Covid-19 caught most of us unprepared, and we at Remake Labs perhaps more than most. I had spent at least a year prior telling everybody about the power of bringing people into one room for 5 days to solve large problems and test new ideas using a Design Sprint, and now — we couldn’t do that anymore.

As client after client cancelled in those early months, many facilitators and agencies jumped on the Remote Sprint bandwagon, ourselves included. …

I am a Product Designer, and through my agency Remake Labs — a kind of Head of Product for hire. What that means, broadly speaking, is that I am in charge of identifying and distilling customer needs, researching the capabilities of competitors, creating product-market fit, prototyping and testing solutions to see what works, adapting to user feedback, optimizing conversions, and designing the company’s product roadmap.

As a Product Designer, I am almost always the person most obsessed with questions of Conversion, Retention, Growth, CAC (Cost of Acquiring a Customer), and LTV (Life-Time Value). …

The Design Sprint wasn’t designed as a way to improve existing products, but to be the first week in the life of the product. And it is structured that way: expert interviews are relatively open-ended, sketches start from a blank slate, and there is no place for user feedback, analytics, or feature requests to feature. (Unless of course, you count on the experts to talk about these in the interviews.)

At Remake Labs, however, we are sometimes called upon to help bring an existing product to the next level. Perhaps a startup got funded based on initial traction but is struggling with retention. Or perhaps onboarding and educating users were done in a non-scalable, individualized way and now an automated and scalable in-app tutorial and onboarding solution must be put in place. More often than not — the initial version of the product was in the right neighborhood in terms of needs and functionality, but considerable user feedback and analytics produce new learnings that indicate that a significant redesign, refocusing, or re-alignment is necessary. …

[ This post is part of my Spiritual Design series, where I will occasionally share thoughts about how looking at ideas and practices from spiritual traditions through a designer’s eye — can help produce beneficial secular practices for the 21st century. ]

These days, I find myself explaining to coworkers and friends the concept of wuwei (無爲), as a remedy to procrastination, stress at work, and fear of failure. So what is wuwei, and how can a thousands year old Chinese concept help you be productive and build the career of your dreams?

I’ll start with a personal example: A year ago or so, I was working on my MA thesis and getting nowhere. I was stuck. It wasn’t that I wasn’t interested in the topic: I was fascinated. (I’m writing about the meeting place of Buddhist Philosophy and Artificial Intelligence.) It wasn’t that I didn’t have much to say: I actually did. But every time I sat down to write it, I found myself wasting time on endless research, conversations with other people at the library, and reading the news. The focus to sit down and write was just not there — and this lasted for months. …

Boring people are not born boring. They are trained to become conformist by a system that fears change, that pushes towards the mainstream, that teaches one to fear judgement, avoid experimentation, await permission, and value approval over real impact.

In their book Creative Confidence, legendary designers Tom and David Kelley, founders of IDEO, argue that anyone can unleash their creative potential by overcoming fear and bad habits that lead people to doubt themselves and stay in the safe zone.

People get ossified into conformity by negative feedback, fear of failure, over-attachment to a certain fixed image, and self-doubt. But a growing amount of research and literature shows that the most successful companies are successful because they reinvented their market and are able to generate creative strategies. …

If you’ve been awake for the past year, you’ve heard of Marie Kondo, the Japanese home-organizing guru, and her hit Netflix show Tidying Up which features her KonMari method of organization.

There’s a good reason why Marie and her method are a hit. In episode after episode she walks into messy, disorganized, heavy American homes and leaves them lighter, more orderly — and strangely more authentic than they used to be.

There is much to be said for various elements of KonMari, but these 3 elements stand out to me as especially effective:

1. Breaking down large problems to their component parts. KonMari breaks down house organizations into 7 steps — first you tackle clothes, then books, then all paper documents, etc — and finally items of sentimental value. This makes the problem manageable and gives a continuous sense of progression. …

I’ve always fantasized about having a real grownup morning routine. It started in college, many years ago, where I had lived with my first girlfriend in a messy apartment in Haifa. I can barely remember what my routine looked like in those days. But I remember fantasizing about waking up in the morning, and slowly sipping coffee while reading the paper: Adult, unrushed, confident in my place in the world and settled into a comfortable, supportive routine. For years, though, it remained a fantasy.

Mornings hold the greatest promise of any part of our day, but also the greatest peril. As our faculties slowly kick into gear, we are vulnerable to old addictions like social media or obsessive email checking, and what we do in those precious first minutes can either help us connect to our true selves, feelings, and priorities — or throw us deeper into the churn of distraction. …

At Remake Labs, we run many Design Sprints. This brings us into contact with lots of external teams and allows us to observe them as the Sprint process changes the way they’d normally interact. Overall, we’ve found this process to be very conducive to a meritocracy of ideas, and to magnifying often-ignored or silenced voices.

This is a topic I’m very passionate about, and one that I think is an under-appreciated aspect of Jake Knapp and GV’s revolutionary Design Sprint process, especially in cultures like the one I live in where being loud and dominating the conversation can still be mistaken for having the right ideas. …