Author Archives: Aaron Sanders

Consequences of Thinking, Fast and Slow on Teaching

Here’s another post in the series of how the book Thinking, Fast and Slow has made an impact on me. This time, I’d like to concentrate on the consequences I see for teaching classes. For starters, I’m glad to see that the book compliments the things I learned from Sharon Bowman’s Training from the Back of the Room, as well as from Chip and Dan Heath’s book Made to Stick.

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Describing Agile Product Discovery

Agile product discovery works in tandem with delivery. The best effect comes when it includes the whole team, is done deliberately and continuously. The video includes the common roles, artifacts and ceremonies involved in discovery. While this is the first of many iterations to come, I hope you enjoy! What questions do you have, or feedback you would like to provide?

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How to start discovery on your Scrum team

How do you get started with discovery on your Scrum team? Participants learn how to improve practices like user research and interviews, persona sketching, design studio, prototyping and story mapping by actively using them in a class. At the end of the class, participants see a different way of working. Then the discussion turns to something like- While this is undoubtedly is a better way to work, it’s so different than what we do today. How can we do this stuff where we work? How do you get started?

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Consequences of Thinking, Fast and Slow on User Interviews

This is the first (second?) post on a series on how my coaching and training style may change, based on the book Thinking, Fast and Slow.

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What are you passionate about?

At Rally, Tim asked me this in my interview. And as we went through a recent company retreat, Jeff asked me this a few times. Here’s my answer. Continue reading

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Consequences of Thinking, Fast and Slow – Blog Series

Have you read the book Thinking, Fast and Slow? Getting asked that occasionally I did little more that watch a video of it from AsapSCIENCE), so that I could nod vaguely as the person who asked me talked about it. Picking it up more than a couple of years after its release I made my way through it all, pausing frequently. Pausing because it’s information dense and I needed to process what I was reading. And as I processed, it made me think about what it means for how I teach and coach people.

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Northern Thailand – Nov 18 to Dec 5

We’d been on our Thailand adventure for 17 days, and finally cracked open the laptop to talk about it. It’s about as difficult as crossing a busy street in Bangkok to stop long enough to try and get this posted. While we address where we’ve been, there are some curiosities we haven’t addressed, such as: why do they sell pork at buddhist temples? do monks wear underwear? why are cat tails cut in half? can more than five people fit on a scooter? Check out our photo stream on flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/neokiwi/ that seems about as easy to update as eating … Continue reading

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dual track Scrum in brief

Coining the term “dual track” Desireé Sy‘s Adapting Usability Investigations for Agile User-centered Design(pdf) (2007) might be one of the first examples drawing out and labeling a process knows as dual track Scrum and stating, Although the dual tracks depicted (…) seem separate, in reality, interaction designers need to communicate every day with developers. This is not only to ensure that designs are being implemented correctly, but also so that we have a thorough understanding of technical constraints that affect design decisions

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my PADI contained water diving skills experience

After a round of mini-partner yoga at the beach, we checked in to our Venice Beach place. Studying and taking quizzes for a few hours, we took our final exam around 11 at night to finish the classroom portion of the PADI open diver qualification. Getting an 85% on the exam (Erica got 92%), we fell asleep around midnight.

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Initial PADI eLearning for Open Water Diver Course Experience

Looking to get the classroom and contained dives completed before leaving for Thailand, I found Eco Dive Center’s PADI Open Water REFERRAL Course. This fits in to our travel schedule and is the same price as the eLearning offered alone by PADI.

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