The Power of Moments: Why Certain Experiences Have Extraordinary Impact is an exploration of the characteristics of memorable and impactful moments. Through moving and inspirational stories as well as fascinating research and psychological studies, the book helps readers appreciate the value of creating moments in our personal and professional lives.

In The Innovator’s DNA: Mastering the Five Skills of Disruptive Innovation, authors Jeff Dyer, Hal Gregersen, and Clayton Christensen completed an extensive study of the world’s top innovators. Their goal was to identify and define the common characteristics and behavioral patterns of these leaders as well as how their companies were organized to unlock innovative ideas and opportunities.

In the book Measure What Matters, John Doerr explores the system of OKRs using testimonials from Sundar Pichai, Susan Wojcicki, Bill Gates, Bono, and many others. Each tells a story about how measuring improvement with OKRs transformed their business and culture.

In his book The Culture Code: The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups. author Daniel Coyle visits a variety of diverse teams to identify what makes some cultures succeed and others fail.

Hacking Growth: How Today’s Fastest-Growing Companies Drive Breakout Success easily made my top 5 list of all-time favorite professional books.

The book is divided into two parts. The first, introduces growth hacking (aka lean engineering) processes, the roles you need to fill on your team, and cultural keys for success. The second, provides detailed tips and tricks for to how to effectively implement growth hacking across all phases of your customer funnel.

One of the most common questions we get during our Customer-Driven Engineering workshops is, “How can I remain customer-centered, if there is no market yet?”

One of the most common Lean/Agile software development principles that I’ve seen paraphrased is to, “value conversation over documentation”. Ash proposes, early in the book, that the “true purpose” of a business plan lies in, “…facilitating conversations with people other than yourself.”

Are you curious about coming up with good business ideas that will eventually work?

The Opportunity Score is a tool that helps (among other things) to estimate market opportunity, to prioritize efforts in product development and to conduct competitive analysis. It is part of the Opportunity-Driven Innovation framework created by Anthony W. Ulwick, that aims at “making innovation predictable”. This article focuses specifically on the Opportunity Score calculation. Bear in mind it is not a silver bullet, and if you want to use properly, you should probably read a bit more on the Opportunity-Driven Innovation process to get the whole picture. To help with that, I have included a few links in the “Further Reading” section at the end of the article.

This is a review of Lean UX: Applying Lean Principles to Improve User Experience.

One technique I keep coming back to time and time again is that of capturing design rationale in QOC (Questions, Options and Criteria) diagrams.

In The Myths of Innovation, Scott Berkun shows you how to transcend the false stories that pop culture foolishly uses to guide our thinking about how breakthrough ideas came to be. Myths of innovation can become barriers to successful insights when they seem magical - let’s break them down to reality so that we can increase our power to innovate.

This Human is a design book that is not about design but about the designer. The book shifts focus from business goals and design technique and puts the desiner—the human, the person—in the spotlight. It discusses several aspects of the designer’s role, reflecting upon the mindset, attitude and behaviors that lead to improving outcomes and that make the designer’s job easier and more pleasant.

Since the introduction of the world wide web, businesses have not only increased in number, but also in size, profit, and customer accessibility. Online and computer products have become ubiquitous and pervasive all across the world. Companies use this interconnectivity to monitor usage and adoption of their services and products. They even attempt to use this data to predict future usage and adoption. In the last twenty years, a variety of different survey techniques have emerged attempting to gauge customer satisfaction, likelihood to recommend, and attitudes towards products.

How does business succeed? By providing value to customers. How does business provide value to customers? The answer from Cindy Alvarez’s book Lean Customer Development: Build Products Your Customers Will Buy suggests that the key lies in lean customer development.

This is a review of Blah Blah Blah: What To Do When Words Don’t Work.

Ever sat in a meeting and upon walking out the door, realized you retained none of what was said?

According to Roam, you were a victim of the Blah Blah Blahs.

The Blah Blah Blahs happen when we don’t think about the way we present our ideas to other people. Often we create overly complex, boring ways to describe ideas that are simple and insightful.

Roam’s book provides a guide on how to improve the way we communicate and present information to others. The main takeaway from the book is simple: complex is never better. Once we rid ourselves of long-winded, complicated descriptions, we can instead focus on how to make user-friendly ideas.