Time to Listen: How Giving People Space Drives Invention and Inclusion

by Indi Young

“If you want to understand people, if you want to serve them, sell to them, work with them… then you have to get good at listening to them . The good news is that you can, and that what you’ll find when you do will exceed your expectations.” —Alexandra Jacoby, Artist and Online Community R&D Product design strategy often seeks first to grow the number of users, and to steer them in ways that benefit the organization. This mindset has driven our organizations into a corner, focused on improving the product. Even when product design teams want to benefit people, they often discover they've harmed people instead by neglecting the diversity of approaches and thinking. In this book, world-class researcher Indi Young teaches you how to listen deeply to help your organization move away from a product-focused strategy toward a measurable strategy centered on people and their purpose. Page by page, Indi explains Across business, education, government, healthcare, and science, better solutions are built from listening. When you recognize diverse perspectives based on peoples’ inner thinking and guiding principles, your team can design solutions that are not just “average,” You will be able to support more people and more thinking styles with solutions that feel uniquely theirs. You will be able to find new opportunities and hidden markets. And most importantly, you will be able to put people and their purpose in the center of your product strategy.

Genres: Design, Communication

301 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 2022

Reviews

[Norbert Boros · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've read many books about design research, but deep listening was totally new for me. I think I learned stuff that I can use in other research areas, not just the deep listening approach itself. It's not an easy book, but worth reading because it differs from any research book available. After I finished the book, I think I understood the method well, and I suppose I can do listening sessions. The only critique I'd like to mention is that the synthesis chapter is not in-depth. I know this is because the book is mainly about the deep listening method, but I think in the real world, it's better if we don't divide the research and synthesis; both are important. But even with this deficiency, Time to listen is one of the best, eye-opening research books these days.