Aaron Cooper
Honeywell

55 / Encouraging Great Ideas

Description
Great ideas can come from anywhere. It is the job of product leaders to seek out these ideas by taking educated risks, thinking (and working) outside the box. In this episode Aaron Cooper, the Enterprise User Experience Leader for Navigation and Sensors at Honeywell, shares key strategies for ideation, workshopping, and working across disciplines.
Aaron believes that “excellent facilitation helps you scale your ideation.” In fact, great ideas and great leadership go hand in hand. An idea can lay dormant for years waiting for just the right moment to be applied; the quietest team members often contribute the deepest insights. The key is creating a space for everyone’s contributions, then recognizing which can be applied to build better products.
Listen in to learn some strategies that improve your facilitation skills, and be sure to catch Aaron’s thoughts on:

Persona speed dating to keep customers’ needs front-of-mind across the organization
Gleaning deep insights by asking the right questions and asking them often
Challenging the status quo and choosing people who are “willing to be a little crazy”
The impact of AI on the future of product, especially for designers

Aaron’s Recommended Reading:
Frank Lloyd Wright, by Bruce Brooks Pfeiffer.
On Fairy-Stories (essay), by J.R.R. Tolkien.

About Aaron
Aaron Cooper is the Enterprise User Experience Leader for Navigation and Sensors at Honeywell. He leads end-to-end design, from researching customer needs through ideation and into implementation and iteration of products and services.
Aaron collaborates and leads, leveraging more than 20 years of growth as a designer in domains ranging from product design and architecture to marketing and interaction design. Every day, he works with cross-functional teams, driving ideation and prioritization to deliver new value for customers and businesses. Aaron is a certified Design Thinking and User Experience instructor, is certified in Scrum, and is a Six Sigma Green Belt. On the side, he does stained glass, which can be viewed at prairiehomeglass.com.
His motto is, “There is always a person I can help to be successful, more efficiently, and with greater joy.”