Rapid Prototyping & Product Management by Tom Chi at Mind the Product San Francisco

[Music] that's pretty cool all right so Martin gave you a quickie pretty quick intro I usually talk about rapid prototyping it's a bit it's a thing that I've been doing for a good long time maybe about 15 years or more starting out way back in the day with software but moving it into organizational operational design design of space the movement through space all sorts of crazy stuff the hardware at Google X and then afterwards things like working on improving things in the world for the two billion people living on less than $2 a day entrepreneurship broadly corporate structures and a lot of other crazy stuff but a thread that runs through all of these things is in these processes I could continue to learn things you know a lot of these lessons I learned from rapid prototyping we're very directly applicable to the discipline of product management so what does it look like when you do stuff like that well I didn't ship to a ridiculous amount of stuff this was like weirdly cathartic putting a bunch of stuff together because I was like that's my whole life holy crap but luckily I made it small enough so nobody will ask any questions about anything in particular but you know you got some self-driving cars you got some balloons to give internet to all of the world you have Google glass you have Yahoo Answers you got Microsoft Outlook sorry and and you've got you know some really interesting stuff I'm actually reasonably excited about some of this work in the developing world so there's you know Guatemala and Liberia and working on a new type of micro pasteurizer in India and so on and so forth so lots of cool stuff that that rapid prototyping has taught me about the world and about product management so I'm going to share a couple of those lessons about product management with you guys today and this is the slide that means nothing because you're going to hear all these things a greater detail right after this but it's going to be about creating a culture of learning staying in the media and optimizing loop life and these all sounds super weird but they'll sound super normal very soon now wasn't mean to create a culture of learning well as mentioned in the intro I've I've traveled all around the world taught workshops worked with teams been an investor advisor mentor to to over 100 entrepreneurs at this point as well as having shipped a lot of this stuff that you saw before and a lot of times I found that it's not really about telling them what to do like the outside game of like knowing some new techniques of what to do is only a little bit of the problem the the deeper problem most of these organizations is what I call the inside game and at the heart of them they have a culture that makes it really difficult to be good at at creating products and product management broadly and I would define this culture as the culture of right and wrong and in fact like this doesn't even have a name really because for the most part the culture of right and wrong is the entire culture that we live in so in order to understand the culture of learning let me give you a quick debrief on what the culture of right and wrong looks like quotes are right and wrong looks like this let's say you are a product person or designer engineer executive whoever inside of a business that does something right well once you've done something right well you get the bonus you know you get the promotion you get more responsibilities and and you gain confidence in yourself and your organization gains confidence in you and when you do something wrong then all the opposite things happen you lose the promote like people give you fewer responsibilities you have less confidence in yourself and people have less confidence in you now in a way this sounds weird to explain this because this doesn't really just sound like product management it's like the entire world we live in works like this but this is what the culture of right and wrong looks like now what does the culture of learning look like in comparison now let's say you are one of those people again that has done something really right but like when you came back from doing this thing really right that worked really well that the customers loved and all sort of thing I asked you as the leader I'm like great this thing went really well last release really wet what I really went well what did you learn and maybe you only give me like one learning I'm like okay that's that's crazy you can't possibly have done so many things that worked well and it only got you know gotten one learning from that thing now similarly somebody might go away and they might do something which is a miserable failure like the release like lost us 20% of our users and you know 15 people quit and whatever right but you might come back from all of that and and I asked you well what did you learn if you come back to me with like well here's like 15 really substantive things that I learned and here's some things that that we need to be looking out for and not be doing again so on so forth in a culture of learning something like that is highly praised and in fact in the culture of learning the person who comes back with a really successful thing with only one learning that's when you're like come on one learning just go back and go a little deeper like see if you can find some more now that's kind of a little snapshot of what it looks like in practice but why is this important well something that's hidden inside of a culture of right and wrong is that a culture of right and wrong is intrinsically diminishing and what do I mean by that so let's say