Entrepreneurs and leaders face big questions every day: what’s the most important place to focus your effort, and how do you start? What will your idea look like in real life? How many meetings and discussions does it take before you can be sure you have the right solution? Now there’s a surefire way to answer these important questions: the sprint.
It’s for anyone with a big opportunity, problem, or idea who needs to get answers today. Within five days, you’ll move from idea to prototype to decision, saving you and your team countless hours and countless dollars. Designer jake knapp created the five-day process at Google, where sprints were used on everything from Google Search to Google X.
A practical guide to answering critical business questions, from small startups to Fortune 100s, Sprint is a book for teams of any size, from teachers to nonprofits. He joined braden kowitz and john zeratsky at Google Ventures, healthcare, and together they have completed more than a hundred sprints with companies in mobile, e-commerce, finance, and more.
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Design Sprint: A Practical Guidebook for Building Great Digital Products
You’ll know within days whether a particular product idea is worth pursuing. Design sprints enable you to:clarify the problem at hand, and identify the needs of potential usersExplore solutions through brainstorming and sketching exercisesDistill your ideas into one or two solutions that you can testPrototype your solution and bring it to lifeTest the prototype with people who would use it.
With more than 500 new apps entering the market every day, what does it take to build a successful digital product? You can greatly reduce your risk of failure with design sprints, a process that enables your team to prototype and test a digital product idea within a week.
Inspired: How to Create Tech Products Customers Love
Whether you’re an early stage startup working to get to product/market fit, consistent innovation, or a large, long-established company trying to regain your ability to consistently deliver new value for your customers, or a growth-stage company working to scale your product organization, INSPIRED will take you and your product organization to a new level of customer engagement, and business success.
Filled with the author’s own personal stories—and profiles of some of today’s most-successful product managers and technology-powered product companies, BBC, Google, including Adobe, Apple, Microsoft, and Netflix—INSPIRED will show you how to turn up the dial of your own product efforts, creating technology products your customers love.
The first edition of inspired, published ten years ago, established itself as the primary reference for technology product managers, and can be found on the shelves of nearly every successful technology product company worldwide. This thoroughly updated second edition shares the same objective of being the most valuable resource for technology product managers, yet it is completely new—sharing the latest practices and techniques of today’s most-successful tech product companies, and the men and women behind every great product.
. How do today’s most successful tech companies—amazon, and deploy the products that have earned the love of literally billions of people around the world? Perhaps surprisingly, Netflix, develop, Facebook, Google, Tesla—design, they do it very differently than the vast majority of tech companies.
In inspired, technology product management thought leader marty Cagan provides readers with a master class in how to structure and staff a vibrant and successful product organization, and how to discover and deliver technology products that your customers will love—and that will work for your business.
Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products
Hooked is written for product managers, marketers, designers, start-up founders, and anyone who seeks to understand how products influence our behavior. Eyal provides readers with:• Practical insights to create user habits that stick. He wrote the book he wished had been available to him as a start-up founder—not abstract theory, but a how-to guide for building better products.
Actionable steps for building products people love. Fascinating examples from the iPhone to Twitter, Pinterest to the Bible App, and many other habit-forming products.
Lean UX: Designing Great Products with Agile Teams
In the second edition of this award winning book, tactics, and techniques covered in the first edition to share how product teams can easily incorporate design, experimentation, leading advocates Jeff Gothelf and Josh Seiden expand on the valuable Lean UX principles, iteration, and continuous learning from real users into their Agile process.
Inspired by lean and agile development theories, Lean UX lets you focus on the actual experience being designed, rather than deliverables. This book shows you how to collaborate closely with other members of your Agile product team, and gather feedback early and often.
Hacking Growth: How Today's Fastest-Growing Companies Drive Breakout Success
. The definitive playbook by the pioneers of Growth Hacking, one of the hottest business methodologies in Silicon Valley and beyond. It seems hard to believe today, linkedin was an exclusive network for c-suite executives and top-level recruiters, Pinterest was a niche web site frequented only by bakers and crafters, Facebook was MySpace’s sorry step-brother, but there was a time when Airbnb was the best-kept secret of travel hackers and couch surfers, and Uber was a scrappy upstart that didn’t stand a chance against the Goliath that was New York City Yellow Cabs.
So how did these companies grow from these humble beginnings into the powerhouses they are today? Contrary to popular belief, they didn’t explode to massive worldwide popularity simply by building a great product then crossing their fingers and hoping it would catch on. An accessible and practical toolkit that teams and companies in all industries can use to increase their customer base and market share, this book walks readers through the process of creating and executing their own custom-made growth hacking strategy.
