Action goals are a powerful but seldom-used technique for business goals that reduces employee anxiety while increasing performance results
Business Goals Will Never Feel the Same Again
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Articles in the "Business" Category
What’s the Difference Between Sales and Marketing?
There are a few reasons people can get confused about the difference between sales and marketing. One is that the words "sales" and "marketing" are often used interchangeably, and many people may not fully understand the distinct roles and responsibilities of each....
When Does Skim Pricing Make Sense?
Skim pricing is a pricing strategy in which a company sets a high initial price for a product or service, and then gradually lowers the price over time. This strategy is often used when introducing a new product or when there is a high level of demand for a product or...
Smart People Always Want to Mess This Up
Several weeks ago, my company released a new product: a tool that helps small service businesses with client follow-up. We did it very quietly, late one night after most of the department had gone home. A few of the product leaders made the decision, flipped the...
You Know Your Core Values—Now What?
So you’ve identified your core values and everyone’s excited about them. Now what?The powerful experience of identifying a company’s core values is too often followed by the unforgivable act of forgetting about them. People frankly just don’t know what to do with core...
Every Document is an Experience
One simple but helpful step is to stop thinking about your company’s operational documents as merely transactional tools.Every document your company produces is an opportunity to emphasize and clarify what your company is all about. Spec sheets, release notes,...
Don’t Talk About Your Positioning—Prove It
Customer experiences are almost always indirect. You don’t feel good because a company told you to feel good. You feel good because that company set up a scene that had the right feel-good elements.Every bank wants to think they’re “a different kind of bank,” yet...
What Ancient Greece Taught Us About Innovation
It’s a little disturbing to realize how much of what we do is simply imitation. If you start analyzing your business objectively, you’ll probably come to the (somewhat depressing) realizing that a lot of it is simply rehashed ideas and behaviors adopted from your...
Why I Left the Agency World to Go Product-Side
There are basically three ways to be a designer: FreelanceAgencyIn-houseEach of those three worlds has its own unique complexities and challenges, and it can take some experience moving between them before you find where you belong.I’ve been on the agency side of the...
Six Hard Questions Every Business Owner Should Be Able to Answer
“Imagine if Walt Disney had conceived of his company’s purpose as to make cartoons, rather than to make people happy.” — Jim Collins Companies typically start with a clear purpose in mind, but over time they find themselves drifting away from it. They hire, fire, and...
What’s Your Company’s Internal Compass?
One of the hardest questions we ask in our discovery workshops is also one of the simplest and most fundamental: “Why does your company exist?”You’d think most CEOs would have a ready (and passionate) response to that question, but most don’t. When asked that...
After Money, then What?
At larger companies, the phrase “maximize shareholder value” has become a trite summary of what they believe is their core purpose. At smaller companies, it’s usually translated into plain English: “Make the owners a bunch of money.”If you dig deeper, the actual...
Purpose-Driven Companies Make More Money
“A real purpose can’t just be words on paper. It has to get under the skin of every member of your organization…. If you get it right, people will feel great about what they’re doing, clear about their goals, and excited to get to work every morning.”— Roy SpenceWhen...
The Power of the Purpose-Driven Company
Picture this: You’re standing in the middle of a beautiful meadow on a sunny day. In the middle of this meadow is a large, heavy rock. Your assignment is to move that rock. So, you tie a rope around it, and you start pulling to the north. It’s heavy, but you’re...
Clear Purpose, Clear Decisions
“Strategy without purpose is like kicking the ball to the goal post without knowing where the goal post is.” (Charles Prabakar) Business is a non-stop barrage of difficult decisions. Should we engage in this partnership? Should we take on this client? Should we accept...
What’s Your Business Really All About?
“From the outside looking in, you can’t understand it. From the inside looking out, you can’t explain it.” (Roy Spence) Figuring out your company’s purpose is no easy task. There’s no formula for it. It’s subtle, and it takes a while to reveal it, identify it, and...
Are Wireframe Diagrams Obsolete?
I’ve been in the web industry long enough to have gone through a lot of major shifts, and we’re in another one of them right now. We’ve reached the end of the wireframe era. For those not familiar with the concept, a wireframe is a structural diagram of a digital page...
What is Design Thinking?
There’s a common thread between companies like Tesla, Airbnb, Uber, SpaceX, Spotify, Square, Netflix and others that have successfully overturned decades of convention and built business empires around solutions that rendered their competitors almost instantly...
Project Management? Try Expectations Management
You take your car into the mechanic. They’ve told you it’ll take about an hour to fix, so you sit in the waiting room half-watching Fox News and flipping through an old issue of Car and Driver until they finish.Half an hour passes.Forty-five minutes.An hour.An hour...
Why Business Owners Fear Customer Research
Customer research is fundamental to the design process. It’s been well established that relying on assumptions alone leads us to make biased decisions that often fail to reflect the reality of the customer’s needs and wants, leading to poor results (including reduced...
The Experience IS the Product
Inexperienced marketers tend to fall back on a benefit-focused approach, believing they’ll win customers by listing their virtues (better products, better customer service, technical improvements, etc.)Unfortunately, most practical benefits don’t address the issues...
The Power of Designer & Developer Collaboration
There are few forces as formidable as designers and developers working together. When they’re working effectively, they hardly need anyone else. Entire companies have sprung up around strong designer+developer teams, and these collaborative teams have built many of...
Run Your Business Like an Astronaut
When I think of the people who were the most influential role models in shaping my approach to business and life, I keep coming back to astronauts. I don’t know where I’d be if it weren’t for astronauts. You see, I’m an emotional guy. I cry easily at movies. My blood...
How Cognitive Bias Skews Design Reviews
Knowing when you’re tricking yourself helps you make better design decisions (This article was co-authored with Jessica Schultz) Being human means we’re not always logical. Our brains have developed certain ways of thinking that help us understand and simplify the...
Getting Past “Pretty”
You can’t solve your problems with a fresh coat of paint Let’s say a company comes to our firm interested in hiring us. We’ll call them SynergyCo. They make about $100 million/year in revenue selling a niche software product. They’ve had their market cornered in the...