“Stop Talking to Customers and Start Listening to People”

We were very sad to hear of the passing of Archie Miller in September 2022. Archie was one of our favorite UX thinkers: smart, funny and worth listening to. He was generous with advice, and we always enjoyed meeting with him. His strong and loyal following online and in conferences demonstrated how much people respected him and loved working with him. It was truly admirable. And inspiring.

Here’s a classic video of Archie in action at the Business Agility conference in 2019, where he talked about the long process of converting a legacy non-digital company to digital best practices (that’s one of our favorite topics, as you can see in our Human Insight Guide). 

In this presentation, Archie describes Listening Labs, a process that helps cross-functional groups (especially product teams) develop a shared understanding of the people who buy a product. He gives very practical advice on the impact of these labs and how to organize them. There are some classic Archie observations along the way, including “velocity is more than speed, it’s also right direction.” Amen, brother!

“Velocity is more than speed, it’s also right direction.”

Archie Miller

You should also pay attention to Archie’s use of stories about people to communicate ideas. It’s a best practice for a human insight advocate, since we collect so many anecdotes about people in our daily work.

The video is below; we encourage you to watch it. You’ll learn something useful, and if you never had the opportunity to  hear Archie speak, this is a chance to experience somebody special who we wish had been with us a lot longer.

Want more? Here’s his blog post and webinar on making insights actionable.

Photo by Jason Goodman on Unsplash

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