This was a presentation by Jason Porritt. He has a website JasonPorritt.com. Forgive the many typos that this will have 
. Transcribed it on the fly again!
The first thing I learned was that you don’t throw away ideas…
Along that same line when you’re brainstorming I discovered you have to build up a lot of trust with the people you’re brainstorming with. When people are sharing ideas they are making themselves vurlnerable. Here are my ideas, here are my thoughts. I think peoples creative ideas tend to identify with this is part of me. If you don’t like my ideas you don’t lik eme. You ahve to be intentional to coax out those creative ideas and nurture that trust through the brainstroming process.
One of the other things I learned is that stories are a very effective communication mechanism. So we’re doing mockups and balsamic and theytold me now you’re going to present this to management people. Some directors and higher. What am I gonna do? I have sketches and these napkins with ideas. iT turns out a story is a really great way to communicate what it is your intent is. The real power behind your ideas. So I basically took an entire meeting and I walked through and I followed along this person who was going hrough his life and got injured and had to dispute a claim. And I used that story to show how we’re really doing what our customers want us to. It’s very effective especially when you’re working with non technical people.
One of the kind of more difficult lessons I learned is that I need to make more noise when expetations are not clearly communicated. It’s difficult when someone comes up to you and says “I want you toc ome up wth cool ias!” How do I measure success? what are they expecting? I found it really difiicult to coax straight ansers out of these people. That was a really frusterating point out of these peopple. I like to have a concrete idea. Am I being successfll? If all the feedback I’m getting is “Yea that looks graet?” I need to know do you want more or less of this? How do I measure success? if you’re in that poisition don’t be afraid to make some noise and ruffle feathers because in the end ti will make you more successfukl.
That kind of brings me to an interesting presentation I saw. Routh Skyberg gave a talk on leading a disruptive innovation team at ebay. Somef ot the things he said really resonated. The three things that you need when you’re running a team like that is you need the Will, the way, and you ned a metric.
Like I said, I didn’t have clrealy defined criteria for success, I was lacking the metric, and that sucked.
The will is you need someone who has bought into the idea that coming up with good ideas is a good thing. You may find people who want immediate results. Fortunately I had that. I had people higher up who were on fire who whanted to see this succeed…
The way is ahving access to resources. People, time, pieces of softwar, knowledge. Tracking down the right people to ask questions to. All of these things are key to having the way or the menas to accmomplish those goals.
The third part was the metric, which as I said I was lacking.
What I thought was interesting whas someone asked if he would have the opportunity would he do it again? He said the only way would be if the metric was ‘Come up with cool ideas!” he would do it.
Some of the other lessons I learned were user driven design principles. Interviewing business stakeholders is an interesting process. It’s even more interesting to ask them big questions. What is success? We’re going into this industry, what is success for our company in this indusry? I was actually surprise by how concrete those answers were. When I brought those answers back to my team and they say this information they were like “Wow! that would have been great to know! We would have done this diffierenly and this differently and looked at this too!” having those kind of big pictures hlp us with a technical bent kind oof see how it is our actions fit into what they’re goals are. Radiating that data to the people around you is useful.
I also learned tha tpeople skills are really important. Coaxing those creative ideas out of people you really hav eto nurture that. When someon mentions something to you, i Had the habit when someone suggested somethiong to just say that was a great idea. But if you write it down then you’re being more serious and taking note(literally) of what they’re are saying. It’s even better if you work it into something that you say it shows that you’re tkaing what they say seriousl.
I guess those are some of the big things that I had. I’ll open it up for questions and discussion.
Questions:
“If we forget everthing you talked a bout what would be the one thing you want us to learn?”
Really valuing the input of peopl. Through the brainstorming process, in meetings, taking note that their feedback. At the end of this thing even if I don’t have clearly defined success criteria I think everyones impression of the projject was that it was successful. And that’s all I have to gauge it by. I still have the job, so I succeeded!
“I’d follow that up with ‘Implement!’” I had a big client that payed hundereds of thousands of dollars and didn’t implement anything.”
I pushed for implementation early on. One of those was the ability to rate things. I had a list of stuff “here’s where we can stat, we start, measure, and improve!” when you ahve a new product get it out there early, get metrics, review those metrics, and btake action based on them.
‘So if you have all these ideas and alot of them are actionable. What do you thik the reason is you ahd buy in to do the process but not to implement?”
They wanted the ideas. They wanted something to gob ack to. They wanted the ideas because they wanted to get ahead of where they were today. Especially in how w thought of our e-commerce website. There were two project stakeholders and this is where the tension came in. One person wante to start implementation and one person did not. When you have that kind of tension you end up not implementing things. You can go ahead and start thingking and planning to implement. Maybe prototypes, mockups, etc. They wanted to get ahead of our current thinking.
“Do you have anythoughts on when you’re presenting a prototype for someone andas they see it implemented they change their mind about little details…. and it doesn’t seem to be going anywhere?”
There’s an interesting tool that is called balsamic that doesn’t give you colour, it doesn’t give you pretty stules. It just tries to take the focus away from the little details and keep the focus on the functionality instead of bickiering about that orange isn’t right and the box needs to be shfited to the left. Detailed discussion goes on. That’s not the kind of detail you were asking about….
“I’m not a web programmer, but the answer helps.”
“There’s an old story called what colour is the bike shed. You figure out how to put the bikes in and keep them dry as opposed to firuring ou what colour it is.”
“I know one thing I’ve done is “ook we need to finish version 1 before we finish version 2. There’s core things we need to work on first and we’ll keep them on the list for version 2!”
“One of the things I like about the notion of presenter firs is you can figure out how to take the presentation aspects and say those are great decisions to make but lets have someone who is greater than I make those decisions later.”
Another thing is minimum viable product. What is the least you can do to get the functionality. Would you reject the bike shed if it were brown vs red? No. It’s probably still useful and goin g to keep the bike dry.
“Did you see where stakeholders with one particular ponjd would come up with ideas that would involve fishing in someone elses pond. I.E. I have a graet idea on how you can do your job? Did you see that a lot? a little? Did those ideas suck?”
I didntsee that so much because we had a specific place we were focusing on. eCommerce. However because it was that broad and that area impacts a lot of areas in our business there was people sayign lets accept credit card payments, etc. It wasn’t a lot of how someon should or shouldn’t do their job.
“People generally understooed their aspect of the task and came up with ideas that they understood best.”
For the most part it was me guiding these brainstorming and prototype kind of stuff.
“Balsamiq is a really cool tool. It’s spelled with a q at the end instead of a C”