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

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.

Peter Merholz is President and one of the co-founders of Adaptive Path. For more than six years, he has been instrumental in developing the company's world-class consulting, training, and public events. Peter began his work at Adaptive Path with a focus on information architecture, and has since developed expertise in product strategy, user research, and practice development.

Peter's personal blog, http://peterme.com, and his essays for Adaptive Path demonstrate his unique ability to foresee what's coming next in information architecture, organizational change, and product strategy. He has the perhaps dubious distinction of coining the term "blog" in 1999, when blogging was still a nascent genre.

As a design researcher for Adaptive Path, Todd Wilkens has worked on research, strategy, and design projects for a diverse group of clients, from large multi-channel media organizations to Internet startups. He is especially skilled at working with people from different backgrounds to synthesize product, business, technology, and user needs into cohesive strategies and designs.

With academic training in sociology, information science, and computer science, Todd is also well versed in social science theory and a wide-ranging toolkit of research methods from ethnography and interviewing to statistical analysis and eye-tracking. He publishes and speaks regularly on design research and human-centered design.

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 *over * 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 the Technology Advisor for Adaptive Path and the Chief Technical Officer of Emmett Labs. His many years of technical leadership and architecture experience cover a broad range of projects and strategies, including Sun, Java, Oracle, and a variety of open source technologies.

In 2000, David launched the WholePeople.com initiative as part of Whole Foods, Inc. He was also a core developer for CodeZoo.net, a web site for programmers sponsored by O'Reilly Media. He provided essential technical leadership to Measure Map, a free web service (now part of Google) that tracks blogs' traffic stats.