Since 2010, our research and design team has helped over 300 incredible startups wrestle with critical questions about their products and customers. We’ve partnered with these companies when they are building something new, expanding into new markets, and troubleshooting sales or other metrics. It’s undeniable that early-stage founders are under intense pressure to figure out exactly what to build and to have unique insights about their target audience. Teams can collect usage data after building and launching their products, but those numbers often don’t lead to truly understanding customers’ needs and motivations. Answering those questions faster — before sinking time and money into development, marketing, design sprints, or expensive market research — is a huge competitive advantage.

Today, we’re excited to introduce Learn More Faster: How to Find Your Bullseye Customer and Their Perfect Product and open-source our formula to accelerate learning and customer discovery. For this book, we’ve drawn on hundreds of research sprints to create an essential guide for early-stage startup founders, product managers, and researchers. Learn More Faster helps you quickly zero in on what to build and precisely who to target.

Over the past 30+ years — particularly the past 14 years running research sprints for GV — I have learned that many research best practices in mature organizations don’t apply to young companies tasked with velocity, change, scarcity, and uncertainty. Along the way, I’ve had to adapt and accelerate user research techniques for faster and leaner companies. The biggest lesson I learned, over and over, is that the quickest way to accelerate a team’s progress is to expose them directly to their customers so they see the world and their products through customers’ eyes.

GV’s design team has successfully run this formula with portfolio companies in GenAI, enterprise security, robotics, apparel, food, construction, developer tools, home appliances, drone delivery, biotech, and healthcare. We’ve developed a fast, efficient approach that helps early-stage startups define their unique value propositions and identify the specific subset of their target market that is initially most likely to adopt their product or service. We call this a Bullseye Customer Sprint.

Our formula for Bullseye Customer Sprints is “5 and 3 in 1”: Five bullseye customers and three simple prototypes in one day. We help founders specify the details that precisely define their bullseye customers. Then, we carefully recruit those bullseye customers for interviews. We prepare three mock landing pages that highlight distinct value propositions. Then, in one day, we interview the five bullseye customers about the pros and cons of each landing page while the whole team observes remotely and debriefs together at a watch party.

Interviewing a handful of specific customers in a single day makes it easier to spot patterns and align around big takeaways and next steps. How we map out the mock landing pages helps teams articulate their distinct value proposition with greater clarity and precision and fuels deeper customer conversations. By observing and debriefing as a team, no time is wasted writing reports or trying to convey what happened. Even after a long day of interviews, teams leave watch parties fired up to implement what they’ve learned, revise their prototypes and bullseye customers, and run another Bullseye Customer Sprint. With these critical improvements, Bullseye Customer Sprints accelerate startups’ customer discovery process.

LearnMoreFaster.com has everything you need to run your high-impact Bullseye Customer Sprints: step-by-step instructions, templates and worksheets, sample interview guides, and demo videos. We’ve even put together an awesome research-themed Spotify playlist!

We’ve seen hundreds of startups working hard to define their bullseye customers and the products they need, and we’ve noticed many common patterns. However, your situation, team, target customer, and product are unique. Or you may have a better idea and want to try a different approach. So get your free copy of Learn More Faster: How to Find Your Bullseye Customer and Their Perfect Product, and start answering those nagging product questions that keep you up at night. We only ask that you let us know how it goes.

[originally posted in GV News]

Introducing Learn More Faster: How to Find Your Bullseye Customer and Their Perfect Product was originally published in GV Library on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

How to learn more faster

Since 2010, we’ve helped hundreds of GV startups (like Nest, Foundation Medicine, Flatiron Health, Slack, Gusto, Lime, and Uber) use UX research to answer critical business questions and to build more successful products. We’ve shared our lessons on Medium and in the GV Library. This table of contents will help you quickly find everything you need to learn more faster about your customers, your ideas, and your designs.

**NEW! See LearnMoreFaster.com for a free copy of Learn More Faster: How to find your bullseye customer and their perfect product, and everything you need to run Bullseye Customer Sprints.**

Why do UX Research?

• Introduction to the GV research sprint
• What fuels great design (and why most startups don’t do it)

What research does your team need?

• Questions to ask before starting user research
• How to prioritize customer research when everything is a priority

Plan Your Research Approach

• Start at the end: How to do research that has real impact
• Field guide to UX research for startups
• The shopping shortcut: How to design for your customer’s mindset
• 8 shortcuts for better, faster design research

Different Types of Research

1. UX Interviews

• “User research, quick and dirty” workshop: An intro to scrappy UX research (video, slides, and templates)

What equipment do you need?

• How to build a simple UX lab anywhere
• Lessons from a truck stop: how to conduct field research without a hitch

Recruiting participants

• How to find great participants for your user study
• Finding “hard to find” customers for research
• The GV research sprint: Start recruiting participants (day 1)
• The GV research sprint: Schedule participants and draft interview guide (day 2)
• No more “no shows” — how to make sure your research participants actually show up
• Beware the consumer advisory board — instead, always be recruiting
  Is it a good idea to test my product with friends and family?

Drafting interview guides

• The GV research sprint: Schedule participants and draft interview guide (day 2)
• The GV research sprint: Finalize schedule and complete interview guide (day 3)
• Free prototypes

Interview techniques: Getting the most out of conversations with customers

• How to test prototypes with customers: The five-act interview
• Get better data from user studies: 16 interviewing tips
• How to build better rapport for better research interviews
• How to hack your body language for better interviews
• The GV research sprint: Interview participants and summarize findings (day 4)

Observing interviews

• UX Watch Parties: How to help your team get the most out of research interviews
• The GV Research Sprint: Interview participants and summarize findings (day 4)

2. Surveys

• Improve your startup’s surveys and get even better data
• Micro-surveys: a faster way to learn about your users

3. Online Research

• Seven tips for lean market research
• Rapid user research: How to survey 400 users and interview 10 in three days
• Tips for testing your designs with UserTesting.com

How to Measure Success

• Change aversion: why users hate what you launched (and what to do about it)
• How to choose the right UX metrics for your product
• How to beta test your top-secret product
• Net promoter score considered harmful (and what UX professionals can do about it) (This excellent article is by Jared Spool, not GV. I’ve included it here because every founder, PM, and UX researcher and should read it.)

— — — —

Please leave a comment or tweet @MMargolis with suggestions for other topics you’d like to see here.

GV’s Guide to UX Research for Startups was originally published in GV Library on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

There’s nothing quite like visiting a foreign city for the first time — especially with a great tour guide. That eye-opening, first-hand experience just doesn’t compare to reading a description or looking at photos a friend brought back from their trip. The same is true for UX research interviews. No second-hand research report or highlights video alone can deliver the same jolt of insight and impact as when the core team actively observes a full set of customer interviews. As a researcher, I try hard to help teams see and hear their customers (and the research process) themselves. I try to be startups’ UX tour guide instead of just their “report-er.”

This guide includes tips and the templates we’ve used to facilitate hundreds of successful UX watch parties with GV startups.

Top reasons your team should gather to watch UX research sessions live

Gets consensus faster on ideas based on their merits.

Research participants react to designs and concepts without knowing which came from your CEO or your intern. A stubborn Decider (usually the CEO or PM) might still override customers’ feedback on their pet idea, but it’s a lot less likely when the whole team watched it bomb in interview after interview. And an unpopular or unlikely idea can win a team’s support by performing well in research. Watching sessions together creates a shared understanding on a team, and makes it a lot harder for any individual to deny the results when a team has witnessed it together.

Accelerates understanding of users and motivates team.

More than most sales or customer support calls, good UX research interviews accelerate teams’ understanding and empathy for their customers’ goals, circumstances, and difficulties. Watching and listening to these sessions turns abstract “users” into real people with unique stories. And it consistently rallies GV startups’ teams to work even harder to improve their product or service for those customers.

Saves time and streamlines communication.

After a team has watched a day of research interviews, you don’t have to spend nearly as much time trying to document and communicate all the details and nuances from the study. It shortcuts a ton of the reporting and subsequent communication work you’d have to do otherwise. Observers are usually very eager to share the stories, findings, and next steps (as well as their excitement about UX research!) with the rest of the company.

Get your team to show up.

• Make sure you’re planning a study that’s directly aligned with the team’s and stakeholders’ top priorities. If they’re not interested in your research, you might be working on the wrong thing. (See Questions to ask before starting user research and Start at the end: How to do research that has real impact.)
• Get stakeholders’ input on your study goals, plan, interview guide, and recruiting criteria. Those are good chances to make sure they’re invested, and eliminates their excuses for dismissing results.
• Schedule interviews in a clump. Whenever possible, I schedule five one-hour interviews in one day. And we ask (require, really) teams to reserve the whole day and attend all sessions, preferably from the same room. Reserving a whole day allows them to focus on the study without getting distracted by other meetings and demands. Observing all five interviews in a day also makes it MUCH easier to spot the patterns, and to agree on key takeaways and next steps. When stakeholders or team members attend only one session, there’s always a chance that’s the session that goes sideways or is an outlier.
• Talk it up! Promote the study to your team. Remind them how it will help the project. Ask team leads to encourage others to attend. Add it to their calendars. Send reminders.
• Stoke FOMO. Ask an observer to send the team catchy updates during the interviews.

