First month “start-up insights”

Wow, that went really fast! Hard to believe it’s already been over a month at my gig leading UX at CloudPhysics in Silicon Valley. So, what are my big insights and learnings so far? Quite a few that I’m still processing… but I’ll summarize with three words: Speed, Impact, and Contradiction. // Living in a […]

A new vocabulary for start-up UX

While leading design-oriented cultural change at Citrix, a global 9k person company, I whole-heartedly espoused the vocabulary of “design thinking” & “customer experience” drawn from Stanford d.school and Forrester —including “workshops”, “catalysts”, “empathy”, and so forth. Such phrases epitomize a certain POV for customer-centric advocacy and education, tuned for a corporate, distributed constituency not familiar […]

Fostering a sense of “visual empathy”

Visuals are powerful tools for compelling teammates to recognize what’s important and useful, from sketches to mockups to prototypes. In this vein of thought, also valuable are quite simply giant posters of collages of graphical interfaces—literally big enough for a whole wall, to dramatically amplify both the examples of current state of affairs, as well […]

Aligning value prop & customer goals

An immensely valuable discussion to hold with your key product stakeholders (like the Product, Sales, and Marketing leaders) involves a critical assessment of two essential ingredients of ascertaining your product/market fit: the product “value proposition” and the customer’s goals. Alignment between these two increases the likelihood of achieving a fit that enables business success (hey, […]

Reactive to proactive designing

In dealing with the perpetual quick-fire nature of a start-up, I’ve begun to develop and apply a useful approach to help manage the swirl of seemingly random chatter and work streams—and when you’re the sole person in charge of UX, it comes in fast! In particular is a mental model for handling the intensely reactive […]