"Don't worry about edge cases or errors, this is an MVP" is a very dangerous line of thought that I usually hear from people used to designing for stakeholder demos, rather than production releases.
A demo for a stakeholder, especially a "user proxy", is a very different path from normal use. Any scenario has to contrive a path through every single one of the stakeholder's pet features, so usually it's a checklist approach instead. "We added XYZ like you asked, see?"
In reality, the "as a user I want to use X feature" user story doesn't cut the mustard - and without designing for plausible scenarios, the product ends up being entirely unusable.

If you're not designing for recovery from exceptions, you're not designing a viable product.
There's another type of stakeholder who will refuse to move ahead until the first release covers every use case, which is a great way to never release. A solid scenario helps choose the right end-to-end paths to cover to provide value to some people in a reasonable time frame.

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More from @PavelASamsonov

26 May
When the PM insists that everything needs to go above the fold Image
When the ease of completing a task is measured only in the number of clicks required Image
When the developers insist that the bug is an edge case and doesn't need to be solved before the release
Read 19 tweets
7 Apr
The business: hey we need you to draw some wireframes for this engagement

Me: Do we have a scope for the problem? How are the user's existing tools failing them? Are we resourced to answer these questions?

The business: nah it's ok they can be low fidelity wireframes
Design artifacts are not the deliverable. They just document the design decisions, and design decisions must be rooted in user research.

If you can't draw a direct line from the artifact to how the decisions it documents will be informed, you won't produce anything of value.
Before someone sets pencil to paper, it's really easy to think you have something while remaining pleasantly vague. Only when you need to render the artifact do you realize that there's no there there. It's up to the designer to say "hang on, I can't do anything with this."
Read 12 tweets
5 Apr
When you're going over the research notes and then the conceptual model clicks into place
Explaining to the client that the conceptual model actually makes sense from the user's point of view
Wait hang on, it wasn't a breakthrough, I just re-invented the to do list app.
Read 5 tweets
5 Apr
Product ownership is an interesting challenge - you want to limit WIP and avoid context switching, but you can't just laser focus on building and neglect caretaking.
This is why trying to develop many new things in parallel doesn't work, and why single threaded leadership is so effective. Without consciously attending to all the dimensions of the product, you'll build an unstable tower that is constantly collapsing.
This model also shows why focusing on outcomes is more important than outputs. The second approach looks tempting from a feature factory perspective, but if you have visibility into outcomes, the work in the first approach becomes just as meaningful.
Read 5 tweets
10 Feb
THE CUSTOMER

is an anagram of

UTTER SCHMOE
DEVELOPMENT TEAM

is an anagram of

MEET, MVP DONE LATE
USER STORIES

is an anagram of

ISSUES RETRO
Read 15 tweets
28 Jan
One of the most important Enterprise design tools you can learn is PowerPoint
This is not (just) my usual spiel about most visual tools being merely documentation - if you don't know how to make your decks look good, it'll be rough to get your ideas across.

PowerPoint can do almost everything InDesign can do. Take advantage of it.
Being a great speaker with pretty, TED-style full bleed image slides won't help you when an exec asks you to email them your deck.

Being able to comp beautiful presentation layouts in Photoshop or Figma won't help you when an exec asks you to email them your deck.
Read 7 tweets

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