Using Paper Prototyping to Facilitate Successful Participatory Design Sessions

Caroline Romedenne and Tricia Okin presented the following before facilitating a workshop at the 10/28 Agile / Lean Practitioners Meetup.


Event Description
How do you get a team working together to be aligned on the value, feasibility, and usefulness of their product ideas?  One approach is to enable team to work together in envisioning the product features via participatory design.  

Agile / Lean Practitioners Meetup is pleased to be co-hosting a free workshop on Using Paper Prototyping to Facilitate Successful Participatory Design Sessions with Caroline Romedenne and Tricia Okin on Tuesday, October 28, 2014 from 6:30 PM to 8:00 PM in NYC.  RSVP now on Meetup.

Description of Event

Caroline Romedenne and Tricia Okin will lead a workshop where we explore and experience how using paper prototyping can be an ideal communication tool to enhance and enable a successful participatory design session to uncover and/or discover how your end-user would see, navigate, understand or even design your content or interface...

Bios: 

Caroline Romedenne

Caroline Romedenne is a User Experience Designer and User Researcher at Kaplan Test Prep. She is a creative thinker, a design strategist with a passion for people, behavior and education.
Caroline studied Fine Art Photography at the Institut des Beaux-Arts St Luc in Belgium, she worked in fashion and portraiture for many years. After much travels, she gets an MFA in Design and Technology at Parsons The New School for Design which has more deeply provided her to creatively conquer wide-ranging and complex work from user-centered, socially networked interaction, to physical installation projects.
Aside from Art direction and other UX-er positions, she is a cultural activist with and for Native American communities, she volunteers over the years designing programs that aimed to bring together different generations through meaningful interactions and cultural experiences.
She is the most motivated when standing at the intersection of diverse needs, ideas and people and ‘making it work’ for everyone.

Tricia Okin

I love learning about people, cultures, languages and why people do the things they do. I’m constantly searching for the “Why?” in a scenario. With all that, my primary love is designing (for) online communities, to connect people to others and to share in storytelling and their histories. In my spare time, I travel to experience new places and people.

My background is a BFA in photography and I completed my MFA in Design and Technology at Parsons The New School for Design. With over 12 years of professional experience within the interactive design industry, my work focuses on practices  such as user experience, strategy, interaction design, creative direction, information architecture, and front-end development knowledge. My work includes clients who extend across multiple industry verticals, including education, nonprofit organizations, entertainment, tech, and food & lifestyle. I'm currently a lead instructor for General Assemb.ly's User Experience Design Immersive course in both the New York and London campuses.

This event is co-sponsored with Lean Product Best Practices meetup group.
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Note: This post was updated to include the presented deck post Meetup.

Lean Applied: A "Mini" Workshop w/ Zain Yousaf

Agile / Lean Practitioners Meetup was pleased to host Lean Applied: A "Mini" Workshop led by Zain Yousaf, Senior Consultant at LeanCog, on Wednesday, October 22, 2014 from 6:30 PM to 8:00 PM in NYC.  Here is a copy of presentation that Zain presented:

Description of Meetup

Over the past several years, Lean Startup and Customer Development have become wildly popular movements amongst startups looking to test their ideas. Larger firms and enterprises have also begun to adopt these methods into their operations. In this hands-on session, we will share examples of how firms are applying these methodologies within their organizations. The group will then practice testing their own ideas using tools such as the Business Model Canvas. Please come prepared with an idea (either your own or from your organization) that you are looking to test and feel comfortable sharing with the group. Looking forward to a fun and interactive session!

Bio:

Zain Yousaf is a Senior Consultant at LeanCog, a strategy, product development, and innovation firm. Zain focuses on helping large firms innovate by applying lean startup and customer development methodologies. Zain has experience working with both startups and Fortune 500 firms as an entrepreneur, intrapreneur, and management consultant. He has an MBA from NYU and a BA from Cornell University.

Learn to Prototype Like a Badass! w/ Danielle Tomson

On August 12, Danielle Tomson led a workshop entitled Learn to Prototype Like a Badass!

Check out the Sample Axure File

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Event Description:
Prototyping is a rapid way of creating a testable product, without writing a line of code. In this class, join Danielle Tomson of the Occom Group, as she walks through how to best use Axure to build prototypes that will test your product's value to customers. Designed with product managers and designers in mind, this class gives you a tool box of Axure best practices, how to test your Axure prototype on customers using Validately, and some prototyping tips and tricks. No experience is required. Participants can follow along or download Axure before the meet-up and try these techniques live. 

Bio:

Danielle Tomson is well-versed in early stage software innovation, service design and prototyping processes. She has lectured in service design, prototyping, Axure and product management at Boston University and New York University. She is a Product Partner at the Occom Group, which works together with their clients to define their ideas and needs before turning them into great software solutions. In a previous life before software development, she worked in international development and graduated from Yale.

