Airpod criticism, inside Google design, and 9 research rules (plus workshops in Seattle, Switzerland, and Berlin)

Howdy!

I’ve got a bunch of cool links this week, but I’ll start with some shameless event promotion. I’m teaching 1-day workshops in Seattle on May 9 and in Switzerland on July 5. I’m also teaching a 2-day bootcamp in Berlin on June 27-28. Early bird tickets are on sale for all three (take an extra 200€ off the extra-expensive Berlin bootcamp with code newsletterjake18.)

Now to the links…

At launch, everybody (including me) hated AirPods, and now, everybody (including me) loves them. This post talks about what happened in between. It’s especially relevant when thinking about design sprints, where we have to make judgments based on customers’ first impressions… which can prove to be wrong in the long run.

This is another installation in the InVision “Design Genome” series. Watch the interviews with Rich Fulcher about the Material Design origin story, and with Margaret Lee about how Google moved engineers past “paying lip service” to user research. (You can safely skip the interview with me… it’s just more design sprint blah blah and you get enough of that here in your inbox.)

Fantastic post from Erika Hall. She’s not talking about design sprints, but her 9 rules both reinforce and challenge some of my key principles. For example: “Testing a prototype can help you refine an idea that is already good, not tell you whether you’re solving the right problem.” Dang, that’s true… 

This is a cool post about Questlove’s new book. He talks about creating the album review before he creates the album: “When you’re on the outside of your own work looking in, you’ll be able to see the overall shape of it, which will help you realize that you’re on the right track (or, alternatively, that you’re not). It’s a way of journeying to the center of what the idea will become.” Sounds like a sprint to me!

More creativity talk! If you have a Kindle, check out Scott Berkun’s book “Dance of the Possible”. Scott was an early influence on my thinking about project management, and this book is well worth a look.

Last issue of the newsletter, Sarah Cooper’s 10 More Tricks to Appear Smart in Meetings was by far the most popular link, even beating out LEGO design sprints! So I thought, what the heck, I should include the prequel this time. It’s so good.

Thanks for reading!

—Jake

P.S. If you didn’t get enough, check out this week’s Product Breakfast Club podcast. Topic: What’s so special about Silicon Valley?