Make it easy for them to watch.

• Build a simple UX lab to make it easy to stream and record from almost anywhere.
• Reserve a good room for observing together. Lure people with lunch, popcorn, cookies, or whatever special goodies are popular in your company. Provide plenty of drinks and caffeine!
• Stock the observation room with supplies, like pens, paper, sticky notes, white board, extension cords and trash/recycle cans (snacking teams create a lot of detritus in a day. You might even want an air freshener!).

Coach your team to be good observers.

Unless your team are experienced interview-watchers, they’ll need explicit instructions about what to look for and how to listen. Remind observers of the study goals and big questions you’re trying to answer. (And write them in the first column of your Summary Sheet.) Provide a brief description of the participants, along with your recruiting criteria. Review the schedule and plan for the day. Then outline the “house rules” for the observation room:

• Try to see and understand the world through participants’ eyes.
• Focus on your observations. Don’t jump to conclusions. (And for Pete’s sake: Don’t make premature changes to the product or prototype during the sessions!)
• Be careful about taking participants’ comments too literally. Watch what they do vs. what they say.
• Don’t dismiss feedback from participants you disagree with, or who don’t match your assumptions or expectations.
• Respect participants’ privacy, and protect their PII. Don’t go digging into their accounts without their explicit permission.

As an example, here’s the Observer Instructions template we use for GV research studies. It includes links to templates for a Running Notes Doc, Summary Sheet, and Big Takeaways Form.

Give them jobs.

Assigning teammates specific jobs (and rotating roles throughout the day) keeps them engaged, and helps them resist the siren song of their Slack or email.

• Primary “Running Notes” Notetaker: Captures notes and quotes in your Running Notes Doc. (As the researcher, knowing others are taking detailed notes frees me to focus 100% on the participants.)
• Secondary “Running Notes” Notetaker: Adds accuracy and depth to notes. Highlight important observations, and capture noteworthy quotes and time stamps.
• Interview Technique Notetaker: Captures specific interview techniques the interviewer
  uses, so you can use them when you run our own interviews in your Running Notes Doc.
• Facilitator: If possible, it helps enormously to enlist a partner to facilitate the observers. While I conduct a day of interviews, one of my partners, Vanessa or Kate, joins the product team to keep them on task, highlight key observations, communicate with me, and manage debriefing between sessions. I like to check in with the observers after each session (especially the first ones) to get feedback and answer any questions about how I’m conducting the interviews.

Debrief together while it’s fresh.

After each interview, help the team fill out one column of your Summary Sheet. Discuss each of the key questions (the rows in the Sheet) while the Facilitator or researcher types the team’s answers.

After a full day of interviews — before your observers leave! — capture the team’s big takeaways. Review the Summary Sheet together to look for patterns and to counter recency effects. I like to ask, “What surprised you?” Ask each observer to complete a copy of this Big Takeaways Form. Before anyone leaves, ask the Decider to weigh in on next steps. In the coming days the team will have time to reflect and continue discussing what they saw and what to do next. But those initial, fresh reactions are a valuable snapshot that teams refer to again and again.

What if team members can’t attend in real time?

• Record audio and video of your interviews (with participants’ permission).
• Throw a viewing party. If team members can’t attend sessions live, schedule a viewing party to watch a recording of at least one session of your choice. Lure them with lunch, special treats, or highly coveted “I’m a customer champion” badges. While watching the session together, point out key moments, observations, and specific interviewing techniques you want them to notice. (“At this point, I was building rapport. They were nervous at first, but see how they relaxed as we chatted about their dogs.”) Reserve time at the end to discuss what everyone observed and what was interesting or surprising.

Some startups resist watching their own UX interviews. They say they’re too busy, and will just read the report later. Maybe they don’t like hearing frank feedback about their ideas or testing their assumptions. The best startups value these opportunities to learn about their customers, test new ideas, and accelerate their progress. As a great UX tour guide, you can give your team the memorable, first-hand exposure to their customers they need to build great products. After they experience it that first time, they’ll be hooked.

Thanks to Kristen Brillantes, Kate Aronowitz, Vanessa Cho, Anshu Agarwal.

UX Watch Parties was originally published in GV Library on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

When I do UX research for startups, I try to make it easy for teams to observe from anywhere, while demonstrating they don’t need a fancy usability lab to do it themselves. Having conducted over 200 UX research studies for GV companies, I’ve come to rely on a simple setup that’s inexpensive, and flexible enough for testing mobile and desktop prototypes in-person and remotely. This isn’t the result of an extensive software and hardware review. This reliable combination just fits my needs really well. After demonstrating and describing this setup countless times, I’m finally documenting it here.

Mobile

What you’ll need

• GoToMeeting¹
• MacBook
• USB webcam
• USB conference mic (optional)
• IPEVO HD document camera
• IPEVO Visualizer app
• Privacy screen for MacBook
• App to keep your Mac awake (like Amphetamine)
• Good WiFi

Setup for In-person Interviews

For in-person sessions, I manage everything from my MacBook. I use a USB webcam to give observers a view of the participant. I strongly prefer using a document camera instead of AirPlay, casting or mirroring or a mobile sled because it allows me to easily swap participants’ personal devices and my test devices under the camera. The document camera also captures participants’ swiping and tapping fingers.

1. Set up hardware like this:

2. Launch Photo Booth. Select the USB webcam aimed at participant. [Or, instead of Photo Booth, just open two Visualizer windows with different camera views. (Thanks, @CallaghanDesign!)]

3. Position Photo Booth and IPEVO Visualizer on the MacBook as shown below. (Restarting the MacBook often helps my Mac recognize the multiple cameras.)

5. Start GoToMeeting and turn off “Attendees can view attendee list” and “Entry/Exit Chimes” so participants won’t be distracted by observers.

6. Start your interview and (with permission) press record!

Remote mobile testing

When I need to view and share mobile screens with participants I can’t meet in person, I ask them to install the GoToMeeting app on their personal devices ahead of time. Then at the appointed time, they join my GoToMeeting from their device, and I join from my MacBook. You can find instructions for participants here for Android and iOS. I can’t see participants’ faces, but sometimes I need the option to share mobile prototypes with remote.

Desktop

What you’ll need

• GoToMeeting¹
• MacBook
• External monitor
• External keyboard (I prefer Bluetooth to minimize USB plugs and cords.)
• Mouse (I prefer Bluetooth.)
• USB webcam
• USB conference mic (optional)
• Privacy screen for MacBook
• App to keep your Mac awake (like Amphetamine)
• Good WiFi

Setup for in-person interviews

For in-person desktop sessions, I manage everything from my MacBook, and create a desktop experience for the participant by giving them control over an external monitor, keyboard and mouse.

1. Set up hardware like this:

2. Arrange your displays in Mac System Preferences like this so participants won’t “lose” the pointer on the MacBook screen.

3. Launch Photo Booth on the moderator’s Macbook screen. Select the USB webcam aimed at the participant.

4. Open the window or prototype you’re testing on the external monitor for participant.

5. Start GoToMeeting and turn off “Attendees can view attendee list” and “Entry/Exit Chimes” so participants won’t be distracted by observers.

6. Start your interview and (with permission) press record!

I love the simplicity and versatility of this setup. I’ve used it for research sprints in my office, in startups’ conference rooms, in cancer centers, in doctors’ offices, in homes, in a truck stop, and even in a hotel room with a robot. Give it a try, and please add your suggested improvements in the comments.

[1] Why GoToMeeting? Of all the video conferencing apps I’ve seen, GoToMeeting has several essential features for how I work with startups.

• The basics: I can share screens, stream, record, and “change presenter” on mobile and desktop.
• Observers and remote participants can join easily.
• Its MP4 recordings are small enough to upload and share quickly via Drive. (No more huge QuickTime files!)
• I can control whether participants can see and hear observers.
• Records confidential sessions on my laptop instead of a third-party’s cloud.

GoToMeeting does have one big drawback: It doesn’t record its webcam view of participants. That’s why my setup includes the simple workaround of using Photo Booth on my MacBook for in-person interviews.

How to build a simple UX lab anywhere was originally published in GV Library on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

How to spot the 5 studies startups need most

After completing hundreds of research projects for startups across dozens of industries, I finally noticed something. Although each project seems unique on the surface, they actually match several patterns that emerge again and again. In my experience, startups look to UX research most often to achieve one of these five objectives:

1. Improve a Process or Workflow

2. Better Understand Customer Shopping Habits

3. Evaluate Concepts

4. Test Usability

5. Refine a Value Proposition

This practical field guide offers a way to quickly identify a startup’s objective, and what kind of research they actually need. It outlines how to conduct research that will deliver actionable results for each of these five common objectives. And most importantly, the “North Star Questions” will help you steer the project from start to successful finish. I’ve included a couple case studies to illustrate how they work.

