Implications of Technology:"

The purpose of a software company:

This Gestalt philosophy helped us understand more clearly the purpose of a software company. It isn’t to facilitate the prioritization of features and user stories, then implement them. We discovered that our purpose is to create great products with Strong Centers. We learned to impose new constraints on our work;
---Poppendieck, Mary. The Lean Mindset: Ask the Right Questions (Addison-Wesley Signature Series (Beck)) (p. 86). Pearson Education. Kindle Edition.

What is "making a decision":

The Westerner and the Japanese mean something different when they talk of “making a decision.” With us in the West, all the emphasis is on the answer to the question. . . . To the Japanese, however, the important element in decision-making is defining the question.1 —Peter Drucker
---Poppendieck, Mary. The Lean Mindset: Ask the Right Questions (Addison-Wesley Signature Series (Beck)) (p. 71). Pearson Education. Kindle Edition.

A great products:Just finish it before you get trust, Just forget your own burdens and only focus on the customers's Pain Points before you do it.

Anna: It’s hard to understand how customers can be convinced not to insist on their favorite features just by telling them those features aren’t compatible with a “Strong Center.” M&T: Most customers appreciate good design when they see it. When customers love an experience, when they find it really engaging, they can usually be convinced to trust the people who designed that experience to know what a good product design is and what is best left out. Otto: How do people design great products that customers love? M&T: We think the most important lesson—and the hardest one—is to stop worrying mostly about technology. Stop worrying so much about getting a list of stuff done. Start spending some time visiting your customers and watching—really watching carefully—as they use your products. Every product delivers an experience, and if you don’t understand the experience that your product creates, you don’t really understand your product at all.
---Poppendieck, Mary. The Lean Mindset: Ask the Right Questions (Addison-Wesley Signature Series (Beck)) (pp. 89-90). Pearson Education. Kindle Edition.

Develop a deep understanding of the targeted consumers is the starting point of a Product:

Otto: It seems to me that these days the most amazing products are things like smartphones and tablets and social media, and I’ll bet they don’t start out as a list of requirements. M&T: You’re right—it’s hard to describe user experience as a list of requirements. When experience is important, the place to start is to develop a deep understanding of the targeted consumers, the job they might want a product to do for them, how they do that job now, what annoys them, and what might delight them.
---Poppendieck, Mary. The Lean Mindset: Ask the Right Questions (Addison-Wesley Signature Series (Beck)) (p. 81). Pearson Education. Kindle Edition.

From Agile to Design

we embraced the fact that trusted agile practices were insufficient for innovation and product design and in some situations could actually interfere with those activities.
---Poppendieck, Mary. The Lean Mindset: Ask the Right Questions (Addison-Wesley Signature Series (Beck)) (p. 84). Pearson Education. Kindle Edition.

Jump out of the pitfall of project and focus on the product, that is equal to focus on customers.

Sadly, we aren’t in an industry where the choice is between being a “design person” and being a “product person”; in our industry everything is focused on the project, not the product. Phase-gate, waterfall, agile, and other methods all focus people’s attention on the project with no guidance about what constitutes a great product.
---Poppendieck, Mary. The Lean Mindset: Ask the Right Questions (Addison-Wesley Signature Series (Beck)) (p. 88). Pearson Education. Kindle Edition.

From engineer to experienced designer:

Let’s face it, competitive differentiation for a lot of products has shifted from engineering to design. For the most part, people are no longer amazed by the technical features of new products; they are amazed by great experiences. And when one of the key objectives of a system is to provide an amazing experience, the leadership of the product team should include an experienced designer.
---Poppendieck, Mary. The Lean Mindset: Ask the Right Questions (Addison-Wesley Signature Series (Beck)) (p. 81). Pearson Education. Kindle Edition.

Designers are intuitive thinkers. They are trained to ask a lot of questions and generate a lot of ideas; they create designs—never just one design—by building a lot of quick prototypes to test out a range of possibilities. They focus on the kinds of emotions their designs will elicit. They constantly ask the question What will make consumers love this product?
---Poppendieck, Mary. The Lean Mindset: Ask the Right Questions (Addison-Wesley Signature Series (Beck)) (pp. 81-82). Pearson Education. Kindle Edition.

There is a new executive position at many large companies these days: Chief Design Officer. Companies such as Procter & Gamble, 3M, Philips Electronics, GE Healthcare, Kia Motors, PepsiCo, Apple Computer, Whirlpool, Electrolux, and many others have added a design executive to the top corporate officers. Why? Because corporations have discovered that good design can be very profitable; they have found that in a world where products quickly become commodities, design helps to create a protected competitive space. But without support at a senior level, design is often overlooked in the product development process.
---Poppendieck, Mary. The Lean Mindset: Ask the Right Questions (Addison-Wesley Signature Series (Beck)) (p. 82). Pearson Education. Kindle Edition.

