The two most important articles I read this year

Two schools that fascinate me and that I have been lucky enough to be involved with are Design Thinking and Agile Development. These pieces, featured below, are perhaps a perfect representation of their practice at work.

The first, from Fast Company Labs, is an interview of Gentry Underwood, founder of Mailbox. Mailbox was acquired somewhat famously by Dropbox earlier this year. What is amazing about Mailbox to me is the fact that it is a. friggin. email. app. That they were able to create such a novel product, subsequent buzz, and nice acquisition is testament to the fact that there was some seriously brilliant problem solving going on behind the scenes. The method at work is Design Thinking, and Gentry leaves no doubt of it's influence over him and his work.

Mailbox's Gentry Underwood: What Hackers Should Know About Design Thinking
http://www.fastcolabs.com/3008886/open-company/mailboxs-gentry-underwood-what-hackers-should-know-about-design-thinking
 
 

The second is actually a radio show from NPR called Here's The Thing, hosted by Alec Baldwin. This episode is an interview with Lorne Michaels, executive producer and creator of Saturday Night Live, one of the most important and influential TV shows of all time. In this interview Lorne sheds some light into how they are consistenly able to deliver the laughs, week after week, year after year.  He doesn't use the word "Agile" once, and I can guarantee you he has never written one line of code in his life, but the parallels between the way he runs his show and Agile Development are uncanny.  

Here's The Thing with Alec Baldwin: Lorne Michaels
http://www.wnyc.org/story/182698-lorne-michaels/

 
These interviews are not just super interesting but also sticky. I hope they can be as useful to you as they were to me.

image credits: Stanford Design School & Vanity Fair