SendGrid Labs is an elite team of product hackers led by Mike Rowan and Chiara McPhee, where I spearheaded a successful 8-month effort to gain executive 'Green Light' 🚦after presenting the body of work from a nonstop series of product development sprints with 2- or 3-week research validation cycles. The alpha prototype with real users trailed the prototypes I was running research on by only a cycle or two at times. Most content currently under NDA.
The SendGrid Way provided the foundation of the method we used to approach the user testing process, but we combined it with the fresh common sense of Jobs theory as explained in Clayton Christensen's Competing Against Luck. This led to rapid-fire iterations around the conceptual job we were doing as expressed in design prototypes, and then fine-tuning the UI after we had made the broad strokes through a few different core experiences and figured out where to focus the production team's energies as the product becomes operationalized.