there's five people in the meeting and there's two people that have different proposals that disagree with each other and like I'm over here arguing proposal a and you're over here arguing proposal B and at the end of the day one of these repulses going to go through this is what the culture of right and wrong and courage is now what you know now clearly if it let's say my proposal doesn't go through well clearly my proposal has been diminished but actually even the person who won the argument the argument and their proposal went through their also diminished because they know for a fact that their entire team does not agree with them anymore right so like this is the world that we live in and we actually are constantly diminishing ourselves through this practice of right and wrong now in a culture of learning so right and wrong is diminishing then a culture of learning things are additive because going back to that that person that went and did the successful thing if they did a successful thing and came back with 15 learnings and somebody did a failed thing and came back with 17 learnings well typically these learnings are additive right now you have like you know whatever 32 things that you know how to do right so so learning a culture of learning is a very additive culture a culture of right and wrong is a diminishing or subtractive culture and when you multiply this by all the different interactions that will happen in a workplace every single day you will see why this can't can kind of destroy you now this is great so people usually reference my Google X work so I have to use some Google X examples but I will speak to it John cocoa said because he is he's actually we used to work together in Austin so he awesome dude so what does it look like when you start to move to a culture of learning well one example is in Google glass we built 150 Hardware prototypes in ten weeks for less than $20,000 with three people so like clearly there's something that we were doing that was different and and it was that number one we didn't spend a lot of arguing time you know like just debating and arguing and trying to prove each other wrong about what to do before we did anything we just be like well let's get on to doing it the only discussion would happen afterwards from by by pulling out key learnings and key learnings can only come from an observed embodied experience so instead of debating about what it will be like in order to go I'll give you a good example of one so one of the things that that I hacked up one afternoon was you guys know those like little laser projected keyboards you can get from Brookstone projects on a thing and you tape like this and does bluetooth another thing so I took one of these things because Google glass didn't have a keyboard or would be weird to have a keyboard on it so I was like well what if it had like a little laser projector on it and then that could like project on any surface and you could walk up to the you know desk and type and you could walk up to a wall and type and that would put stuff in the glass and that would be amazing right so I spent like an afternoon hooking that up together you know basically bought one and hacked it apart and added two glasses and and and kind of worked it up so that you could type with it and at the end of that you know maybe four hour prototyping exercise I was like this is freaking amazing it's walking up the tables and walking up the walls and I was like this is huge and then I then I called over some people from the office I was like guys you gotta go check this out you gotta check this out they all walked over and I go what's up what's up you know I was like okay so you know I'm typing here it's like well you guys can't see what's happening in my eye but I'm like typing right now you can't see and it's like you can't see what's happening my eye and I'm typing right now I mean they could see the laser projected keyboard so they knew that wasn't crazy but like but like you know after typing a little bit I was like guys isn't that amazing and like all three people were like ah because if you think about it for a second when you have lasers projecting out of your head and you look at your friends lasers go in their eyes now like you could have like thought this through and debated this in a meeting for a long time and it would have sounded like a freaking amazing idea like it would make a beautiful-looking movie right but like when you actually embodied this experience my key learning for the day is you have this you're gonna shoot lasers in your eye your friend's eyes and then you could like eyes like tried to work around it as like what if as a camera and then we'd do face detection and when they're the faces on the scene and it's like nah that's too crazy that's way too much work to be able to type so so that's what a key learning looks like a key learning is not like we debated hard enough where I looked it up on Wikipedia or or you know according to mary meeker latest study you know it's and I'm not saying that that those aren't wikipedia or mary meeker are not good sources of information they absolutely are but they do not provide key learnings for what your product experiences in the world right so don't rely on debating right and wrong move into to creating key learnings and and using those key learnings to make a path forward and this is also essential for product managers because if product managers can't measure something like you know the right and wrong of decisions on to a release what can they measure well they can absolutely measure how many key learnings are you generating as an organization every single week and in Google X like