This is the third post in a series I recently started on software development and the role of the Product Manager.  If you haven’t already done so, it might be a good idea to read Part 1 (Overview) and Part 2 (How to ensure that product requirements are informed by user needs) before your read on.  This post continues the discussion on Product Requirements and the different sources that should feed into requirements.

In Part 2 of this series I discussed the role of user needs in product requirements, and in this article I’d like to talk about the role of business needs and technology needs, and making sure that the right balance is struck when incorporating these (often loud, often conflicting) voices in the organization into what gets built.  So, let’s dive in…

Business needs

When I was at eBay, we often heard the mantra from our executive team, “If you fix the user experience, you fix the business.”  Lovely words, but when it comes time to decide what to build, “Fix the business” usually comes first.  This is, of course, not a bad thing, but unfortunately the best user experience often means taking revenue-generating features out of the product.  Would we have banner ads if UX really was king?  Don’t think so…

Still, you have to make money.  That is, after all, the point of the business.  The trick is to understand the difference between good revenue streams and bad revenue streams, and opt for the good ones as much as possible.  A good case study on this is eBay’s interesting approach to photos in product listings on the site.  eBay started charging users to add photos to their  listings pretty much from the very beginning.  This was back in 1995, and in those days storage wasn’t dirt cheap, so it was a natural thing to do.

As the years went by, and more and more photo sharing services popped up that allows users to upload and stores pictures for free, this approach became increasingly frustrating for users.  The other side of the story is that it’s actually in eBay’s best interest for users to upload photos of their items — items with photos convert way better than those without photos.

Still, it took many months to convince the executive team to make it free for users to upload photos of their items.  This is an example of a bad revenue stream — it brings in money, but to the detriment of users and the overall success of the business.  When it comes to adding revenue streams to your product, the important question should always be: are you doing this so people will buy it, or are you doing this so people will want to use it and be willing to pay for it?

In a recent interview on Microsoft and tablets, Steve Ballmer said the following:

And so we are working with [our] partners, not just to deliver something, but to deliver products that people really want to go buy.

And in that lies the core of what’s wrong with Microsoft — the difference between making products users want to buy vs. making products they want to use.  When you make products people want to use, charging for the value it brings (i.e., looking for good revenue streams), becomes so much easier.  Approaching it from the more negative side, I guess you could also say it like this:

Technology needs

One of the dangers of product roadmaps and the PM’s role is that back-end maintenance and optimization can start to take a back seat.  This is a huge mistake, best explained through the metaphor of technical debt. In Steve McConnel’s great post on this topic, he defines technical debt as follows:

The first kind of technical debt is the kind that is incurred unintentionally. For example, a design approach just turns out to be error-prone or a junior programmer just writes bad code. This technical debt is the non-strategic result of doing a poor job.

The second kind of technical debt is the kind that is incurred intentionally. This commonly occurs when an organization makes a conscious decision to optimize for the present rather than for the future. “If we don’t get this release done on time, there won’t be a next release” is a common refrain—and often a compelling one.

He goes on to explain why this can become a problem:

If the debt grows large enough, eventually the company will spend more on servicing its debt than it invests in increasing the value of its other assets. A common example is a legacy code base in which so much work goes into keeping a production system running (i.e., “servicing the debt”) that there is little time left over to add new capabilities to the system. With financial debt, analysts talk about the “debt ratio,” which is equal to total debt divided by total assets. Higher debt ratios are seen as more risky, which seems true for technical debt, too.

Technical debt isn’t always wrong — quick hacks to get a product out the door is often the right choice.  But as with most debt, it’s important to start paying it off in small chunks as soon as it’s incurred, before you get into too much trouble.  If you’re interested in this topic, also read Andrew Chen’s great post called Product Design debt vs. Technical Debt.

Striking the right balance

Now that we’ve discussed user needs, business needs, and technology needs, the obvious question is: how do you decide what to build now vs. later vs. not at all?

For that, the right answer is unfortunately, in my experience, the traditional cop-out answer: it depends. It depends mainly on the following factors (in no particular order):

• The level of user engagement and involvement.  If users are screaming for a particular feature, or if there are rumblings around “why haven’t you done anything for us recently?”, it could be a good time to up the level of customer needs you meet.
• The stage of the product in its lifecycle. If the product is just at the beginning, customer needs will most likely come first.  As the product matures, technology and business needs become more important and should start taking precedence.
• The financial state of the business.  If there are ways to add good revenue streams, those opportunities should always be taken.

Depending on where the business is on each of these 3 factors, the different inputs might be weighted differently. If the product is going through a growth spurt with lots of buzz, more attention could be placed on user needs. If the product is mature and making good money, technical needs might get more weight.