Like any guide, you may have to reference this a few times until you get the hang of it, so don’t get discouraged if it feels like a lot of information right away. Whether you’re a founder, an engineer, a designer, or a seasoned research pro, I hope this guide will help you plan and use UX research more effectively.

Improve a Process or Workflow

When to use it

The company wants to streamline an existing process, or they want to create a new system or product that will save their customers (or themselves!) time, money, and mistakes. Use this to document the details of who does what when, highlighting problems and opportunities for improvement.

What to listen for

The client will say things like: “streamline,” “identify pain points,” “When is the best point to. . .?” “best practices for…,” “efficiency,” “process,” and “How do our customers currently. . . ?”

North Star Questions

This objective requires careful observation and a specific type of interview: we need to prompt customers to walk through a given process/workflow step-by-step so that we can study what happens. I flesh out a complete interview guide, but a few core questions serve as my North Star. I get pretty detailed with each step of their process, asking the participants, “What’s your goal right now? How does it start? Then what? And then what? Can you show me?”

During interviews, those North Star Questions help me focus on gathering the information I need most, and keep me from getting lost in the weeds, especially when talking to experts about an unfamiliar or fairly technical domain.

In addition, I will watch for and ask about:

• Pain points: What parts of the process are difficult, slow, unpleasant, costly, or error-prone?
• Variations: When have they deviated from the process they just described? How has this process changed over time?

Final deliverable

Our final step will be to put this information together in a way that makes sense to the client. In this case, I usually use a spreadsheet. Down the first column on the left, I label rows with the key details I want to capture for every step, such as: name of the step, who’s involved, their goals, what they do, questions they’re trying to answer, and pain points (or opportunities!). Then I fill out all of the fields for each step, fleshing out the columns from left to right.

Example

Let’s look at a real-life example so you can see how it works.

Flatiron Health’s mission is to learn from the experience of every cancer patient, and a top priority is improving clinical trials for potential new cancer treatments. A while ago, one of their product managers spoke to me about the difficulties of identifying and enrolling eligible patients into clinical trials, and he asked questions like:

• How can we help cancer centers enroll more eligible patients faster?
• How do practices find and enroll eligible patients?
• What are existing pain points in enrollment?
• When is the right time to alert physicians about eligible patients?

These questions may seem specific to Flatiron, but when I listened closer, I heard key words like “pain points” and “How do they. . . ?” and “How can we move faster?” I recognized he was really asking me, “How can we improve the existing process or workflow of enrolling new patients for clinical trials?” And to answer that question, I knew I’d need to interview clinical research teams about the nitty gritty details of each step of their workflow, then create a grid like the one I described above, highlighting specific points where Flatiron could help.

And that’s what we did. We visited five cancer centers in three states in four days, and interviewed 25 people. Every session followed a typical arc, starting with introductions, context questions about their roles and organizations, and conversation about their goals and metrics for success. But my North Star for the interviews (What’s your goal? How does it start? Then what? And then what? Can you show me?) helped me get what I needed most from my precious time with those clinical research teams.

We created giant posters of my summary grid to inform a design sprint we facilitated with the Flatiron team. After a lot more hard work by Flatiron, their OncoTrials product is now live in many oncology practices across the US.

Better Understand Shopping Habits

When to use it

A company wants to figure out how best to merchandise their product to increase online conversion. They need to know how customers judge and choose items in their category, and what content to present at each stage of the journey.

I’ve applied this method to improve online conversion for products as varied as coffee, APIs, furniture, vacation rentals, doctors, and databases.

What to listen for

Companies don’t usually frame their goals in terms of shopping or merchandising. They usually start by asking “How do we get more people to sign up/buy?” Listen for phrases like, “What do people want to know about our…?” and “What information or imagery is most important to explain or convince…?” “How do people want to sort or filter. . .?”

North Star Questions

When studying shopping habits, I build my interviews around a “shopalong,” shadowing target customers as they visit several sites or stores for an item. These shopping trips usually include a client’s homepage (or physical store) or prototypes, along with their competitors’. It’s easy for these sessions to stray if you’re not careful. In these interviews, I’m guided by my North Star Questions. Getting the answers to these is what makes each project a success. I ask each participant, “What questions are you trying to answer here? How? In what order?”

In addition, I will watch for and ask a few more things from the participant:

• Recent relevant experiences: Talk through both successful and unsuccessful shopping attempts.
• What content reassures you? What design elements convey (or detract from) trust and credibility?

Final deliverable

Describe their steps and the hierarchy of key criteria prospective customers use to narrow their options and validate their selections. In other words, answer the North Star questions: What questions are they trying to answer? How? In what order? You can read more about this in The Shopping Shortcut: How to Design for Your Customer’s Mindset.

Example

One Medical asked our team for help redesigning their homepage to increase member sign ups. They wanted to answer questions like:

• How do we get more members to sign up on our site?
• What information do they want to see?
• Where do they look for that information?
• How do they choose a primary care physicians? What criteria are relevant?

“Doctors” and “primary care physicians” seem pretty industry-specific, so it would be easy to assume this project would need a custom approach. But a second look at their questions reveals that what One Medical really wants to understand is how people shop for primary care physicians.

That objective told me what kind of interview to conduct. As usual, I planned the full arc of the interview — starting with introductions, learning a little about the participant and their past experiences, etc. But what really mattered was the shopalong and my North Star: What questions are they trying to answer? How? In what order?

And for One Medical, we learned that patients first look for doctors who are conveniently located, accepting new patients, and of the preferred gender. Once they have this, they narrow their list based on additional criteria like expertise, years of practice, education, hospital affiliations, and online presence. As a result, One Medical redesigned their landing pages to help prospective members find the details they care most about at each stage of their shopping process.

Evaluate Concepts

When to use it

A company needs to gauge interest and reactions to an idea or concept before they invest time and effort to build it. They have to determine which parts of a new concept appeal to their target customers and why. In this case we’re trying to understand customers’ perceptions of new features and ideas rather than testing usability.

I often plan this type of interview for the last day of design sprints to test the ideas we’ve prototyped.

What to listen for

Questions like, “Which way will people prefer to. . . ?” “Will people want to. . .?” “How will customers react to this?”

North Star Questions

With these interviews, I want participants to experience a few different prototypes or sites during our interview session. I also want to see what they think are the best (and worst) parts of each. My North Star questions are: How does this idea compare to the others? What are the pros and cons of each product (or prototype)?

In my interview, I’ll follow this basic arc:

• Discuss relevant habits, experiences and needs: For context and to help me interpret their feedback, I ask about any relevant past experience.
• Introduce prototypes and products: Next I’ll describe a scenario and invite participants to look at a mix of sites or prototypes with me. For example, “Imagine your boss asked you to review and evaluate these different services for use at work.” How do participants perceive what each site or prototype does or is offering? (You can even use competitors’ offerings as “free prototypes.”)
• Compare features & value prop: Prompt participants to contrast the products they’ve just tried. The goal is not to pick a single winner, but to tease out the best elements of each that we can combine into the next better prototype.

Final deliverable

After these sessions, briefly highlight what worked well about each concept, and what didn’t work well. (What are the pros and cons of each product (or prototype)?) Document which aspects of each prototype seemed most (and least) useful, valuable, and credible to the testers, along with any additional insights about customers’ needs and expectations.

Example

This short video demonstrates what this kind of interview actually looks like.

Test Usability

When to use it

These studies help teams see whether their users are able to complete certain tasks with a detailed design prototype, a launch candidate or a live product — and why! This is what people typically think of when they talk about “user research” or “user testing” or “usability testing.”

What to listen for

Questions like, “Will users be able to. . . ?” and “Are there any red flags in this design?” “Why are users getting stuck?” Will our customers understand how to. . . ?” “Is it intuitive?”

North Star Questions

In these sessions, we present testers simple goals and scenarios so we can observe them using the product or prototype to complete key tasks while they think aloud. For task-based usability sessions, my North Star is: Can users complete the task(s) with this design? Where do they get stuck or confused? Why?

I usually start these sessions with a brief conversation about their past experiences and existing habits that are relevant to whatever I’m testing with them. Every session helps the team learn a bit more about their customers.

Final deliverable

After several test sessions, a topline summary simply answers the North Star Questions: “Where did people get stuck or confused? Why?” Document patterns you observed about what did and didn’t work well about the design and instructional text. Also take note if most users failed to discover any important elements or features. Indicating the relative severity of the different problems helps teams prioritize their work.

For more details about conducting basic usability studies and interviews, see the PDFs and video from my User Research, Quick and Dirty workshop.

Refine a Value Proposition

When to use it

A company needs help communicating the key benefits of their existing service or platform in ways that resonate strongly with prospective customers. . . or they’re struggling to distinguish themselves from their competition. This type of study also often reveals weaknesses, along with where a company should invest in amplifying distinguishing features.

What to listen for

Questions like, “What is our value prop?” “What features distinguish us from competition?” “Why should customers choose us?”

