Shipulski On Design

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If you’re dissatisfied, there’s a reason. If you’re dissatisfied, there’s hope for us all. If you’re not dissatisfied, there’s no forcing function for change. If you’re not dissatisfied, the status quo will carry the day. If you’re not dissatisfied, innovation work is not for you. If you’re dissatisfied, you know it could be better next […]

Here are some important questions for innovation. What’s the Distinctive Value Proposition? The new offering must help the customer make progress. How does the customer benefit? How is their life made easier? How does this compare to the existing offerings? Summarize the difference on one page. If the innovation doesn’t help the customer make progress, […]

The primary responsibility of management is to allocate resources in the way that best achieves business objectives.  If there are three or four options to allocate resources, which is the best choice? What is the time horizon for the decision? Is it best to hire more people? Why not partner with a contract resource company? […]

What do they want? Some get there with jobs-to-be-done, some use Customer Needs, some swear by ethnographic research and some like to understand why before what.  But in all cases, it starts with the customer.  Whichever mechanism you use, the objective is clear – to understand what they need.  Because if you don’t know what […]

When someone you care about needs help, help them. Even when you have other things to do, help them anyway. When people ask you for help, it’s a sign they trust you.  And they trust you because you’ve demonstrated over time that your words and behaviors match.  You said you’d do A and you did […]

As a technologist it’s important to know the maturity of a technology.  Like people, technologies are born, they become children, then adolescents, then adults and then they die.  And like with people, the character and behavior of technologies change as they grown and age.  A fledgling technology may have a lot of potential, but it […]

To meet ever-increasing growth objectives, established companies want to be more entrepreneurial.  And the thinking goes like this – launch new products and services to create new markets, do it quickly and do it on a shoestring.  Do that Lean Startup thing.  Build minimum viable prototypes (MVPs), show them to customers, incorporate their feedback, make […]

Sometimes we get caught up in the details when we should be working on the foundation.  Here’s a rule: If the underlying foundation is not secure, don’t bother working on anything else. If you’re working on a couple new technologies, but the overall business model won’t be profitable, don’t work on the new technologies.  Instead, […]

We have too many ideas, but too few great ones.  We don’t need more ideas, we need a way to choose the best one or two ideas and run them to ground. Before creating more ideas, make a list of the ones you already have.  Put them in two boxes.  In Box 1, list the […]

If you know what to do, do it. Don’t ask, just do. If you’re pretty sure what to do, do it.  Don’t ask, just do. If you think you may know what to do, do it.  Don’t ask, just do. If you don’t know what to do, try something small.  Then, do more of what […]

Innovation is all about learning.  And if the objective of innovation is learning, why not start with learning objectives? Here’s a recipe for learning: define what you want to learn, figure how you want to learn, define what you’ll measure, work the learning plan, define what you learned and repeat. With innovation, the learning is […]