for for the Google glass you know we did 15 Hardware prototypes per week for 10 weeks each one of those Hardware prototypes typically generated two to five key learnings by the end of 10 weeks we just had you know hundreds and hundreds of key learnings that helped us define what the first version of the product became now this is an important thing to go avoid so actually it's it's it's weird that people mentioned my Google experiences too because like the thing that actually probably qualifies me and to be on stage here is that I was a product management executive running product user experience and analytics at a multi-billion dollar organization operating in 44 countries and that sounds kind of impressive except for my entire day was meetings and and like you know meetings with Europe in the morning meetings with California and the hang in all-day meetings with Asia and the evening it's freakin disaster and I created a new unit of measure which is called meetings per linear foot because not only would I have all these meetings lined up when I was walking between meetings like two people would walk up in my Tommy I just gotta get three minutes holy crap and like by the time I would get to like grab my pizza from the food court and back up I had like four more meetings you know it's just on my lunch break to go between meetings so when I got to Google I was like super relieved because I was like I'm never gonna book out my calendar like that again that's ridiculous I'm gonna open it up so I have at least like thirty forty percent of my time to make stuff and there's never gonna be any of this like politics meetings again and then I got into my first meeting on the first day and then the first meeting on the first day there are some interesting characters well there for example these guys and as well as some really smart PhDs and just like folks I admired that had done artificial intelligence or robotics or whatever work and in like 15 minutes I was like this is just as bad as my last organization right like like like all these situations a guess Athan because all these people are so it started out like really actually kind of inspirational like the axe brief for Google glass was not like make a computer in your face the actual brief for Google glass was imagine as soon as you wanted to know something you would just know it I was like okay well make something that allows that to be true so like you know we were in the process of like brainstorming this thing and that was like pretty good for 15 minutes but we spent almost half of that 90 minute first meeting on that first day arguing what color the heads-up display should be and like at the end of the day the normal thing that happens in almost all these meetings happens the the people that win this argument are either the people that are best at arguing in the room or the people that have the highest title in the room and in this case it was the same person in a Sergey Brin and he basically said guys the colors just got to be read has to be read and he is like because red photons are the least energetic they'll be the least strain on the eye that's true physics wise and then the other great reason he had was plus it's always read in science fiction so I was like not super satisfied with that answer and I was like I moved from one like very slow corporate environment like being an executive with lots of meetings and politics to a new environment which didn't have quite as many politics but it had just as many guest thoughts this is what I call these types of meetings no one's had the direct experience they're all guessing each other about like what the future is going to have to be and actually I pose this question to you very quickly because I think this will undo every meeting that you have had probably in the last month is like what is the truth of the invention that has not been invented yet it's like a completely absurd thought and in fact like this is what we're trying to prove to each other through gas Athan all the time well I'm pretty certain that when we expanded this market blah blah blah will happen I'm pretty certain that when this when this features added people are gonna like this that is us arguing the truth of the uninvented invention right like we are literally operating on an absurd concept hoping that like the law of averages may may defeat absurdity but it does not now what actually happened that day is I built this thing which allowed them to experience a heads-up display and in that heads-up display we projected a paragraph of text in every color in the rainbow that you you could try and cycle through and we found out like everybody so remember argued some of the smartest people that that I know we're all in a room arguing about this when for you know a night in during a 90-minute meeting and within like 55 seconds or a minute of actually putting this thing on walking around and trying out different colors we just we we had degree red was the absolute worst possible color for heads-up display and it wasn't even like close like red was like the worst by a lot and then purple was like second worse but still a lot better and then white you know light blue and yellow we're good now there's like what argument could you possibly have had that would have led to those conclusions how could you possibly know that outside of an embodied experience like despite all the PhD is despite all the successful entrepreneurs despite all the brilliant people in that room like we were just going about it in a fundamentally absurd way now as soon as like rational people approach something in a non absurd way we figured out in 45 seconds so that's one of the