So, design thinking helps us go in and figure out who our users are and then develop empathy for those users, go and actually observe them, see what they do, see what they say they do and see what they actually do. Design thinking is really a human centered approach to design and what the lab does it’s all about discovery, it’s about looking for great ideas and proving that they are actually great ideas. In general what we do in the lab is we start with design thinking. Todd: Tell us a little bit about, because you mentioned Lean Startup and design thinking, maybe tell us a little bit about what each of those is. We started with Agile because that’s stuff that we already knew and Lean principles, but quickly we discovered that Lean Startup was something that made a lot of sense, also something called design thinking makes a lot of sense, when you are searching for innovative ideas, when you are in a very uncertain space, those are very useful, so we have been doing a lot of playing with those. We didn’t quite know where to go at first, and we started to look at what other people were doing and in all directions. Today we have, a year and a half later, we have a team of 14 people and they work as two studios and do some really cool stuff. So, JB hired me as a consultant and then we started hiring some other people, some amazing people. Without all that as a backdrop they decided to experiment with the innovation labs, they went to JB, my friend and said “here’s a room, here’s some money, hire some people, play with some tech and give us some good ideas and we don’t know what that looks like, but we trust you to help us figure out what it looks like”. Their customers are changing really quickly, customers in retail are changing really quickly, what they expect, what they want, they want mobile today, they want different types of service, everything is changing, different competitors, it’s all kinds of stuff. First off, how did that come about as a thing that they were going to want to do and then tell us a little bit about how that works and what that means?Ībout a year and a half ago Nordstrom decided that they wanted to experiment and try an innovation lab. You are involved with Nordstrom Innovation Lab, part of larger Nordstrom organization. That’s how I found myself going with this Agile background, this execution background, in an R&D facility and we started just playing.Ģ. About a year and a half ago I got a call from a friend of a friend who was starting an innovation lab at Nordstrom “I’d love for you to come on and help us out with process, this is a total new experiment, we are not sure where it’s going to go, I know they want to use Lean and Agile principles and go from there”. I started as a developer, writing code, and I still do, I still write code most days, at least every other day and I heard about this thing called Agile and it made a lot of sense, it made much more sense than what I was currently doing at IBM and I just dove into it, joined a company called ThoughtWorks, became a coach there, jumped around a little bit and today I am independent. Can you give us a little bit of background about yourself and how you got from where you started to where you are here and what brings you to Agile 2012 today? We are here at Agile 2012 and you have been talking about a lot of Lean Startup stuff, except you are doing it not in a small start-up organization but you are doing it in a much larger organization. This is Todd Charron, Agile editor at InfoQ and today I am joined by Jeremy Lightsmith.
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