Exactly how this is balanced in each version/release of the product has no clear answer, and it’s where the art of product management comes in. But one thing is for sure — none of these needs can be ignored for any extended period of time. Take too long to pay down technical debt, and your platform will become bloated and unable to scale. Focus on making money too much, and users will fall out of love with your product.

Successful products have clear product management leaders who are able to take all the different requirements inputs, place it into context with other external and internal pressures, limits, and opportunities, and design a product vision and a (flexible) product roadmap that ultimately increases product/market fit (which I mentioned briefly in Part 2 of this series).

But what do product requirements look like, and what is the Product Manager’s role in that process?  That will be the topic of the next post…

I recently started a series on software development and the role of the Product Manager.  If you haven’t already done so, it might be a good idea to read Part 1 (Overview) before continuing.  In this post I’d like to write about the first step in the development process, namely Product Requirements, and the various sources of input that go into deciding what to build and how to improve your product.

As I started writing I realized the topic is just too big for one post, so I’m going to split it up into a few different posts:

• Part 2 (this post) will be about user needs as an input to product requirements.
• Part 3 will be about business needs and technology needs as inputs to product requirements.
• Part 4 will be about  the PM’s role in the Product Requirements phase.

Even though the focus here is not on what kind of product/service your company should develop and sell, I do want to briefly mention product/market fit, because it is probably the most important aspect to figure out to be a successful business.  No one talks about this better than Marc Andreesen, so I wanted to quote from one of his (now deleted) blog posts:

The quality of a startup’s product can be defined as how impressive the product is to one customer or user who actually uses it: How easy is the product to use? How feature rich is it? How fast is it? How extensible is it? How polished is it? How many (or rather, how few) bugs does it have?

The size of a startup’s market is the the number, and growth rate, of those customers or users for that product.

The only thing that matters is getting to product/market fit.  Product/market fit means being in a good market with a product that can satisfy that market.

With product/market fit figured out (no easy task), and a workable product to start with, it’s time to get serious about building and improving the product — and that’s the stage where this post starts.  At the heart of a good product roadmap stands a Product Manager that is able to strike a balance between user needs, business needs, and technology needs.  So let’s look at each of those in detail, starting with user needs.

User needs

Identifying user needs is at the core of a user-centered design process, and it involves gathering feedback from the users of your product through a variety of methods to uncover unmet needs and opportunities for improvements.  This is called user experience research (UER), and there are plenty of resources available on the topic, so I’m just going to provide an overview here.

First, it’s important to mention the fundamental difference between market research and user experience research:

• Market research seeks to understand the needs of the market in general, and is generally more focused on areas like market fit, brand perception, advertising and pricing research, and ways to uncover perceptions of the company and its products.
• In contrast, user experience research focuses on users’ interaction with the product.  It relies heavily on observational techniques, since users are notoriously bad at describing their experiences or predicting their behavior.

There are many ways to classify different UER methodologies, but my preference is for a classification that lines up the different methods with the outcomes required by different phases of the product development process.  In that approach, there are three classes:

1. Strategic research

Strategic research is done with the goal of coming up with new product ideas and business opportunities, or preliminary design explorations during the product discovery phase to  help with the brainstorming of design solutions.  Here are some of the methods that fall into this class:

• Ethnography.  A technique long used in Anthropology that has only recently found its way into the toolkit for research on interactive products.  It involves going to users’ homes or offices, and observing how they use your products in their natural environment.  It allows the researcher to see users in action where they feel most comfortable.  Ethnography is all about observing and listening.  It is generally not task-based like usability studies, but follows a loose interview script with the goal of uncovering needs and insights that users are unable to articulate.  I have an extreme positive bias towards ethnographic research, especially in contrast to focus groups (of which I’m not a fan at all, but that’s a subject for a different post).  I have seen first-hand how ethnography sparks innovation when it shows how users make up their own workarounds for the limitations of software, which in turn reveals opportunities for product improvements.  When it comes to exploratory methods to help with product strategy and roadmaps, there simple is nothing better than a good ethnography study.
• Participatory design.  Another favorite, this technique brings users together to solve design problems in a way that would make sense to them.  The purpose is not to take users’ designs and implement them, but to find out which elements and activities are most important to them.  My preference is to do this in diads, where 2 users work together on a design.  This forces both participants to be active, and you learn as much from their conversation with each other as with the designs they put together.  The usual process is to provide users with a blank page or basic framework, cut-outs of various elements that could go on a page, and watch and listen as they make trade-offs and design decisions on what should go on the page based on how they would use the product.  This technique especially helps guide interaction design because it gives a glimpse into users’ process as they go through the site.
• Concept testing.  This is a good way to gather feedback on an approach before wireframes or mockups are created.  Storyboards/comics are great artifacts to use for this kind of testing, since it takes design out of the process, and gathers feedback from users on the process you intend to design.  Although mostly done in-person with 6-8 users, there are also great tools for large-scale concept testing, like Invoke.  Below is an example of a storyboard one of our researchers at eBay used during early concept testing for one of our products:

Further reading on strategic research:

• Ethnography in Industry: Objectives?
• How to set up and run participatory design sessions, analyze data and present results effectively

2. Design research

Design research includes most of the methods that are associated with traditional user experience research.  Its role is to improve and refine existing designs in various levels of fidelity.  Some of the methods include:

• Usability testing.  This is, of course, the most well-known UER method, and what most people default to for any kind of design feedback.  Task-based usability testing in a lab is a fantastic tool, but it has become a little bit too much of a “when all you have is a hammer…” method.  Usability testing should be used to uncover usability problems with a proposed interaction design.  It should not be used for feedback on visuals, finding out which design users prefer, or uncovering new product ideas.  There are other techniques that are much better suited to that task.  Usability testing involves 1-on-1 sessions with users where the researcher observes them as they perform assigned tasks.  This kind of direct observation is a great way to understand what users would actually do on the site (as opposed to what they say they would do), as well as to uncover the reasons why they do what they do.
• RITE testing.  Rapid Iterative Testing & Evaluation (RITE) is a very specific form of usability testing, but I wanted to call it out because it is my preferred way of testing.  It involves a day or two of focused usability testing, followed by a design cycle where the feedback is immediately injected into the design before the next round of testing.  Doing several of these cycles quickly means your outcome isn’t a bloated Powerpoint deck with a bunch of recommendations; your outcome is a better design that incorporated user feedback in real time.  As the debate continues on how UX can be more involved in Agile development, this technique should become increasingly important since it fits in perfectly with the Agile mindset.
• Desirability studies.  Invented by researchers at Microsoft (yes, really – see this Word article where they outline the approach), this has become another favorite technique for me if I want feedback on the visual aspects of a site (not so much interaction), and specifically which visual approach users like more when there is more than one alternative.  It involves a survey to a large number of users where they are asked to rate one of the proposed design alternatives using a semantic differential scale.  The survey is done as a between-subjects experiment, meaning each user sees only one of the proposed designs, so that they are not influenced but the other design alternatives.  The analysis then clearly shows differences in the visual desirability of the proposed design alternatives.

Further reading on design research:

• Complete beginner’s guide to design research
• Usability testing overview
• Do’s and Don’ts of usability testing

3. Assessment research

Often neglected, the role of assessment research is to measure the impact design decisions have made, and to evaluate success and continued areas that need improvement.  This requires larger sample sizes to ensure the ability to compare before/after metrics with statistical significance, so these methods are mainly quantitative in nature.  Methods include:

• Product surveys.  Everyone hates surveys, but it remains an effective way to assess how design changes are affecting user perceptions of the site. Different from most market research surveys you receive (and delete) in your inbox, these surveys deal specifically with user perceptions of the interaction and design.  It’s not always effective as standalone research studies since there is so much bias in surveys with their <5% response rates, but if you can run surveys over time, and control the sample so that the bias remains the same, it can be a very good tool to ascertain the success of your design changes.
• Online user experience assessments.  Another favorite, tools like Keynote allows you to gather real-time click-through data as well as subjective user feedback.  It uses a proxy or a browser download to give users tasks on a site, and ask them questions about the experience while their activity is being tracked.  This often produces a mountain of data, which can be quite overwhelming and not always effectively used if there is not enough time/resources available to analyze the data.
• Analytics.  Web analytics need no introduction, but there are several tools specifically aimed at user experience, with my favorite being Razorfish‘s Advanced Optimization tool for web forms.  By placing a small piece of JS on form pages, it gives you a mountain of data on how users interact with forms, including what error messages they receive, how much time they spend in each field, the last field they were on before closing the form, scrolling data, and the list goes on.  It’s a great way to improve form conversion.  I honestly don’t know why they don’t market this thing more.

So that’s an overview of user research methods — there are many more, but I wanted to focus on the ones I’ve found especially useful in my own work.  The real power of user research starts to happen when you combine methods and triangulate results to come up with a product strategy that takes a variety of quantitative and qualitative insights into consideration.  If you’re interested to learn more about this, Using Multiple Data Sources and Insights to Aid Design is a good post on the topic.

There are so many resources available on user research — your best bet to stay on top of the latest happenings in the field is to subscribe to UX Booth and UX Matters.

In part 2b, I’ll talk about the other two inputs to Product Requirements: Business Needs and Technology Needs.  I’ll also discuss how all of this fits into creating Product Requirements, and what the Product Manager’s role is in all of it.  Stay tuned!

