BuildTV

A collection of 60 posts

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Diversity and Inclusion: How to Navigate Conversations About Diversity and Inclusion in Tech

I’m sure you’re aware of the talk and debate around the topic of diversity and inclusion. Maybe it’s left you feeling frustrated, tired, or downright apathetic. I get it. Much of the emotional rollercoaster stems from the challenges of navigating conversations with your teammates and peers on

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Product Design: How to Balance Accessibility and Interactivity Across Devices

In the last two episodes of Build, we tackled why accessibility needs to be prioritized in product design and the three key tips that are critical and will make a big impact on your product adoption. This week, we’re going to answer two questions that inspired this series from

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Product Design: 3 Key Tips to Keep in Mind When Designing for Accessibility

Wasn’t last week’s episode on accessibility in product design enlightening? Well, get ready for more! The goal of the last episode was to give you solid understanding of accessibility, and all the things you could think about when designing a product with accessibility in mind. But we understand

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Product Design: Why Accessibility Needs to Be Prioritized in Product Design

It’s a new month, and with it a brand new theme for our upcoming Build episodes! When designing products, we think a lot about usability—how easy to use a product is. But we often overlook another aspect of product design: accessibility. So all this month, we’re going

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Startup Funding: What It’s Going to Take to Get That First Check From an Investor

All this month, we’ve been exploring how startup fundraising is changing and why it’s going to continue to change in 2018. We started off by talking about why you don’t want to reach out to an investor when you just have an idea, how to evaluate if

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Startup Funding: Why Investors Keep Saying 'No' to Your Big Idea

Think you’re onto something big, and surprised you’re receiving so many noes from investors? It can really make you second-guess yourself, and shake your confidence…but it shouldn’t! Receiving a lot of noes is natural. You may be tempted to listen to the feedback after being rejected

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Startup Funding: When It Does and Doesn’t Make Sense to Fundraise for Your Startup

Ready for more myth busting around startup funding? Let’s get to it then! Last week, I shared a number of reasons you should share care about fundraising, whether you’re a founder or startup employee. Here they are again, and in the Build episode we talked about why it’

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Startup Funding: How Fundraising Will Impact You in 2018—Whether You Are a Startup Founder or Employee

It’s the start of a new year, which is an exciting time all around. You’re probably excited about new opportunities, starting a company, or building product in 2018! While I’m all for optimism, I’ve also gotta stay true to them theme of Build: debunking myths and

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How to Succeed in Your First Remote Working Position

I don’t know about you, but I cringe at the thought of having to commute. The traffic, road rage, not to mention having to find parking—it was enough to make me throw in the towel seven years ago! Since then I have been managing remote teams around the

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How to Get Your Teammates to Adopt Product Design Sprints

Did you share last week’s Build episode on product design sprints with your teammates? Wait! Give me two chances to guess the outcome: * You did share it and you faced some pushback? Well, kudos to you for putting it out there! * Or maybe you didn’t because you were

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How a Product Design Sprint Fast-Tracks Testing Your Ideas

How many times have you and your team spent countless hours building, bug fixing, and finally releasing a new feature only to hear feedback from a customer that it’s not what they wanted? Or worse, they don’t say anything. Why? Because they aren’t even using the new

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Free eBook Download of Present! A Techie's Guide to Public Speaking

As a team that engages in our fair share of presentations, we know how important it is to nail it, so we’re always looking for ways to improve our game. That’s why we’re extremely happy to be able to share valuable tips with our readers by offering

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What is Product Debt and Why You Need to Prioritize Paying It Down

Confession time! As an engineer and founder who is eager to ship and get a product out into the hands of customers, I’ll admit there have been not one but more than a handful of times when I’ve deprioritized usability and visual design in favor of shipping a

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Should You Worry About Your Skills Getting Rusty?

I don’t know about you, but before I decided to take on my first leadership role, I agonized over it for months! I worried that as an engineer, the coding skills that I had taken years to learn and hone would get rusty. And I wasn’t alone in

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What Stops Us From Taking a Leadership Role

Have you been in your current role for a while, and are eager to try something new? Perhaps you’ve thought about transitioning from being an individual contributor into a leadership role, but you’re not sure if it’s the right move for you? You might worry about being

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What to Do Before You Redesign Your Product

A redesign is a great way to reinvent your brand, get a leg up on the competition, and revisit those clunky and outdated workflows. While we may be eager to jump right in, we have to be careful about what is actually going to help us accomplish our business goals.

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Why the Last 20% of a Project is the Hardest to Get Through

All this month on Build, we’ve been talking about project management. First, we shared two ground rules you need to set for yourself to get through a software project successfully, and in the last episode, we shared strategies for handling new ideas and unexpected challenges that may derail your

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How to Respond to New Ideas in the Middle of a Software Project

In the last episode, we shared two ground rules you need to set for yourself to get through a software project successfully. But we know that managing our own anxieties is only half the battle to keeping the project on course; the other is navigating new ideas or unanticipated challenges.

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The Project Management Ground Rules You Need to Set to Get Through a Software Project Successfully

So you got tasked with managing your first high-stakes software project? Like handling tech debt, breaking up a monolithic code base into a microservices architecture, or something else? Congratulations! Are you excited? Maybe a little nervous? Or maybe you’re really nervous because you need to deliver on a tight

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How to Think Quickly on Your Feet During a Q&A

As if preparing and delivering a presentation to your peers isn’t nerve-wracking enough, you also have to worry about the Q&A period at the end of your talk! You’re worried about people asking not one but two questions, and having to decipher those questions that are

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Why an Elevator Pitch Isn't the Only Type of Pitch You Need to Prepare

All this month, we’ve been focused on the theme of pitching. We started out by talking about why many creative problem solvers shy away from pitching, leaving it up to CEOs, founders, and salespeople. But pitching is a valuable skill that all of us need to hone in order

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Why You Don't Need to Change How You Speak When You Pitch Your Idea

One of the reasons people don’t like pitching is because they feel like they have to be someone else. They have to abandon their personality, get into character, and speak in a way they normally wouldn’t in order to impress a colleague, customer, or investor. However, people on

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Why It’s Important to Pitch Ideas Even If It Doesn’t Come Naturally to You

Have you ever had an idea for something, like a process or product that you wanted to improve? But instead of sharing your idea with others, like your friends or coworkers, you just kept it to yourself because the thought of having to “pitch it” felt icky and salesy? Many

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Why It’s Easier for Software Product Teams to Cram Features and Bugs Into Each Release Instead of Cutting Back

For every product release, our goals are the same—we want to show customers we care about meeting their needs and we want to stay ahead of our competition! So how do we get it all done? We cram as many features and bugs as we can think of. Cutting

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How to Keep Your Passion Project Growing Despite Challenges

All this month, Joy Dixon and I have been digging into the theme of working on side projects that you’re passionate about. We started out by talking about how to keep your day job and pursue your passion project on the side, and last week we talked about how