The Software Product Management Blog

Grab a front-row seat to the world of software product management, where I share everything from industry insights to personal anecdotes, aiming to enlighten, educate, and empower those passionate about crafting cutting-edge software products.

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Rework Book Summary

The book Rework talks about the product development process at Basecamp. This is an outline of the book.

Lead the Field Book Summary

The book Lead the Field is one of those old school self-help books who’s advice is still applicable today. It focuses on developing yourself around serving others, developing a positive attitude, personal responsibility and goal setting. I wrote this outline so I could come back and visit the key points in the book. Have you read any good productivity books? I’d love you to take a moment to tell my your favorite in the comments.

Stop Treating Your Users Like Children

I spent about 15 minutes yesterday bulk deleting photos from Google+. Each time I clicked delete on a photo the computer so kindly asked me “Are you sure you want to do this?” I dutifully clicked “Yes”, as I’ve done thousands of times over the last 20+ years. Then, it hit me. Why am I still doing this? It’s 2013. If my computer were a sentient being and asked me to confirm every time I took some slightly dangerous action I would respond with something very sarcastic. “No, I don’t really want to do this. I just love clicking buttons.” Actually, I don’t. It made me feel a little like this guy. Why do we continue to think that we know our users better than they do? Why are we treating our users like children that we must protect because they aren’t able to protect themselves? Actually, that’s really not what’s going on. I’ve designed enough product to know that we’re not all sitting around thinking “Poor users, they just don’t know any better.” I think there is a much simpler explanation. We are lazy. Why are we lazy? It’s just so much easier to specify that a developer throw up a confirmation box then think through the problem. The thing is, it really doesn’t need much thought at all. The pattern for dealing with safely managing destructive actions has existed for almost as long as the computer. It’s called Undo. Ah, the Undo. You have saved my butt more times than I can count. And that’s exactly what you are there for. You are like Lindsay Lohan’s personal assistant. Never seen but always there to clean up the mess she makes. Why doesn’t every application implement Undo? Well, building an Undo system isn’t easy. It’s actually kind of a pain and you must plan for it up front. Despite that, every destructive action should have an Undo function. Why? Because your users have conditioned themselves to just blindly click on dialog boxes without reading them. Especially if they need to click many of them in a single session. They may just end up doing this. Confirmation boxes are a way for the product team to wash their hands of any responsibility for the actions their users take. Undo however, puts the responsibility back in the hands of the computer, the software team and the product owners. It’s harder to implement but provides a much better experience for people like myself.

Be Amazing

I recently went to a great BYOB restaurant that just opened in Philadelphia. A week later, they sent me this.