Interview with Charbel Semaan Product Designer and Founder of Made in Public
Poornima Vijayashanker (left) of Femgineer, and Charbel Semaan (right) of Made in Public
Did you share last week’s Build episode on product design sprints with your teammates?
Wait! Give me two chances to guess what the outcome was…
… you did and you faced some pushback? Well, kudos to you for putting it out there!
… or maybe you didn’t because you were afraid of the pushback you’d get? That is OK too!
Charbel Semaan and I are back this week and prepared to help you get over the pushback you received or will receive once you bring up the idea of product design sprints to your teammates.
You’ll recall Charbel Semaan has been a product designer for the last 20 years and recently launched his brand, Made in Public.
Charbel and I have built a lot of products, and we know that even if our teammates hate the current process and the outcomes it produces, they will still find comfort in it and resist adopting a new one because there’s a lot of fear when it comes to change.
But no one is going to willingly admit to being scared, so they’re going to couch their fear in remarks that are skeptical, just say no, or create excuses like: “Now is not a good time.” “We just don’t have the money to run extra experiments.”
Then there’s my personal favorite: “Prove to me that this is going to work!” But the whole point of an experiment is to test assumptions by following a process, and then see if they were right or wrong. You can’t prove anything until you do the experiment! #chickenegg
Because we want you to be really prepared for all the excuses and pushback around a design sprint, here are a few more excuses that you’ll hear when it comes to product design sprints from our friends at Invision. There are also some guidelines and prerequisites that we recommend you consider mentioned in this post to make sure a product design sprint is right for your team.
By the time you finish watching today’s episode you will have learned how-to:
- Get people to adopt product design sprints
- Convey the number # 1 benefit of a product design sprint
- What to do if all else fails and you just can’t get over the pushback
- Make product design sprints work for larger teams
- Convey who does and doesn’t need to be involved in a product design sprint
- Highlight how a product design sprint is different from lean startup methodologies and Agile
After watching the episode get in touch with Charbel! You can reach him at [email protected], and visit Made In Public to see the projects he’s working on, the sprints that he runs publicly to help teach and empower other to run sprints themselves.
Listen to the episode on iTunes!
You can listen to this episode of Build on iTunes.
Enjoyed this episode and want to watch more?
Help others enjoy it too by hitting the 👏🏽 ! And subscribe to our YouTube channel to receive additional episodes.
Check out these additional resources on product design:
- Product Design: How a Product Design Sprint Fast Tracks Testing Your Ideas
- Differentiating With Product Design
- Product Debt: What Is Product Debt And Why You Need To Prioritize It
- Product Redesign: What To Do Before You Redesign Your Product
- The Art vs Science of User Experience Design
Build is produced as a partnership between Femgineer and Pivotal Tracker. San Francisco video production by StartMotionMEDIA.