Dina’s foot hit the curb, and her body jolted forward.  The cane fell off her hand, and she felt her palms and knees hitting the hot sidewalk. The fall reminded her of her days at elementary school, but her body was now much older to take it gracefully. It was painful. And despite the fact that it was early afternoon, it was pitch black. Her mind hated the paradox, but she knew that if she needed to survive, she’d better adjust to her new situation. Everything sounded much louder: car honking on the street she just ran across, voices of pedestrians, and footsteps on the sidewalk she just fell on. How would she ever get used to this?

She felt a couple of strong hands helping her get up, and another handing her the cane that fell off. A female voice asked her if she needed help getting to where she wanted. She thanked her. She knew that if she started asking for help this early in the journey, she would never be able to go anywhere on her own.

She dusted off her pants with her scraped palms, and resumed her walk in the darkness. She counted the steps to her next turn,  feeling her way around the bumps and holes on the sidewalk with her white cane. That day, there were no street names, no visual landmarks, and no red lights. It took her more than two hours to walk home from school. A journey that took less than 20 minutes only few days earlier, when her world still had light.

For the following weeks, Dina experienced almost everything a blind person would go through to adjust to her new world. One where ears replaced her eyes during long lonely trips on uneven sidewalks, busy streets, and crowded public transportation. Being blind is one thing, but being blind in Egypt was a completely different story. She knew that she had to go through all of it, to understand what it feels like to be one. She knew that if she couldn’t live it, she wouldn’t be able to help them. That’s why she decided for her graduation project as a vision therapist, to tape two cotton patches on her eyes, wear a pair of dark glasses, and live for three weeks as a blind person.

Last time I visited Egypt, Dina told me her story, and I could immediately see how her world was transformed. She no longer describing her patients’ experiences, she was describing her own because she’d lived as one of them.  I remember to this day her exact words "Everything I studied was just a theory. When I asked them about their challenges and problems, I tried hard to relate to their answers but honestly couldn’t. Now I hear them talk and I nod – even though they can’t see me. I nod because I know what it is to be there. Sometimes, I ask them advice about how they coped with a particluar situation, and often they ask "Have you ever been blind before? You describe my world better than I would describe it myself."

Since her graduation with honors from the school of education, Dina continued to do this ritual every year. Her patients are constantly amazed by her ability to describe their challenges as if she were one of them, not just someone who’d studied them in order to help them. She continuously crosses the bridge between her world and theirs, and returns with a wealth of insight for her work and Ph.D. research.

Hearing her story was humbling, because Dina never read about customer development, and never had any entrepreneurial inclinations. Yet she was doing something that most business don’t take the time to do.

Sometimes all we need is a little bit of compassion, sympathy, and the willingness to leave our world and step into someone else’s shoes.

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I wasn’t surprised that developers didn’t like reading them. Spec review meetings used to feel like one of the scenes from office space – and I didn’t even have my red stapler.

An interesting shift happens when a fellow PM started prototyping instead of writing specs. And because we were basically creating a prototyping tool, he was testing the tool along the way. Dog-food’ing, as we used to call it at Microsoft. I followed his footsteps immediately. And not only I was having a lot of fun creating prototypes instead of writing requirements, developers were having fun using them and providing feedback, and spec review meetings went by like a breeze. Instead of spending time on making sure everyone understand the description of the interaction, everyone was on the same page much faster.

Needless to say, the final product matched the interactive requirements far more than it ever did with written spec documents.

As I recently started using Keynote to create interactive prototypes, I found more startups teams willing to use the prototype as their requirements. I realized that Keynote is ideal for this task.

Here is how I use Keynote to capture and communicate requirements

I won’t go through the detail of creating an interactive prototype in Keynote, as this has been covered in several previous posts. Once you’re done iterating on the prototypes, it’s very easy to annotate them in Keynote using comments and presenter notes.

Comments are sticky-notes that you attach anywhere on the slides to indicate a special case for user interaction or a message for development or testing teams.

And presenter notes are great way to track discussions on a specific screen or interaction.

The best thing about this workflow is that neither presenter notes nor comments show up in slideshow mode. So they won’t be interfering with the actual interaction when the prototype is being tested.

You can also export to PDF with presenter notes included, and still maintain the interaction within the prototype – in this case, the sticky notes will not hide/show nicely in slideshow mode as they do in Keynote. This is a screenshot of the PDF export:

If you’ve been writing long spec documents, give Keynote a spin. This is the lean approach to capturing and communicating requirements. And you don’t need to use different tools to create your prototypes, take screenshots, embed them in documents or wiki, and make sure the screenshots are synchronized with written requirements.

