Thomas Essl

I'll dive into what metrics I care about during product development and tell you about lesser-used methods of gathering insights about user behaviour and interactions with your product.

When working out how to organise things and what to call them, Card Sorting offers an easy and rapid research method to ensure that what seems obvious to you is also obvious to your users.

User testing helps you ensure that you're building your product in the right way before you go and actually do it, thus de-risking your work and avoiding wasted effort.

Discovery interviews are a universally useful, flexible, and simple method to understand entire user journeys, build personas, and ground all work that follows.

Every successful product is built around a genuine human need. But you don't need to have an experienced researcher by your side to uncover user insights and guide your human-centred product development. Anyone on a team should know the basics and can even lead successful research sessions. All you need is a few basics to get going.

In this episode, I'll share the few methods that cover the majority of my research needs, and a few guidelines that apply to almost all of them. Get ready and dive in!

When faced with too many opportunities or problems to solve, nothing focuses the mind more than some good old prioritisation and refinement. We'll use a simple prioritisation technique and the Lean Business Canvas to move our project from a range of problems, towards a focused product business.

Too many great projects get stuck at the idea phase - either struggling to focus on one or going with what will turn out to be one that's less than ideal. In this short episode, I share one simple technique that will help you find out where innovation can make a real difference.

Kicking off a mini-series on starting up, before actually doing anything let's be clear on how we want to operate. Principles offer a handy tool to help you keep the eyes on the right ball. Here are seven to get you started.

Stakeholder interviews maybe the first thing to consider on any project. In the second part of a two-part series, I share tried and tested questions to get to unique insights, and explain why they work.

Stakeholder interviews may be the first thing to consider on any project. In this first part of a two-part series, I discuss why you shouldn't miss them and how I structure them.

Discovering that an idea we feel passionate about has already been implemented by someone else can feel like a punch in the gut. But you should not prematurely give up on your idea because of it.

In many industries - from Health to Finance - tech-enabled solutions aim to drive changes in behaviour. Learn what levers you can pull to make this happen effectively.

Surveys are an excellent tool to remotely gather information from a large audience. Done right, they can provide the information you and your team need to make good decisions from engaged respondents who are happy to help you. However, their flexibility opens them up for a number of risks.

In the second episode on this topic, I share my checklist for questions guaranteed to bring you more and better quality results.

Surveys are an excellent tool to remotely gather information from a large audience. Done right, they can provide the information you and your team need to make good decisions from engaged respondents who are happy to help you. However, their flexibility opens them up for a number of risks.

In the first episode on this topic, I share a few general points to help you frame your survey in the right way.

The Head of Design at Publicis Poke talks about how to chose the right side project when confined indoors, how she pushes for a more mindful use of technology, and celebrates the death of User Experience Design.

Weathering a crisis is about more than just nailing your work-from-home setup. Some main challenges lie around connecting with others - especially if working in a collaborative team environment that is suddenly disrupted and dispersed. In this episode, I present 10 tried and tested tips to help you and your team continue to make great impact - even with great distances between yourselves.

User feedback is crucial to help your team to develop your product in the right direction. But it also serves another purpose: To convince others of what you already know. Augmenting quantitative findings with real-life snippets of user feedback makes your points more real and believable and can buy you a ton of support.

When close collaboration in a team becomes a natural part of a team’s culture, ownership and responsibility for the team’s output is shared equally and naturally. This has many benefits, and there are numerous points throughout a project during which you can build towards such a culture.

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. - Let's turn Clarke's third law around and use magic to create a simplified view of a process and identify the right opportunities to focus on.

Competitor research can be an invaluable tool to inform your product strategy. It can also be an utter waste of time. Here are a few points to help you make sure you get ground your activities in a solid understanding of your competitive landscape.

Setting and tracking against quality goals is one of the most important things you might do. Implementing the OKR framework is often attempted but can short of expectations. There are many reasons for this. In this episode, you’ll hear about some common sticking points, and how to fix them.