North Star Questions

The goal of these interviews is to study your happiest, most successful customers (like Dan Heath’s “bright spots”) to find out why they chose your service from among other alternatives, and what they value about it. The answers may surprise you!

When trying to understand what appeals to happy, high LTV (lifetime value) customers, my North Star Questions are: Why do you use this service or platform? What are its strengths and weaknesses?

It’s also important to ask about:

• Background about their business or organization: Get some context about the work they do, and why they need this kind of service or platform. What are their goals and constraints?
• Previous experiences: What other solutions have they tried? What did they like and dislike about those? Why did they switch?
• Stories and examples: Ask customers to describe (in detail) recent examples of how and when they used your service or platform.

Final deliverable

Summarize key takeaways and patterns you heard from customers to answer the North Star questions: Why do high LTV customers use this service or platform? What are the strengths and weaknesses?

Conclusion

Phew! We made it. Hopefully you’re able to see that no matter how unique each project may seem on the surface, identifying the patterns provides a shortcut. Of course, these aren’t startups’ only UX research objectives, but in my experience they’re the most common by far.

For some additional material, I recommend checking out this article on a 4-day process for answering important startup questions that also offers some insight on recruiting the right participants for your projects.

Best of luck!

Field Guide to UX Research for Startups was originally published in GV Library on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Twenty years ago, when I started my design career, I made a lot of fake stuff. I can still clearly remember when I designed my own CD covers for albums by famous bands, created a fake e-commerce site with my friends, recreated famous logos in Corel Draw, redesigned a popular website just to see what I would do differently, and designed fake logos for fake products that didn’t exist yet. You might say, “What a waste of time on unpaid work!” You could say “Gosh, you didn’t understand the intricacies of designing for the real world!” But, all of this fake design work was critical to my career.

Fake design work let me get in thousands of reps. When I was about seventeen, I literally designed a hundred album covers in one year. I bought a stack of cheap jewel cases and repackaged my CD collection in my own designs. I didn’t make a penny, I didn’t get critique from anyone, but I sure as hell got a lot of practice digging into Photoshop 5, trying typography in ways I’d never done, using photography in ways I’d never considered, and trying to get decent results on a crappy color inkjet printer. The final ten album covers were leagues better than the first ten.

Fake design let me try work that I wasn’t qualified for. When my friends and I started a design agency in 1999, many of us were in our late teens and we had never built an e-commerce platform before — this was all scary brand new tech back then. Who was going to trust a bunch of kids to build a secure payments system? Heck, we didn’t know if we trusted ourselves to build one. So, we made a fake one called Coffee Cartel. We “sold” coffee mugs with funny slogans, beans, and coffee makers. It all worked, except we only processed credit cards for a penny and we didn’t actually make any products. We learned a ton about designing for e-commerce and also acquired technical prowess.

Fake design let me build a portfolio in a chicken-and-egg situation. That Coffee Cartel website was in our studio’s portfolio page for over a year. On the back of that work, we landed a real e-commerce client and built a sophisticated e-commerce system and inventory management system for a large Canadian retailer.

Fake design let me learn the intricacies of product design. Back in about 2003, I created a fake redesign of Verizon Wireless. I thought their website was crap and I was convinced I could bang out a big improvement in a day or two, just to prove to myself that I could. Turns out those big company suits were better at design than I thought. Creating a text input that suggested the user enter their full 10 digit phone number was surprisingly hard. I started to guess that the stupid 300x250 advertising banner jammed into the page was likely a release valve for internal marketing pressure. So, I embraced those constraints and ended up coming up with a design that seemed about 20% better, not the 200% better that I’d arrogantly predicted. That 20% improvement was totally based on my own judgement (no user studies, no quant, no qual) but it was an excellent learning experience.

If you’re thinking of doing fake design work, what should you watch out for?

• Don’t be a sucker and do unpaid work for other people — it’s called spec work, not fake work, and there are a lot of risks to doing work on spec. There a handful of exceptions to this rule (see below) but generally people who ask you to do spec work are assholes.
• Try not to gloss over complexity. Design work in the real world is pretty hard. If you design a fake graph, put in realistic data. If you fake redesign a site, like my Verizon Wireless redesign, don’t just magically remove an ad unit. If you create a sexy fake login screen, don’t forget to include a way to recover lost passwords or usernames.
• Write real copy. Lorem ipsum is for amateurs.
• The gold standard is to actually test your design work. Real designers often measure their work by putting it in front of real users. My Verizon project would have been way stronger if I had tested it with some potential customers in 1-on-1 user studies. This is how some great design schools like Tradecraft teach students to conduct unsolicited redesigns: design > test with customers > design again.
• Design to learn, not to get accolades. Other designers are rarely your real audience. It doesn’t matter if ten thousand designers applaud your work if your customers find your designs hard to use.

Go out there and fake it til you make it, my friends. Hell, I still fake it to learn new stuff and I’m not quitting anytime soon.

PS: You can also build your experience by doing “free” work. Not to be confused with spec work, some of us got a ton of experience by doing free work for groups we respected or as fun side projects.

For instance, way back in 2004, my friends and I volunteered to work with Mozilla on the branding of Phoenix as it was being renamed Firefox. Mozilla is an open-source project and we thought it would be cool to volunteer design work just like engineers were contributing code to the project. Note that Mozilla didn’t coerce us into doing it, we did it for the love of the project, and we consciously volunteered our time. We learned so much as a team and built confidence (and reputation) to do more work like it. And we had a lot of fun. Jon Hicks wrote a great article explaining the project and how we each contributed.

PPS: Thanks to Ariel Waldman, Dann Petty, Helen Tran, Kristy Tillman, Tim Van Damme, and many others for furthering the discussion on these issues.

Fake designs yield real results was originally published in GV Library on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

When we walk into the room ready to do our research, we’re usually focused on how to efficiently gather the information we need and get out. And we may be nervous ourselves, especially when we’re doing research off-site in unfamiliar territory like a participant’s home or office. In either case, rapport isn’t top of mind for us — but it should be.

We have to remember that no matter where they happen, research interviews are a little weird for everyone. We invite strangers to have one-sided conversations with us that can often feel quite personal. The participants just want to do a good job and make us happy, but they’re worried about doing something wrong, or worse, looking stupid. Collecting quality information from them hinges on our ability to put them at ease and quickly earn their trust. If we don’t, they’ll remain nervous, suspicious and hesitant to share their personal stories — and we’ll never get the information we’re after.

How do we solve this problem right away? While I’ve seen a lot of literature about things like micro expressions, mirroring breathing, and transactional analysis, it’s too much for me to remember during an interview. Instead, I try to focus on just a few simple concepts.

1. Be a good host: Think of each research meeting as though it were a dinner party, and you are the host.

Before I walk into any research interview, I pause, take a deep breath and imagine the ideal host at a dinner party. They’re welcoming, attentive and encouraging. They run the show in a way that puts everyone at ease. They show interest and concern for their guests. This is the role that I aim to play for the length of the interview.

The nuances can vary — by the person across the table from you, by the project involved or even by culture — but thinking about the whole process as a dinner party reframes what we demand of ourselves, and it sets the stage properly for how we treat our research “guests.”

The “Gracious Host” rule applies equally well when you, the researcher, are the guest. A gracious guest arrives on time (the fashionably late rule does not apply here!) and is flexible, willing, appreciative and courteous. I consider myself the guest whenever I’m not on my home turf, but the whole guest/host relationship can manifest itself in some interesting ways.

Testing the Nest Protect smoke and CO alarm required setting it off repeatedly throughout the day with a squirt of canned smoke. But doing that at my office would have triggered the fire alarms in the whole building. So I convinced a kind co-worker to let me use his home for our research sessions.

That meant that I was both the host and the guest, a pretty interesting situation. Fortunately, I figured out that I could play it to my advantage. With each of my research participants, I pointed out how weird it was for both of us to to be in a stranger’s house, and I think the shared experience aided our relationship. I love looking for those types of commonalities. They help build trust quickly.

The goal here is to stop thinking about the research interview as a business meeting or a scientific experiment and instead think of yourself as the role of a host (or guest!) hoping to put the other person at ease so that they’re able to really open up to you.

2. Figure out the status: Quickly identify someone’s status and set your own to complement theirs

Status refers to the pecking order within a group. It’s the informal social hierarchy amongst any two (or more) people — who is dominant (high status) and who is subordinate (low status) — which is identifiable through things like body language, eye contact and tone of voice.

As social animals, we’re highly sensitive to behaviors that indicate social status and hierarchy. We constantly read and react to each other’s status cues automatically and unconsciously. During an interview, if I act too high or low status relative to the person I’m interviewing (whether it’s a CEO or a student), I’ll have trouble connecting with them. But learning to read basic status cues helped me identify and correct those discrepancies.

A high-status person tends to take up more space, behave confidently (and sometimes intrusively) and is generally less accommodating of other people. A low-status person might look nervous or try to defer to others. There are a number of concrete, easy-to-memorize status indicators that I’ve listed below.

