Marking time at Zeitspace

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Time is important to us at Zeitspace. It is at many organizations, of course, but it’s part our name, so it had better be important here!

We think about our product development work in many ways. One way is to divide it up into blocks of time during which we’ll execute on it. As we’re an agile organization and use scrum to organize our work, that means working in sprints. We like to use one-week sprints on our projects. The rhythm of planning, executing, and delivering in these one-week cycles is a wonderful experience for all. The uniformity of the time units in this approach is powerful.

We’re also fond of design sprints, which are similarly named but slightly different. While I was in Mountain View recently for the Google Experts Summit I was delighted to learn that the prescriptive one-week durations of the Google Ventures design sprint are relaxed within Google itself. That is, while the stages of the design sprint are critical, the choronological durations are much less so. That means that there’s room for variation in time devoted to the design sprint, which is also powerful.

Today it’s been 30 days since our Hallowe’en Zeitspace launch. Each day has brought some combination of interesting conversations, new insights, exciting opportunities, and more. There’s much to do and, happily for us, time is on our side!

This post originally appeared on the Zeitspace blog.

Sprinting in California

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I’m in Mountain View, California, right now, attending the Google Developer Experts Summit, an annual gathering of, well, Google Developer Experts. (My expertise in this context is, as some readers may guess, in UX.) It’s a chance to meet and learn from the many people who are a part of this global group. One session on the program that I’m excited about in particular is the full day Design Sprint Master Academy that’s happening on day two of the summit tomorrow.

Design sprints have become fairly visible in the last few years, especially the approach used at Google Ventures as outlined in the book Sprint: How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days. While many of the constituent parts have been well known to the broader design and software development communities for years, there’s a real value in the way that they’ve been pulled together into a coherent whole here.

The workshop/academy that I’m attending here is an immersion in the Google approach. It’s being run by Kai Haley, who spoke at Fluxible this past September and also ran a half-day workshop on the same topic. The workshop/academy promises to be good fun, and I’m looking forward to using what I learn here in design sprints with Zeitspace clients.

This post originally appeared on the Zeitspace blog.

Conversations about Zeitspace

Having launched Zeitspace last week, I’m now very much out in the world having conversations with people — friends old and new, past Boltmade clients, past colleagues, and more. It’s great to see and hear how much interest there is in the new company and how much our story resonates with people.

The last few weeks, before and after launch, have been a reminder of just how much detail work there is to be done at the beginning of a new venture. Happily, it’s detail work with a highly motivating purpose, and there haven’t been any major issues. On the contrary, things have gone smoothly so far, and progress has been swift. The response since our Hallowe’en launch has been gratifying, and has provided some emphatic validation that the idea remains a sound one.

All of which makes the conversations that much more fun. Let me know if you’d like to get together and chat.

This post also appears on the Zeitspace blog. Go check it out and follow the company’s adventures!