show notes. Send your questions, suggestions, and guest ideas to Dawan and the Fluid Hive team. Cheers ~ Dawan   Free Download — Design Driven Innovation: Avoid Innovation Traps with These 9 Steps   Innovation Smart Start Webinar — Take your innovation projects from frantic to focused!

In today's Q&A Friday, we talk about serving a diverse customer base, hiring a professional coach, growing multiple email lists, staying motivated, and more! When you serve a very large range of customers, how do you decide what features to build first? Any advice for picking a product or service that fits with your content?  When personally welcoming a new subscriber to my newsletter, is it better for me to write a personalized welcome email to them or send a personalized welcome video instead? What are the things you should look for when hiring a professional coach? ​Nathan, you mentioned how you quit your job and it took you about six months to get back to your usual pace of productive output. Can you talk more about that and motivation while working solo? Would you put out an e-book first? Or go for a full book for a specific topic? ​As a rapidly growing business, when is the right time to transition from "scratching your own itch" to "serving the current/future needs of your market/customers"? When should creators start a new email list vs. growing a single large one? Should new but related products start with a new list? Links Drew Holcomb Episode 36 of Future Belongs to Creators: Coming Up with a Business Model Dan Ariely Sean Wes How to Build a Sustainable Business Coaching Practice (And Double Your Rates in the Process) by Barrett Brooks  Mike Pacchione Chris Guillebeau Free ebook Templates Interviewing Users: How to Uncover Compelling Insights by Steve Portigal How Fizzle Uses Customer Research to Improve Our Products and Grow Our Business by Barrett Brooks Start building your audience for freeWith ConvertKit landing pages, you can build a beautiful page for your project in just a few minutes. Choose colors, add photos, build a custom opt-in form, and add your copy. All without writing any code! Check out landingpages.new to get started.Stay in touch Apple Podcasts Spotify Twitter Facebook Instagram

My guest today is Steve Portigal, Founder of Portigal Consulting. Established in 2001, Portigal Consulting helps organizations bring insights about their users into their design and development processes. Additionally, he has also authored two books: "Doorbells, Danger, and Dead Batteries: User Research War Stories," and "Interviewing Users: How to Uncover Compelling Insights." And, Steve hosts Dollars to Donuts which has 24 episodes with remarkable guests including head of User Experience Research at Pinterest, Airbnb, Mailchimp, Goldman Sachs, and IBM. Find Steve Online: LinkedIn Website: portigal.com Find Us Online:  Social Media: @happymrxp LinkedIn Website: happymr.com This Episode’s Sponsor:  This episode is brought to you by HubUx. HubUx reduces project management costs by 90%. Think of HubUx as your personal AI project manager, taking care of all your recruitment and interview coordination needs in the background. The platform connects you with the right providers and sample based on your research and project needs. For more information, please visit HubUx.com. [00:00] On Episode 228, I'm interviewing Steve Portigal, founder of Portigal Consulting, but first a word from our sponsor.  [00:11] This episode is brought to you by HubUx.  HubUx is a productivity tool for qualitative research.  It creates a seamless workflow across your tools and team.  Originally, came up with the idea as I was listening to research professionals in both the quant and qual space complain about and articulate the pain, I guess more succinctly, around managing qualitative research.  The one big problem with qualitative is it’s synchronous in nature, and it requires 100% of the attention of the respondent. This creates a big barrier, and, I believe, a tremendous opportunity inside of the marketplace.  So what we do is we take the tools that you use; we integrate them into a work flow so that, ultimately, you enter in your project details, that is, who it is that you want to talk to, when you want to talk to them, whether it’s a focus group, in-person, or virtual or IDI’s or ethnos; and we connect you to those right people in the times that you want to have those conversations or connections – Push-Button Qualitative Insights, HubUx.  If you have any questions, reach out to me directly. I would appreciate it. Jamin@HubUx.com    [01:36] Hi, I'm Jamin, and you're listening to the Happy Market Research Podcast. My guest today is Steve Portigal, founder of Portigal Consulting.  Established in 2001, Portigal Consulting helps organizations bring insights about their users into their design and development processes. Additionally, he has authored two books: Doorbells, Danger and Dead Batteries, User Research War Stories. I actually am ordering that one as soon as we are off this call. It's on my list of things to do today, by the way, and then I've already ordered the Interviewing Users - How to Uncover Compelling Insights. Holy Moly, that is going to be super interesting.  And Steve hosts what is now my number one listened to podcast for the last two weeks. In fact, I've got a six-hour or eight-hour road trip coming up this Wednesday. All the episodes are downloading. I believe I'm going to be caught up at the end of that road trip. He's got 24 episodes with remarkable guests, including head of user-experience research at Pinterest, Airbnb, MailChimp, Goldman Sachs, IBM, and the list goes on. Steve, it is an honor to have you on the Happy Market Research Podcast today. Thank you.  [02:47] I'm happy to be here.  [02:48] I'd like to start out with a quick kind of assessment of, from your point of view...  You grew up in a different area than the Bay Area. Tell us a little bit about your parents, your upbringing, and how that informed who you are today and what you're doing.  [03:03] Yeah, I was raised by a single parent. My mom raised me and my sister in southern Ontario.

