The reading list
Essays, tech notes, and the in-between.
- Product·3 min read
1-2-4-All: Fast Group Ideation for a New Pipeline Feature
The default workshop opener — silent thinking, then pairs, then fours, then the room — surfaces more usable ideas in twelve minutes than an hour of open discussion. Here's how it runs, and how I used it to kick off a pipeline-feature redesign without one voice dominating the room.
- Product·3 min read
User Experience Fishbowl: The Whole Team Watches a Rep Prep for a Meeting
Meeting-prep tooling had been debated in the abstract for two quarters. Watching one rep actually prepare for a real call, live, in front of the whole team, ended the debate in twenty minutes.
- Product·3 min read
User Experience Fishbowl: Watching a Student Enroll, Together, Live
The engineering team had never seen a real student enroll in a course before. Putting that first enrollment in front of them, live and unedited, surfaced a checkout-flow assumption nobody had ever actually tested.
- Product·3 min read
User Experience Fishbowl: The Whole Team Watches a Merchant Onboard, Live
One usability tester and a highlight reel afterward wasn't landing. Putting a real merchant's onboarding session in a fishbowl, with the whole team silently watching live, made the friction impossible to argue away.
- Product·3 min read
Celebrity Interview: Letting a Top Instructor Tell Us What We're Getting Wrong
We invited our top-performing instructor on stage specifically to criticize the product, in front of the people who built it. What she said reframed a whole quarter of roadmap priorities in ninety minutes.
- Product·3 min read
Celebrity Interview: Putting a Power User on Stage in Front of the Product Team
We'd read this power user's feedback in tickets for a year. Interviewing her live, in front of the whole product team, with a real audience and real follow-up questions, surfaced things a ticket never could — including how wrong we'd gotten her mental model.
- Product·3 min read
Simple Ethnography: A Full Day Shadowing a Rep Through Their Pipeline
We'd studied the CRM in isolated feature sessions for years. Shadowing one rep for a full day, watching every tool she actually touched, showed how small a fraction of her real workflow the CRM was — and where the real friction lived.
- Product·3 min read
Simple Ethnography: What We Saw Watching One Merchant's First Theme Setup
Onboarding analytics told us where merchants dropped off. Sitting quietly and watching one new merchant set up a theme, without steering her at all, told us why — and it wasn't where the funnel chart said to look.
- Product·3 min read
Simple Ethnography: Watching a Learner Take a Course Inside Someone Else's Store
Our usability tests happened on our own staging environment, in isolation from the store the course actually lived in. Watching one real learner enroll inside a real merchant's storefront showed a context mismatch no isolated test ever would.
- Product·3 min read
Appreciative Interviews: What High-Converting Merchants Do That the Theme Doesn't Ask For
Instead of studying why some storefronts convert poorly, we interviewed the merchants whose stores were already converting well — and found a set of small, unprompted customizations the theme should have been suggesting all along.