How to kill a bad idea workshop at Thoughtbot Summer Summit

I had the pleasure of running a workshop at Thoughtbot's Summer Summit on how to kill a bad idea.

How to kill a bad idea workshop at Thoughtbot Summer Summit
Written By:
Categories:
Holly Hester-Reilly
Holly Hester-Reilly

This was originally posted on August 19, 2017.

Yesterday I had the pleasure of running a workshop at Thoughtbot's Summer Summit.

Thoughtbot

Thoughtbot is one of my favorite design and development shops, because they are creative, smart people who are great at applying modern best practices like design sprints, design thinking, agile, and extreme programming to build products for their clients. We used them when we were getting Shutterstock Editor going and they brought a lot of value to the team.

So I was thrilled to have the opportunity to talk with them about how to persuade key stakeholders to pivot or even kill an idea. We did exercises around about empathizing with stakeholders; quantifying the product opportunity; selecting key outcomes, core behaviors, and key metrics; and focusing research by talking about initiatives' risks ahead of time.

It's not enough to be right. You also have to be persuasive.

I'll be expanding on this to offer a public workshop in October. Contact me or sign up for my newsletter if you want to be among the first to know when tickets are available!

More Posts
The Ben Foster Hypothesis: High-Growth Product Leaders Set a Clear Vision and Push Authority Down to the Teams

The Ben Foster Hypothesis: High-Growth Product Leaders Set a Clear Vision and Push Authority Down to the Teams

Ben Foster, Chief of Product at GoCanvas and the founder of Prodify, a product management consultancy shares where he thinks the industry is headed today, and what he looks for when he’s interviewing for a new position.

The Dave Chan Hypothesis: We Are All Designers

The Dave Chan Hypothesis: We Are All Designers

Dave Chan, a senior product designer at Adobe, explains why the best teams integrate design from the start.

Product School Talk: How to Make Data-Informed Product Decisions by Shutterstock PM

Product School Talk: How to Make Data-Informed Product Decisions by Shutterstock PM

Even teams that think of themselves as data driven can get caught up on the wrong metrics, bias their research, or get confused by seemingly conflicting feedback from users. How do you navigate these challenges to create products that drive the business outcomes they are charged with?