In one of his characteristically brilliant essays, Paul Graham recently wrote:

I think most people have one top idea in their mind at any given time. That’s the idea their thoughts will drift toward when they’re allowed to drift freely. And this idea will thus tend to get all the benefit of that type of thinking, while others are starved of it. Which means it’s a disaster to let the wrong idea become the top one in your mind.

The importance of focus in a startup, or any other business for that matter, is such a basic principle that no one disagrees with it, but it is still such a difficult thing to get right.  One of the reasons is that you don’t want to stifle innovation, and some of the best ideas can come from a completely random project you went off to do in your spare time.

Whatever your feelings are about side projects that take you off your main focus, it is important to recognize them for what they are: distractions.  This doesn’t necessarily mean it’s bad, but let’s call it what it is — these projects distract you from your “top idea.”

For the products I’m responsible for at Yola, we have name for such distractions.  We call them “squirrel projects.”  If you’ve seen the movie Up, you’ll probably immediately know what I’m talking about.  If not, here’s a refresher:

I don’t think “squirrel projects” need more definition than that video…  So, when one of your team members go off on a sometimes-random-but-always-guaranteed-to-be-cool tangent, it’s important to do two things:

• Call it out as a squirrel project
• Determine whether or not it’s a squirrel worth hunting

Figuring out if it’s a squirrel worth hunting depends mainly on:

• The timing of the project
• The potential value of the idea

I’d say that 2 days before release day is a pretty bad time to go squirrel hunting.  But what if you’re in the beginning of a sprint and something great comes along?  Adjust.  Reprioritize. Throw some things on the backlog, and make room.  Because sometimes, it’s worth it.

It’s also important to note that “value” doesn’t necessarily mean immediate ROI.  There are different ways to get value out of a squirrel project.  Sometimes it’s the potential for revenue down the road.  Sometimes it’s the time spent now on automation tasks that will save you a bunch of time later.  And sometimes, it’s just plain cool (two words and a hint for something you should try on Yola: Konami Code).

Squirrel projects aren’t bad.  But they can be devastating to your focus and momentum if they happen at the wrong time, and/or they have no potential for value.  So go hunt the good ones, and let the bad ones go.

Almost a year ago I wrote a post to propose/summarize a universal model for product development.  I’ve now refined that model into what I believe is much closer to what the original intention was: a product development framework that is detailed enough to be practically usable, but generic enough to fit on top of any development paradigm (Agile, Waterfall, etc.).

I’ve decided to start a series of posts on software development and the Product Manager’s role in that process.  The first, this one, is a very general overview — it’s basic, yes, but necessary to lay the groundwork.  After that, I want to spend time writing down my thoughts on each of these stages in detail.

Why do this? Because I think the Product Management profession is finally starting to come into its own, and I’m hoping that through discussion we can, together, evolve a practical guide to what we do from day to day, something that is both flexible enough and rigid enough to be helpful without being constricting.  And maybe also just to force myself to think through this in detail and become more deliberate and focused on each of these steps.  I hope you’ll join the discussion!

I won’t be talking about scheduling, scrum methodology, or team organization in these posts.  The goal is to focus on the work that needs to be done — whether it’s being done by an individual or a core team is not the focus here, and will be different depending on the company, the philosophy, and the team.

So let’s start here — a diagram of a proposed universal model for software product development:

Borrowing from and expanding on my original post, I want to make a few observations. First, there are a few assumptions that are important to note about this model:

• Regardless of the development methodology, representatives from Product, Marketing, Business, Design, and Engineering should be involved to some extent from the very beginning of the process. Once detailed requirements are being written, it largely becomes an Engineering and Product effort to ensure momentum and avoid the dangers of design by committee, best summed up by Dilbert:

• Having said that, it is important for one person to own this process (i.e. be accountable for its success) from start to finish, and that person should be the Product Manager/Product Owner. A good product manager is not a dictator. He/she is a facilitator between all the different stakeholders of a product, and the really good ones are able to get through this model on time and on budget, every time and with as much consensus between groups as possible.
• The roles of the Responsible (R), Supporter (S), and Informed (I) are important to define for each of these steps.  Most important is that there should be only one “R” for each step.  This doesn’t necessarily mean it’s the person who does all the work, but it’s the person who is ultimately responsible to get the work done (with help from the “S”es).
• This model is designed to work for any organizational structure, project size, and timeline. If the project is large, more time can be spent on each step. If the project has a tight timeline, it doesn’t mean that you will skip the “Iterate” part of “Design + Iterate.” It just means that you will spend less time on it (more on that later).