That methodology is called growth hacking, walmart, but also companies like IBM, marketers, and it’s practitioners include not just today’s hottest start-ups, and Microsoft as well as the millions of entrepreneurs, managers and executives who make up the community of Growth Hackers. Think of the growth hacking methodology as doing for market-share growth what Lean Start-Up did for product development, and Scrum did for productivity.
It involves cross-functional teams and rapid-tempo testing and iteration that focuses customers: attaining them, retaining them, engaging them, and motivating them to come back and buy more.
Make Time: How to Focus on What Matters Every Day
If you want to achieve more without going nuts, read this book. Charles duhigg, bestselling author of the power of habit and smarter faster better Nobody ever looked at an empty calendar and said, "The best way to spend this time is by cramming it full of meetings!" or got to work in the morning and thought, Today I'll spend hours on Facebook! Yet that's exactly what we do.
Make time is not a one-size-fits-all formula. Making time isn't about radically overhauling your lifestyle; it's about making small shifts in your environment to liberate yourself from constant busyness and distraction. A must-read for anyone who has ever thought, If only there were more hours in the day.
. Make time will help you stop passively reacting to the demands of the modern world and start intentionally making time for the things that matter. Building on the success of these sprints and their experience designing ubiquitous tech products from Gmail to YouTube, focus, they spent years experimenting with their own habits and routines, looking for ways to help people optimize their energy, and time.
Nor does it propose unrealistic solutions like throwing out your smartphone or swearing off social media.
Beyond The Prototype: A roadmap for navigating the fuzzy area between ideas and outcomes.
Jake knapp, inventor of the design sprint and new york times bestselling author of Sprint"I work with so many companies excited about their first Design Sprint that then ask: 'Now what?' Douglas' book is the great advice they've been looking for. Jeff patton, author of user Story Mapping"Douglas Ferguson has long been a top design sprint facilitator.
If you've ever experienced the dreaded "post-sprint slump, " this is an absolute must read. Based in austin, voltage control designs and leads custom innovation workshops and Design Sprints, as developed by Google Ventures. If you want to know where to go after a Design Sprint, Beyond the Prototype shows the way.
Chapter overviewintro & design sprint 101: an overview of the processthe post-sprint slump: why teams struggle after a sprintwrap it up: unpack what you learnedShare Your Story: Show what you accomplishedChart the Course: Formulate the path forwardExpand the Inner Circle: Gather the right perspectives and skillsCultivate the Culture: Inspire the sprint mindsetGet Guidance: Know when to reach out to the expertsExpert Tips for Planning Superb Sprints: A bonus chapterBeyond the Prototype will guide you through the road bumps and pitfalls that often follow a Design Sprint or innovation workshop.
You’ll know exactly what to do to move your project forward. Voltage controlvoltage control is an innovation workshop agency founded by Douglas Ferguson, an entrepreneur, and technologist with over 20 years of experience.
The Design of Everyday Things: Revised and Expanded Edition
The rules are simple: make things visible, exploit natural relationships that couple function and control, and make intelligent use of constraints. The problems range from ambiguous and hidden controls to arbitrary relationships between controls and functions, coupled with a lack of feedback or other assistance and unreasonable demands on memorization.
The design of everyday Things shows that good, usable design is possible. The fault, argues this ingenious -- even liberating -- book, lies not in ourselves, but in product design that ignores the needs of users and the principles of cognitive psychology.
User Story Mapping: Discover the Whole Story, Build the Right Product
This insightful book examines how this often misunderstood technique can help your team stay focused on users and their needs without getting lost in the enthusiasm for individual product features. Author jeff patton shows you how changeable story maps enable your team to hold better conversations about the project throughout the development process.
User story mapping is a valuable tool for software development, once you understand why and how to use it.
The Lean Product Playbook: How to Innovate with Minimum Viable Products and Rapid Customer Feedback
Despite their enthusiasm and familiarity with the high-level concepts, many teams run into challenges trying to adopt Lean because they feel like they lack specific guidance on what exactly they should be doing. The missing manual on how to apply Lean Startup to build products that customers love The Lean Product Playbook is a practical guide to building products that customers love.
Entrepreneurs, analysts and anyone who is passionate about building great products will find The Lean Product Playbook an indispensable, product managers, developers, marketers, executives, designers, hands-on resource. Whether you work at a startup or a large, established company, we all know that building great products is hard.
Most new products fail. His clients include Facebook, Epocrates, Hightail, Box, and Medallia. It walks you through how to: determine your target customers identify underserved customer needs create a winning product strategy Decide on your Minimum Viable Product MVP Design your MVP prototype Test your MVP with customers Iterate rapidly to achieve product-market fit This book was written by entrepreneur and Lean product expert Dan Olsen whose experience spans product management, UX design, coding, analytics, and marketing across a variety of products.
This book describes the lean Product Process: a repeatable, easy-to-follow methodology for iterating your way to product-market fit.