The Software Product Management Blog

Focus On Customer Experience like Nike and Disney

I just did an interview on the Design Your thinking podcast we covered a lot of ground related to product development. Some highlights include:

• Why you should focus on the customer and not the product.
• I give some tips on how I keep myself organized (hint - hire a great team)
• What tools I use to accomplish my day to day tasks.

Check it out.

How to Be the Product Manager Every Company Wants to Hire

Stand out in a crowded PM job market. This guide shows how to prepare, differentiate, and win the product management role of your dreams.

Lazy UX Design - Phone Number Fields

Grrr, I hate poorly designed forms. I’m especially annoyed by forms that want humans to think like computers. Case in point, take a look at this phone number field from Bed Bath and Beyond.

Phone numbers in the US can take many forms - parens around the area and dash separated are the most common. What isn’t common is a form typed out without any separators. However, lazy design forces that on people.

Don't start a business until people are asking you to

Derek Sivers just posted an article about starting a business that has some really great advice that while obvious is often overlooked. In a nutshell:

Don’t announce anything. Don’t choose a name. Don’t make a website. Don’t build a system. You need to be free to completely change or ditch your idea.

Yet too often we get sucked into doing all of those things? Why? Because it feels like work. It’s not though. It’s just a form of procrastination. The real work, talking to prospects, is hard. It’s also scary. Talking to prospects means coming to grips with the idea that an idea might be terrible. It’s much easier to fool yourself into thinking you’ve started a business because you cobbled together a Wordpress site. Derek’s right. Get paid, then you can start your business. Read the entire article over at Sivers.org

When to Use Which User-Experience Research Methods

There are many different ways to research your users. So many in fact that it’s hard to know when to use a particular method. In this post, the author lays out framework you can follow to help you determine which UX research method to follow. In When to Use Which User-Experience Research Methods the author describes a framework for choosing which research method to use based on where you are in the lifecycle of a project.

5 Scrum Experts Weigh in on Splitting User Stories

User Stories are the building blocks used by Scrum teams to develop working software. When stories start out they often describe large areas of functionality that can’t be completed in one sprint.

Beginning Scrum teams often fall into the trap of breaking the stories down by technical area (i.e., front end work, back end work, database work, etc.) The problem with this approach is that the resultant stories don’t deliver value to a customer. It also causes integration work to happen “at the end.”

Prioritizing Product Requirements with Scorecards

One of the product managers core responsibilities is to effectively prioritize product features. To an outside observer this often looks like reading tea leaves. Creating a process in your organization to effectively rank product initiatives will help create transparency and avoid squeaky wheel prioritization. I’ve collected some research on the topic below. This first article from Karl Weigers suggests using a cost / benefit ratio to prioritize product features. I’ve used this method in the past and thought it was pretty effective.

How Papa John’s Delights Customers (and What You Can Learn From It)

Learn how Papa John’s turns customer experience into a competitive edge—and how you can apply the same principles to your business.

Great 15 minute overview of the role of Product Owner

Henrik Kniberg,  Agile/Lean coach at Spotify & Lego gives a 15 minutes presentation on being a product owner. I love the way he condenses this information down into a digestable bit. https://youtu.be/502ILHjX9EE

Some key takeaways here.

1. Your agile teams should be cross functional.
2. Don’t get bogged down in manual regression testing. Invest in automated testing and continuous integration.
3. Every story needs at least one automated acceptance test and unit tests on the code.
4. Keep team morale high by using the velocity from earlier iterations or “yesterday’s weather” as an indicator of how much work a team is capable of taking on in a sprint.
5. Guessing the “value” of a story is hard to do, that’s ok though. Even when you are wrong the real benefit is in the conversations with the team.
6. Product ownership is all about communication which fits nicely with the agile manifesto.
7. Reduce risk by trying to acquire knowledge. Use UX prototypes, technical spikes, and experiments to gain that knowledge.
8. There should be a healthy tension between the building the right thing in building the thing right. This tension should be  between the product owner and the development team.

Add Agility to your Product Management Process

Agile is a software development process that focuses on delivering customer facing value in small iterations.

This article assumes that your development team works in Agile Scrum.

At my current company, the Product Management Process is what I would term Scrumfall. We do not build heavy Product Requirements Documents that we turn over to developers. Rather, we plan iterations while still maintaining an overall vision of what we think the final product should look like.