Deciding to hire your first start-up designer is not easy, but it’s only the first step in the hiring process. With product design going far beyond “making things pretty” and even “making things usable”, how do you find the right person with the right skill set to help your business…

Let’s start with an example of communication skills: they are important for any profession, and you expect any professional to have a decent level. However, excellent communication skills won’t make up for the lack of core expertise. Imagine a plumber who is a great communicator (just look at his sense…

Experimentation (or A/B testing) is a fantastic tool that gives teams confidence in the impact of their improvements and changes. But it comes at a cost: on top of a technical setup and basic statistics training, adopting experimentation requires a significant mindset shift and acceptance of the idea that you’re…

When people talk about lack of alignment, they immediately think of adding strict processes and rituals to fix the problem — it takes about 30 seconds for someone to jump into scheduling a bi-weekly 15-people Monday meeting. …

This year, I’ve reviewed more than 400 portfolios, a large portion of them from candidates with little or no product design experience. Each follows the same pattern of presenting a few imaginary case studies — a lot of effort that says little about the designer’s real-world skills and abilities. …

How to stop resisting experimentation and make the most of it. Written together with Till Westermann. 0. Do we really need experimentation? Experimentation, or A/B testing, is the most reliable way to see a cause-effect relationship between your product change and your metric change. Pre-post analysis limits the number of changes that can be done in…

Have you ever felt the struggle to squeeze in some creative or strategic work time in your busy schedule? How did it work out? I had a long-time assumption that creativity and stress are not compatible. Whenever I block two hours in the middle of a busy day for “creative…

It’s nearly impossible to find practical examples of what good product discovery is. So one way to learn and improve is to look at other industries and leaders. Even made-up ones — House MD offers a surprisingly useful guide. But first, what is product discovery? Any sustainable product design strategy comes down to this: achieving business…

Or why you should stop dot voting on product ideas. How do teams make decisions? We’re all familiar with democratic and autocratic models. Imagine a boss constantly telling people what to do, or a team voting on the next big thing. Because of autocracy’s deserved bad reputation and lack of…