key things like whenever you are in a meeting ask yourself is this becoming a guess Athan are we basing things off of actual embodied experience are we basing things off of guesses or sometimes I call them conjectures because it's nicer than saying hey you're just guessing it sounds like one more scientific than people like feel better so the mantra of this entire thing though is that conjectures become experiments there's nothing wrong with conjectures they're like a well of creativity that allow you to know what to try next and then only actual actual observed embodied experience that's what you use to make decisions because I could have made conjectures all day about a laser projected keyboard but the actual is I like partially blinded my friends you know and actually to John Coco's point you know we actually we had a bunch of actuals about what Google glass is good for so if you are if you are surgeon and anesthesiologist a factory worker a technician it's amazing for you because imagine your anesthesiologist what any steezy ologist do right now is they have an injection site where they're applying the anesthetic then they have a bank of machines behind them typically which has all your vital signs on it so they're constantly doing this just watch a video of them they're not looking at you while they're injecting stuff than they're looking at that then they're looking at you then they're looking at that now what's way better is in your glass there's your vitals right that works a lot better if you're a technician that's a lot better a lot of things like we had actual is where this just works better now there was an executive not to be named who had the conjecture where it's like well despite all those actuals I think what glass is good for is all the people especially skydivers and mountain bikers and whatever and and I was like well we don't have a lot of actuals about that I mean it was kind of cool to like watch somebody else's feed but I don't know anyway so it was it went to market the way it went to market but not necessarily because we knew for you know it's okay we just keep you like so so lesson number two is to stay in the medium and so my wife is a painter this is a oil painting that she did at the Marin Headlands and when you think about what a painter does so an oil painter their medium is oil paint this is pretty obvious I guess but what it looks like for a painter to be in their medium is that their hands are in it they're touching it everything that they do you know mixing it up like getting it on the brush the right way applying it scraping it off with a pallet night they're constantly in the medium that's how great work gets done but if imagine for a second that you were a painter but every single time that you wanted to go do a brushstroke instead of like dabbing something on a mixing a pallet dabbing it and then applying something to the canvas the following thing happened instead you had to stop you had to write a slide deck take it to a meeting communicate to enough people to get the shareholders on board take that formalize it in a specification then take that over to some dev managers who argue down and decide to build 40% of it then you know that 40% is okay done then the QA teams like oh it's not acceptable and then you go back and start doing a little bit more of that and after all that's done for a couple months then you get to do your brushstroke now think about how hard it's going to be to make a masterpiece if you've decided that that's the way you're going to paint and the issue here is not that there's anything you know wrong with any of those disciplines or though people these are like great people like I I've been a lot of those disciplines I think that like people are honestly trying to go do the right thing but like as a practical matter you're spending a very little amount of time in the media right you're spending a very small amount of time and oil paint you're spending most of your time inspect reviews and triage and all that sort of thing look something like that very different than what you imagine a painter to do now I caught it the Bermuda Triangle ideas you can see I have some biases about this work but yes all sorts of terrible things can happen now so you need to go ask yourself some really fundamental questions what is ultimately the medium of what you do like if if staying in the medium enables you dramatically to like see more of what's happening be more active in what's happening and bring forward a masterpiece and when I say you I mean your entire team together then you have to ask what is the medium of you and your team and I would say that anybody who actually builds stuff so designers and engineers like like so here's the fallacy so a designer so an engineer might think well my medium is like this programming language or lines of code or what have you the designer might think well my medium is kind of like color and form and line and visual hierarchy and you know interaction flow and whatever but I think that's all wrong like everybody who builds product their medium is act is real human behavior in the real world that is what your medium is and if you are far away from that you're spending all your time like obsessing about type you're spending all your time making like four layers of abstraction for something that users would never do then you are completely out of the medium right so everybody who is a builder your medium is to go and yeah is human behavior in the real world and your purpose should be to go the B in that medium see real human behavior modified by what you do in the real world all the freaking time now product managers have a really