Other Services
We have other specialty services that we’ve used with past teams as part of their team maturity journey.
Take a look below to understand these specialty services.
Pretotyping and Lean Canvas
As a C-suite executive, an R&D leader, a startup founder, or as an entrepreneur or intrapreneur, how do you know if what you hope to sell really has a market – before you invest thousands (hundreds of thousands, millions) of dollars and lots (months, years) of time in developing a prototype before it’s built? Is there really a way to know?
How can you reduce the chances that your product or service will fail in the marketplace?
Creating a traditional Business Plan means that you’re going out of your way to predict potential success, while having no certainty that your Plan will succeed or fail. Now you can take some of the guesswork out of this process by using Alberto Savoia’s Pretotyping experiments (no, it’s not a typo – we really do mean “Pretotyping”).
With principles tested straight from Google, Tesla, Amazon, Whole Foods, and other great companies, comes Alberto Savoia, Google’s first Engineering Director, and now global leader of the Pretotyping Movement. Alberto used his engineering mindset to successfully develop the now ubiquitous Java programming language at Sun Microsystems, as head of the Google AdWords project— now called Google Ads— at Google, and at his own startups. He succeeded pretty easily and thought he had the magic formula for success – until one day, he didn’t…
We’ll let him tell you about it. He’s as funny as he is smart, so you’ll love laughing and learning along with him.
From that point on, he studied Failure – not because he wanted to fail, but because he desperately wanted to understand it so that he could stay away from it in the future. He couldn’t figure out WHY he and others failed when bringing a product or service to market when they had been so successful with other products – he wanted to study why products failed in the first place.
What he came away with are the principles that have changed market Startup Hypothesis Testing which are set forth in his book, The Right It.
Since that time, there have been many major developments in Pretotyping worldwide, including:
- Lean Startup Guru, Dan Olsen’s Product Management Podcast.
- Exponentially.com Global Australian Pretotyping Expert, Leslie Barry, created an online Pretotyping Class in partnership with Alberto (who acts as an Advisor). Exponentially now runs an international Pretotyping online class. Leslie has kindly offered a 10% discount on his class for people who get into the class from this website link. Use the code cultural-strategies for your discount. Sign up here.
- The Design Sprint Movement is using Pretotyping – with Dallas Design Sprint Owner, Robert Skrobe holding the point position
- And a host of documents shared online that advocates have contributed free of charge or through Creative Commons licenses. Some of them are a Wall Mural by UX Master Certification Designer, Chris Callaghan from McCann Manchester, UK, and an MS Excel document, created by Margaret Ricci of Cultural Strategies, LLC; based on Chris’ Wall Mural, but used for iterative Pretotypes.
- A global following for learning through Alberto’s LinkedIn profile. He teaches many new things every week through his LinkedIn account – please follow him for new information.
We teach Pretotyping principles – how to use them, how to run them, how to capture the metrics and data of them. We also teach how to iterate the tests to make sure you’re building the right things. We love teaching Pretotyping because we know the principles work – we use them ourselves! See our Case Study on this.
Don’t build the Wrong It, build the Right It – where product design meets product need.
Emotional Intelligence
IQ and understanding your strengths are only half of the picture of who you are. But learning about the “you inside” is the beginning of understanding “Us” together. Emotional Intelligence is purely about the “I” – each individual on your team.
Popularized in the 1995 book, Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goleman, EI was one of the first concepts to fully explore how humans behave when we can be attuned to our own emotions, as well as attuned to the emotions of others. From these beliefs come the formation of the “self” concept.
How I see myself,
and how I see myself and others interact together
Together, we learn how our own emotions affect ourselves or the work we do with others. If you are a leader, these are doubly important attributes to learn about yourselves, and the people you lead. We all know leaders who have mastered a few of the five attributes of EI, but there are exceptional leaders among us who have mastered all of them. Jim Collins calls them “Level 5 Leaders” in his book, Good to Great. These are people who know themselves, understand what they contribute to life and to their companies, and are just as compassionate with their fellow teammates, co-workers, and employees, as they are with themselves.
EI is not something we are left with at birth– it is something that we can continue to grow as we learn more about ourselves, the people around us, and about the concepts themselves. It is a developmental journey that we continue to walk as long as we live.