8. What is your secret weapon or go-to technique for devising strategies or building consensus on a shared vision? Doing the right research, talking to the right kinds of folks, asking them the right kinds of questions, and observing the right kinds of behavior that can be analyzed and appropriately inform strategy and delivery. It’s hardly a secret weapon; a lot of people do it. Are you identifying your prospective audience appropriately so that your research participants are the kind of people who are going to engage once you have a product in the market? Are you asking the right questions? Observing the right behaviors? Probing them appropriately? You’re not just asking dumb questions. You’re allowing them to be who they are, but also recognizing you can’t do a purely anthropological study that can take months. So, to the degree that you’re forcing things, you’re forcing things appropriately, you’re getting the right stuff out of it. Are you then analyzing the results in meaningful ways so that you can develop appropriate insights? I’m a fan of personas as developed by Alan Cooper (see Chapter 3). I don’t use them all the time, but when I do I like to study a full spectrum of user behavior. When I have the opportunity to look at the data from numerous user research interviews, I can identify the salient behaviors that stand out. 9. What is a business case or anecdotal story that you can share that walk us through the steps you have to go through when conducting strategy specifically for an innovative product? For my last Adaptive Path project, we worked for a big global media brand client. We worked on its ecommerce platform — its online store. So, the strategy process began with research. This was a children’s media brand, so the research involved mainly moms. We did a lot of in-home interviews, talked to moms about buying stuff for their children, and focused mostly on gifting because of the nature of this brand. It wasn’t bought everyday. It was bought for special occasions. So we took that research and analyzed it. We didn’t create personas for this project; we created profiles, very similar to personas but different. A persona is a face with a name you give it, and it’s meant to be a specific individual. Profiles are more categorical. We broke up these moms into four or five profile types. We had the mom who’s still a kid at heart and loves the stuff herself as much as the kids love it; we had the mom who’s more of the “I want to be an educator. I’m buying this stuff so I can create