Examples of High Status Behaviors

• Take up space by spreading feet, putting hands on hips or behind head
• Stand tall, still, relaxed, and in control
• Invade others’ space or touch them without asking or apologizing
• Interrupt
• Direct, intense eye contact
• Gaze down at other people
• Look stern, unfriendly
• Speak with steady voice

Examples of Low Status Behaviors

• Shrink by slouching, and pulling feet, arms and legs in close
• Fidget
• Touch face or hair
• Fig leaf positions: Hold hands or object as if protecting crotch. Stand behind chair
• Smile and nod
• Avert eyes
• Speak tentatively. Asks for permission
• Defer to other people’s wishes and physical space
• Gaze up at other people

I use these indicators to judge how the other person is feeling, and then I have to respond accordingly using the Seesaw Principle.

3. Remember the Seesaw Principle: Status isn’t fixed. You can lower someone’s status by raising your own and vice versa.

If I raise my status, it lowers theirs (“I’m in charge here, so why aren’t you following my instructions?”). Or I can boost others by lowering my own (“Thank you so much. I couldn’t have done this without you!”). It’s like a seesaw where my status can go up and down when I want it to — and often when I don’t!

In an interview, the researcher often starts out higher status because we’re in charge and we know what’s going on. We’re also usually on our turf. So, when I notice that a participant is nervous I try to make them comfortable, boosting their status by lowering my own to a level slightly below theirs. Misquoting Michelle Obama a little bit (I hope she won’t mind), “when they go low, we go lower!” For example, I might literally go lower by lowering my desk chair so I look up to them, smile and nod more and shrink in a bit. I can also instantly make myself sound more tentative by starting my questions with “umm…” or “err…”

What happens if you get this wrong? I once learned this lesson the hard way in the conference room of a hedge fund in New York. I was interviewing high-powered analysts on behalf of a company that I’d assumed had laid the groundwork so that everyone involved was eager to help out. There I was, interviewing the executive across the table from me, when she turned to me and asked, “So, why exactly are we meeting?” in a tone that left no doubt what she really meant was, “Why are you wasting my time?”

Bam! The seesaw dropped out from under me. I had come in playing a pretty high status role to match hers because I wanted her to perceive me as credible, and because I thought she already understood and valued what we were doing. Instead, I was left scrambling, offering her an apology, instantly switching to very low status and getting straight to the point to try and save the whole meeting.

This was a rookie mistake, and it’s a good lesson for everyone. I hadn’t judged my audience correctly and had assumed a status that didn’t fit the situation. It was correctable — this stuff almost always is — but it taught me an important lesson about knowing the audience before you go into the meeting.

4. Focus on the other person as much as the information you need to gather

As researchers, we don’t have to wear a white lab coat to make our participants feel like lab mice performing tricks for us. It’s also easy to forget, after the tenth or even hundredth interview you’ve done, how intimidating the whole process can be for the other person.

When you sense an interviewee’s discomfort, or just feel like you’re not connecting well with that person, check your body language and theirs for clues. What status are you each playing? Did something change? If it did, adjust your own status gradually — too quick a change can seem unnatural and undermine rapport further. And if your adjustments and reassurances don’t work, check in with your interviewee with casual questions, like, “You seem nervous/distracted/uncomfortable. Is everything okay?”

Interviews exist in a strange time box. We’ve just met this person, yet we’re asking them to be very open with us right off the bat. And then we both walk away, likely to never speak again even after they’ve shared a lot of personal information with us. That’s okay, but I always try to remember that I may be the only person they ever meet representing my company. So my goal is that we always both walk away feeling a little better for having had the experience.

5. Beware external factors that affect rapport

• Clothing: How should I dress to fit in? Think about your audience (truckers, CEOs, physicians) and try to dress like they might.
• Cameras: Cameras and other gear can make participants nervous, so keep them small and as out of the way as possible. And don’t forget that one-way mirrors can make it seem like you’re just one good cop/bad cop away from an interrogation room.
• Sensitive Topics: It often takes extra time to build enough trust to really delve into personal, embarrassing or sensitive topics.
• Other People Present: Who else is there, from co-workers to bosses to friends and family of the participant, can affect their status and make the participant nervous or more guarded.
• Brand Halo and Bias: How will research participants react when you tell them who you work for? To some, your brand may give you credibility, while others might find it intimidating, or worse, they may dislike it. Try to be aware of these perceptions beforehand so you know what kind of bias you may encounter.

Further Reading

Below are books I’ve found useful to this topic. You can practice these things by watching how the Seesaw Principle plays out in meetings, on television or in movies and then experiment with it on your own a little bit. Or take an intro improv class!

Impro by Keith Johnstone: Learning the basics of improv can be great for practicing status, and this book offers excellent insights.

The Power of Body Language by Vanessa Van Edwards: Perhaps too into the weeds for most, this book still offers greater detail on reading body language to build better rapport.

How to Build Better Rapport For Better Research Interviews was originally published in GV Library on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

In an increasingly competitive environment for technical talent, and with the average time to hire for software engineers now over 35 days at best, startups need to consider faster, more efficient strategies to recruit the best talent. Whether you’re building an in-house recruiting team from scratch or looking to maximize the efficiency of your existing recruiting team, read on for five strategies that will take your recruiting operations to the next level.

Focus on the “tech” in tech recruiter

Hire a tech recruiter who understands your technology. You would be surprised to learn how many startups hire tech recruiters that only have a cursory understanding of technology. A technical recruiter should be able to explain at a high level what a distributed system is, or the difference between a native mobile app and a web mobile app.

Having a good general grasp of technology is a core differentiator between an average tech recruiter and a great tech recruiter. Tech recruiters with a solid grasp of technology are more effective in understanding the complexity and relevance of the problem sets that technical candidates have encountered and solved. More importantly, they are in a much better position to determine whether or not those experiences and skills translate well and fill the technical gaps the new position is intended to address.

Edward Avila, head of global talent acquisition at Synaptics, stresses this point. “Effective recruiters are the ones who are able to go beyond the buzzwords of job description,” he says. “By having working knowledge of the company’s creation process, they are well-informed about the opportunities that they are sourcing for. They possess the advanced skills that allow them to appropriately engage and screen candidates. This is value that they add to hiring managers. Anything less is just being too administrative.”

Here are some questions to ask a tech recruiter to get a sense of how technical they are:

• Break down into three parts a technology stack for a large-scale web app: Frontend, Backend and NetOps. What would an engineer build and what kind of problems would he or she solve in each of these three parts of the stack?
• What are some general technical challenges a backend engineer faces when scaling a web app from 10,000 users to 10 million users?
• What are the trade-offs when building a native mobile app over a web mobile app?
• What are the benefits of service-oriented architecture for web apps?

Look at tech recruiters as product partners

Ensure that recruiters attend product meetings that involve roles for which they are hiring. The effectiveness of recruiting operations begin to unravel when recruiters don’t have a seat at the table where product discussions are happening. Recruiters who are part of these discussions will be much better prepared to manage the inevitable pivots, get ahead of shifting priorities and have a deeper understanding of the technical challenges the team is facing.

Maryanne Brown, head of recruiting at Gusto, reinforces this idea. “At Gusto, one of our values is that we are all owners in the business. With that value in mind, our recruiters are expected to be thought partners to the functions they specialize in,” Brown says. “They attend all team meetings, and sit by their counterparts regularly to understand the daily needs of the team they work with. Organically they’ve grown into a more hybrid Recruiter and HRBP role where they help to predict the future needs of the team. This enables the recruiter to be in the driver’s seat and think further out in regards to the impact they can make. Being proactive versus reactive helps us not only to hire great recruiting talent, but also retain them for the long term.”

Armed with an understanding of the product roadmap and technical challenges, a great technical recruiter will provide objective insights around a candidate’s strengths, weaknesses and any potential red or green flags. Require your recruiters to call out where the gaps are for each candidate they submit, and make sure those areas are addressed during the interview process. If this is not being done, you are missing a key value-add of having a strong technical recruiter, and you should consider an alternative (such as hiring a sourcer).

Seek hunters, not gatherers

Recruiters are often split between two different types: hunters and gatherers. Gatherers need to be pointed toward targets, such as target companies, job titles or product spaces. They will post a job description to a bunch of job boards in the hopes that their golden candidate will apply. Gatherers generally begin to flail after the low-hanging fruit is exhausted and more emphasis on passive candidate sourcing becomes paramount to successfully filling the position. What you’ll typically get from a gatherer are the best currently available (i.e. active) candidates on the market, not the best possible candidate.

Dialpad’s head of talent, Moses Sison, explains, “Having a strong hunting mentality in Dialpad’s talent acquisition organization has really been invaluable. We were able to hire A players, which created a network effect of attracting more A players to join. Without ‘hunters’ going after only the best candidate, I don’t think our engineering team would have been as strong as they are right now.”