Are you committed to doing user research in order to design and build products and services that work well, solve real needs, and create engaging experiences? Chances are pretty good that if you produce user research in your work, at some point you will feel like your research is just not making the impact it should be. Or you may have trouble making a case for doing more research — and the number one way to get your organization on board with doing more research is to make sure the research that IS done is super effective. So, how can you get more effective?We spoke with expert researcher Danyell Jones, and she’s got a recipe for making research more effective for in-house teams. Danyell is a User Experience Research Lead at ZS Associates, a management consulting firm in Chicago, and she’s giving a talk at the upcoming Convey UX conference called A Recipe for In-house Research. We caught up with her recently where she was working from home while Chicago was in the middle of the Polar Vortex. Danyell Jones oversees and conducts research across 5 different verticals in the Software Development group at ZS Associates. Danyell works with teams to develop reusable and efficient processes for conducting and analyzing research while increasing the visibility of the research practice and user experience team. In addition to working in user research, Danyell teaches graduate-level classes in the HCI program at DePaul University as well as at the Illinois Institute of Art in the Web Design and Interactive Media department. She is also a runner, an avid reader, a Whovian, and a video game lover.Follow Danyell on Twitter @danyelljonesWondering how to ask better questions to avoid the mistakes we talked about? We recommend this book for every level of experience: Interviewing Users: How to Uncover Compelling Insights by Steve Portigal See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Hello and welcome to another episode of This is HCD. I'm your host Chi Ryan, and in this episode, I'm speaking to researcher Steve Portigal. Steve is the Principal of Portigal Consulting and the author of two books: Interviewing Users: How to Uncover Compelling Insights, and Doorbells Danger and Dead Batteries: User Research War Stories. Based outside San Francisco, Steve helps companies to think and act strategically as a result of human insights. Steve has his own podcast, Dollars to Donuts, where he interviews people who lead user research in their organizations. Throughout his career, Steve has interviewed hundreds of people including families eating breakfast, hotel maintenance staff, architects, rock musicians, home automation enthusiasts, credit default swap traders, and radiologists. His work has informed the development of mobile devices, medical information systems, music gear, wine packaging, financial services, corporate internet and video conferencing systems. Wowsers - Steve has really done a lot of things! Exclusive discount The following 20% discount code for 'Doorbells, Dangers and Dead Batteries'. Expires on December 31, 2018: HCD2018 Resources Doorbells, Dangers and Dead Batteries Interviewing Users  Portigal Consulting Rosenfeld Media  Steve Portigal on LinkedIn  Vox Media  Dollars to Donuts podcast This is HCD is brought to you by Humana Design Follow This is HCD us on Twitter Follow This is HCD on Instagram Sign up for our newsletter Join the This is HCD Slack Channel Follow us on Medium   Support the show.

