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It was a strange sight: a 40-year-old man taking a block of wood out of his shirt pocket, then pretending to scribble something on it with a stick. He stopped, then tap, tap, scribble again. After that he put it back into his shirt pocket.

The man is Jeff Hawkins, the inventor of the PalmPilot, the first handheld device that put computers into our pockets.

Hawkins had launched a similar venture a few years earlier, an amazing handheld computer called GRiDPaD. This was before we had LED monitors, when laptops weighed more than 10 pounds, so it was an impressive piece of hardware ¡ª but it was a flop because it wasn¡¯t small enough for people to carry around. This is why he decided to simulate the experience of carrying around the device by cutting a block of wood representative of its size, sticking a piece of paper on it to simulate the interface, and carrying it around for months. Every time he needed to make an appointment, he¡¯d take it out and pretend to check his calendar on the ¡°device¡± and add the appointment to it.

This story illustrates prototyping ¡ª a quick and cheap way to simulate a product experience in order to reduce risks ¡ª very well. In the Palm Pilot example, the biggest risk was that the device might be too big to carry around. This type of prototype looks very crude because the focus is on realistic scenarios.

Prototypes can be really close to the final product with all of the features that will be included when the product is launched. But designers often start out by making a rapid prototype, the quickest and easiest way to prototype, in which the designer tries to mimic the experience without actually building or creating anything.

In software development and product design, rapid prototyping refers to techniques used to simulate the experience of using the software. In most cases, these techniques involve no coding in order to optimize speed and minimize cost. The goal is still to reduce risks ¡ª in this case, having to do with the product¡¯s efficiency and effectiveness.

Effectiveness and efficiency are essential in user experience (UX) design. Effectiveness means the product¡¯s user is able to get the value they come to the product for. If you¡¯re an Airbnb user, you want to be able to book a place to stay while traveling. How do you do this? You would visit Airbnb¡¯s website or open its mobile app. Can you accomplish this task (booking a room) using the website or app? If you can, then it¡¯s effective ¡ª it¡¯s giving you the result you desire.

Now, just because a product is effective doesn¡¯t mean it¡¯s efficient. Efficiency means you can complete the task with very little effort. If booking a room on Airbnb¡¯s website takes you over an hour or too many steps, you probably wouldn¡¯t use it often.

To determine whether a product is effective and efficient, we need to test it. And if the product is not built yet, we create a prototype and test it with real users.

The UX design process is based on design thinking framework, a problem-solving approach used by designers that¡¯s centered around the target audience for which they design. It starts with understanding who they¡¯re designing for (called a persona) and the problem the persona has before coming up with solution ideas. This way, the solution directly addresses an actual problem the target audience is experiencing.

The design thinking framework looks like this:

1. Empathize: Understand who your users are and the pain point(s) they experience.

2. Define (the problem): Using the problem as a starting point, generate ideas for potential solutions.

3. Ideation: Generate ideas and choose the one or two most promising.

4. Prototype: Create prototypes of the best idea or two.

5. Test: Test the prototypes, and use the learnings to improve the solution. After testing, you¡¯ll return to the appropriate step. For example, if the idea is not effective, you¡¯d go back to ideating more or simply choosing another idea to prototype, then test again.

UX designers go through this iteration loop multiple times until they find an effective and efficient solution.

The focus of prototyping is to get as much learning as possible with the least amount of effort. This means we only put into the prototype what we need to test, based on what we want to learn about our product idea. In Lean Startup, a methodology to build businesses and products, this concept is called building the minimum viable product, or MVP. The focus here is the viability of the product idea ¡ª is it going to work?

When creating prototypes for digital products, like apps and websites, there are many tools available. These tools allow designers to create prototypes, regardless of whether they know how to code. Some of the platforms commonly used by professional product and UX designers include InVision, Marvel, Flinto, UX Pin, proto.io, and Axure.

Creating a prototype with these tools is very easy. Here are the steps:

1. Use a UI design application like Sketch or Adobe Photoshop to upload screen mockups (typically in the PNG file format).

2. Add hotspots ¡ª areas with which users can interact ¡ª to a screen and define what should happen when the user interacts with it (e.g., take the user to another screen, transition between pages, etc.).

3. Preview the prototype to make sure it¡¯s doing what you want it to do.

4. Repeat steps 2 and 3 for each screen.

Once you¡¯ve connected all the screens, you can then use this prototype to test your design in usability test sessions. You¡¯d show the users your prototype, then ask them to complete the specific task for which you¡¯re designing the prototype. This would allow you to discover, then address issues that block them from completing the task.

At 足球竞彩网 Assembly, students in our full-time User Experience Design Immersive and part-time User Experience Design course (on campus and online) learn hands-on how to create a rapid prototype by using Sketch to create the screens, then InVision to connect those screens and make them interactive. This portion of the course happens right before the students learn how to conduct usability testing to make sure their design work well.

