Lean UX, 3rd Edition

Forewords

In reading Lean UX, you’re about to embark on a tour of a new way of working. For those of us steeped in traditional management techniques, it may seem a little disorienting. I sometimes like to imagine what it would be like to have a bird’s-eye view of the typical modern corporation. From on high, in your mind’s eye you could examine each silo of functional excellence one at a time: Marketing, Operations, Manufacturing, IT, Engineering, Design, and on and on in a tidy row of crisp, well-run silos.

Let’s imagine you reached down to grab one of these silos and popped its top off to see inside. What would you see? This being a modern company, you’d see each silo designed for maximum efficiency. To achieve this efficiency, you’d likely find a highly iterative, customer-centric approach to problem-solving. In Manufacturing, you’d encounter traditional Lean thinking. In Engineering or IT, perhaps some variation on Agile development. In Marketing, customer development. In Operations, DevOps. And of course in Design, the latest in design thinking, interaction design, and user research techniques.

Zooming back out to our high perch, we might be forgiven for thinking, “This company uses a variety of rigorous, hypothesis-driven, customer-centric, and iterative methodologies. Surely, it must be an extremely agile company, capable of reacting quickly to changes in market conditions and continuously innovating!” But those of us who work in modern companies know how far this is from ...