unusual medium because most of time you're not writing the code or or you know sketching up the designs and I think the the medium of product management is uncertainty because if you think about the meat of an oil painter they're covered in oil paint by the end right and if you have a project manager you're covered in uncertainty all the freaky dive whenever there's uncertainty it's like I think that's where I'll go well then I'll go over to here and I'll get some uncertainty on me over here right but but hopefully they're through the pastas process of wrangling uncertainty something beautiful comes out just like through the process of getting oil paint all over you something beautiful comes out in the painting that happens right so so just think for a moment are you in the medium that you are meant to be in it are the people that are building the product in the medium that that they could be alright third lesson optimizing the the loop length so the loop length is basically the amount of time before between somebody asserting and conjecture and then being able to observe the actuals from that conjecture and for most folks it is a process like what I mentioned before about the medium which is people come up with an idea that the ideas are debated endlessly and pitched at each other eventually somebody is you know through some kind of process an idea is selected and then it goes to a build cycle which then takes its own time and so on and so forth and when you have something like that your loop length you know your amount of time to go try out one new conjecture might be I don't know three months now if you're using like you know agile or scrum or whatever maybe you're getting down to a week between releases maybe you're doing continuous integration and you think that that's the same thing as having a short loop plane but it's not because the loop length is if you're if you're continuously integrating and like making a new build every day but you're not observing any actuals from customers from that build your loops not closed yet right so you can continue integrate all freaking day but then you only test with users once every three months your loop length is three months right so now once again this is another number or metric that product managers can really pay a lot of attention to and focus on on reducing and what might it look like to go work with loop lengths so here's a schedule for a number of the teams that I currently run and all the blue stuff is time when we actually get to do work so that's pretty good there's only two required meetings one is a team sync on Monday to actually talk about what we're going to do for the week and the other thing is a it's kind of required but if you don't have it any of it that's totally fine but on Friday morning there's a reflection and gratitude meeting which is required but if you have no gratitude you can skip the meeting I don't know happens now the the other really important feature of this calendar is every Tuesday and Thursday we're in front of customers because it means that our loop length you know effectively becomes like two days long at the longest right there's never a loop length that is longer than two days long and in fact we have micro loops within the customer day because we will go to a place and do code changes live will see a tranche of three customers and we'll do code changes so the next three will go get better results and the next thing you will get better results it's kind of like a write study and then afterwards we'll have like a slightly slower loop where we're pulling together learnings and adjustments that might take more than 15 minutes to go modify so this is a calendar that that is about kind of optimizing loop length now I stress that this customer feedback chunks they need to be non-negotiable and this happened with one of my teams I was like hey we did in a kick-ass thing it was a totally new team so they didn't know what my expectations were yet but like I'm the Tuesday they had a totally great customer cycle learned a lot started fixing all these things you know coated all through Wednesday and toward the end of Wednesday they're like you know Tom like I know we have a customer cycle tomorrow or like one is scheduled for Thursday but if we could just like you if we could just like plow through and design and develop on Thursday we could have an amazing one on Friday and I said well there's a lot of things in life where if you're 95 percent committed the world is really hard and when you're 100 percent committed the world becomes really easy because right now there's five percent of you that's saying the thing will not be ready for Thursday and it's going to you it's going it's asking me right now to go push this to Friday and trust me if you allow that five percent to live we'll get to Friday morning sometimes and you'll want to push it to Friday afternoon and we'll get to Friday afternoon and you want to push it to next week if you're 100% committed it looks more like this hey it's actually not a special thing that we're getting customer feedback so the fact that it's not all done is fine the stuff that is done that's what we're testing it's a way simpler way to live life if you're a hundred percent committed to to serving your customer and being around them and caring about them then this is incredibly easier than all the debates and like and like fears and like ego drama around about around releases if when you're only 95 percent committed to your customer so non-negotiable customer feedback cycles now these are all very abstract looking what might it look like in practice so a number of you guys are staying at the Zeta