The Continuous Discovery Habits of Inspired Lean Startups and Lean UX Sprints (Generic Book X)
Debbie Levitt ????
LifeAfterTech.info ???? & dcx.to - Strategist, author, coach, researcher, and designer finding & solving human problems. "The Mary Poppins of CX and UX"
In the last 12 or so years, a number of books have become huge successes in the business and technology worlds. These books include the Lean Startup by Eric Ries, Sprint by Jake Knapp, Lean UX by Jeff Gothelf, Continuous Discovery Habits by Teresa Torres, and a couple by Marty Cagan. Hence the article’s silly title combining these.?:)
I’ve been reflecting on how each new book appears to just be a rewording of someone else’s previous book. The new author takes someone else’s model or technique, they create a slight variation or a derivative, give it a Fresh Name in initial caps, and a trademark symbol?.
These books are so similar that I want to refer to all of them as Generic Book X.
Each author starts by jumping on the bandwagon of the previous book’s popularity.
Who wouldn’t want to jump on the popularity of a current book, create their own surprisingly close derivative, and make that sweet sweet book, speaking, and training money?
Due to the turnover in tech jobs, each new Generic Book X seemed like something really new and fresh to the new and fresh tech workers. The more veteran workers ignored each new Generic Book X having heard it many times before.
Many veteran tech workers gave up fighting these books and their methods. Some didn’t bother speaking up against the books or leaving bad reviews on the assumption that who would ever use such a flawed and bad method? At least that’s what many people have told me when I asked why they didn’t leave a bad review for a book they hated. We know now that even a book with a really poor method can become popular, so we must be unafraid to leave that book a review matching what we thought of it, whatever that is.
A new Generic Book X wins audiences every few years while repackaging what the previous Generic Book X?said.?
This helps companies imagine they are doing things right. Look at all of these books saying this is the way to do it! And we are doing it this way! We must be getting it right.?
For example:
“Be careful, however. Sometimes when we embed user researchers on product teams, it can be easy for the team to let the user researcher do all the research on their own. We don’t want this.”?—?Teresa Torres in a 2021 blog post
And…
“Making sense of [UX research] can be time-consuming and frustrating?—?so the process is often handed over to specialists who are asked to synthesize research findings. You shouldn’t do this.”?—?Lean UX book, second edition from 2016
Generic Book X rides the coattails of the previous Generic Book X, saying many of the same things. If they sold well when Lean UX said them, and led to lucrative training and engagements, then when someone repackages or repeats them, they too might sell well and make some sweet training money.
The writing style is even similar. It’s a warning that you might do the logical, fair, friendly, good-teammates thing, and let a specialist do their specialized work… but you shouldn’t?—?in a short, imperative sentence. You might think that we opened a Researcher job and spent weeks interviewing people, so it must be important that these specialists are here. You might have wanted to let them do their jobs, maybe even by themselves (just like PMs do their jobs themselves). But no, you don’t want that and you shouldn’t do that. Bad dog!
We pretend that “we” don’t want this, but surely nobody asked Researchers what they want. They didn’t want to be disempowered. They didn’t want to be blocked from their work by PMs or “the team.” They wanted to be empowered and supported. It sounds like the “we” is a very select “we,” who is enjoying power over other teammates.
When companies don’t really want to change, evolve, or innovate, it’s easy to be complacent with our?methods.?
And we’ll happily feed that confirmation bias with more books putting new names on the same way we’re doing things now. New names help us feel like we’re trying new things, but Generic Book X sold you derivatives and variations of what you’re doing now.
If it was easy to go from how Generic Book X said to do things to how a later Generic Book X said to do things, you probably didn’t have a transformation. You’re doing the same things the same ways?—?as fast as possible?—?and filling out new templates and maps that are just variations of the old ones.
Amazingly, books telling us we can be innovative and create new and exciting solutions rarely, if ever, have innovative methods. But that’s on purpose. If we offer something too radical or different, companies might not adopt it. Companies would rather hear what they want to hear, and the authors of Generic Book X are happy to feed that.
Generic Book X has subtle and non-subtle content on how we need to be?fast.
We’ve been hearing that we need to be fast for so many years that we don’t remember why we need to be fast. But we know that fast is absolutely the most important thing our company can be. It’s even more important than being good.
It might have started with Lean Startup and books that made us want to be like cool startups… moving fast, trying another idea, and showing enough vanity metrics so that we get investment.?
We thought we had to be first to market even though companies we often admire like Apple are rarely first to market.
Generic Book X tells us that we need to go fast, which usually means recommendations or an entire model revolving around running with assumptions. Just run with this idea and you’ll figure out later if it worked or not.
We were supposed to be delivering value to users and customers. That was supposed to be at the core of Agile and Lean. But that message became increasingly quieter when companies saw how fast they could try to churn out something… anything.
