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Welcome! Here you'll find my collection of writings on product management and productivity. I am sharing my knowledge and experiences learned over my career in the hopes that it will help you excel in your role.

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You're a Product Manager? What's that mean?

How many times has someone asked you this question? I’ll bet often. Over the years how I’ve answered this question has evolved to this… I delight customers by giving them meaningful products. I think it summarizes nicely the core role of a product manager. Everything you do is in service to this end. Without focusing on this core concept then it doesn’t matter what process you follow, what tools you use to wireframe, what your competitors are doing.

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.

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.

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 to delight customers like Papa John’s Pizza

Last night I ordered a pizza from Papa John’s Pizza. It’s usually not my first choice but like most fast food it was convenient. I called to order the pizza and was told it would be ready in 20 minutes. About 12 minutes later I arrived to pickup my order and was greeted by the man behind the counter who said “Oh you must be here for the Pepperoni Pizza. It will be up in two minutes.

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. Your agile teams should be cross functional. Don’t get bogged down in manual regression testing. Invest in automated testing and continuous integration. Every story needs at least one automated acceptance test and unit tests on the code.

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.