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This event is co-sponsored with Lean Product Best Practices meetup group.

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Note: This post was updated after the event to include the deck and sample file.

Importance of Reflection within Agile Software Teams

Embedding Reflection and Learning into Agile Software Development by Jeffry Babb, Rashina Hoda, and Jacob Norbjerg is an interesting study that emphasizes the importance of reflection and continuous learning for software teams via Reflective Agile Learning Model (REALM). The study emphasizes both Reflection-In-Action and Reflection-On-Action within Agile teams.



It showcases this concept within Agile Ceremonies:



It also points out that when teams are working at an unsustainable pace, they often remove their opportunities to be reflective and minimize their opportunities to improve.

While the concepts in the article should not be new to experienced agile practitioners, the Reflective Agile Learning Model (REALM) is worth looking into more. I am also encouraged that studies like this are being done.

Read more at:
http://computingnow.computer.org/cms/Computer.org/ComputingNow/issues/2014/07//mso2014040051.pdf

Using Lean Startup to Ace Your Job Search

On May 21st, 2014, Debbie Madden presented onUsing Lean Startup Tactics To Ace Your Job Search at the Agile / Lean Practitioners meetup.  

Using Lean Startup to Ace Your Job Search from Debbie Madden

Event Description:

For 10 years, Debbie Madden ran Cyrus Innovation, a 50 person Agile consultancy in NYC. On January 9th, I exited. On January 10th, I asked myself "What's next?" I had a million ideas and couldn't figure out how to make sense of it all. I decided right then and there to use Lean Startup to guide me in finding my next career move. Several months in, I can't imagine doing a job search any other way. In the past 2 months, I've been a startup founder for a services company, a CEO at a company (for 3 days), retired, an advisor, and a startup founder for a product company. This is all true, and I did it intentionally, well most of it. The key was I intentionally tried to fail hypotheses and pivoted fast. I'll share with you my successes, my failures and the lessons I learned along the way. 

Bio:

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Debbie Madden is a seasoned executive and an entrepreneur. For 20 years, she has guided tech companies and created strategic plans that result in year over year profitability and efficiency. Her focus is on creating scalable processes that enable sustained growth. As the CEO of Cyrus Innovation, she grew the company into a profitable, close-knit family of over 50 employees. Cyrus landed on the Inc 5000 Fastest Growing Companies list 5 years in a row, and was Crain's NY Best Places to work in 2012. Debbie is now exploring her next venture.

Evolving Alignment Across Multiple Agile Teams - Agile / Lean Practitioner's Meetup

On April 29, 2014, I gave a a presentation entitled Evolving Alignment across Multiple Agile Teams, at the Agile / Lean Practitioners Meetup. 

Evolving Alignment Across Multiple Agile Teams from Ilio Krumins-Beens

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Event Description:
Agile principles emphasize empowered, self-organizing teams but provide little guidance in how create alignment across multiple agile teams. In this presentation, Ilio Krumins-Beens will share experiences gained trying to improve strategic and operational alignment with more than 10 agile teams. Discussion will include experiments with different ways of sharing teams’ roadmaps, identifying dependencies, risks, synergies and achieving operational alignment.

Presented by: 

Ilio Krumins-Beens is an agile practitioner and coach with over 18 years working with teams to build software and web applications. He has spent more than half of his career working with companies / teams to roll out Agile / Lean practices. Currently, Ilio is the Executive Director of Agile Practices, at Kaplan Test Prep.


Ilio has presented and co-authored the following work at various agile conferences and events including National Agile Conferences, AgileNYC, Agile NJ, and HICSS

Building Successful In-House Innovation Teams w/ Jeff Gothelf @ Agile / Lean Practitioner's Meetup

On March 11th, 2014, Jeff Gothelf, presented Building Successful In-House Innovation Teams at the Agile / Lean Practitioners Meetup Group.  View Jeff giving a recent presentation in Stockholm on this topic.

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Event Description:
You’ve read The Innovator’s Dilemma. You’ve bought in to The Lean Startup. You’re ready to kickstart your company’s product innovation efforts. There’s just one problem: you’re not sure where to begin:

- What can design teach us about building a collaborative culture? 
- How do you structure a successful product design team? 
- How should that team work?
- How will that team measure success?

Jeff will offer practical, step-by-step, guidance on how to build and support successful product design innovation in your business. Using insights gained from leading and working with dozens of product and design teams, Jeff will step through team makeup, process steps, management structure and the corporate infrastructure needed for these teams to flourish.

About the Presenter: 


Jeff Gothelf is a designer & Agile practitioner. He is a leading voice on the topics of Agile UX & Lean UX and a highly sought-after international speaker. In addition, Jeff is the author of the O'Reilly book, Lean UX: Applying lean principles to improve user experience (www.leanuxbook.com). Jeff has led teams at TheLadders, Publicis Modem, WebTrends, Fidelity, & AOL.