If you’ve been using better tools/techniques for faster requirements, please let me know about them in the comments.

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One day, an elephant came to the village.

Since none of them had ever seen an elephant before, they all gathered around the animal to figure out how it looked like.

The man who touched the trunk said: "An elephant is like a thick tree branch".

"No! It’s like a pillar," said another who touched the leg.

"You’re both wrong!", said a third who touched the tail, "the elephant is like a rope."

"Oh No!", shouted another who was feeling the belly, "it’s like a wall"

And a man who was touching the tusk said "Come on, guys! The elephant is nothing but a solid pipe".

They began arguing and fighting, and each of them insisted he was right.

They were getting agitated and frustrated at each other.

A wise man was passing by the village, when he heard the shouting.

He stopped and asked: "What’s the matter?"

So they told him that they could not agree about what an elephant was, and each told him what he thought it looked like.

The wise man smiled and said:  "

All of you are right.

But because each one of you touched a different part of the elephant,

you all had different images of what an elephant looked like.

And because each one of you imagined an elephant through his own experience,

doesn’t mean that the other person’s image of the elephant is wrong.

An elephant has all the features that you described, and much more.

But you can never tell what an elephant is by just touching one part of it."

Let’s not forget that each of us is looking at a different version of reality; a small aspect of life that’s colored with our own perception and experiences.

The more we accept to see life through other people’s perspective, the richer version of it we will have.

Photo Courtesy of Ashes and Snow

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One day he was with his fellow chicken picking seeds off the ground when a shadow covered the sky above him. He lifted his gaze and was mesmerized by the sight of a beautiful eagle cruising the sky. Unlike other chicken that he saw trying to fly, this eagle didn’t seem to be making much effort. With his wings spread wide, he was flying smoothly and changing his direction with the slightest gesture. “Wow. Look at that!”, yelled the young eagle to his friends. “Who is that?”, he asked. “That’s an eagle”, replied a chicken. “He’s the king of the sky. But we belong here on earth. We are chicken.”, she continued. And the eagle staring at the bird disappearing in the horizon as if it was gliding on an invisible path that only he could see.

Days later, the old eagle was flying again over the barnyard and was stunned by the sight of an eagle running around with the chicken. He surged down to the ground. As the other birds saw him they ran back to hide in the house. He descended in front of the other eagle before he reached the door.

“What are you doing?”, asked the old eagle.

“What do you mean?”, answered the young one.

“What are you doing running around with chicken?”.

“I am a chicken. These are my brothers and sisters. I grew up with them.”

“No you’re not. You’re an eagle. You belong in the sky, not on the ground.”

“No I am not. I am one of them. All I know is to do as they do, and to eat what they eat. I can’t even fly.”

“You can’t because you never tried. But you’re an eagle, just like me”.

“Even if what you say is true, I’ve lived all my life as a chicken. I am not an eagle anymore”.”

“It’s the heart of an eagle that matters, not the way he lived or ate… Come with me”

The eagle took another look at his friends hiding in the comfort of home. “Don’t listen to him!”, yelled one of the chicken. “He is tricking you”,” said another. “ If you go with him, you will die!”. “ Come back and be with us”…

But deep inside the eagle’s heart, a faint voice told him what he needed to do. He took one more gaze at the barnyard where he spend all his life playing with his friends, then turned around and followed the older eagle.

A moment later, the arrived at the cliff he used to visit sometimes with his friends. They stood next to each other on the edge looking at the mountains in the distance. Without a second of hesitation, the old eagle jumped off the edge, spread his wings and soared upward.

The young eagle looked down the cliff and trembled. He’d never flown before. May be he would die. May be he should go back.

“Don’t look down.”, the old eagle said “Look up at the sky. Aim toward the sun. Give it a bit of faith.”

The young eagle lifted his sight up, spread his wings and leaped…

Back at the barnyard, the chicken heard a triumphant cry that ascended to heaven. Their feather trembled and they looked at each other without exchanging a word. They know they will miss their brother a lot. They know he might visit some day and tell them how it felt to fly. And they will gather around to hear his stories about the lands he visited. But for the time being, they would keep doing what they did best: living as chicken.

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Traffic on the freeway slowed down to a halt that Friday evening. Everyone was coming from the same direction and going to the same destination. After a long sunny week, clouds were starting to gather, looking down at the streets in sarcasm, and preparing the town for another rainy weekend.

