Hallway Studio

How to avoid a $32M flop: Inside the Hertz-Accenture Lawsuit

Last week, Hertz sued former marketing partner Accenture LLP for failing to deliver a promised redesign of their website and mobile apps. While the complaint is still in dispute, companies can learn from what we know about this alleged breach of contract. Where does a big project like this go so wrong it ends up in a […]

My favorite posts of 2016

2016 was a big year for me. I was asked to lead and transform the Product Consulting team at 3Pillar. It’s been great to bring such a talented, adaptable and fun group of people together and learn from them. Here are a few of my favorite posts from this year: Determining the First Release The […]

How to run a customer test in 10 minutes

Swirl

I mentor with 1776, a DC area incubator, and in a recent conversation the member was asking about feedback. He told me that he was sending links out to a prototype and hoping to receive good stuff back. I told him I was concerned with this approach because he was : Missing the gut reaction […]

Getting to Meaningful Feedback

arc

I’ve spent this year getting feedback from small business owners, high school students, doctors, entrepreneurs and bankers. Every few months I start working with a new group of customers and every few months I have experiment and learn how to get meaningful feedback. When you are just getting started the feedback you get might not be that […]

If you want to run a good customer test, ask these quesitons

learn

When I’m planning a test with my teams these are the questions that we ask ourselves. It really helps us to focus our efforts in planning, recruiting and creating a a prototype or other artifact to test. What do we want to learn? This is the best place to start and should drive the answers […]

Getting the Most out of Prototyping

Productsketches

This was originally published on the 3Pillar Global website and has been republished with permission.  Prototyping is a great way to test ideas and assumptions, but you have to be smart about what to prototype and how much time and effort you want to put into it. Resources can be tight so you want to […]

The scrappy guide to customer development recruiting

AbstractTargets

If you want to build a product that people want, you need to talk and test with people, lots of people and on a regular basis. This is going to take a serious, ongoing recruiting effort. Sometimes you can buy your way out of this problem by using a vendor. But money and time are not […]