hotel which is actually right next to where we do all the a lot of this customer testing at least for business to consumer stuff the place where we do customer testing is we go to the mall and why in the world would you go to the mall well what's great about the mall is no matter what your b2c product is there is a store in the mall that already filters for that demographic so if you like want women over 35 you go to an tailor you know if you want teenagers you go to Hot Topic whatever it's like what you're not going to go find a 50 year old in Hot Topic it's just not what's gonna happen so it's like the mall has already done your demographic segmentation and recruiting right you can just go to where they are the secret of course too is like you know you're mostly going to think that they're but you're bothering them but a lot of people that are in the mall are actually kind of bored because they're like what are you up to I'm bored let's go to the mall so like they're actually they're actually not that offended if you go and try to talk to them though there is a little bit of a secret if you if you approach with an away team of two guys you get a forty percent like you know people will talk to you rate guy in a girl is like 55 almost sixty two girls is north of 70 so if you're if you're an entrepreneurial team it helps to have female entrepreneurs for many reasons not just for that one now you know what do we do when this happens well there'll be an away team that will be over at you know Hot Topic or whatever you know demographically filtered areas that we want to use and then there'll be a home team that's in the food court or some other place where we won't get kicked out and what happens is because sometimes you get kicked out you know but what happens is while the away team is talking with these customers they are either have the development team on speakerphone or like right after you know a 5-10 minute customer interaction the pool aside is like okay so so they got to the second screen they're really confused about these two buttons I don't think they're actually necessary until later and the thing and they didn't notice this so we need to kind of let's try to move that more in the center so it's a little bit more obvious got it okay cool and then they keep testing and then about like you know 15-20 minutes later your phone buzzes and they're like refresh and then when you refresh the changes are it and that's what a loop length of 15 minutes looks like so fast changes are you know you can do five in an hour it's totally plausible we do this all the time at the mall now of course those are not substitute deep you know coding changes these are things where it's just like a basic usability problem oh this this text didn't make any sense to people this button was in the wrong place like these things you can easily change in 10 or 15 minutes and and you'll get a bunch of these fast changes done within the day at the end of the day there might be some slower changes where it like might take you half a day a code or whatever or or half a day of design in order to go deeper when I call them medium changes and we do them right after we get back from the mall for the following Wednesday and then the slow changes are things that are more substantive they're they're things that kind of like they're like deeply structurally wrong with what you've done or they're they're deeply challenging the premise of what you're trying to create now how do you even know what you're trying to create well we look for these things that are called eyes light up moments and eyes light up moments or like people this is not you talking about the product these are people you know just doing the thing oh this is a nod to John cocoa to situational nog Rafi this is what we're doing that's what he said to go do that's what it looks like so you know so people will be having this experience on the mobile or they'll be having this experience on on the laptop and you're not telling them to get excited about they're just doing it and then all sudden there's like a moment like wow does this do that's not yeah totally and like that's an eyes light at moment it's like really difficult for people to fake and people don't just randomly fake eyes light up moments that like would just be absorb but but when you see that you know that you've got something in your product which really stands out and matters to people right because most of the time you're thinking about why the product matters to you I mean you you believe that you're thinking about your customers but most of the time you're thinking about your own concerns like oh is this dev manager cool to allow this to go through how am I gonna communicate this to my SVP it's like that's definitely not about your customer so so in these moments and these I like isolates at moments this is like a beautiful moment which is really truly about your customer like you've done something in their life that matters enough that they'll have that response and when you have like these eyes light up moments we also call the magic moments then this is actually what your product is about all the things that you think your product is oh it's this search box and this login flow and this like use set of user records and this way that we serve ads and whatever is not what your product is your product is this kind of magic moment and like a lot of your task then is to get out of the way of that magic moment we're only add features that amplify and improve that magic moment now a lot of you may be thinking like how could you possibly do so many changes so quickly like 150 Hardware prototypes in ten weeks or or doing so many