This morning I listened to Jared Spool interviewing Jeff Gothelf on Lean UX on the UIE Spoolcast. Jared does a nice job of probing into where Lean UX differs from traditional user research and where there’s overlap.
I loved Jeff’s emphasis on forcing teams to state their assumptions about who their customers are when starting on a new project. Especially when they have market research groups, companies often assume they know who their customers are and assume that everyone on the team is on the same page about this. Getting them to explicitly state their hypotheses often reveals that the team is all over the place. Getting some initial agreement, and laying out a plan to regularly validate/invalidate/iterate the personas is key.