The Software Product Management Blog

Humanize Your Data

I’ve been playing around a lot with the app Rescue Time, it’s a really cool productivity tool that helps keep your workday focused. I’ve used it for a number of years. Today, I was taking a look at some of my stats and came across this pretty cool statistic.

Wow, I’ve been productive for over 5 thousand hours. Wait, how long is that? Is that a year? So I popped on over to a time conversion website and plugged the data in. It turns out, it was about 31 weeks out of a total of 49 weeks logged. This data meant a lot more to me then pure hours. I took that information and plunked it into a mockup. This simple change makes the data so much more consumable. So, the lesson here my friends is look at the data you present to your users. If they have to do math in their head you need to simplify things for them. Rock on

3 Things I Learned About Usability Testing By Looking at Customers in Their Underwear

Usability testing is critical to building a better product. Learn how I've used qualitative and quantitative testing to help me improve my products.

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

My daughter once decided she was going to try out for the school musical. I asked her if she was going to rehearse before hand.

“Nah, I’m good.” she replied.

Fast-forward two days later she gets in the car crying because she was asked to sing a song during the audition. Needless to say she didn’t get the part. Hopefully she leared the value of preparation.

It’s not the school play but landing the product management job of your dreams requires the same level of preparation.

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.