In order to determine what to prototype, students create user flows, wireframes, and information architecture before they create the screens in Sketch. By the end of the course, students have both the theory and hands-on experience of applying the design process.

Students in GA¡¯s part-time Product Management course also learn to create rapid prototypes; after drawing drafts of their wireframes on paper, students turn to platforms like Sketch, InVision, and more to digitize their designs and create interactive prototypes.

Danny Setiawan is a UX professional with 15-plus years of experience. He is currently the managing director of CoCreate, a UX consulting firm, and a product mentor at Starta Accelerator. Danny has worked with brands like Yahoo! Finance, The Economist, PwC, MSN, Kimberly-Clark, and Microsoft. Danny teaches the part-time User Experience Design course at 足球竞彩网 Assembly¡¯s New York campus.

When you think about the world¡¯s most visionary leaders, whose faces do you see? Steve Jobs? Elon Musk? Perhaps Oprah Winfrey, Bill Gates, Sheryl Sandberg, Henry Ford or Amelia Earhart? In hindsight, what makes these leaders ¡°visionary¡± is often the enormous degree of impact they enabled. However, leaders like the list above rarely stumble into their success; they enter their field with a resolve for how they will make a difference. They see things no one else does. They have a vision.

Seeing things no one else can see takes practice. It¡¯s not a bolt of lightning, but consistent practice that allows truly visionary leaders to constantly push the boundaries of what products can enable a better world. Subsequently, forming a product vision enables you to set the North Star to guide you and your team toward a goal without leading you astray.

In the context of?product management, business strategy, and entrepreneurship, if your company¡¯s mission is to solve problem ¡°X,¡± your vision is the imagined and idealized world in which your product has solved problem ¡°X¡± with the greatest conceivable outcome. The best product visions paint a picture of a dramatically better world in which the lives of your users are improved by your product.

Having a clear product vision allows product teams and leaders to:

• Suspend constraints.?It¡¯s impossible to develop a vision without dreaming big. Thinking about the ideal end-state, even if only for a moment, will allow you to open yourself up creatively to all the possibilities of how a problem can be solved without being held back by feasibility concerns. When developing a vision, anything is plausible as long as it doesn¡¯t?violate the laws of physics.
• Inspire greatness.?A well-articulated vision allows your stakeholders (both internal and external) to close their eyes and envision the same thing as you. Your customers who?see themselves as part of your vision?will be more likely to buy your product. Talented employees who share in your vision will be more likely to join and stay on your team.
• Set strategy.?A vision helps you forge a path from where you are to where you ultimately want to be. Your vision will inform short-term roadmaps as well as long-term strategies, where you can plan concrete steps (e.g.,?minimum viable product, future version releases) toward your end goal, saving you time spent via?trial and error?iterating in the wrong direction.
• Align teams.?Having a shared North Star means anyone on your team can constantly evaluate whether the work at hand gets you a step closer to the end goal, lending a level of built-in focus to your team.

A great company mission and product vision informs clear strategy and roadmaps. To clarify further, here¡¯s an excerpt from?a post I wrote?about product strategy:

¡­ I want to provide a relevant and concrete example using Tesla. I choose Tesla because a) Elon Musk is rad, b) Musk and Tesla have been unusually?public?and?transparent?about their strategy, and c) Tesla is a rare example of a company that has followed through on its strategy with execution that is down to the ¡°T¡±. This puts it into a godly territory that is almost difficult to believe.

• Mission:?¡°Tesla¡¯s mission is to accelerate the world¡¯s transition to sustainable transport.¡± (This was recently?updated?when Tesla merged with SolarCity.)
• Vision:?To summarize, Tesla¡¯s vision is to reduce vehicle carbon emissions through the advent of electric vehicles.
• Strategy:?This is the famous ¡°Master Plan¡±: 1) Build a sports car, 2) use that money to build an affordable car, 3) use that money to build an even more affordable car, 4) while doing above, also provide zero emission electric power generation options, and then finally 5) don¡¯t tell anyone.

Interestingly, despite all of these benefits, many teams don¡¯t (or don¡¯t know to) explicitly define a clear product vision. Often, teams will home in on a short-term solution and begin defining, designing, and developing a product without a long-term vision. Product teams can go on for months and years building features and fixing issues based only on reacting to?user?or stakeholder requests without a clear end-goal in mind.
In the absence of a vision, product leaders from all backgrounds (product management,?engineering,?design,?marketing, executives) are required to step in and define a vision and ensure that the team gets to a shared understanding.

We¡¯ve spoken primarily about product vision at a grand level, but it can also be something as small as how a single feature can transform a?user¡¯s experience?in the product. It is never too early for early- or mid-career professionals to practice developing and sharing a product vision.

