Jon Kolko > Quotes

“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.”
― Jon Kolko, Thoughts on Interaction Design

“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”
― Jon Kolko, Thoughts on Interaction Design

“When technology changes, tasks usually change, but goals remain constant,” so”
― Jon Kolko, Well-Designed: How to Use Empathy to Create Products People Love

“Great ideas can’t be tested. Only mediocre ideas can be tested.”
― Jon Kolko, Well-Designed: How to Use Empathy to Create Products People Love

“network effect.” Every new person who joins or starts using the service makes it much more valuable to everyone else on the service.”
― Jon Kolko, Well-Designed: How to Use Empathy to Create Products People Love

“Some things get big as people store more data in them; this is called progressive commitment.”
― Jon Kolko, Well-Designed: How to Use Empathy to Create Products People Love

“While designers and developers may be asked to participate in brainstorming activities, their job is frequently prescribed for them: they are handed a specification and told to satisfy requirements that someone else has already defined. I’ve seen talented individual contributors scratching their heads about these requirements, because they are left without a strategic view of how these choices support larger business decisions. They don’t understand why product decisions were made in the first place, and they question the value of particular decisions or an entire strategic approach.”
― Jon Kolko, Well-Designed: How to Use Empathy to Create Products People Love

“A lot of my teammates were excited about building individual things, but I was excited about seeing the pieces come together.”
― Jon Kolko, Well-Designed: How to Use Empathy to Create Products People Love

“Design is about humanizing technology or finding ways for technology to integrate into the fabric of our culture.”
― Jon Kolko, Well-Designed: How to Use Empathy to Create Products People Love

“Today’s designers work to make technology fit appropriately into our human-to-human interactions”
― Jon Kolko, Well-Designed: How to Use Empathy to Create Products People Love

“If it succeeds, great, you have a business. If it fails, you have a great experience and stories to talk about that make you very marketable to teams that need people like you.”
― Jon Kolko, Well-Designed: How to Use Empathy to Create Products People Love

“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.”
― Jon Kolko, Well-Designed: How to Use Empathy to Create Products People Love

“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.”
― Jon Kolko, Thoughts on Interaction Design

“Jon Freach, director of design research at frog design, gave me three reasons why the externalization of data is critical for successful innovations: “First, the physicality of a dedicated room gives the project team a common space to work together in. Second, the room says to the organization, ‘this is important work’ and through its structure conveys an evolving narrative about what the team is learning and making. At any point in time, stakeholders can ‘read the room’ and walk away informed or inspired. The third, and possibly most useful function of a room filled with externalized data, is that it enables forced comparison of information and team dialogue to occur—two critical and often overlooked tools in a designer’s toolbox, both of which are essential to the act of sensemaking.”
― Jon Kolko, Well-Designed: How to Use Empathy to Create Products People Love

“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.”
― Jon Kolko, Well-Designed: How to Use Empathy to Create Products People Love

“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.”
― Jon Kolko, Thoughts on Interaction Design

“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.”
― Jon Kolko, Well-Designed: How to Use Empathy to Create Products People Love

“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.”
― Jon Kolko, Thoughts on Interaction Design

“Modern start-ups like Airbnb and large corporations like JetBlue or Starbucks have proven that industry disruption is possible not by focusing on adding features or merely getting people to buy more, but instead by focusing on providing deep, meaningful engagement to the people who use their products or services. This engagement is achieved by designing products that seem as though they have a personality or even a soul. These products feel less like manufactured artifacts and more like good friends.”
― Jon Kolko, Well-Designed: How to Use Empathy to Create Products People Love

“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.”
― Jon Kolko, Well-Designed: How to Use Empathy to Create Products People Love

“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.”
― Jon Kolko, Well-Designed: How to Use Empathy to Create Products People Love

“That vision is about people and the market. Product management is about ensuring a good fit between a product, a person, and the market.”
― Jon Kolko, Well-Designed: How to Use Empathy to Create Products People Love

“vision led, customer informed.”
― Jon Kolko, Well-Designed: How to Use Empathy to Create Products People Love

“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.”
― Jon Kolko, Well-Designed: How to Use Empathy to Create Products People Love

“Design, however, is frequently a generative activity. Designers consider multiple futures, thinking about different ways that the world might be.”
― Jon Kolko, Well-Designed: How to Use Empathy to Create Products People Love

“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.”
― Jon Kolko, Well-Designed: How to Use Empathy to Create Products People Love

“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.”
― Jon Kolko, Well-Designed: How to Use Empathy to Create Products People Love

“Product development process transitions”
― Jon Kolko, Well-Designed: How to Use Empathy to Create Products People Love

“There are common traits shared by product managers. The idea of control goes out the window. The more tightly a product manager tries to control the situation, the less successful they will be. Another trait is the ability to ask good questions. If you can ask good questions, you can challenge things, because you are thinking deeply about the problem you are trying to solve, not because you are charismatically trying to assert your point of view on the team and on the world.”
― Jon Kolko, Well-Designed: How to Use Empathy to Create Products People Love

“If you have a crazy new approach or idea for something, you can’t measure it. I like this quote from George Lois, one of the first ad men, in 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. If we made decisions purely based on numbers, we would have quit. The numbers for many months told us to quit, to work on something else, because this idea was not going to take off. We don’t always make decisions based on numbers.”
― Jon Kolko, Well-Designed: How to Use Empathy to Create Products People Love