Clubhouse’s product strategy, interaction model, OKRs, opportunities & threats, and business model recommendations
Disclaimer: Opinions expressed are solely my own and do not express the views or opinions of my employer.
If you are new to this publication, welcome! I am a venture designer and a product strategist, currently working at PwC Labs. I help venture teams develop and commercialize what start out as experimental concepts. I hope to share in this publication what I learned about incubating products within corporate environment.
It all starts somewhere…
What does a product concept experience from value proposition to business model? What artifacts need to be created in this process?
In this article, I share an approach to creating an…
Measuring the business value of an idea without perfect information is venture design.
Disclaimer: Opinions expressed are solely my own and do not express the views or opinions of my employer.
Assessing the business value of early-stage ideas is a big part of my job. A product concept can be evaluated in many ways. While UX people prefer to use qualitative data (usually nicely organized in what we call “value proposition canvas”) to communicate the human-centered value of a concept, business folks prefer to see numbers.
As someone bridging the two groups, I see tremendous value in understanding how a dollar amount is “assigned” to a concept. …
How to understand ethics and take action to reduce ethical risks in product development?
Disclaimer: Opinions expressed are solely my own and do not express the views or opinions of my employer.
Ethics is an abstract and broad topic that has been discussed for thousands of years in the academic field. It has recently been pushed to the forefront of attention due to the rise of AI.
Many digital product creators heard terms like data ethics, ethical AI, responsible design… daunting and exciting as they might sound, very few product people know how to embed product ethics in their daily job.
Ethical risk is one of the five types of risk, as Marty Cagan…
Skills you need to become a venture designer, and beyond.
Disclaimer: Opinions expressed are solely my own and do not express the views or opinions of my employer.
If the practice of venture design sounds interesting to you, you might wonder — what do you need to know to become a venture designer?
For the past 4 years building venture products, I picked up skills that I didn’t expect to. These skills were sporadic and incoherent at the beginning. Learning them seemed to be a reaction to a situation — a need to solve a problem. …
Introducing the discipline of venture design.
Disclaimer: Opinions expressed are solely my own and do not express the views or opinions of my employer.
I have been working with venture teams for more than two years at PwC New Ventures. Although I was informed I would be working with ventures during the job interviews (which was why I picked the job), little did I know that I would get so deep into a field now called venture design.
After prototyping and experimenting with numerous ventures, and witnessing ventures succeed and failed, I develop my theory about venture design.
In this…
Human-Centered Pricing (1/3) — What is value, how to decompose it, what are the characteristics of an Internet product, and how to measure its value？
Disclaimer: Opinions expressed are solely my own and do not express the views or opinions of my employer.
Previously I wrote a post about calculating ROI of an AI concept, and showed an approach to calculate the value created by a concrete product idea. But what if we need to measure the value created by early concepts, something not launched in the market yet and not used by anyone? How much can we sell an idea for? Does that value change as the concept evolves? What’s the best pricing strategy to use?
Product valuation is no trivial matter. I have…
How great product experience supports Calendly’s growth into a 3 billion dollar startup.
A fantastic UX can be great in many different ways. Yet, a financially successful business always has its UX done right at the strategic level.
As someone who lives and breathes interviews and enjoys connecting with others, I benefited a lot from Calendly as a freemium, leisure user. Calendly has done many things right — brand positioning, value proposition, go-to-market strategy, product onboarding, UX design, visual design…
I am particularly impressed by how Calendly manifests its message, brand, and value through UX design. I’d like to share an appreciation of Calendly’s product design from these 3 angles.
What is UX?…
Embracing the learning mindset as a venture designer.
Disclaimer: Opinions expressed are solely my own and do not express the views or opinions of my employer.
Venture building is about learning, but how do you know what you need to learn to begin with?
I mentioned in my first article that venture designers spend a lot of time doing non-design activities. Building tools to learn what nobody knows is one of them.
In this article, I will not only share mindsets and tools I use, but also a detailed approach to building the most important learning tool — a product’s OKR system. …
Being data proficient is no longer optional for an intelligent product designer. How do we start and which direction should we go? Here’s what a data proficiency model for intelligent product designers would look like.
Where My Interests Meet
Back in college, I studied two seemingly unrelated subjects: mathematics and psychology. I enjoy exploring the inner workings of humans and machines equally, but I struggled to fit my two disparate interests in one career. I had to make a choice: data science, or user experience design.
Fortunately, if one is in a similar situation today, he/she won’t have to pick. One can be an intelligent product designer. An intelligent product designer designs for systems that exhibit a certain degree of artificial intelligence.
Many have discussed what an intelligent designer is and the roles it plays. In this article, I…
I come up with a Voice UX approach after studying conversational UI for a month. I share it in a case study with plenty examples.
As a product designer who’s thrilled with the rise of voice-driven experience design, I couldn’t help myself or stop my impulse to design an Alexa skill any more.
Two weeks ago, I designed an Amazon skill for Laundroom, a cross-platform service that helps college students with completing laundry duty. I initiated the Laundroom project back in 2016. …
Fergie Leung
De-dimensionalizing what I learned as a venture builder & product strategist. LinkedIn@fergieleung