Engineer VS Designer

Harvard professor Peter Rowe introduced the term design thinking but IDEO’s David Kelley popularized the term, bringing it to the forefront—not just of industrial design but of the entire creative sector. The belief is that designers think differently and maybe even see the world differently. For example, an engineer is supposed to solve a problem by finding a minimal yet sufficient solution, whereas a designer is supposed to solve a problem by making something that is well adapted for human use. This is a distinction with a big difference. Engineers make things work, they make things efficient, and they make the process of making them efficient, regardless of whether people like or hate the thing itself. Designers exist to make things people like, often by inefficiently integrating elements and materials when doing so improves the product’s overall fit for human use and perception. In all honesty, we were attracted to both engineering and design. We have the soul of engineers but the heart of designers.
---Poppendieck, Mary. The Lean Mindset: Ask the Right Questions (Addison-Wesley Signature Series (Beck)) (pp. 87-88). Pearson Education. Kindle Edition.

Designers's challenges:

We began using the term Strong Center to express the aspect of a product’s identity and virtue that emerges from its wholeness. We realized the hard part wasn’t executing within cost, schedule, and feature boundaries; the hard part was to use those boundaries to do something excellent.
---Poppendieck, Mary. The Lean Mindset: Ask the Right Questions (Addison-Wesley Signature Series (Beck)) (p. 83). Pearson Education. Kindle Edition.

Learning to design products so they have Strong Centers was only the first challenge. As software developers we also needed to learn how to make interactive experiences resonate. We were already well aware of usability engineering but considered the resulting products bland. We realized interaction design isn’t just about usability (counting mouse clicks and tracking eye fixations); it is about creating meaning and engaging people in complex layered activities so they lose track of time and forget everything outside the experience. To learn how to do this we sought inspiration from experts in engagement psychology, not usability or user interface design. By studying people like Nancy Duarte (public speaking) and Margaret Robertson (video games), we learned that designers use cadence to engage audiences and overcome blandness. The word resonate itself implies that the natural vibration (“vibe”) of a product is on the same frequency as the audience. It turns out there are optimal transitions and timings that, like the golden ratio, seem to resonate with people at a base level. By varying the intensity of user engagement according to these timings and transitions, we learned to entice users into what behavioral psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls a “flow experience.” We also dove deep into a study of Gamification and developed an appreciation for subtle ways of engaging users, forcing effective learning, recognizing achievement, and acknowledging failure without making the experience depleting.
---Poppendieck, Mary. The Lean Mindset: Ask the Right Questions (Addison-Wesley Signature Series (Beck)) (p. 86). Pearson Education. Kindle Edition.

How do designers work?

• Designers start by immersing themselves in the experience of the people who will interact with their designs. They spend a lot of time watching people. If they are designing a shopping cart, they watch people shopping.13 If they are designing a potato peeler, they watch people peeling potatoes.14 If they are designing a system for people to track their finances, they go to homes and watch how real people deal with finances.15
• Designers are not alone when they immerse themselves in the experience of consumers. People from development, quality, technical writing, marketing, production or operations, even finance, are also involved. People with different backgrounds bring different perspectives to the product team, and a broader perspective leads to a deeper understanding of the essential problems to be addressed.
• Designers do not take a single approach to the issues they uncover. Numerous concepts are sketched or quickly prototyped so everyone has a way to visualize the ideas. This is especially important because designers are not designing in a vacuum; they are discovering what other team members with different perspectives are thinking so as to enrich their search for an understanding of the multiple factors influencing the experience they are creating.
• Designers understand psychology; they study how people react in various situations to different stimuli. They do not accept the status quo. They ask questions, challenge assumptions, try to gain a broad view of the situation they are dealing with. Designers seek constant feedback as they develop their ideas. They change their minds and try new things. They don’t consider unexpected results to be a failure; they think of surprises as a learning experience.
  ---Poppendieck, Mary. The Lean Mindset: Ask the Right Questions (Addison-Wesley Signature Series (Beck)) (pp. 91-92). Pearson Education. Kindle Edition.

How much purposeful practice make perfect:

We asked Thad Scheer, President of Sphere of Influence, what it takes for analytical thinkers to appreciate the value of design, and what it feels like when you get there. He said: Design is something you can’t learn by studying, practice is essential. Practice is not just essential for mastery, it’s essential for understanding. Only through purposeful practice can people gain the vision to see Design and ultimately wield its power. It takes about 500 hours of practice before a person’s eyes are truly opened to the world of Design. Even though Design is all around us, it’s invisible (they say good Design is invisible whereas bad Design tends to be pretty apparent). It’s also said that once you’ve had your eyes opened to the universe of Design you will never again look at a door handle the same way. It’s true! This is why we capitalize the “D.” While it only takes about 500 hours of dedicated practice to see Design, it takes about 2,500 hours of purposeful practice to develop any degree of proficiency with it. As with most things, it takes about 10,000 hours of purposeful practice to be good enough to compete globally. Practice is everything!11
---Poppendieck, Mary. The Lean Mindset: Ask the Right Questions (Addison-Wesley Signature Series (Beck)) (p. 89). Pearson Education. Kindle Edition.