Quotes from Jon Kolko

What many refer to as intuition, then, is not the untaught or unteachable but instead is a learned understanding and respect of process, molded by experience and refined over a great deal of time and practice.

Hidden in the physical work space, in the user's words, and in the tools they use are the beautiful gems of knowledge that can create revolutionary, breakthrough products or simply fix existing, broken products. People do strange things - unexpected things - and being there to witness and record these minute and quick moments of humanity is simply invaluable

When technology changes, tasks usually change, but goals remain constant," so

Great ideas can't be tested. Only mediocre ideas can be tested.

The "product requirements document," for example—a leftover artifact from the 1980s—still seems to find its way into product development meetings, and those same meetings seem to spin endlessly around arguments about features, alignment, and time-to-market.

vision led, customer informed.

Esquire magazine: "Great ideas can't be tested. Only mediocre ideas can be tested." It sums up how I feel about trying to measure radical ideas. You simply can't. You can't apply data to see if you should do a radical idea. You do the radical idea, and then you measure how it worked.

Interaction Designers, however, are required to balance issues of form with issues of time: An interaction occurs in the fourth dimension, and simply attending to aesthetics does not take into account the unfolding experience that a user has with a product.

In many ways, the role of design in a corporation has shifted dramatically from one of craftsmanship—making artifacts—to one of facilitation—or driving an agenda. Designers find themselves operating in a space between project manager and consensus driver—and that's not a particularly creative or invigorating place to be. For those who end up in this role, the following may offer guidance to rekindle the creative embers that are beginning to burn out.

As a software developer writes a function, she commits to a strategy and a series of steps, and in doing so she eliminates other strategies or steps.

Design, however, is frequently a generative activity. Designers consider multiple futures, thinking about different ways that the world might be.

But you don't want a retrospective, and you really don't want a summary. You want a rich, cohesive, detailed, and real view into the person's personal life or job.

Product managers are responsible for articulating a vision for the product and ensuring that those who do build the product are working to achieve that vision.

That vision is about people and the market. Product management is about ensuring a good fit between a product, a person, and the market.

Design is about humanizing technology or finding ways for technology to integrate into the fabric of our culture.

designers conceive of what does not yet exist, their process cannot be analytically proven until after the fact. That means that they must make intuitive or inferential leaps.

the design process is one that must accept innovation risk. Innovation risk is the chance that a new product, system, or service may fail. The larger the risk, the larger the reward. Similarly, the larger the innovation risk, the deeper the repercussions of failure.

Product development process transitions

Today's designers work to make technology fit appropriately into our human-to-human interactions

Product management, both in the context of a physical consumable and in the context of a digital product, is the process by which a product comes to life and the process by which it achieves and maintains success. It's not project management.

network effect." Every new person who joins or starts using the service makes it much more valuable to everyone else on the service.

Some things get big as people store more data in them; this is called progressive commitment.

Interaction Design is the creation of a dialogue between a person and a product, system, or service. This dialogue is both physical and emotional in nature and is manifested in the interplay between form, function, and technology as experienced over time.