Blog: The Philosophy of a Red Dot

Upcoming Events

Lean Solutions Summit - September 15th-17th

Rich will be a keynote speaker at the Lean Solutions Summit in Grand Rapids, Michigan happening September 15th-17th!

This year’s theme, "Better Together: People + Innovation," is all about how empowered people and strong systems create meaningful, lasting progress.

Rich's talk, "Winning with Humanity: The Joyful Culture Imperative," will dive into a topic he's been pursuing for the last 25 years: what happens when organizations stop treating people as a variable to manage and start treating them as the point of the whole thing?

We'd love to see you there! You can use this link to learn more and register, and use code Rich100 for $100 off registration. 

Shingo Discover Excellence Workshop (Virtual) - October 7th-8th

We are excited to announce that Menlo will once again be the host site for a virtual Shingo Workshop this fall! Discover Excellence is the two-day, foundational workshop in the Shingo Workshop Series. Through engaging discussions, real world case studies, and virtual Go & Observe tours of Menlo, participants will explore how to align culture, systems, and leadership to create lasting results.

Learn more or register here!

Transparency Works
How openness and communication build success

At Menlo, transparency shows up in a lot of different places. Pay levels of everyone on the team are posted for all to see, team members have visibility into the company's financials and decision making, and quarterly State of the Company meetings allow the Senior Leadership Team to share quarterly and annual goals with the rest of the team.

But you don’t have to be just like Menlo to embrace transparency. We recently read a Forbes article titled “The Case for Transparency in the Workplace, and Its Impact on Organizational Performance,” which explores why transparency is so important for both employees and the business, and offers some simple ways to increase transparency in any workplace.

Why does transparency matter? For starters, it can increase employee engagement and build trust. And when employees and leadership have strong relationships built on trust and understanding, people are much more likely to feel invested in the success of the company. It’s a win-win: employees feel more connected to the work they’re doing, while the business benefits from having an engaged team doing great work.

So, how do you get there? When thinking about how to actually achieve greater transparency, it really comes down to one thing: good communication. Whether it’s giving employees visibility into their own career trajectory, communicating the “why” behind a task, or making sure business goals are clear and aligned, effective communication helps people do their work more effectively, and enjoy the work they’re doing!

If you’re interested in learning more about how you can increase transparency in your own organization, we’d definitely recommend checking out the full article below!

Read the full article here!

Costco Knows Its Customers
How understanding the end user helped Costco succeed

Japan has historically been a tough market for large American retailers, but Costco found a way to succeed where others struggled. When Costco entered the Japanese market in the 1990s, there was plenty working against them, including a spiraling financial crisis and a strong emphasis on local mom-and-pop stores. Other large retailers, including Walmart, ultimately struggled in Japan because they tried to bring their U.S. business models into the market without making enough adjustments for the people they were serving.

Costco took a different approach: they thought about the end user.

They stayed true to what made Costco Costco, including prioritizing American products and their Kirkland Signature brand, but they also paid attention to what Japanese customers wanted. For example, they continued to sell in bulk, but found ways to package some products into smaller portions that could be split among family and friends.

Just like with our High-Tech Anthropology® process, when you take the time to truly understand your user, the outcome is much more successful.
 

Watch the video here!

UX Soup: The UX of Waiting in Transportation

Podcast Hosts: Chris Schreiner and Derek Viita

Recommended by: Angela Jenkins, High-Tech Anthropologist®
 

Listen to the episode here!

For every design and development project, Menlo High-Tech Anthropologists® transform their designs into story cards. Each week, the developers estimate the cards we will propose for prioritization by the project stakeholder. We do this to share context, validate the card, identify risk/complexity, and of course, assign a preliminary cost to completing the functionality. On one of our larger projects, the project stakeholder authorized two pairs of developers to spend 24 hours to estimate a large number of cards to facilitate release planning. This was a rare request and a great opportunity to run a few experiments.

How did we schedule the authorized 24 hours?

We broke it down into six sessions, each being four hours with two pairs of developers. We also made sure no developer would be in back to back sessions, avoiding the repetitive nature of this process. We found this to be very effective. One “shift” of developers would estimate cards from 9am to 1pm (we even fed them!). Then, a second “shift” would estimate from 1pm to 5pm. As facilitators, we saw a lot of benefit from shorter shifts. Developers would have a chance to stop estimating for the day, take a break, and go back to doing development work; meanwhile, two new pairs of developers would come in and we’d continue estimating the next cards.

We realized we hadn’t struck the right balance between discussing the card in depth and providing an estimate. In order to estimate all the currently written cards in the 24 hours, we could only allot 8 minutes to every card discussion and estimation. To accomplish this, we put a countdown timer on the screen, keeping us aware of how long we had discussed each card. The goal of this was not to say “after 8 minutes we must be done,” but to keep our conversations focused on getting an estimate in a timely manner. The timer made it clear to us how much time we had spent conversing. It enabled us to ask, “is this conversation leading us to an estimate?”. We’d keep discussing if it was getting us to the estimate. If we needed more information to provide an estimate, we’d stop and document any questions.  

We ended up getting through roughly 250 cards in the 24 hours we had scheduled, and learned a lot about how we can best run estimation sessions for this project. A successful experiment! 

Have an experiment you'd like featured in the Menlo Bits?
Email us!

Thanks for Playing!

Back in June, we announced we were participating in the Ann Arbor District Library Summer Game, an event that encourages players to get out and explore the Ann Arbor community. We set up a lawn sign overlooking Liberty and Division Streets with our custom code for players to enter to win points and prizes. As the game comes to an end, we wanted to give a shout out to the 350+ visitors that found our code. Thanks for visiting, and we hope all of our readers have had a wonderful summer!