Joshua Porter

Reducing the Stress of a Product Launch

Product launches are exciting. But they are also stressful and nerve-wracking, especially the launch of a new product. Here are some valuable lessons we've learned to reduce that stress.

design

Our Tips for Managing Design Teams Remotely (During a Crisis)

Now that we're in the midst of a global pandemic, we are all forced to work at home exclusively. So, it's more important than ever to be thoughtful about how to manage your design team. Here are our tips.

Reaching Escape Velocity (Dept buys Rocket)

Less than four years ago we launched Rocket [https://blog.rocketinsights.com/3-2-1-blastoff/] as a new kind of product agency. Our goal was to create a company that lived and breathed the craft of software. Our hypothesis was that a holistic product agency executing across the entire product development lifecycle would be better able to service clients and accelerate their business. Well, our hypothesis has proven largely correct. After four years of ~100% growth per year and building a reputat

design-sprints

Why Steve Jobs would have Loved Design Sprints

Steve Jobs, arguably the best technological innovator of the last 50 years, would have loved design sprints. He would have loved them not for their structure or process details but because they are a tool that allows teams to do what is most important when trying to innovate: Focus. How do design sprints help you focus? By validating and invalidating product ideas quickly. The Real Value of Sprints You see, that’s the real value of design sprints. Contrary to popular belief, the goal of design

design-sprints

Announcing a Design Sprint Workshop with Jake Knapp in Boston on March 15

We are holding a one-day workshop on Design Sprints with the creator of the process, Jake Knapp this March 15. View all the details on the Eventbrite registration page: Design Sprint Workshop with Jake Knapp [https://www.eventbrite.com/e/design-sprint-workshop-w-jake-knapp-tickets-42498236369] Here is the back story. Back when I was managing the design team at HubSpot [http://www.hubspot.com] we learned a new process for creating innovative products called a Design Sprint [http://www.gv.com/sp

Seven Tips for Running Better Design Sprints

Here at Rocket [http://www.rocketinsights.com] we are big practitioners of the Google Design Sprint [“”], the five day process whereby you test product/business ideas to see if they are worth pursuing. We use them to test everything from early product concepts to options for a large new feature. Here are a few things we’ve learned about how to run them more effectively. 1. Know when to run them. Even though design sprints are conducted quickly (in a single week) they are substantial proje

voice

7 Secrets to Designing Alexa Skills

As a design & development agency, the team here at Rocket Insights invested in building Alexa Skills early and have learned a lot. Here are 7 secrets we learned the hard way while building custom voice skills for our clients: 1. Use Cocktail Party Math to Determine Session Length We’ve all experienced grabbing drinks with friends and getting stuck talking to someone where the conversation seems to go on too long. That same dynamic plays out in Voice Skills and it’s really important to measure,

mobile

Rocket Insights wins award for "best visual design - mobile" at 2016 Davey awards.

We are proud to announce that we've won an award for "best visual design" and "best user interface" at the 2016 Davey awards for our work on the Virgin Pulse Apple Watch app. With nearly 4,000 entries from across the US and around the world, the Davey Awards honors the finest creative work from the best small agencies, firms, and companies worldwide. We wrote up our experience working on this app: What we learned designing and building the Virgin Pulse Apple Watch app [https://blog.rocketinsig

design

We partnered with Virgin Pulse to design and build their Apple Watch app - here’s what we learned

Rocket Insights recently partnered with Virgin Pulse [http://www.virginpulse.com/blog-post/announcing-the-virgin-pulse-apple-watch-app/] , the leader in enterprise health and fitness, to build a new Apple Watch app, and we are excited to announce the app has launched today in the Apple App Store [https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/virgin-pulse/id793322895]. We worked with the team at Virgin Pulse over the course of several months to design and build the app and learned a lot in the process. Below

design sprints

Five reasons why design sprints are the best way to kick off a new product initiative

Rocket Insights [http://www.rocketinsights.com] has been in business less than a year and we have done design sprints with over half our new clients on new product initiatives. We noticed that the projects in which we’ve done design sprints have gone smoother than those in which we haven’t done them. Naturally, we wondered why. So we dug in to find out. Our conclusion is that design sprints offer amazing benefits for product teams in an extremely short period of time (one week). They accelerate

Why we like Simple, Working Systems more than MVPs

We're big fans of Lean Software Development [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lean_software_development] movement here at Rocket [http://rocketinsights.com] because it contains many useful principles we appreciate like "Amplify learning", "Deliver as fast as possible", and "Build quality in". One of the more contentious elements of Lean, however, is the MVP, or Minimum Viable Product [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_viable_product] . The MVP is a popular topic in software these days but the

boston

Observations of the Boston Tech Scene

One of our goals with the Launchpad blog [https://blog.rocketinsights.com/] is to chronicle the launch of Rocket Insights [http://rocketinsights.com] and our flight path over time. We've been in business about four months now, and here are some observations we've made so far about the Boston tech scene: Boston is rocking. Our initial observation is that Boston is a pretty awesome place to be building products right now. Tons of startups are building new products and some established companies a

design

The Next Feature Fallacy (or, the case for simple, working systems)

Tell me if this sounds familiar: You released the first version of your product some months ago and it was an exhilarating experience. You went through the highs and lows of launch and had moments of excitement and pride when people started using your product for the first time. But...as the weeks wore on it started to become clear there just wasn’t enough usage. People aren’t using your product as much as you want them to, or as much as your business needs them to. But it’s OK, you rationalize

agency

3...2...1...Blastoff!

So Ashley, Jesse, and I have launched an agency called Rocket Insights [http://www.rocketinsights.com]. We’re excited about it. We officially started on May 4, 2015 but you could almost say we have been ramping up psychologically all this year. Our focus is designing and building web and mobile applications. We’re already working on several products, building an awesome team, meeting some great people working on amazing things, and we couldn’t be more excited about our future. As part of this w

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