Presentation: Tweet"Safety Not Guaranteed: How successful teams ignore the rules to create successful products"

If you’re looking for simple solutions for building successful products, don’t come to this talk. This is the talk about how hard it really is to succeed, and how the best way to succeed is to ignore the best practice, avoid playing it safe, suck it up, and get used to it.

As long as I’ve been in software development, I, and others I know, have been seduced by seemingly simple and self-evident process ideas. But, in spite of our best efforts, we fail. Agile development, User Centered Design, Design Thinking, and Lean Startup all offer promise. They all seem to address some of our worst shortcomings. And, while we may experience some success, in the end, we still have big challenges

In this talk, you’ll hear about companies that started with the best of intentions. But in the end, deliberately broke their process and learned a few counter-intuitive things along the way: The most user-centric companies learned to lie to their customers, skip research and trust their guesses, and stop worrying about usability. The most agile companies learned to deliberately ship bad code, and to stop planning more than a few hours in advance. Design Thinking advocates adopted Lean Startup thinking. And, Lean Startup advocates adopted Design Thinking. In the end the most successful companies end up with a process soup that’s not true to any single process style, and definitely not simple to explain to anyone.

In the end you might end up with a few clever ideas to try in your organization. But what I hope you take away is a willingness to abandon the false security of any process approach, and focus on succeeding in spite of your process.