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Showing posts from July, 2017

Using JTBD in a B2B setting

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It's now about 4 years since I started to think that the "As a ..." user story format wasn't the best starting point for building long running products. One of the things that I found and liked was the jobs story format . The situation When collecting the data I didn't do proper JTBD interviews as such. But I did extract the info from pre-sales calls, product demos, and talking to users. Plus enriching the collected date with the known strategic goals 15below as motivation , i.e. reduce support overhead. I have adapted it a bit and marked it up for our dev teams here. But here is an example for a password reset function. Main thing is that as a B2B supplier we have four distinct groups that could appear in the stories. 15below (us as supplier) as an org,  our clients, their users,  and the client's customers  Here is a simple example for a password reset function all the words in bold are entities that have a defined meaning in a glossary,

Getting email up and running for side projects

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This is  part of a series  about my side project  Bashfully , which aims to give graduates and other new entrants to careers a seasoned professional level way of expressing themselves through the super power of story telling. Following the core principles of being discoverable, personalised and guiding in approach. Photo by Songeunyoung on Unsplash Rectifying my previous mistake - not building community by using email engagement - has proved to be a learning experience! Since our investment is minimal (and we have no real users yet!) the tools that we use all come with some constraint/trade-off. This next bit explain this is going to be slightly technical ... With Heroku it has surfaced as putting in CNAME records in the root of the domain. With register.ly this then stops us adding any other root records, for example mail servers. Cloudfare has a service that will flatten CNAME records for you into A records so everything plays fits together. So a switch of nameservers and

Building awareness of Bashfully

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This is  part of a series  about my side project  Bashfully , which aims to give graduates and other new entrants to careers a seasoned professional level way of expressing themselves through the super power of story telling. Following the core principles of being discoverable, personalised and guiding in approach. So to validate an idea you need to have people be aware of you. The first step in  Introducing bashfully  was a Twitter account. This provided someway of people finding out about project, promoting the survey, and getting to the landing page. Publishing the survey was one of the first pieces that I had available to promote. It was also vital in starting to get some evidence for the problem that we were trying to solve and the audience. The landing page was a very important piece in getting started. When this was created it gave us a way of sharing progress, to explain the concept in more detail. This then meant that when we directed people to the survey from the landi

Chromebook on the go after 3 months

Bit of an update on cloud working and the tools that I'd picked out to investigate over the past three months: Codeanywhere and Cloud9 (online IDE and dev environment VM),  Caret (simple text editor in the style of Sublime), Pixlr Editor and Polarr (online photo editor in the style of photoshop), WeVideo (online video creator and editor) Office Online (Microsoft's free online version of Office, inc editing ability) Draw.io Desktop and Mockflow Draw.io is a great alternative to Visio, although working in a Microsoft dev and productivity stack I'd still stick with Visio. It's missing some extra collaboration features that would give it the edge. Which brings me onto Mockflow. This is a great wire-framing tool. The collaborative element allowed for some "paired designing". Each with our own laptop to look things up while the other added elements that we'd agreed to. Pixlr editor is a good replacement for what I need in an image editing tool. H