Jared put together an impressive team including a specialist in artificial intelligence. Our value proposition was basically that it would be the “OkCupid for barter,” or in Jared’s words, “a dating site for your shit.” The big idea was that customers could make lists of all the things they had to offer and all the things they wanted. Then, the backend algorithm would match up the appropriate people. The project was ambitious and complicated. Figure 7-5 demonstrates that the transaction flow alone was complex. Figure 7-5. Transaction flow created for TradeYa Then one day, at the beginning of a wireframe review call, Jared told me I had to stop working on the UX. Instead I had to go read the New York Times best seller The Lean Startup. Over two days I listened to the audio version while hiking the Arroyo Seco trails in Pasadena. The concepts in the book jolted me awake to two scary realities. The first was that Jared and my course of action for the product drastically needed to change. This meant I had to throw out or put aside a lot of hard UX work. The second reality was that my practice of UX strategy and design methodology based on the traditional “waterfall” software development model was now outdated. The rules had completely changed: No more working on UX strategy phases geared toward a big 1.0 “launch.” Now, I needed to plan for making small incremental prereleases (MVPs) that articulated different aspects of the UX. No more working in isolation and then just handing off documentation to the team (stakeholders, developers, designers). Now, I needed to continuously collaborate and strategize with them to ensure that the product was released as quickly as possible.