Everyone wants to build the digital products of the future that are used and loved by customers. But what makes some products thrive and others die? What principles do sticky products follow? And is there something – really anything – that makes products just a little bit more sticky?

In 2009, Tim Brown published his now famous book “Change by Design”. His idea: Design strategies and techniques can be used at every level of business. In 2018, Design Thinking has become a methodology and is used for innovative activities by project teams around the world.

We explore: How can design thinking help you when you are building new products? What strategies can you use? And how can you integrate Design Thinking into agile software development?

Jake Knapp’s sprint concept and his book “Sprint: How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in just Five Days” are used in teams all over the world and has become a staple in agile process management. The idea is to explore new ideas, prototype, and get new things off the ground in a limited time and without making huge investments.

We take a look at Jake Knapp’s famous sprint concept and take you through his design of a sprint week, from planning to prototyping and testing.

Ready for a sprint? 🙂

Everyone wants to get more done in less time. However, that is not what Greg McKeown’s New York Times bestseller book “Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less” is about. It is rather a book about getting the right things done and focusing on the things that are essential while eliminating the clutter.

In the last few weeks, we covered productivity and communication topics here on our blog and asked how they can be applied to working together with your dev team.

In this article, we want to take a look at the tipsMcKeown’s is suggesting and ask how they can work when you are building digital products with your dev team.

Happy reading!

Our communication is becoming more visual every day. We send emojis, gifs, pictures. We Instagram, Snapchat, or use the latest Facebook Filters to add some visual elements to our video chats. Visual communication is everywhere – and it’s faster, more effective, and fun.

Business communication is not exempt from integrating visual elements and from giving everyone more and more opportunities to communicate visually. From Trello boards to Basecamp organization to our very own Usersnap (a visual communication tool for web developers – check it out!) visual communication is everywhere!

Why should you care? And why should you make sure to integrate visual communication into your daily work? We have 4 reasons for you to make you love visual communication even more! 😍

Communication is a key strength that is required no matter what you do for a living. Since tech companies have defined the “team” as the basic unit of an organization, communication skills take on a new significance.

However, not every developer possesses the same skills, when it comes to communicating ideas, exchanging feedback, and articulating thoughts on a new product update or feature.

In this article, we are looking at ways to improve communication for your dev team and show how visual communication can help you not only communicate faster and more effectively, but also in a way that’s fun.

Everyone knows about the 80/20 rule. Here’s how Richard Koch defines it in his book “The 80/20 principle”:

“The 80/20 Principle asserts that a minority of causes, inputs, or effort usually lead to a majority of the results, outputs, or rewards. Taken literally, this means that, for example, 80 percent of what you achieve in your job comes from 20 percent of the time spent.”

In his book, Koch illustrates in which areas the 80/20 principle holds true and how to use it to optimize work. Koch’s 80/20 rule goes back to the “Pareto Principle”, named after economist Vilfredo Pareto. It states – like the 80/20 rule – that 20 percent of the input is responsible for 80 percent of the results.

However, you might think that in our highly competitive world, achieving 80 percent is not enough. Sometimes, it seems that with growing customer expectations, giving 100 percent is just barely okay.

So how can you motivate your product team to go the last mile? How do you instill a culture of curiosity and learning?

Or in other words: What does it take, to make your team go the last 20 percent?

Here are our 6 practical approaches.

Teams have become the fundamental unit of an organization. That’s the reason why there has been a lot of research on how to improve team culture, collaboration, and communication. The question is no longer around what individuals can do, but how they can work together. Especially when it comes to web development projects, teamwork is key. In this article, we want to spotlight a few things that the best teams get right.

We take a look at three critical things: 1) communication, 2) culture of learning, and 3) psychological safety. Our goal is to provide a few tips of actionable advice so you can work better after reading this. Better as a team, of course.

One of the most common questions I get asked is this:

“Which programming languages should I learn in 2018?”

It’s a valid question, but it’s difficult to answer without knowing more about you and what you want to achieve.

It depends on…

• What is your current web development knowledge?
• What is the purpose of you studying programming?
• How much time do you have available?
• Do you want to work for yourself or for a company?
• Do you prefer frontend or backend?
• How much are you willing to invest in learning?

In our post about the “Best Programming languages for 2017” over 10,000 readers voted for their favorite language. Here are the results (Don’t worry: You get to vote this year, too. Just scroll to the end of the post 😉)