Comments on: 3 Product Management lessons from Comcast’s new sign-in pages

By: JBMONCO

JBMONCO — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 14:14:00 +0000

To add insult to injury, comcast requires you to create and use an email address of xxx@comcast.net to use as your login to access your account information if you use their high speed internet service. Even if you use an entirely different service provider for email. A dumb corporate decision designed to alienate previously satisfied customers. http://jbmonco.wordpress.com/2010/02/07/comcast-customer-service-not/

By: Twitted by RianVDM

Twitted by RianVDM — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 22:35:31 +0000

[...] This post was Twitted by RianVDM [...]

By: Scott Sehlhorst

Scott Sehlhorst — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 13:25:09 +0000

Great article, Rian.

Let’s hope the Comcast team is able to recover from this with an agile “fail quickly” approach.

Assuming they elected to have a send-receive cycle (to validate the email address) before allowing someone to enter the password, how long will it take them to refactor their implementation to do that with AJAX (or whatever) so that the user experience is seamless. A week? Six months? If it is a week, then this isn’t a big deal. If it is months, then this is heinous.

Gopal – I love the ‘lame duck release’ moniker.

Also – this is a great example of the importance of integration of UX and product management. The screenshots remind me of the “advanced” prototypes that auto companies take to the test tracks before they are released. Those prototypes have random body panels and weird paint patterns so that spy photos don’t provide clues to the competition. This sign-in process is like one of those prototypes showing up on the dealer’s lot with a hodge podge of design elements.

Thanks again,
Scott @sehlhorst

By: Rian

Rian — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 15:53:16 +0000

Thanks Gopal – I actually read your post this morning and RT’d it! I completely agree with your assessment and characterization of lame duck releases.

By: Gopal Shenoy

Gopal Shenoy — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 04:17:00 +0000

Great points. It just so happened that I blogged on this very same topic today – post about “lame duck” releases vs. well defined phased product releases. http://bit.ly/4EVguW

What you have described here is what I call a lame duck release. It is released before it is ready for prime time, very likely because someone internal promised his superiors some release date and hence what gets released is basically a pig with a lipstick on it.