Hunters take pride in seeking and landing the best possible candidate, not just the best currently available. These are people who are skilled in unearthing top talent far beyond saturated tools like LinkedIn. Hunters understand the product/problem spaces so well they can easily determine when someone overstates their skills and experience. They know the industry and product space so well they can effectively counter competitive offers the candidate may receive. They are problem solvers who get down into the weeds with candidates during their pre-screens, and are masterful in their ability to pitch the opportunity as a solution to the candidate’s pain points. The hunters are the recruiters you want on your team.

Integrate product and hiring roadmaps

Create a technical hiring roadmap, complete with deliverables, milestones and deadlines. Couple this roadmap very closely to your product and business roadmap. Now you’ll have something tangible that is driven by the company’s product and business needs that can be executed against. This will help you systematically move away from the “I needed this person yesterday” style of recruiting (also known as reactive recruiting) and into a “We knew this role was coming and already have five viable candidates” style of hiring (also known as “just in time” recruiting).

Creating a hiring roadmap that ties directly to the product roadmap enables recruiters to reverse-engineer hiring needs and establish a clear set of company-wide priorities. From there, you can inject metrics around phone interviews to onsite ratios, cost per hire, time to hire and more. With clear visibility into the pipeline and process you can start to identify places where there is room for improvement. H. James Harrington, author and expert on business process improvement, said it best: “Measurement is the first step that leads to control and eventually to improvement. If you can’t measure something, you can’t understand it. If you can’t understand it, you can’t control it. If you can’t control it, you can’t improve it.”

Mathew Caldwell, former VP of People at Instacart, remarks that, “Recruiting should be approached with the same rigor as product development. For every role you recruit for there are multiple people responsible for all the deliverables along the lifecycle of the recruiting process. The companies that are the best at recruiting approach recruiting like they approach developing a product — they identify what the ideal outcome is and when that outcome should be completed… If you have a solid product roadmap that identifies what you are developing and when, you should be able to determine the gaps in the team that will keep the company from hitting their targets. That will then inform them on how, who and when to begin recruiting.”

Communicate inside and out

Lindsay Grenawalt, head of People Operations at Cockroach Labs, points out that because recruiting is a process, we often forget that it is fundamentally a human experience. “At any stage of the process, you can lose a candidate because you reject them or they reject you,” she warns. “It is important that once you engage with a candidate, you listen to what motivates them. If it’s not your company, that’s okay. If it is your company, make sure you take notes at each stage of the process to understand how your candidate’s motivations may be changing.”

You’ll want to hire a technical recruiter with excellent communication skills when it comes to speaking, listening and exhibiting passion for your product space. Recruiting is not just about pitching a product and a role. It is a two-way conversation around how a new position can solve both a candidate’s and a startup’s pain points. Identifying and addressing candidate pain points, discussing the technical challenges and understanding how the candidate’s experience can help solve these challenges in a 30–60 minute pre-screen interview is hard to do. It requires very strong communication skills and the experience of knowing when and how to ask great questions.

Lastly, insist that your recruiter communicate opinions and points of view even if they are unpopular or contrary to your own. Avoid hiring someone who will recruit the way they are told, even if it is not the best approach. Imagine a scenario where you told your recruiter that they need to find, hire and onboard a mobile developer with deep knowledge in both iOS and Android platforms within two weeks. A weak recruiter will jump in and start sourcing new candidates without much thought about the constraints. A great recruiter will listen to the problem, understand the constraints and communicate solutions. These include hiring a contractor, promoting from within, focusing on the primary platform first and employing an agency.

Ultimately, ask yourself, what kind of recruiter do you want on your team? Look for those who understand your technology and mission, seek new platforms to recruit, understand the product roadmap and communicate effectively. Those are the technical recruiters who will get you to the best engineering talent faster and more efficiently.

This article was originally published at TechCrunch.

How to attract top recruiting talent was originally published in GV Library on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Recently, Jared Spool caught my attention with an article about how Netflix’s performance engineers are actually designers. It’s a provocative idea, but it makes sense. His argument is that everyone in your organization (including performance engineers) designs the product, not just the people with “design” in their job titles.

From some of the reactions, you might think Jared had kidnapped a baby for ritual sacrifice. What exactly did Jared write?

The members of this team are performance engineers. They are architecting, engineering, and maintaining the performance of a very complex system. It occupies all their time and then some. In systems engineering, there are few jobs more technical than these.

And yet, at the very moment that a Netflix viewer’s video stream stops and that spinning animation appears, indicating the player is now awaiting more data, these engineers make a dramatic change. They become user experience designers.

I made that last sentence bold — because it’s really important. Some designers are uncomfortable with the idea that an engineer or a salesperson or a CFO could be a designer.

Whether you like it or not, whether you approve it or not, people outside of your design team are making significant design choices that affect your customers in important ways. They are designing your product. They are designers.

This shouldn’t be provocative — it’s just a statement of fact. I work with dozens of startups every year, and I see it happen at every one. A CFO makes a pricing decision and changes the product experience. An engineer makes a performance trade-off. A salesperson writes a script for talking to customers. In my view, people who fundamentally change the customer’s experience are designers.

If this is so self-evident, why do Jared and I press the point? I keep beating the drum because I want designers to change the way they think about their role and become better stewards of good design.

For a moment, consider how this shift in perspective could change the way you work.

Everyone needs a design mindset

When you accept the reality that design decisions are coming from outside your group, by people without “design” in their job titles, you approach your co-workers differently . Now they’re not just your co-workers — they’re your design team.

The companies that produce great design, such as Apple and Airbnb, have learned this. Alex Schleifer, VP of design at Airbnb, tells Wired how the company isn’t design-led:

The solution [at Airbnb] actually deemphasizes the designers. The point… isn’t to create a “design-led culture,” because that tends to tell anyone who isn’t a designer that their insights take a backseat. It puts the entire organization in the position of having to react to one privileged point of view. Instead, Schleifer wants more people to appreciate what typically lies only within the realm of designers — the user viewpoint.

Does everyone need all the skills of a designer? Of course not. But each person needs to be armed with the tools to understand how their decisions affect the customer experience.

When an engineer takes a shortcut and scrimps on performance, they need to understand how that damages the user experience. Likewise, when a designer pushes an engineer to make a change that affects performance, that engineer should help the designer make the best overall design decision — not just roll over and do what the designer asked. It’s this type of respectful collaboration that makes great design happen.

One of the best ways to encourage empathy is to watch customer research studies with co-workers from across your company. When my colleague Michael Margolis runs a study with a GV company, we insist that the real team — not just the designers — watch those interviews and take notes. If it’s not possible for everyone to watch in real time, you can record the sessions and schedule a “viewing party” for later.

Work outside your design team

When you accept that design happens almost everywhere in your organization, you have to take responsibility for it. Your app is slow? Go sit with your engineering team. Your marketing team is poorly communicating your product to future customers? You’d better offer to work with them on the problem.

Yes, doing design with everyone at your company is a lot of work. But it’s necessary if you want to be a truly great designer — otherwise, you’re simply papering over bad decisions. For example, imagine that your CEO created a complex pricing structure for your product. You could focus on making the pricing page as clear as possible using your interface and information design skills. But the harder and more important design opportunity is to work with your CEO on repricing your product so it’s clear to customers and compatible with the business goals.

Focusing on the core business is what differentiates real product design from interface design or even user experience design. Fundamental product design is really hard and requires a lot of legwork, but this is what designers at the highest level do — and it’s why their work is better than yours.

Grow your design team to include non-designers

Design is a hard job. You’ll need a wide range of skills (look at all of those circles in the diagram of UX Disciplines by Dan Saffer) and years of practice to truly master design.

Maybe that’s why so many designers are offended when non-designers do design work or get called “designers” by Jared and me. You can act offended if you want, but the reality is that other people are making design decisions with or without you. Embrace them . They don’t make your job less valuable. They don’t make your job title less meaningful.

Having more people who do design is additive, not competitive. These designers make your team and your product stronger, because they’re contributing from their unique perspectives. Help them bolster their skills, and use their expertise to the advantage of your product and company.

Let’s make a better future together

A few years ago, I met an executive from a Fortune 500 company. When I told her I’m a designer, her eyes lit up. “Oh, I love design!” she said. “My group is just down the hall from the design team. They do so much creative work in there.”

My heart sank. The design team was just down the hall from this executive, but they didn’t work together. Instead, the designers sat behind soundproof glass walls and did special “creative work” in isolation.

This executive made decisions every day that affected her customers. She bears some of the blame for not reaching out to the designers “in there.” But the design team is primarily at fault — for missing an opportunity to reach out and work together on some of the business’s most important challenges.

Thanks to Jared M. Spool for writing an excellent article, John Zeratsky, Nick Burka, and Michael Margolis for editing and suggestions, and Alex Schleifer for the excellent Wired interview.

Everyone is a designer. Get over it. was originally published in GV Library on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

GV’s Simple Recipe For Getting Started On Your Brand

With super deluxe thanks to Laura Melahn, Daniel Burka, and John Zeratsky

Warning: This is a post about branding, but I’m no brand expert. For most of my career, any mention of the word brand made me uncomfortable. I figured it was a fine line between “brand exercise” and “total waste of time.”