Companies want to measure people by deadlines.?
Or how many features did we release in a certain amount of time, regardless of quality, value, or success. They even want to measure UX research?—?a completely quality-based job with quality-based tasks?—?on how many insights they found.
We say, “Outcomes over outputs,” but if we really measured outcomes, the value we delivered, or the customer experience, we’d have to face some demons. And if we saw some demons, someone might want to hold someone accountable. If we had accountability, someone might have to examine and question our methods.?
Generic Book X gets a bit hand-wavy and non-specific when it’s time to talk about metrics, quality, and failures. The advice tends to be to iterate and try again! Yet we so rarely understand why we failed. Where we went wrong. Which assumption or guess bit us in the ass later. We assume that our solution must be close, so let’s burn more time and money on some small changes to see if that moves the business needle.
Since we want to be fast, Generic Book X makes great product and customer satisfaction seem easy. Just fill out these templates or do this workshop!
And boom, amazing products and services. Customers will be thrilled! Teams are inspired and empowered! Generic Book X says it is so!
Generic Book X whistles at customer satisfaction or “delight.”
They whistle at how talking to customers and users will help us know what to create or build. Generic Book X will tell you how you need to delight your users and really create great products and services.
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Fulfill your brand promise and beat the competition to innovative products and services that will make customers score you 9 or 10 on that NPS survey! Generic Book X will tell you that you need to have empathy or build empathy. You need to care about customers.
The techniques in Generic Book X then get a little fuzzy. We have lots of templates to fill out and maps to draw, yet all of these seem to start with “business goals” or what metrics the business needs to see. We are unlikely to delight customers when they are barely in the conversation?—?or only in the conversation as the pawn we’ll push around to achieve business goals.
Sometimes Generic Book X details how to reverse engineer user needs to explain why building the features we want to build will somehow be good for our users. We don’t start with user needs or real problems, and then consider the best solutions. We start with features, and try to figure out who will want these, what they’ll pay for them, and if we can rationalize why our idea might work.
Generic Book X promotes feature factories while claiming to be against the feature?factory.?
Generic Book X claims to be user-focused while putting business goals, stakeholder whims, and what’ll get leadership promoted first. We’re idea-first, hypothesis-first, product-first, and product-led while customers and users are mostly there to be pushed into helping the business achieve its goals… until the users leave.
Generic Book X doesn’t really handle what to do when you are bleeding customers. Maybe you didn’t get out of the building enough! Maybe you didn’t call the right people to ask what our product is missing. Maybe you need to create another focus group to learn if everybody is having the problems you think they are having. Or maybe we don’t care if we’re bleeding customers; get your Sales team working on winning more new customers.
These books whistle at the importance of research, especially early research.?
Generic Book X tells you how to do research. Who should do research. Who shouldn’t do research. How little research we can do since we need to be fast.
Yet none of these books was written by a professional CX or UX Researcher.?
If I had written a book about the best ways to code or how we should do DevOps Engineering, I’d be laughed off the planet since I’ve never had a career in either of those. Yet, so many people seem comfy taking “how to research” advice from authors who were never professional or career Researchers.
Generic Book X rarely suggests that research be done by qualified Researchers. Research is treated as something anybody can do, regardless of education, skill, experience, technique, or quality. And we can get away with this since Generic Book X offers no model for accountability or governing the quality of this research work. The work just needs to be done, and higher standards for quality will slow you down. Without standards, any research is evidently “good enough,” and Generic Book X ignores that we might be setting ourselves up for risk and failure due to flawed research and bad data.
Generic Book X proclaims that utilizing real Researchers would be slow and expensive, while having non-Researchers do research is somehow much faster and cheaper. If you have a professional, qualified Researcher, Generic Book X usually requires them to mostly or only coach, advise, or teach. Don’t let them do the research. Research is for the whole team! Or just the Product Manager!?
Generic Book X tells you to make sure you’re going out and talking to some users. Get out of the building. Pick up the phone talk to at least a few customers each week to find out their pain points and problems. Just send out a survey. Just call a few people and see what they think the product needs. Better yet, find the people who have the problem we think they have so we can prove that people have the problem we think they have!?
A professional Researcher wouldn’t call that good research, but Generic Book X says it’s the way to go!
Some books treat researching users as something we do in service of figuring out how to achieve business goals. We wonder what we can sell people or how to make more people do more of what the business wants them to do.?
Generic Book X does not want anyone to be held accountable.?
Generic Book X doesn’t want anybody in trouble, on a Performance Improvement Plan, demoted, fired, laid off, transferred, or having their budget cut because of their bad decisions. Generic Book X is afraid of what our work, products, services, and outcomes would look like if there were real accountability.?
Generic Book X teaches you that failure is?great.