software changes in an hour or a day sounds frickin crazy and this is a really important concept not just for but for you but all your engineers as well now a thing just like we don't examine the culture of right and wrong versus of the culture of learning we don't examine the culture of development and most of the culture of development is about scalability and efficiency so like you know what do you hear all the time it's like well I write this code but gotta make sure it's scalable I'm gonna do this but make sure it's scalable but scale abilities are already a decision right and just like people can go designed for efficiency or scalability they can also engineers can also design for adaptability now when you design for efficiency or scalability what you're actually saying is you're designing against adaptability because what efficiency means is what's the least number of things I could put in there so it does exactly this that's what something efficient does now if it's not going to go do that you need to break a lot of things to make it go do something else because it's been made very efficiently efficient at doing blank so start out any new process with a design for adaptability and have the engineers know that actually most of this code base is getting thrown away because the fundamental architecture that you build around a design for adaptability is very different than a architecture around scalability or efficiency but by having a design for adaptability you're able to go answer the the critical question of what should we do and then by by doing your later design for scalability you can say well this is how we're gonna do it big right that's fine so by separating those two you can get you can get much further with these sorts of process and a lot of the heartache of innovation comes from mixing up which stage that you're in here all right and just to close this out wrapping up the the last couple slides so your product you think your product is all these screens and flows and whatever really your product is just this magic moment like it's the thing that like people will talk about people don't talk it so the magic moment in uber for example is you you press this thing in a car shows up outta nowhere in a row and then like afterwards like you know you leave the thing without paying they actually have two magic moments that's why there were fifty billion dollars and you guys are worth whatever so if you have to even better right usually you only get one to start but but when you have those magic now the magic moment of uber is not what was the login flow like what was the payment flow like what was the water flow like it's like whatever I don't even remember what the screens were right I just remember when I got out of the cab I was like oh that was nuts now the magic moment two is actually very small it's oftentimes only like five ten fifteen seconds long and what you want to do is like when you identify that moment you want to like take away all these features in dark grey that are detracting from this moment and you want to accentuate some of these features in green that would amplify this moment and you want to get rid of all usability issues no matter what because imagine having difficult usability on something that detracts from the magic moment in the first place that's horrible like not only is it hard to use it's hard to use to finish something that makes the thing terrible in the first place so so the the fast cycles the short and medium revisions are really about like tweaking fixing usability issues and like get those little lightening bolts out of there like you you know and this is what I would adds a kind of Kathy's talk where it's like remove the friction from that sort of stuff because this is unnecessary difficulty right you know that stuff you should make effortless but there's going to be in your magic moment your magic moment may include necessary difficulty which is great right and that's kind of her point there's like at the core of it your magic moment in order for to be challenging exciting or what have you that may have necessary exciting engaging difficulty and it as opposed to accidental unnecessary terrible difficulty and the other thing to go think about is you know your product is not the world the product gets used in the world so the world will come in and throw the big lightning bolts and it'll be like oh you're not gonna complete this flow because your wife needs this now you're like oh crap alright or like you know you're not going to complete this flow because you got to your bus stop and you need to put this thing away right so so you know both the solving of the larger contextual problems as well as the honing of the magic moments these are the things that you explore a via the medium to longer term cycles and revisions so so the just to close on the concept very quickly the the idea of of working on your loop length you're gonna have you're gonna be thinking about how long it takes you to go from a new conjecture or observation to a new actual observed result from customers you're gonna make lots of different loop plants that allow you to do fast medium and slow alterations then you're going to apply those you know the short and medium ones to nail usability issues like super fast instead of letting them linger for four months and you're going to use the longer cycles in order to go deep into discovering your magic moments as well as making the thing work in the context and the purpose of the world itself so with that thank you [Applause] [Music]

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Length: 36min 58sec (2218 seconds)

Published: Thu May 31 2018