I was forced to confront my branding heebie-jeebies five years ago, when I joined Google Ventures. Previously, I’d always worked at big companies (Google, Microsoft, Oakley) with established brands. But at GV, I found myself working with startups who were thinking about their brands for the first time. They were designing logos, creating visual identities, and naming their companies — in other words, making a lot of big decisions.

Brand exercises make big decisions easier

Luckily for our startups, two of my colleagues at GV, Laura Melahn and Daniel Burka, actually are experts on branding. (They’re modest and will tell you they’re not experts, but don’t listen. Among other things, Laura helped name Calico and Daniel helped design the Firefox logo. They really get this stuff.)

Over the past few years, I’ve watched Laura and Daniel help startups through these stressful decisions about naming, identity, logos, and so on. They start with brand exercises. Much to my surprise, the exercises are not a goofy waste of time.

The point of these exercises, it turns out, is to make the abstract idea of “our brand” into something concrete. After doing the exercises, the team gets a common language to describe what their company is about — and all subsequent squishy decisions about visuals, voice, and identity become way easier.

Introducing the Brand Sprint

At GV, we use our five-day Design Sprint to help teams tackle product and marketing challenges. We decided to put the brand exercises into a sprint-like process that any team can use. And the best part is: We squeezed it into just three hours. We don’t think more time necessarily yields better results. And because the process is fast, you can involve the people who really need to be there.

Now, to be clear, we didn’t invent these ideas or exercises. Instead, the Brand Sprint borrows from great thinkers about branding. Laura’s favorite examples include Steve Jobs’s 1997 internal meeting at Apple, Stewart Butterfield’s essay We Don’t Sell Saddles Here, Simon Sinek’s TED talk How Great Leaders Inspire Action, Phil Knight’s Nike memoir Shoe Dog, and the work of the excellent identity agency Hello Monday. If these materials are the greatest hits, the Brand Sprint is our mix tape.

The Brand Sprint consists of six exercises. First, you’ll think about your company’s motivation:

• 20-Year Roadmap helps you think long-term.
• What, How, Why reminds you why your company exists.

Next, you’ll add detail:

• Top 3 Values makes your why more specific.
• Top 3 Audiences helps you prioritize the target for your brand.

Finally, you’ll position your brand relative to others:

• Personality Sliders defines the attitude and style of your brand.
• Competitive Landscape compares your brand to other companies.

This post is a D.I.Y. guide. You can do these exercises with your own team, without any special expertise. At the end, you’ll have a set of diagrams — a simple brand cheat-sheet — that you can use to make decisions. It’s not a replacement for a good branding agency, but it’s a heckuva lot better than nothing. And if you do hire an agency, the cheat-sheet will make you a better, smarter client.

Before you start your Brand Sprint, you’ll need to make sure a few things are in order.

Set the Stage

It’s time to assemble a team, find a three-hour block on the calendar, set the ground rules, and assign some optional homework (which is the best kind of homework). But first, should you even run a Brand Sprint at all?

Start with a trigger

A word of caution: Don’t run a Brand Sprint unless you really have to. If you won’t use the results right away, wait for a trigger event. Good triggers are naming your company, designing a logo, hiring an agency, or writing a manifesto.

Get the right team

You need two to six participants for a Brand Sprint. These have to be company executives. Many startup teams don’t think of themselves as “executives.” If it sounds funny to you, try “decision-maker” or “stakeholder”. Bottom line: Your Brand Sprint needs to include people with authority and ownership of your company’s identity.

Must have in the room:

• CEO

And at least one of these:

• Co-founder
• Head of marketing
• Head of product or design

One participant must be the “Decider” — the company’s true decision-maker about your brand. In most cases, the Decider is the CEO, but in some cases the Decider could be a co-founder or CMO. This does not work without the Decider. Find some way to fit the Brand Sprint into her schedule. If she won’t make the time, don’t do the sprint.

In addition to your executives, you’ll need one or two facilitators. These might be folks from marketing, product, or design. Since you’re reading this post, you’re a good candidate. The facilitators should have good writing skills. (You’ll see why later in the post.)

Sometimes, you might bring in a customer expert. For example, in our Brand Sprint with Element Science, we had CEO Uday Kumar (the Decider) and design director Maarten Dinger — but Uday also brought along his colleague John White, an expert in the medical device field who could help us see through the eyes of the customer.

Schedule a Block of Time

The Brand Sprint is designed to fit into a morning or afternoon. The schedule will go something like this:

Try to find a block of three straight hours — it works much better if you don’t have to split up and regroup later. Be sure to book your time in a room with lots of whiteboard space, and bring blank white copy paper and some pens.

Homework (optional)

For an optimal Brand Sprint, ask everyone to do two things before you start:

1. Read this post.
2. Fill out this PDF or this Google Slides deck (thanks to Human Deluxe).

But if you don’t have time before the sprint, don’t worry — it’ll still work.

Set the ground rules

Once everybody’s together in the room, the Brand Sprint has two simple rules to maintain focus:

• No devices. Put away your laptops, phones, Oculus Rifts, etc. (But do take a break in the middle for snacks and email.)
• Time-box all activities with a Time Timer or other simple timer.

Okay, you’ve got a triggering event, you’ve got the right people together, you’ve set the ground rules, and you’ve (maybe) done some homework. You’re ready to sprint!

1. 20-Year Roadmap (15 minutes)

Most teams focus on what they’re doing now, which makes sense. But if your company is successful, your brand will last a long time. So for the first exercise, you’ll look into the future and think about what your company might be doing 20 years from now.

HOW TO

Draw a timeline on the whiteboard, labeled with 5, 10, 15, and 20 years into the future, like this:

What will your company be doing at each of those future dates? To decide, you’ll use a simple exercise we call Note-and-Vote. In fact, you’ll be using Note-and-Vote throughout the Brand Sprint, because, as Daniel Burka says, “If you let people talk out loud very much, the whole thing will be a disaster.”

Note-and-Vote speeds up thinking and decision-making by alternating between solo and group activities. Here’s how it works for the 20-Year Roadmap:

1. Each person quietly writes down his or her own prediction for all four dates.

2. Going around the room, each person reads their answers aloud and the facilitator writes them on the whiteboard.

3. No argument or discussion yet.

4. Each person looks at the list and quietly writes down their favorite answers.

5. Going around the room, each person reads their votes aloud and the facilitator marks the votes on the whiteboard.

6. Discuss and argue for about five minutes (use a timer to keep it to five minutes!).

7. The Decider chooses her favorite item for each future date.

8. Take a photo of the whiteboard and put it into a new slide deck called “Super Simple Brand Guide”.

You might be wondering: Who cares? What’s the point of imagining what we’ll be doing 20 years from now?

Nobody will expect you to stick to the 20-Year Roadmap—that’s not the point. The point of the 20-Year Roadmap is to get your team thinking about the lifetime of your brand. A great brand will last until the year 2038 — and beyond.

2. What, How, Why (30 minutes)

What, How, Why is an exercise based completely on Simon Sinek’s “Golden Circle”. (Sidenote: Sinek’s TED talk is the third most popular of all time with 30 million views, despite grainy video and the fact he uses a flimsy flipchart instead of fancy-pants slides. It wasn’t even at the main TED — it was at a small TEDx event! But the framework and the talk are so great it doesn’t matter.)

Sinek’s premise is basically this: You need to know why you’re in business — and talk about it. When a company has a strong motivation and that motivation shines through, customers buy the product. It’s easy to find supporting examples. Sinek points to Apple, but companies like Nike, Patagonia, Airbnb, and LEGO obviously fit the bill.

On the other hand, you might argue, there are plenty of successful companies whose primary motivation seems to just be… making money. And, yeah, that’s a reasonable argument. But if you’re reading this post, you probably want a brand that stands out from the competition, and stands for more than just financial success. And I think Sinek’s right: why brands are stronger.

Plus, knowing why you’re in business can be very motivating for you and your team. In other words, it’s worth the 30 minutes.

HOW TO

Start by drawing three concentric circles on a whiteboard. Label the outside circle “what”, the middle circle “how”, and the inside circle “why”, like this:

Next, collect answers to these questions:

What does your company do?

A phrase or sentence describing your primary business for the next five years. Examples: “Make toothpaste”, “fix cars”, etc.

How do you do it?

What’s your secret sauce? What technology or approach sets you apart from the competition? Examples: “Made with all-natural ingredients”, “best-in-class friendly service”, etc.

Why?

You can think of the why as the reason you get out of bed in the morning and go to work. The why should reflect the core reason your company exists, and it won’t change much over time. You may pivot the business, launch new products, and enter new markets, but your why remains the same. Examples: “Promote healthy living”, “help people get where they need to go”, etc.

