Subject to Change: Creating Great Products & Services for an Uncertain World

Peter Merholz is President and one of the founders of Adaptive Path. For more than six years, Peter has been instrumental in developing Adaptive Path's ability to provide world-class consulting, training, and public events.At Adaptive Path, Peter began with a focus on information architecture, and over time expanded his knowledge to include product strategy, user research, and practice development. He's worked with a wide variety of clients, from large companies such as Intel, Vanguard, and United Airlines, to smaller, avant-garde firms like SocialText (an enterprise wiki startup) and Rojo (an RSS feedreader acquired by Six Apart).Peter's personal blog, peterme.com/, and his essays for Adaptive Path demonstrate his foresight on issues of informationarchitecture, organizational change, and product strategy. He has the perhaps dubious distinction of coining of the term "blog" in 1999 when it was still a nascent genre.Brandon Schauer is an experience design director for Adaptive Path. He speaks on, writes about, and practices design as a means to create value. He has a decade of experience developing new user experiences on the Web, desktops, and products. His passion for finding and understanding the unmet needs of customers has led him to diverse environments, from the homes of cancer patients to tunnels beneath Walt Disney World.Brandon holds two master-level degrees from schools with the Illinois Institute of Technology, a Master of Design from the Institute of Design in Chicago and an MBA from the Stuart School of Business. Brandon also has a love of Excel that is unnatural for a designer.David Verba is Director of Technology for Adaptive Path, a leading user experience company. His many years of technical leadership and architecture experience cover a broad range of projects and strategies.David brings 15 years of development experience with both open source and more traditional technologies to Adaptive Path. In addition to the typical mix including Sun, Java, and Oracle he has many years of involvement with a variety of open source approaches including linux, perl, apache, mysql, postgres and now ruby and ruby on rails.He launched the WholePeople.com initiative as part of Whole Foods Inc and was a core developer for CodeZoo.com, an O'Reilly and Associates web product. He also provided necessary technical leadership to the Measure Map product acquired by Google.Todd Wilkens is the design researcher for Adaptive Path. Thanks to over a decade of experience in research and design he holds a passionate belief that focusing on and truly understanding people allows us to create products and services that provide compelling experiences and real value.Todd's work has focused on everything from online communities to digital video to youth, religion, and culture. He is adept at working with people from different backgrounds to synthesize product, business, technology, and user needs into cohesive strategies and designs. He is also well-versed in social science theory and a wide-ranging toolkit of methods from ethnography and interviewing to statistical analysis and eye-tracking. He publishes and speaks regularly on design research and human-centered design generally. He also teaches courses and workshops in design research, interaction design, information architecture, and sociology at at professional events as well as at several universities and colleges.

To achieve success in today's ever-changing and unpredictable markets, competitive businesses need to rethink and reframe their strategies across the board. Instead of approaching new product development from the inside out, companies have to begin by looking at the process from the outside in, beginning with the customer experience. It's a new way of thinking-and working-that can transform companies struggling to adapt to today's environment into innovative, agile, and commercially successful organizations.Companies must develop a new set of organizational competencies: qualitative customer research to better understand customer behaviors and motivations; an open design process to reframe possibilities and translate new ideas into great customer experiences; and agile technological implementation to quickly prototype ideas, getting them from the whiteboard out into the world where people can respond to them.In Subject to Change: Creating Great Products and Services for an Uncertain World, Adaptive Path, a leading experience strategy and design company, demonstrates how successful businesses can-and should-use customer experiences to inform and shape the product development process, from start to finish.

Introduction