Summary of the different aspects of the model

The rest of this series will be devoted to detailed discussions about this model. My goal with this post is to be general and make one or two points about each aspect. So let’s look at some definitions and implications of the model:

• The starting point – identifying needs. At the beginning of any project (new or iterative), it is important to gather and synthesize input from three different sources:
  • User needs. Everyone needs to have a good understand of the market, the target segments, and their behaviors and attitudes. There’s not enough room to go into detail here, but it is important to look at four sources of user input: market research (segmentation, etc.), user experience research (usability studies, ethnographic explorations), site analytics (behavioral analysis), and customer support (call transcripts, interviews with CS reps, etc.). Having this common understanding allows the organization to build products that matter to users.
  • Business needs. User experience practitioners too often neglect the fact that well, your site has to make money! Revenue goals are not a good excuse for bad design, and that attainable revenue goals are essential to push the organization to design good product.
  • Technology needs. Engineering needs to be at the table from the start. They know the limitations of the product, they know what needs to be fixed, they know what technical debt needs to be paid down. Having engineering and product working together is essential in good product development.
• Requirements gathering. Pragmatic Marketing, in a post entitled “On Reqs and Specs: The Roles and Behaviors for Effective Product Definition,” proposes some solid definitions for the three different documentation outcomes in this model: Requirements, Functional specifications, and Technical specifications. The first outcome from the discussion and synthesis of needs is a common understanding of the problem statement you are trying to address, which takes the form of Requirements. A requirement is simply a short statement of the problem, and Pragmatic Marketing recommends the following format: “Our preference is the Requirements That Work format: [Persona] has [problem] with [frequency]. It forces product managers to explore the problem, not the solution, and helps the design team understand the context of the problem.”
• Solution brainstorming. Once the problem has been defined and agreed upon, the team starts thinking about solutions, usually through some form of design thinking or abductive reasoning. There are three important aspects of this phase, which is often called Product Discovery:
  • Start with blue sky ideation (divergent thinking). At this point, don’t limit solutions by what is technically or otherwise feasible. Spend time dreaming about the product – this is where innovation happens!
  • Relentlessly prioritize (convergent thinking). This is the part of the process where nonsensical ideas are thrown out, and the team consolidates around a few possible solutions to the problem that can be further explored. Remember: there is no commitment to implementation or specific designs yet at this phase.
  • Apply the technology filter only after the ideation phase. There is a very important technology filter that needs to be applied during prioritization. What is technically feasible? If something is currently not feasible, what would it cost to build the right architecture? Those early inputs can save a lot of headache down the road.
• Flow charting and wireframing. This phase starts to put some flesh around the second output document, Functional specifications, which Joel Spolsky defines as follows: “A functional specification describes how a product will work entirely from the user’s perspective. It doesn’t care how the thing is implemented. It talks about features. It specifies screens, menus, dialogs, and so on.” At this point visual design is still left out of the picture, all you are doing is defining flows and interactions.
• High-fidelity mockups. In this phase, visual design gets involved to design the experience as it will look on the screen.  If there are pre-defined patterns and standards (as is hopefully this case), this could be a pretty light step, but I do believe it is important, even in an agile environment, not to leave this part up to chance.
• Technical specifications. Development can start before the full designs have been completed.  Once the flow and interaction are sorted out, you do in most cases have enough information to start task breakdown and implementation.  Quoting Joel Spolsky again, “A technical specification describes the internal implementation of the program. It talks about data structures, relational database models, choice of programming languages and tools, algorithms, etc.”
• Build, discuss, iterate. Everyone designs a product, but it is sad to see that when time/budget gets tight, iterating on it before it goes live is often the first part of the process to fly out the window. It cannot be overstated how important it is to prototype and test your designs before they go live. And not having time is really no excuse. If you have no time, make a paper prototype and test it with three of your friends over coffee in the evening. You’d be surprised how much value this can add. Boxes and Arrows has a great article on prototyping and how to integrate it with your design process that’s well worth the read.
• QA, release, assess. After the thrill of releasing, the assessment phase is extremely important and often overlooked. It is important to define your measures of success upfront, and then follow up to see if you’ve met those goals. How do users respond to the product? Are we meeting revenue/engagement goals? What can we learn from how users interact with the product to give us ideas for new products? I’m also an advocate for using the same four sources of input we discussed earlier (market research, user experience research, site analytics, and customer support), as opposed to relying on only one methodology, like a 3-week A/B test. More on the dangers of that in one of my earlier posts.

Where we go from here

So now that the stage is set, what happens next?  Over the next weeks and months, I’d like to write a detailed post on each of these phases, particularly from a Product Management perspective, and what the role of the PM/PO is during each of the phases.

There are, of course, lots of resources out there for Product Managers, but I’m hoping to talk more practice than theory here, and hopefully generate some discussion (and disagreements!) to help us reflect on our chosen profession.

