Category
Product
- ·3 min read
Drawing Together: What the Theme-Customization Journey Actually Looks Like
Ask a room to describe a merchant's customization journey in words and everyone nods along to a vague consensus. Ask them to draw it, silently and simultaneously, and you discover that half the room pictures a completely different shape of journey than the other half.
- ·3 min read
TRIZ: Engineering a Course No One Would Ever Finish
The instructional designers already knew what made learners quit — they just weren't allowed to say it as long as the question was framed as 'how do we improve the course experience.' Flipping the question to 'how do we guarantee nobody finishes' let them stop being polite about their own curriculum.
- ·3 min read
TRIZ: Designing the Perfect Way to Make Merchants Abandon Setup
Asking a team to improve onboarding gets you polite, incremental ideas. Asking them to deliberately guarantee merchants quit during setup gets you an unflinching list of every real anti-pattern already in the product — and a reverse of that list is your actual roadmap.
- ·3 min read
1-2-4-All: Untangling an Approval Workflow Nobody Agreed On
Managers, employees, and HR each experience a leave-approval workflow completely differently, and a normal discussion lets whichever group is in the room set the agenda for everyone. Here's how 1-2-4-All got three conflicting mental models onto the table before any of them could dominate.
- ·3 min read
1-2-4-All: Getting Everyone's Real Read on Course Completion
When 'why don't learners finish courses' gets asked in an open meeting, you get the three theories the loudest three people already believe. 1-2-4-All gets you the theories nobody had said out loud yet — including the one that turned out to be right.
- ·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.
- ·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.
- ·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.
- ·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.
- ·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.