Once again, you’ll Note-and-Vote:

1. Each person quietly writes down his or her ideas for what, how, and why.

2. Going around the room, each person reads their answers aloud and the facilitator writes them on the whiteboard.

3. No argument or discussion yet.

4. Each person looks at the list and quietly writes down their favorite answers.

5. Going around the room, each person reads their votes aloud and the facilitator marks the votes on the whiteboard.

6. Discuss what and how for about five minutes each, but don’t argue the semantics — it’s not that important.

7. At the end of each five-minute segment, the Decider chooses her favorite answer.

8. Discuss why for about ten minutes. This can be difficult, so agree that today’s version will be a placeholder — you can come back to it later.

9. After ten minutes, the Decider makes the call.

10. Take a photo of the whiteboard and add it to your slide deck.

To better understand the power of why, let’s talk about Apple and Nike.

As I mentioned above, Simon Sinek uses Apple as an example of a company who understands and communicates their why extremely well. Normally, I avoid using Apple or Steve Jobs as an example for anything, because (a) it’s really overdone and (b) there are so many hard-to-replicate reasons for their success. Saying “do what Apple did!” isn’t very helpful advice. But… when Laura showed me this 1997 video of Jobs, I realized we had to include it in this guide.

The video is worth watching for a few reasons. First, it’s unpolished. Jobs was a fantastic speaker, and here you get to see him without the trappings of an iPhone event. Second, he’s addressing Apple employees, not the world. It’s a behind-the-scenes video from before Apple’s resurgence, which is very cool to see. And finally, it’s completely on-topic for your Brand Sprint. This is the moment where Jobs explains Apple’s why and its importance to their products, advertising, and sales. Today — 20 years later! — the why is still relevant.

One more classic example is Nike. (Also a bit obvious and overdone, but so good I can’t resist.) Here’s a quote from Phil Knight’s Shoe Dog about the earliest days of Nike, in 1964:

“I’d been unable to sell encyclopedias, and I’d despised it to boot. I’d been slightly better at selling mutual funds, but I’d felt dead inside. So why was selling shoes so different? Because, I realized, it wasn’t selling. I believed in running. I believed that if people got out and ran a few miles every day, the world would be a better place, and I believed these shoes were better to run in. People, sensing my belief, wanted some of that belief for themselves. Belief, I decided. Belief is irresistible.”

Today, more than 50 years later, Nike stands for pretty much the exact same thing. Here’s their current mission statement:

Bring inspiration and innovation to every athlete* in the world.

*If you have a body, you are an athlete.

Coming up with a great why sounds basic. It’s not. It’s surprisingly hard. Encourage your CEO or founder to be idealistic and remember why they started this company or took this job. We spend most of our time at the office being pragmatic. This is not a time to be pragmatic — it’s a time to wear your heart on your sleeve.

3. Top Three Values (30 minutes)

Next, you’ll make your why more specific by listing and ranking your company values. I know “company values” sounds like consultant baloney, but it’s just another way of saying “stuff that really matters to us” or, better yet, “decision-making principles”.

Company values are often things like:

• Honesty
• Integrity
• Sustainable
• Affordable
• Luxury
• Data-driven
• Service
• Simple
• Trusted
• Reliable
• Accessible to everyone
• Etc.

Lots of companies list their values, but very few do the hard work to reduce and prioritize. And prioritization is essential — you’ve got to cut down to just three values and rank them so you have one single most important value. If you have ten or twenty values, anything you do can be considered “on brand”. Knowing your most important value makes decisions easier, clarifies your message, and sets you apart from the competition. It’s hard work but worth it.

HOW TO

To generate and rank your values, you’ll do another Note-and-Vote:

1. Each person quietly writes down a list of values—as many as they can think of.

2. Going around the room, each person reads their values aloud and the facilitator writes them on the whiteboard in one giant list.

3. No argument or discussion yet.

4. Each person looks at the list and quietly writes down the three values they think best describe the company.

5. Going around the room, each person reads their votes aloud and the facilitator marks the votes on the whiteboard.

6. Discuss for about five minutes.

7. At the end of five minutes, the Decider makes the call. Give her a few minutes to quietly write down her top three values, in order. This is the hard part, but it’s also the key to success—you must narrow down to three, and most importantly, you must choose a single most important value.

8. The Facilitator writes the final decision on the whiteboard.

9. Take a photo of the whiteboard and add it to the slide deck.

4. Top Three Audiences (30 minutes)

Values are helpful for brand decisions, but they’re not the whole picture — you need to know who you’re talking to. In this exercise, you’ll list all your possible audiences, then figure out who’s most important.

Who qualifies as an “audience”? Customers, for sure, but you can think more broadly by asking this question: Whose opinion do you care about?

When you answer that, you may realize your brand matters not just to customers but also to other businesses, reporters, advertisers, employees, potential hires, and heck, maybe even government regulators.

A common question is whether to use broad categories (like “athletes”) or segments (like “runners”). Really it’s up to you — most companies just know whether segments or categories are the best way to go.

HOW TO

Guess what, Note-and-Vote!

1. Each person quietly writes down their own list of the company’s audiences.

2. Going around the room, each person reads their list aloud and the facilitator writes one giant list on the whiteboard.

3. No argument or discussion yet.

4. Each person looks at the list and quietly writes down the two audiences they believe are most important.

5. Going around the room, each person reads their votes aloud and the facilitator marks the votes on the whiteboard.

6. Discuss for about five minutes.

7. At the end of five minutes, the Decider makes the call. Give her a few minutes to quietly write down her top three audiences, in order.

8. The Facilitator writes the final decision on the whiteboard.

9. Take a photo of the whiteboard and add it to the slide deck.

Okay, at this point you’ve talked through the company’s identity and its audience. Only two more activities to go!

These final two exercises are classics you may have seen before. Both are designed to get you thinking about how your company’s brand compares with others. And, to be honest, both exercises may seem corny the first time you do them. Just power through — I promise this is all worthwhile.

5. Personality Sliders (30 minutes)

“Personality Sliders” sounds delicious, but it’s really just another whiteboard thing. In this exercise, you’ll position your company’s “sliders” between pairs of brand extremes:

There are good reasons to be on the left or right of any of these lines, and it’s even okay if some of your sliders end up in the middle. But it’s helpful to be strongly opinionated on at least one or two ranges.

HOW TO

1. Draw a diagram on the whiteboard with four ranges:

- “Friend” to “Authority”

- “Young & Innovative” to “Mature & Classic”

- “Playful” to “Serious”

- “Mass Appeal” to “Elite”

2. Give everyone a printout of this diagram (PDF here):

3. Each person marks their printout to indicate where they think the company sits on each range.

4. Everyone takes turns marking the whiteboard with their sliders, then labeling each one with their initials.

5. Discuss any diagram where people disagree about where the company should be. For example, if Andy put a dot right by “Mass Appeal” and Beatrice put a dot right by “Elite”, they should explain their positions. Time this discussion—it needn’t take longer than five to ten minutes.

6. At the end of the discussion, the Decider makes the call. She should be given a few minutes to quietly plot her final choices on the whiteboard.

7. Take a photo of the whiteboard and add it to the slide deck.

6. Competitive Landscape (30 minutes)

This last exercise is a simple 2x2 matrix (I know, consultant nirvana). I actually don’t think I even need to explain this one, so let’s dive right in:

HOW TO

1. Draw a 2x2 matrix:

   a. “Classic” to “Modern” on the x-axis

   b. “Expressive” to “Reserved” on the y-axis

2. Each person writes down a list of other companies in the same space or industry.

3. Each person chooses the one or two most important companies on their list.

4. Going around the room, each person reads their choices aloud and the facilitator writes the company names on sticky notes (one name per sticky).

5. One at a time, place the sticky notes on the matrix. Quickly discuss where it should go. Repeat.

6. Once all the sticky notes are up, the facilitator should ask the Decider if she’d like to move any of the notes.

7. Finally, plot your own company on the matrix. This should be fairly easy — after all, you’ve just been doing brand exercises for 150 minutes.

8. Double-check: Look back at the rest of the sprint exercises. Does this placement make sense for your 20-Year Roadmap, What How Why, Values, Audience, and Brand Sliders?

9. As always, the Decider makes the final call.

10. Take a photo of this whiteboard and add it to the slide deck.

Now you have a complete Super Simple Brand Guide! That’s right — it’s just a slide deck filled with whiteboard photos. But don’t underestimate it.

Taken together, these six diagrams are a powerful, concrete representation of your company’s brand. When you’re faced with a big decision — about naming, identity, marketing, or even company policy — you can use these diagrams as a guide. And if you decide to hire an agency, you can start your relationship with them by walking through your new brand guide. It’ll give you a giant head start.

Your Super Simple Brand Guide can also help new employees understand what your company is about, and can even remind the founding team what you stand for. That’s a big deal. When you really nail your brand, it’s not a fluffy veneer applied at the end (as I had often feared). Instead, it’s everything: what you build, the way you build it, who you build it for, and how you do your work. And we think it’s definitely worth three hours to figure that out. 🙂

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