PS Big hat tip to @justinspratt who gave me the nudge I needed to start this series.  He is the real deal, despite being Australian.

I just read an interesting New York Times article on “social reading” (Yes, People Still Read, but Now It’s Social), and it got me thinking about the future of reading, and the e-reader battle that’s currently going on, particularly between the iPad and Amazon’s Kindle.  And then I upgraded my Kindle software to v2.5 this morning, and it made it clear to me why I think the Kindle is a far superior reader to the iPad.

No one will deny that the iPad’s iBooks app has a nicer user experience than the Kindle.  It’s colorful and pretty, it has a nice bookshelf, you can turn the pages with your fingers, and, uh…  Well, that’s where it stops.  The two major issues with iBooks are:

• Since it’s a back lit display, it starts hurting your eyes when you read for too long.
• The battery life is, you know, not ideal…

Now consider the Kindle.  Though not as pretty to look at, you can tell that Amazon decided to focus on the reading experience.  You don’t have to plug it in all the time, and you can read it for hours without hurting your eyes.  But it is v2.5′s forays into social reading that really starts to set the device apart.  There are two features in particular that I think are brilliant:

• First, Amazon allows you to opt in to viewing popular highlights. This allows you to see when passages of a book you’re reading were highlighted by others who have read the same book.  It’s like a virtual book club, but instead of trying to get 6 people to agree on a book to read, you can connect with 100′s of readers who are already reading the same book.  This kind of connection really is where the Internet is at its most useful.
• Amazon also allows you to link your Twitter and Facebook accounts to your Kindle.  This means that you can highlight a passage that you’re reading, and share it with your followers, like I did this morning:

That is powerful.  It not only allows you to share what you’re reading and thinking about in real time, but it’s also great business for Amazon, since it provides a way for your followers to purchase the book right away.  Of course, even the Kindle packaging tells you that this is an experience built around passionate readers:

The differences between the iPad and the Kindle have larger implication as well, particularly in the field of Product Management.  Look, the iPad is gorgeous, it really is.  But it is an experience designed to contain so many different uses, that it is not possible to focus on doing one particular thing (like reading a book) extremely well.  The Kindle is singularly focused on readers, and that is why it beats the iPad hands down as an e-reader.

Dropbox did exactly the same thing to beat out their competitors — they focused on making file sharing as easy and convenient as possible.  They didn’t have all the features, but they made sure the features they do have has a superior user experience.  On that note, if you haven’t watched this 23-minute talk by Dropbox’s CEO where he discusses their business model, you really should.  It is inspiring and well worth it.

One of the hardest parts of Agile development, but also one of the most powerful and rewarding, is figuring out how to make the process work for the team you’re part of.  Even though the guidelines are clear, there is simply no “one size fits all” approach when it comes to Agile.

We as Product Owners need to loosen up a little when it comes to pre-determined process, and work with our development teams to design an Agile process that works for everyone involved.  With this in mind, developer @darb and I evolved the following sprint guidelines for one of the applications we are responsible for here at Yola.

The ingredients of a good sprint

Every two weeks we sit down and discuss the next sprint, and we make sure the following ingredients are included:

• 1 x silly name. Darb is partial to automatic Linux-generated names like Thundering Tuatara.  I am partial to non-silly names like “Sprint 3″.  But he won this argument — it’s all a game of give-and-take.
• 1 x revenue-related. Every sprint has to include at least one bug fix, enhancement or feature that will improve our top-line revenue.  We are a business, after all, and this part is too often neglected by Product Owners.
• 1 x front-end maintenance. With every sprint we have to make an improvement that customers will notice.  This can be small visual tweaks to increase usability, or bigger overhauls of the interface based on customer feedback and analytics.
• 1 x back-end maintenance. Performance improvements and general back-end maintenance get put on the back burner way too easily – and as Product Owners we are often very guilty of deprioritizing maintenance because you can’t immediately see the effects of working on this.  But balance is extremely important, and paying down technical debt needs to be part of every sprint.
• 1 x error messaging/UX improvement. This is related to front-end maintenance but different in that these tickets aim to address user experience and usability improvements mainly through changes in the interaction, not necessarily the visual design.

It’s important to note that these buckets aren’t mutually exclusive, so some tickets will address more than one issue — and that’s even better.  This is also the minimum requirement, usually we try to get a good balance of all kinds of tickets into a sprint.