In 足球竞彩网 Assembly¡¯s part-time?Product Management?course, students practice developing a product vision as part of their final project. The course guides each student through the steps from identifying a problem in the market to solving that problem ¡ª no matter how small the product or feature may be ¡ª through the development of the product ideas into a concrete vision, executable roadmap, along with success metrics, and product?design.

For businesses,?train your team?to get the full picture of the product development cycle. Through?design thinking,?lean methodology, and?agile development skills, you can ensure your company is equipped to efficiently develop and deliver effective digital products and services.

Vince Law is a?Product Management?instructor at?足球竞彩网 Assembly San Francisco, where he has helped newly promoted product executives become effective leaders and aspiring product managers land jobs. He was previously GA¡¯s director of product management, a role in which he directed, mentored, and built a team of 15-plus product managers across a spectrum of initiatives. In addition, he advises and consults various startups around the world, and?blogs on Medium. He has previously served as the senior product manager at Storm8 and as a product manager at Kabam, and has worked in the consulting, finance, telecom, and automotive industries in various capacities.

By Cliff Gilley

Agile methodologies in product development are those that embrace the principles of the Manifesto for Agile Software Development, a set of guidelines created in the late 1990s by a group of software development professionals seeking to revolutionize the business. These methodologies focus on performing work in small, iterative steps that allow a product team to validate its assumptions and test hypotheses frequently. Examples of these methodologies include Scrum, Kanban, and Extreme Programming.

These Agile methodologies are often contrasted with ¡°waterfall¡± approaches, which focus on defining as many of the requirements as possible before the project can begin, in as much detail as possible, so that there is no question as to what will eventually be delivered. The biggest downside of a waterfall approach is that it requires a large amount of up-front work and long development times before anything useful and testable is actually completed.

The importance of the Agile way of thinking cannot be understated in the modern business of software and general product development; its application stretches from development and quality-assurance work up into product design and management, and even into marketing and business strategy. While Agile began as a solution to a very specific set of problems developers were facing, it has grown into its own culture that permeates every aspect of modern businesses. It¡¯s essential for any product manager to understand the fundamentals of Agile methodologies so that they can influence an organization to change for the better or engage more meaningfully with their teams on a day-to-day basis.

In practice, the most popular Agile methodology is Scrum, one of the first methodologies designed to deliver software products following Agile principles. In Scrum, the product manager creates a backlog of ¡°user stories,¡± simple statements of the problem a development team is being asked to solve. Each user story gets stored in a ¡°product backlog¡± that the product manager prioritizes according to business and other needs.

The development teams, usually sized between five and nine members for optimal effectiveness, look at these stories, estimate their complexity, and take some of them into a ¡°sprint¡± as a commitment to deliver. A sprint is a two-to-three-week period during which teams work to deliver their commitments. During a sprint, the product manager and development teams work together to discuss, clarify, and deliver all of the previously agreed-upon stories. At the end of the sprint, each development team demonstrates to the product team and interested stakeholders what it has completed. Once the team has iterated to the point that the product team believes the work is worth sharing widely, a release can be created and push out the product updates.

There are other Agile methodologies, besides Scrum, that are important to understand given that many companies may pick and choose from one or another to build their processes. Kanban focuses on limiting works in progress, only allowing teams to take on a set number of stories or efforts at any one time, then working them through to completion before taking on more. Extreme Programming, on the other hand, is a very hands-off methodology that puts most of the power and authority on individual developers rather than taking a full-team approach. This methodology stresses that constant pairing and test cycles ensure quality outputs from the teams.

The main value of Scrum and other Agile methodologies lies in their focus on atomic units of work. The Scrum team commits to a small number of user stories for each sprint, which means that, at any time, the future work can be reprioritized, or even abandoned or added to without affecting the team¡¯s work in progress. At the beginning of the next sprint, they look at the next set of priorities and commit to delivering another set of work. This is the opposite of ¡°waterfall¡± methods, which establish a large commitment over the course of many months and apply strict processes for changing those requirements.

The other value in Scrum and Agile methodologies lies in the testing overhead required to validate the work the team completes. Because the team is delivering small sets of functionality, each of those sets can be tested during the sprint. This reduces the kind of massive, overarching integration testing required with a waterfall approach, in which everything is ¡°done¡± only at the end of the entire project.

足球竞彩网 Assembly teaches Agile methodologies as it relates to software development in our part-time Product Management course, full-time Web Development Immersive (WDI), and in workshops. We focus on the difference between the principles of Agile methods and the real-world application of those methods. Expert instructors, who have used these methodologies to help teams through Agile processes in their own careers, prepare students for the use of Agile through lectures and practical examples from their real-world experiences. In WDI, we reinforce Agile principles through lessons on user stories, pair programming, and more.

Product Management is the ultimate “jack-of-all-trades” role in a healthy organization. It’s one of the few roles where you’re likely to be needed to contribute to the success of so many other teams.

 – Cliff Gilley, Product Management Instructor, 足球竞彩网 Assembly Seattle