He stops his car few inches away from the one ahead of him. He glances at the infinite line of cars that disappears in the horizon and realizes that the week won’t let go that easily. He turns on the radio in search for some distraction from this moment. The same songs that were playing last week are playing again. He turns it off and glances up at the sky.

“Are you kidding me?”, he groaned. He’s been waiting for this weekend, like every other weekend, with great anticipation. It’s been a long week. Long days with endless meetings where no decisions were made, frequent visits from his manager to inform him about what the next hours of his life should be spent on, and long emails written mostly to people who were sitting at the end of the same hallway.

But today is different. He feels burnt out. He remembers the feeling when he stepped out of that building letting go a long exhale, as if he’s been holding his breath for the past 5 days. He felt like doing what he did back in school when the bell rang after a period of several boring classes in a row. He ran out of the classroom with everyone else and screamed their lungs out. He didn’t know back then why they were all doing this. But it felt good. Now he knows the nature of  what he was releasing with those screams. He knows that it was the only way of expressing how they all felt. But he cannot do it anymore. He’s a grown up now. And unlike children, grown ups know how to deal with reality.

A series of honks brings him back to the scene he’s playing a role in. He notices that the car ahead of him moved forward few meters and the ones behind him were urging him to follow. It was as if everyone was trying to get as far as possible from where they are coming from. “Follow the follower”, he thought. He puts his car in gear and starts moving, but a glance at the fast moving exit lane on his right makes him realize that it’s best to take the inroads. He sneaks into the faster moving traffic, takes the exit, misses the yellow light flipping red and stops by the white line. He is often amazed at the amount of lines on the road. Lines separating one direction from another. Lines separating cars going the same direction. And lines dictating when he can turn and when he should just keep going. He;s always felt that as long as he followed the lines, he will reach his destination safely. And he rarely wondered who drew these lines in the first place. Someone who knows what they’re doing, probably… Hopefully.

Light is still red, and the ticking sound of his left turn blinker relaxes him a bit. It reminds him of the sound of that old clock hung on the wall in his grandfather’s house. As a kid, he used to spend long moments mesmerized by the fast moving needle. He once asked his grandfather “why is that red needle moving much faster than the other ones?”. His grandfather chuckled and replied: “because it’s got much more important things to do!”. And he replied back: “I can’t wait till I grow up! I have very important things to do”. The ticking sound of the blinker is different than that of the clock. It ticks twice, instead of once. Two quick ticks, a second of silence, and then two more quick ticks, and so on. One tick in farewell of the second that passed, and another welcoming the one to come. And before one knows it, the next click signals the end of that last second, followed by another for the future one. And between one tick and the other, now happens. His attention shifts from the ticks to the silence between the ticks. And the more he becomes aware of that silence, the longer that silence feels. It was the same silence between the ticks of his old grandfather’s clock. The same silence that mesmerized him as a kid. That eternal moment between the past and the future.

He’s brought back to reality with another series of honks. He sees that his light is now green and he’s holding back a line of cars behind him. He puts his car in gear, presses the gas pedal, and the car starts moving forward. Then the car suddenly stops, urging his body to jolt forward and stop under the pressure of his seatbelt. “What the…?”. The car is still on, no gas or battery lights, it’s in the right gear, and his foot is on…. His foot is now on the brake! He stares for a second at his foot that just made its own mind to release the gas pedal and hit the one next to it. Then with the corner of his eye he feels a slight motion to his left. He lifts his head and sees it coming. The old rugged Honda was cruising at 40 mph, crossing the red light, and approaching in a straight line that ends on his side of the car. He sees the car crossing the white intersection line without slowing down. The license plates reads H7A30.

He read  before that during moments of danger, time stretches almost indefinitely. He also read that when one is coming to his final moment, he will see all his life playing back in front of his own eyes.Like a movie. And now, he is experiencing both. The volume of everything around him decreased to a mute. The speed of all things slowed down to a pause. Even his blinkers gasped one more tick and stopped. There were no two ticks this time around. Just one last tick. The past. Then he saw it all. He saw every moment in his life flashing. Everything he said. Everyone he met. Every place he’s been to. They weren’t flashing quickly. Feeling that something was quick requires time. At that moment, there was no time. These moments were just there. He saw his childhood moments. His first day at school. His first kiss. His graduation. His first day on a plane. His new job. He saw how some small things he did made big impact on others, and some big things he did made no impact whatsoever. He saw how simple moments stretched to fill more of his life, and how years of doing the same things he despised were not even there, as if they didn’t count. And he sees a man in the middle of all these moments. He was standing in front of a closed door with his back toward him. As the man slowly turned around to face him, he was still staring at his back. In that place where time didn’t exist, his fear had no face. He’s been the one placing masks on that face all his life. He’s been giving him his voice. The voices of many others. And when he didn’t find a voice to cast, he created new voices for him. This time, he didn’t have a voice at all. He was just standing there. And he knew the things that were behind that closed door. All the things he’s dreamt about doing. All the things he’s always enjoyed doing and ended up gathering dust in his life basement. All the things that he thought he would have time to do later, when he gets more time. Everything he’s imagined himself to be and do when he was a kid. And all the things he’s been always itching to do and has been rationalizing why he should be doing other things instead. He always thought he’d have more time…