Fail fast, fail often, and dare to fail. We pretend that failure is a great way to learn. But it shouldn’t be the first time we learn, or the only way we learn.?
And too often we fail without really understanding why we failed. We went into that product, service, feature, or experiment with high confidence. We probably didn’t care that much about the outcome for users. But we had high confidence that our idea would work well to achieve our business goals.?
It failed in small or large ways, and we don’t know why. Generic Book X doesn’t recommend stopping and figuring out why we failed. Don’t bother looking for root causes. Just come up with another variation or idea, and try again. Ideate and experiment. Try another variation. Keep cycling around through guesses until business numbers look a little better.
Don’t you dare think critically!
Generic Book X might inspire you to draw some trees, maps, or fill in some canvases and templates. But Generic Book X does not want you to think critically about any of this. Generic Book X does not want you to question its content, models, or methods.?
The author of Generic Book X needs you to not notice that it’s the same stuff as the last book with A Fresh New Name and slightly revised template. Generic Book X and all of its trademark symbols might make you think that this is the great new method. But it’s the same methods we’ve been hearing about for at least 15 years. Generic Book X’s author hopes to be forever employable and make endless money from selling you training, webinars, and workshops on how to do their models.?
How to make things faster. Pretend we’re empowering workers or users. So much empathy. It’s just the same old message. How to innovate fast and delight users while usually doing no innovation, working slowly and in wasteful cycles of guessing, and without user delight.?
In a few years, we will have another Generic Book X that tells us how do the same things we’re doing now but?faster.
It will tell you how many jobs at your company can be reduced or cut because AI can do those jobs well enough. Someone on LinkedIn recently told me that AI in 2024 can absolutely do all of Service Design. I disagree; even if AI “could do it,” it’s unlikely to do it well, and I care about the quality of work and its outcomes.
But while companies believe that complicated and strategic work like Service Design can be done by AI, you can be sure that the next Generic Book X will suggest maximum speed with maximum work done by robots and automation.
The antidote to Generic Book?X.
May I please suggest my book, “Customers Know You Suck”? It’s a strategic and tactical book aimed at creating change and taking action. It pushes against everything all the Generic Book X authors have been borrowing from each other.
That might seem like a shameless plug, but I offer the book for free (as well as paid versions). Feel free to consume it for $0. It’s not about the money. It’s about empowering teams and companies to break out of the Same Old, Same Old advice that every few years gets a new name and trademark symbol.
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Product and Service strategist. Putting UCD at the core of decision making for every solution
11 个月Ah, back in my day we used to get by with just It’s Not Rocket Surgery, Don’t Make Me Think and The Design Of Everyday Things. Good times, good times. Yes, the market is full of generic, repetitive, recycled publications, dressing up the old as new, and feeding into the echo chamber of established biases. The sad thing is, despite (or perhaps because) of the sheer amount of them, the core elements of what we try to do are still largely ignored or misunderstood by so many businesses. Perhaps it’s us in the echo chamber, because often it doesn’t seem like anybody else can hear us.
UX Designer | Human-Centered Problem Solver
11 个月Every word was worth reading here as usual! The methodologies that are taking over the industry originated by people who aren't leaders in it. It's a scary to see something that itches people's ears take away true efficiency - have a person do what they are excellent at instead of people who don't know what they are doing try and fill the gap.
Life & Business Strategist. MBA, MA Psychology, ICF. CEO, Kaspari Life Academy. Host of the Unshakeable People Podcast. Habits & Behaviour Design, Neuroscience. I shape MINDS and build LEADERS.
11 个月Spot on reflections! It's time to break free from the cycle of generic advice and seek true transformation. ?? Debbie Levitt, MBA
Experience Researcher & A11y for hire.
11 个月Tired of it? Most definitely. I feel sometimes like those books are bricks in the wall to shore up vast uncertainty within. Can't be any dissent, if everyone is trapped inside.
Everything is a remix of a remix of a remix ?? I recently started rewatching the Sillicon Valley 2014 series for a reason. Depth is not what thought leaders care about but FOMO sells well or selling the idea that a 20-30ish old can have the maturity and accountability of what "go global" and "impact" and "scale" means and who the "users" are. Same goes for many promoted videos of Ex-insertfancycompany advocating on how what they've built in their early 20s can and should be repeated as a badge of honour, avoiding the many "digital" problems we are confrunting now with specific segments (or age groups). The things done.. in the name of "innovation"...and gold rush. "Digital literacy" for the wider segments not a priority or asking sociologists, researchers etc - how about another book, app, quick tip and "framework" so the "exit" strategy goes as planned and we keep "optimising fast" "ideas" to "make the world a better place". "New language!" Everyone raving about platform Y which made it in specific economic contexts with specific "network support"/investment from certain actors. Attributtion bias gets complicated. Lets build statues for the "heroes" CEOs and keep advertising them as role models.