Chapter 26.
Think Synthetically to Design Systematically
“As UX practitioners, analytical thinking is so essential to our work we’re often not even aware we’re doing it. Analysis is a fantastic way to understand parts and pieces of a user’s experience, but it’s not as appropriate for understanding how those parts work together to deliver the experience.
When breaking experiences down, we can often lose sight of the interactions between the parts. As those interactions become less and less visible, our instinct can be to increase analysis of the pieces by breaking them down further. When we do this, we risk getting caught in a cycle of analysis. In trying to better understand the parts, we increase our distance from the whole…”
“There are at least two universal cosmic forces affecting your product organization’s culture that directly govern the progress your teams and company are making today. The relationship between your organization’s constraints and your teams’ energy.
Those two forces, playing off one another, really set the the pace and vibe your folks experience on a day to day, and their effectiveness at delivering good outcomes. Neither force is necessarily bad, neither is necessarily good (although you always need some spark of energy or you’ve just sort of got nothing floating in a soup of nothingness).
So what are these two forces?…”
Great Product Cultures are Made of Stars
The Caves of Uncertainty
“For most of us working in and leading product development organizations, dealing with uncertainty is just a simple fact of life. If the decisions that go into building products were straightforward and obvious then none of this would be so hard (or fun).
So for almost all decisions, big and small, we trade certainty for speed.
We do this as PMs, designers, and developers, we do this as a team, we do this as leaders, and we do this as whole organizations…”