He moves forward to open the door. His fear doesn’t stop him this time around. He passes through his fear as if it were a ghost, and as he does, he merges with him. In this moment, as he became fear, he sees it all. He feels how weak and powerful he is, how small and huge he became, and how hated and loved he felt. He grabs the door knob and turns it around. The door is suddenly sucked into the void behind it, and a flood of light came through it.

Light. Lots of light…  He closes his eyes to shield them from the bright scene in front of him. And as he does, his ears are suddenly deafened by the sounds around him. It was as if he was coming out of the womb, and everything around him was so bright and loud. Loud screams. Not human screams. They sounded like alien screams. more like loud squeaking. And the feeling of a cold breeze touching his ear.

All at once his senses come back to him. He is sitting in his car looking at the tires of the red Honda as they just crossed the white line and started screeching over the dry asphalt. He glances up at the driver and their eyes met for a second. Then the Honda driver tries to steer his car away from the collision course. The red car is now gliding over the road, still approaching at a deadly speed, but slowly curving away from its previous destination. All this is happening in slow motion, and he is watching it the same way he watches a movie: he is a detached observer. With his hands still on the steering wheel and his foot on the brake, he watches the other car drifting past his front bumper and missing it by an inch. His car shakes for an instant when the air between both cars is strongly disturbed, then the other car spins and stops in the middle of the road.

The next moment feels as if someone just hit the pause button on the playing scene: total stillness and complete silence. None of the cars stopped at the intersection is honking. Everyone seems to be here now. No one is thinking about what happened at work, or what will happen at home. They are all experiencing a moment out of time. And everyone is waiting for someone else to move. As his foot decided to hit the brake few seconds earlier, it now leaves it to gently press the gas pedal. The car starts moving, and he finally takes that left turn and hears the blinker latching off. He glances in his rear view mirror at the scene behind him: no one is moving yet. The red Honda was now stopped in the middle of the intersection, facing the opposite direction it came from after spinning 180 degrees. He glances at the licenses plates in his rear view mirror and smiles. Few drops of rain show up on his windshield. He looks up at the clouds and smiles even wider. Rain never felt so good.

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Two young MBA couple graduated and landed great jobs in California. They realized that they had some time before their job starting date, so they flew to California a couple of weeks earlier and enjoyed spending their days on the beach.

One day, the Devil walked by and saw them, so he approached them and said: "Hey. I see that you are enjoying your time here. I have a proposal for you:

I will offer you everything you ever dreamt about: fame, success, money and prosperity for as long as you and everyone of your descendant shall live. In return, I need you to offer me one thing: your soul."

The couple looked at each in bewilderment, then looked back to the Devil and asked: "What’s the catch?"

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When I was a kid, my school used to host a circus every summer. In the morning, I would sneak behind the circus tent and watch the animals being fed and trained. That was one of my greatest joys.

I remember looking at the elephants, and noticing something that fascinated me and kept me wondering for a while: knowing how powerful an elephant is, I was surprised to see a thin rope tying the elephant’s leg to a pole, and that the elephant never tried to escape even though it wouldn’t take any effort for it to cut the rope and walk away.

After a while, I gave up guessing and went to ask one of the trainers. He smiled and said:”It wasn’t always a rope, you know. When the elephant is young, we put a hard chain around its leg so that whenever the elephant pulls, it would feel the resistance of the strong chain and know that how far it can go.”.

“When the elephant grows up”, he continued, “there is no need for the chain anymore. We just put a thin rope around its leg and the elephant stops pulling whenever it feels that rope. The elephant doesn’t know anymore that the chain is gone, and that the rope tying it to the pole can be easily broken as soon as it decides to walk away. The only limitation that elephant has, is in its own mind.”

“For the elephant,” the trainer said, “all that it knows is the memory of the old chain, and the slight feeling of resistance from the thin rope… The elephant doesn’t know the difference. “

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