Resources, Tutorials, and Tools

Agile in General

Tutorial on Alex’s Site: Agile – Just the Basics. This page covers…the basics. It’s a good place to start if you want to understand the general nature of a topic and how it relates to the practice of agile.

Tutorial on Alex’s Site: Your Best Agile User Story. This page covers the user story- how to prepare to write them, how to use them, and how to link them to implementation and testing.

Venture Design Process

Tutorial on Alex’s Site: Venture Design. This page provides a comprehensive set of resources. What I would do for a general overview is just read the intro to each of the areas (Personas, Problem Scenarios, etc.).

Tutorial on Alex’s Site: Venture Design Sprints. This page provides an overview of design sprints and four different focal types for those sprints: Problems, Motivation, Usability, and Architecture.

Design Thinking

Tutorial on Alex’s Site: Personas. This page introduces the use of personas and problem scenarios, the primary design thinking tools we use here in the specialization.

Tutorial on Alex’s Site: Customer Discovery (Persona and Problem Hypothesis). This section of the handbook steps through methods for talking to users, customers and generally doing design research.

Lean Startup & Evidence-Based Innovation

Tutorial on Alex’s Site: Your Lean Startup. This tutorial will allow you to review the fundamentals and a few case studies. It also links to the applicable Venture Design templates.

Slideshare deck from David McClure on ‘Pirate Metrics‘. While we use the AIDAOR framework to talk about the customer sales/relationship funnel, this is another popular alternative you might want to explore.

Book on Lean Analytics: Lean Analytics. If you’re interested in how to use analytics to drive your practice of Lean Startup, this is a great resource. It also has a lot of baselines and case studies I find useful.

Usability Testing and User Experience Design

Tutorial on Alex’s Site: Customer Discovery (Usability Hypothesis). The usability section of this tutorial describes the fundamentals we use in discussing user cognition, a systematic approach to usability, and usability testing.

Tutorial on Alex’s Site: Build Your First Prototype Right Now in 30 Minutes. This is a good place to review the fundamentals of software prototyping, including (but not limited to) specifics on Balsamiq.

Tutorial on Alex’s Site: The 25 Minute Style Guide. This is the stitch in time that saves nine (unnecessary stitches). Create a working consistency for your brand and/or product. Includes a link to a Google Slides template you can use.

Book from Donald Norman on Human-Centered Design: The Design of Everyday Things. This was the first book I read about the practice of design and I still think it’s one of the best (possibly the best). Prof. Norman recently revised it and the new edition is even better.

Book from Laura Klein on Lean UX: UX for Lean Startups. If you’d like to hear more from Laura about Lean UX, this is the place.

Book from Edward Tufte on Visual Communication: Visual Explanations. If you’re new to communicating visually, this is an enlightening introduction.

Book from Mike Monteiro on Working as a Designer: Design is a Job. If you work with designers or you yourself work in that role, this is a great book about not only the practice of design, but specifically how designers make themselves effective.

PM, Agile, & IT/Enterprise Software

Tutorial on Alex’s Site: The Enterprise Software Playbook. This page introduces the use of product design and lean concepts for use in enterprise software.

PM, Agile, & Marketing + Sales

Tutorial on Alex’s Site: Growth Hacking Canvas. The Growth Hacking Canvas you saw in the course. This is a good way to discuss the fundamentals of your product/market fit and how to scale it with your marketing team.

Talk at True University: Lars Nilsson on Inside Sales. This a great talk from a seasoned sales executive about how to link product/market fit and Customer Segments to the actual work of a sales team.

Corporate Innovation

Tutorial on Alex’s Site: Growth Hacking Canvas. The Corporate Innovation Canvas you saw in the course. This is a good way to discuss the fundamentals of your company’s innovation goals if you are involved in corporate innovation.

Continuous Delivery and DevOps

Post from Simon Stewart at Google on Testing: Test Sizes. This is the source of the test sizes (small, medium, large) I referenced in the module, and has some background you might find interesting.

Book on Continuous Delivery by Jez Humble and David Farley: Continuous Delivery. This is a thoughtful, systematic, practical introduction to the practice of continuous delivery.

Post by David Heinemeier Hansson on what he calls ‘test-first fundamentalism’: TDD is dead. Long live testing. While many developers benefit from test-driven development (TDD) and advocate its practice, this is perspective you might find interesting, particularly regarding things your team may be grappling with as they consider and refine their practice of TDD.

Post by Kent Beck in response to the above: RIP TDD.

Discussions between Kent Beck, David Heinemeier Hansson, and Martin Fowler on TDD: Is TDD Dead?