Today I just turned 35. It sounds like old enough I would say. Turning 30 was a big change for me, as I left my job in Paris to start a new adventure in Singapore, that lasted for 3 years ! Now I am 35 and I am about to do a whole new change as well. I am about to leave the Accor group to think about a new adventure. Is not yet settle but most probably it will involve some changes in my carreer. Stay tune!
Techstars Paris Bootcamp 2019
This week I just started a new intrapreneur experience. Accor is one of the main partner of Techstars Paris along with Air Liquide, Total, FDJ, Gefko…
All companies are looking for new ways to innovate. To do so it is important to get out of the daily routine and make your brain available for creativity. There are ways to incentivize your brain to do so. This is called (amongst other things) design thinking. How do you work with a canvas that will unleash your inner creativity.
At Techstars we have started to do so by learning to build a lean canvas. This is your framework on top of which you will be able to plug all bricks of your product until you see the big picture.
On top of this canvas the main goal is to make sure that you do solve a real problem and you have the right pain point to address. This means gathering information from the potential customer that you have in mind. Make sure that clients are actually interested in your solution.
It’s only when you manage to define precisely your problem, that you can start gathering information about your potential product. Do not narrow your mind too quickly. Even though your guts are telling you that you have the correct solution, you should keep your mind open, listen carefully to what your users are saying.
When this will be clear enough, it is time to get your prototype out in the field and make sure your target do enjoy your product. The earlier you start testing the easier it will be to pivot if needed.
More to come in the coming weeks.
Product Conference from Blablacar VP Product
If you have 40 minutes to spare to learn more on how to “fight complexity”, I would advice to watch the conference from Rémi Guyot (VP Product) at the family conference:
Otherwise If you just want the key points to remember, here is my notes:
- keep it simple stupid is not a good thing, keep it simple is a way not to acknowledge that things are complex. accept the situation because things are complex from the start
- if someone talked about the corner case, forget about it, and focus on the main use case
- you need to develop complexities antibodies, Be a fanatic focus because the more you add to the roadmap the less are going to be done
- the two list priority method by Warren Buffet:
- list your top 10 goals, the things you want to accomplish
- pick the 3 most important one out of this first list
you will end up with 2 lists, one with the 3 main goals (the company priorities) and the second list with all the other very important goals. Usually the second one, is called the secondaries priorities list. Instead for Warren buffet those items are the one you should avoid at all cost
Being a fanatic focus is to make sure that we avoid working on the second list item.
when someone comes with something not prioritise you can say “yes, it is important and we have decided not to focus on it for now.” (polite version of no)
If you want to rank your company in term of priorities maturity
level 0 = No priorities
Level 1 = Clear priorities
Level 2 = Level 1 + everyone knows priorities by heart
Level 3 = Level 2 + No one works on other topics.
SIMPLIFICATION REVIEWS
when screens are too cluttered here is the blablacar method. The idea is how we can avoid to add extra things into the interface.
Introduce the HORSE framework to simplify things:
HIDE
ORGANIZE
REDUCE
STANDARDIZE
ERASE
ABSCENCE TESTING is testing the absence of something. Usually no one ever say that something is useless so it is important to test a version of the interface without the feature. If no one complain about it, it means it wasn’t really useful after all
Simplify till it hurts
Video Montage for newbies
Ok if you are on a Mac the question is fairly easy, just go with imovie, which is by far the easiest and powerful tool to get a decent video ready in a short period of time.
On Windows, because I do switch often between system I would advice you strongly to try out VSDC. Even though it seems to have a paid version, the free one is full of features packed in a decent interface.
Otherwhise I love Premiere Rush. Adobe took the basic for youtubers and video wannabe alike to make a powerful and straitgthforward tool for newbies and savvy alike.
Enjoy!
Resources for the web creator
100 tools to launch and grow your start-up.
This is an impressive list of resources to create things online. The title talk about start-up but honestly if you are just looking for resources to create stuff online this will be helpful at some point!
Create banners online
If you want to create banners quickly with absolutly zero creative knowledge. You can try out https://pablo.buffer.com/. There are a lot less options than on canva.com so it makes it easier to create.
Templates for UX tools
I haven’t tested out but the promise it to help you create UX assets like interview materials, persona, sitemaps etc. Give it a try!
Mobile journalism
Are you willing to do video reports with your smartphone. The website will give you plenty of informations on where to start and how to do it!