Time to Listen

“If you want to understand people, if you want to serve them, sell to them, work with them… then you have to get good at listening to them. The good news is that you can, and that what you’ll find when you do will exceed your expectations.”

—Alexandra Jacoby, Artist and Online Community R&D

Product design strategy often seeks first to grow the number of users, and to steer them in ways that benefit the organization. This mindset has driven our organizations into a corner, focused on improving the product. Even when product design teams want to benefit people, they often discover they've harmed people instead by neglecting the diversity of approaches and thinking.

In this book, world-class researcher Indi Young teaches you how to listen deeply to help your organization move away from a product-focused strategy toward a measurable strategy centered on people and their purpose.

Page by page, Indi explains clearly:

• How deep listening is different from interviewing—and from regular conversation
• Techniques for helping the person unfold their interior cognition
• How to create a safe space inside a listening session
• Building assumption-wary knowledge from perspectives that are not your own, nor your team’s

Across business, education, government, healthcare, and science, better solutions are built from listening. When you recognize diverse perspectives based on peoples’ inner thinking and guiding principles, your team can design solutions that are not just “average,” You will be able to support more people and more thinking styles with solutions that feel uniquely theirs. You will be able to find new opportunities and hidden markets. And most importantly, you will be able to put people and their purpose in the center of your product strategy.

Indi is a researcher who coaches, writes, and teaches about inclusive product strategy. Her work is rooted in the problem space where the focus is on people, not users. Indi pioneered opportunity maps, mental model diagrams, and thinking styles. Her way of approaching the problem allows teams to truly pay attention to people, without letting cognitive bias and assumptions creep in. Indi has written three books, Time to Listen, Practical Empathy and Mental Models. She is at work on another book in the series, Assumptions Aside, that will cover thinking styles. She builds knowledge and community via a series of live online advanced courses about the importance of pushing the boundaries of your perspective. She was one of the founders of Adaptive Path, the pioneering UX agency.