In just five years, Garrett Moon has built CoSchedule from 0 to 7 figures in revenue, 9,000 customers, 1.5M monthly page views, and over 350k email subscribers. Listen to this episode to learn exactly how he did it. Topics Discussed in this Episode: [01:31] How Garrett started with his first agency and how far they got before moving forward with CoSchedule [04:37] The idea for CoSchedule and how they decided it was the product to move forward with [10:36] How they focused on getting customer feedback and understanding customers’ problems [14:17] What was their method of getting customer feedback? [15:28] What were their original SEO strategies? [17:12] What was their promotion strategy? [20:04] Launching the Actionable Marketing Podcast and how it has impacted their growth [23:22] What is their email list growth strategy and what were its drivers? [26:18] What were the 10X projects they released? [30:56] How they dealt with product changes and client base changes Key Takeaways: When you’re an agency and you have serviced customers, it’s really easy to leverage that relationship to get feedback on your software or to get them to buy it, and you kind of get this false sense of validation. When it comes to SaaS, you’re constantly adding more product. And as you make your product more complex and add more features, it becomes a better solution for larger customers. Development is never done. Your customers always need to see new features and they expect the software to get better and more powerful over time, not stay the same. The blog posts that drive traffic aren’t always the most valuable ones. And traffic isn’t always the best signifier of access to some customer segments. If you’re focused on two things, you’re not focused on anything. You can’t focus 100% on two things. Action Steps: Base your business decisions on growth velocity long-term versus just short-term happiness for certain customers. Be constantly focused on growth and moving upward. Learn to delegate and how to manage and trust people. Coach your talent to be good. Garrett said: “You have to learn to really understand the problem and then the emotional reasons that that user might buy a product versus ask them would they buy. It’s not even a real question because there’s so much emotion wrapped into buying, it’s just not a good place to start.” “The reality is that as your product changes and as your customer base changes, you have to make decisions or release features that you know are only going to help a certain set of users.” More from Garrett Moon: CoSchedule 10x Marketing Formula: Your Blueprint for Creating 'Competition-Free Content' That Stands Out and Gets Results by Garrett Moon Garrett’s Twitter: @garrett_moon Resources mentioned: Interviewing Users: How to Uncover Compelling Insights by Steve Portigal Actionable Marketing Podcast The Score Takes Care of Itself: My Philosophy of Leadership by Bill Walsh Sponsor link 14-day Free Trial to LeadQuizzes Thank you for listening! If you enjoyed this episode, subscribe to this podcast! And don’t forget to leave me a rating and a review on iTunes!