The recipe for a good sprint

In addition to these minimum requirements of what should go into each sprint, we put together the following guidelines:

• Leave time for ad hoc planning and work.  Other stuff will always come up.  Don’t let it make you miss your deadlines — leave room for it so that you have “planned outages” in your sprint work.
• Make sure there is a good mix of big and small size/complexity tickets.  Momentum is so important.  Seth Godin talks often about the importance of shipping often, and to do that, you have to bite off manageable chunks of work.  Make that small text edit that’s been on the backlog for months because it’s just too small to schedule.  And couple that with bigger tasks that get you closer to your overall product vision.
• Make effective use of priority. We use Jira to track our projects, and we use Priority to schedule the order of work.  We have to get P2 and P3 projects done in the sprint.  P4 and P5 projects are nice to have, and we do them if there is time.  For P1 work, see the first bullet…
• Stir Rian into vitriol. I’m not sure why it is important for Darb to find new ways to freak me out every week, but he seems to thrive on it, so this remains in the recipe for now.
• Simmer in QA by mid 2nd week.  It’s such a simple thing, but so many organizations forget that for something to release on Thursday, it doesn’t mean that first round development is completed by Thursday morning.  It means that at least some first round development needs to be completed by Tuesday morning so that QA can start.
• Rinse and repeat.  And then we do it all over again.

The “ingredients” and recipe are very specific to the application that Darb is the lead developer on, which is our payment system — with all its many back-end and front-end complexities.  Obviously different applications need different ingredients.  On our website, for example, we place a lot more focus on front-end than back-end.

And I think that’s the point I’m trying to make — that the best product development process is the one that Product and Engineering agrees on, and it never looks exactly the same across all applications.

Last night I attended my first Cape Town GeekDinner, and I have to say that I will definitely be back next time.  Good food, good wine (thanks Delheim!), great atmosphere and discussions, and a few 10-minute geeky talks sprinkled in between… yes, this is an idea I can get behind.

I also got to do a short talk on 5 things I’ve learned about website redesigns from being involved in various projects at eBay and Yola.com.  The slides are posted below.  As I mentioned in my talk — since you can’t say a whole lot in 10 minutes, I went with breadth over depth here.  There are obviously a lot more that goes into redesign projects (and yes, I know Content Strategy is about more than not using Lorem Ipsum in your designs…).  But these are a some things I’ve learned going through the process a few times:

I recently realized that you don’t hear the word “globalization” all that often any more.  And I think it’s because globalization has moved from being a buzz word to a reality that is just part of the way we do business now, making it unnecessary to give it a fancy name.  As we become more comfortable with managing companies and projects across multiple locations, it’s easy to assume that geography does not matter any more.  And certainly the technology is there to support the around-the-clock collaboration that is so valuable when you work across time zones.  With cloud computing now a reality, and plenty of collaboration applications to choose from, working together has never been more efficient.

But I believe geography does still matter, and can result in decreased efficiency if not managed correctly.  The difficulty with working across multiple locations is not technology limitations, it’s human nature.  We tend to not trust what we can’t see, and that’s a problem if developers, product managers, and marketing folks sit in different offices and different time zones.  Once different work philosophies come out and you’re not able to talk about it, things can escalate out of control and make for really bad relationships if conversations happen intra-office but not inter-office.

This is not an insurmountable problem though.  Here are some things I believe can help distributed teams run smoothly.  Please also add your tips and ideas in the comments section!

1. Meet in person. Now.

People get along so much better once they’ve shared a meal together.  This is just a fact of human nature — we thrive on in-person social interaction (yes, even us introverts).  If you have distributed teams, it is imperative that they meet each other in person as soon as they start working together.

If a trip can be planned during a major software release — even better.  Nothing binds people together like the stress and exhilaration of getting a new product out in the wild.  Work hard, but also make time to go have dinner together.  You’ll find that after the initial trip, you’re able to understand each other a lot better over IM/phone calls.  I do think it’s worth getting teams together at least once a year, but even if it’s just once at the beginning of the relationship, it will go a long way to improve working relationships.  So go ahead, spend the money on that trip.  It’s worth it.

2. Be respectful of time zones.

10am in San Francisco is 8pm in Cape Town.  Not a great time to have a meeting… Now, it won’t always be possible to line up time zones, but at the very least it’s important to trade off meeting times.  Don’t make the guy in the smaller office always dial in at 9pm.  Alternate between meeting times to give everyone a chance to have a life outside of work.  Try to have all night-time calls on one or two nights, not spread out across the week.  It’s the little things that count.

3. Use the right technology.

When it comes to collaboration across teams, there is no excuse for inefficiency.  We use the following applications, and I can highly recommend all of them:

• Google Docs and Dropbox for document collaboration
• Jira and Confluence (enterprise wiki) for bug tracking, product specs, and related discussions.
• Conceptshare for sharing and commenting on visual designs.
• Campfire for group chats during projects, and especially during product releases.  The Propane desktop app and the Ember iPhone app are great add-ons to Campfire.

