Well-Designed: How to Use Empathy to Create Products People Love

The book is about how to approach product management by shifting the focus from features, to the emotional value that your product provides.Beyond the introduction, each chapter combines three narrative approaches:- The story of a fictional PM that wants to create a product related to health and fitness.- The "hands on" explanation of each phase of product design.- Interviews with PMs of different companies.That structure is well balanced: the fictional story serves as a way to organize the book into the different phases of product design; the explanation is right to the point, and the interviews are really interesting (I got good insights from them, so reading only the "hands on" part will give you a partial picture).Any critique about the book? Well I love it, but nothing is perfect. The last part of the book: about planning how to build your product... well there are others books dedicated to that particular area; and in this book I found it to be just "ok". For the build planning part with a UX perspective, take a look also to User Story Mapping by Jeff Patton.

This is the best book on design thinking. Jon Kolko is a master at explaining this concept.

For a new business this book can be very useful. It helps one to think deeply about the product or. Service one is considering to provide, how that will benefit and impact customer. This can really help one to plan better through empathy.

I have read almost 10 related books trying to get enough practical advice to lead efforts to journey map and start designing products and services with a more customer centric approach. This is the only book that articulates a the clear, simplified approach that we have been able to actually use without a lot of expensive consultants implementing a seemingly complex process to better understand our customers.

Great book. Inasmuch as its about design thinking, it did not really talk much about empathy. But a good book on product design and the interviews are eye opening.

This is the first book I’ve owned where I actually wanted to highlight the pages and steal some passages to pass off as brilliant quotations of my own. Great introduction to design thinking!

It's THE book for anyone in product management or for anyone who wants to learn about product management. It provides the framework needed to not only create value, but to understand why you are creating the value in the first place. Humanizing the product or service is a key element that this book delves deeply into. The What, Who and most importantly, Why, are discussed in great length with plenty of stories shared by thought leaders and product experts regarding how they have perfected the design thinking mindset and succeeded in the marketplace. This will be a required book for my product-centric Introduction to Marketing course.

Well - Designed covers the core of Design thinking, practices and the ethos of a movement that is challenging just about every business and industry. Kolko's book is recommended for executives looking to understand what Design is all about, why its important and why it is different from being easy to use or other customer buzzword trends. This book combines a designers view on products and design in the future with a more practical illustration and approach.The book breaks down the product design process into a set of easy to understand an actual process in six simple chapters.Chapter 1 - By DesignCovering issue like the scope of the product, the role of the designer, design thinking and design in product management.Chapter 2 - Product-Market Fit: Finding Broad AppealFocusing on re-defining the nature of the market based on experience and empathy along with how that reality changes market definitions.Chapter 3 - Behavioral Insights: identifying latent needs and desiresHow do you organize and observe human behavior and incorporate those insights into new products and experiences.Chapter 4 - Product Strategy: sketching a playbook for emotional valueGetting what seems to be qualitative input and insight into a structured process and set of investmentsChapter 5 - Product Vision: crafting the product detailsDiscusses how you move from ideas into product designs and deliveryChapter 6 - ShippingCovers the use of product road maps in mobilizing, testing and learning which are critical aspects of a digital future.StrengthsThe story within the story of a new designer working at a new company launching a health and wellness app. This story works in much the same way as it does in Goldratt's The Goal. It brings the storyline and ideas together and provides an end to end example of the cases and ideas in the book.The case examples are clear and well articulated.The ideas and particularly the examples are well illustrated and laid out.ChallengesMost books about design tend to celebrate the 'designer' as the new leader of the organization and economy. Well Designed adheres to this trend with interviews with designers who have started up their own companies. Executives may find these interviews a little self serving and less accessible than the rest of the book.Design books can easily take on a preaching tone as if everything that went before them was bad and only with design will things get good. This book has some touch of this, but Kolko is far from being a design bigot.

Received in perfect condition.

El libro es una maravilla, excelente contenido, y llego en tiempo y forma

Great deal for a book I really needed. Excellent condition!

Good one to read

This book presents a thorough and thoughtful approach to product design as it applies to software, a discipline that is still very much in its infancy.