It's always such a pleasure to get to sit down with one of your heroes...and it's especially wonderful when they are just warm, wonderful people. Steve Portigal is a prominent author of two excellent books on user research ( Interviewing Users: How to Uncover Compelling Insights and Doorbells, Danger, and Dead Batteries: User Research War Stories,   linked below) and Steve also speaks prolifically on the conference circuit. And while he maintains a solo practice on the west coast, he somehow makes time to also give a lot of his knowledge away, blogging, podcasting...When I was coming up in the design world, Steve's writing was always clear and helpful. And when we first met, he was approachable and human. Steve is a model for the kind of design thought leader we need more of! Sitting down with Steve for this episode was an interesting risk, though. We ran into each other in SF and talked about the possibility of an episode grounded in a topic Steve is an expert in, but indirectly. Let me explain. Steve is a User Researcher, heart and soul. And he talks and writes about it, fluently. Facilitation is something that he *has to do* in order to bring people together. He's an extremely reflective practioner  about research, but about facilitation, less so. For me, it's fascinating to see that divide. I think there are a lot of people where facilitation is a means to an end. Steve illustrates something I coach people on often - you have to be your own kind of facilitator. I can be theatrical and energetic. Steve is more introverted and centered. My way of solving for group work isn't Steve's : he's adapted his own approach that feels natural and gets the job done. There are a few key insights I got out of this conversation that I want you to look out for: Treating Workshops as a series of games with clear rules and goals Steve breaks his time with groups up into "beats" or "scenes" just like an improv person would. Each scene has a focus, an outcome and rules. It breaks the time up and keeps energy moving. Narrow Ranking 0, 1, 2: If you're going to get participants to rank things solo before comparing, make the structure simple. 0 is meh, 2 is awesome. 1 is good. That's it. Too much granularity confuses things. Direct vs indirect facilitation Steve talks about comedic scolding of groups, pushing teams but using humor, vs letting them do their own thing, watching and listening…and stopping the room to call attention to something worthwhile that group is doing. One way might be called extroverted or direct facilitation  and the other introverted or indirect facilitation. Steve says that the extroverted practice of calling people out, using names is "not in my energy." Facilitation is about using what feels natural to you. Being conscious of your choices as a facilitator What are you doing, when? And is it working for you? Why or why not? What to absorb or drop? I know that facilitation is a means to and end for most people, but taking time to reflect on your practice can provide significant dividends The "chef's roll" of facilitation Bringing what you really need into the room. The tools make it go smoothly. Some people love 3 X 5 stickies, others want black, or manage color in other ways. I hate pop-up notes with an undying, smoldering passion. The tools matter. Insights generate energy and clarity by making things simple Steve tells a story about how one woman's insights infused the room with energy and clarity. My feeling is that insights pull multiple threads together, grouping complex behaviors into a simple narrative core. Is it the management of too many mental/narrative threads that's exhausting? And the reduction of threads that gives cognitive release? Expand the frame of your work Steve is a researcher, but he doesn't let his work stop there. He knows nothing will happen with the research unless he pulls the work forward into the org. Running ideation or concepting workshops can tip the energy of the team forward and shift the momentum Links: Steve on the Web Steve on Twitter Steve's Podcast: The Episode with EBay's Pree Kolari Interviewing Users Doorbells, Danger, and Dead Batteries: User Research War Stories Brian Eno's Oblique Strategies on WikiPedia and the App I use! (android) DSchool Facilitation Guide The McDonald's Theory      

Steve Portigal has interviewed everyone from high-finance traders to rock musicians, regular families to medical professionals, all in search of finding out how to make products better. "Great leaders are not territorial," he said in this episode of Helping Sells Radio. "They're looking for everything and anything that can help make their products better." In his book, Interviewing Users: How to Uncover Compelling Insights, Portigal starts off by stating that "you are not the user". That is, that interviewers are not the users of the product and so shouldn't be involved in the user research experience. "The whole purpose of the interview is to understand someone else's point of view, belief structure, the language they use, etc. in order to embrace their perspective," says Portigal. Get on the email list at helpingsells.substack.com

Steve Portigal is the founder and principal of Portigal Consulting, a boutique firm that brings together user research, design and business strategy. Steve is the author of Interviewing Users: How to Uncover Compelling Insights and Doorbells, Danger, and Dead Batteries: User Research War Stories.

Steve Portigal is the founder and principal of Portigal Consulting, a boutique firm that brings together user research, design and business strategy. Steve is the author of Interviewing Users: How to Uncover Compelling Insights and Doorbells, Danger, and Dead Batteries: User Research War Stories.

Steve Portigal is the founder and principal of Portigal Consulting, a boutique firm that brings together user research, design and business strategy. Steve is the author of Interviewing Users: How to Uncover Compelling Insights and Doorbells, Danger, and Dead Batteries: User Research War Stories.

Steve Portigal in this interview shares insights from his very popular book Interviewing Users: How to Uncover Compelling Insights. For all our listeners, there is a 20% discount on purchasing a copy of Steve’s book if you purchase through Rosenfeldmedia.com. Here's the link: http://rosenfeldmedia.com/books/interviewing-users

Steve’s book is a distillation of his years of experience conducting research with users. Somehow existing as both a handbook of sorts and as a casual conversation with one of the sharpest minds in the field, it’s a must-have for anyone thinking about the research side of things. Steve breaks down interactions with users to illustrate when, and how, to ask the right questions to uncover valuable insights.

Steve’s book is a distillation of his years of experience conducting research with users. Somehow existing as both a handbook of sorts and as a casual conversation with one of the sharpest minds in the field, it’s a must-have for anyone thinking about the research side of things. Steve breaks down interactions with users to illustrate when, and how, to ask the right questions to uncover valuable insights.