When the Room Agrees Too Quickly
There is a particular kind of meeting that should make any product leader nervous: the one where everyone agrees. Anyone who has led a project of moderate complexity knows the exact opposite situation well enough;…
Category: Innovate
The Feature That Made It Worse
There is a quiet assumption embedded in most product roadmaps: that more capability means more value. It sounds reasonable. It rarely survives contact with actual users. Service Focus: In 2018, Snapchat redesigned its app with…
Footwork, Footloose
Discover the Unconventional What does a traditional Ukrainian folk dance have to do with a 396–1 boxing record? In my book, Main Batata Hoon, I explore the fascinating story of Vasiliy Lomachenko, whose legendary dominance…
A Conversation that Moves Things Forward, for Co-founders, Product Leaders, and Decision-Makers
There's a particular kind of problem that doesn't get solved in meetings. It sits with you, in the margins of a product review, in the pause before you answer a stakeholder's question, in the nagging…
My 2-hour virtual consults for Chief Product Officers and Service Leaders
Writing my books, Think Like an Innovator and Design the Future was, in many ways, an act of distillation; years of consulting work compressed into frameworks and principles that could travel further than I could.…
The Human Angle: Design Thinking
Every product you’ve ever loved was designed by someone who first tried to understand you. Not your demographic. Not your purchase history. You! Your frustrations, your workarounds, your unarticulated wishes. This is the engine behind…
The Innovation Thinking Sandwich
The world has massive problems with "cool" solutions that create even bigger disasters. From the 1950s, we solved convenience with plastic, and now we’re literally breathing it. We solved the fossil fuel headache with Electric…
Innovation: Don’t Let Frameworks become Cages
We have a strange fascination with frameworks. I certainly do. A framework is a visual shortcut that offers a bird's-eye view of a complex idea. It helps us find our bearings when we're overwhelmed by…
What Design Thinking gets wrong about Empathy
Here's something that might sound strange coming from someone who's spent years in innovation and design: I'm not always empathetic. And neither are you. There's this perception in the design world that innovators, designers, and…
The Questions We Don’t Ask: How Problem Framing Determines Solution Quality
I often wonder about how we frame problems (challenges, as I prefer to call them), and more importantly, how that single decision can ripple out for decades, sometimes centuries. Back in the 1950s, the consumer…
Customer is KingDesign ThinkingDTEverydayHuman BehaviourImproveInnovateLife or something like itThe known unknown
When Did We Stop Designing for Humans?
In the past year, customer experience has taken a real nosedive. Big brand products and services making baffling choices. Let's start with recent Panasonic/Google TVs. With any TV including the good old ones, adjust the…
Gimme Your Best Question!
A few days ago, I shared how one re-framed question unlocked a breakthrough solution for a pediatric hospital project, and opened up a contest for you to share YOUR transformational questions. I've been thinking about…
Signed Copies of Think Like an Innovator – Gimme Your Best Question!
Good questions get us further, faster. And here's a chance for you to win a signed hardcover of Think Like an Innovator! One of my favourite questions, and I mention this in the book, came…
Thumbs Up for Good Design
I was getting a haircut earlier this week and got curious about the trimmer my barber (or hairdresser or hairstylist; unsure what they are called nowadays) was using on my head. It was an unusually…
The Simple, Superpower Habit for Productivity and Creativity
If you have watched Kung Fu Panda, do you remember the scene where Master Shifu is meditate? Or trying to, and his ear keeps twitching from some imperceptible disturbance he can sense some distance away?…