4. Keep it human

One of the most important aspects of team dynamics — and especially distributed team dynamics — is not losing your sense of humor.  Even when things get really stressful, keeping funny alive is essential because it reminds you that there are real people on the other side of the phone line/email address.  And, of course, it relieves stress.

I’ll give an example from a project I recently worked on with a developer team in our Cape Town office.  They built an environment for us to test the new product flows, and the screens can live either in a website or a pop-up window.  The normal (boring) thing to do would be to put a link there that says “Open in pop-up” when you want to test the pop-up dialog version of the flow.  Instead, the developers called the link “Pop that collar,” and the following image appeared when you hovered over the link:

Now, I don’t know if they did this to amuse me or themselves, or a little but of both.  But for some reason the joke doesn’t get tired for me, and it made working on the project so much more enjoyable.  Always bring the funny on your projects.

5. Trust each other

A recent article called Forced compliance is an obstruction to discipline really got me thinking about trust within teams — especially distributed teams.  I agree with the author on how damaging it can be if team members don’t trust each other:

A forced compliance style of governance is a lot about trying to compensate for lack of trust and admitting that we are more likely to fail than succeed. On the other hand, discipline is not pain, suffering and anguish. It’s only sadistic if you implement discipline for nothing.

We need to trust our team members — they are (usually) smart people who do the things they do for a reason.  It doesn’t mean you don’t have tough conversations when someone makes a mistake.  But making a mistake doesn’t make you untrustworthy — who among us would be able to meet that bar of excellence anyway?  Ask questions before you judge…

6. Don’t stop talking, especially when you disagree

The book Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes are High is a must-read book about having those tough conversations when things do go wrong, or when disagreements arise.  At the heart of the book are tools to ensure that everyone on the team gets listened to, and that no discussions happen behind peoples’ backs.  I much rather prefer an open dialogue about a product disagreement, than having to find out 3 months after launch that someone on the team didn’t like the way we did things.  As Product Managers, our role is to gather information from a variety of sources and channel that into the best possible ideas and products.  How can we do that if we don’t listen to everyone?

I often remind myself that as Product Managers, we are not judged by the number of times we ask for input, or how often we change direction based on new and relevant information.  We are judged by the success of the live Product.  So why would we not want to hear everyone’s ideas upfront so that we can launch the best possible experience?

So these are a few principles I try my best to apply when working with teams on different continents.  But I have hardly figured it out, and we’re basically making this up as we go along.  I’d love to know your thoughts and ideas: how can distributed teams work better together?

There is a very interesting and healthy debate going on in the Agile Development world about Minimum Viable Product (particularly in startups).  Before I get into the topic I’d like to address today, I just want to do some positioning and say that in this debate, I currently (but am open to being convinced otherwise) side with writers like Andrew Chen (read his excellent post, Minimum Desirable Product) and Jason Cohen (read Releasing Early Is Not Always Good? Heresy!).  The other side is represented by posts like this one by Jeff Atwood: Version 1 Sucks, But Ship It Anyway.

While the debate is still ongoing, I’d like to write about a very specific related aspect, namely product development process (and those of us who would like to argue for fairly strict compliance to it).  Two recent blog posts address the topic of compliance directly, and I wanted to reference them and then write a quick response on why I think process is so important, especially in agile development.

The first is Seth Godin’s Dancing with entropy.  His rant on compliance actually inadvertently includes a pretty good description of what Product Managers do:

People are often paid to enforce compliance. The job is to ensure that everything is in its place, that errors are zero, that things are delivered on time and as expected. The random event is a problem, something to be feared and extinguished.

His main point seems to be that you should embrace the unknown, and “dance with it”:

Most people, though, the ones with great jobs, are in the business of dancing with entropy, not creating it. Take what comes, sort it, leverage it, improvise and make something worthwhile out of it.

I’m assuming he refers here to the definition of entropy as “a measure of the disorder or randomness in a closed system.” This is a great sentiment and we should all be able to deal with the unknown, but in practice, creating Ordo ab Chao during development can only happen effectively with proper product process behind it.  You can’t dance with entropy without bug tracking, if you catch my drift.

The second is a post by Aslam Khan entitled Forced compliance is an obstruction to discipline.  I respect him a lot for his forceful call for self-discipline in development, and I don’t doubt his sincerity at all when he writes:

Surely, we have learned enough from spectacular failures that governance does not give people an opportunity to exercise self discipline. When you give a person a chance to develop personal discipline, then forced compliance is unnecessary. With forced compliance, we force people into ignoring their own discipline because the system will “sort” it out for you. It breeds an attitude of “the system failed me and it’s not my fault”.

This is an ideal situation, and I agree with Aslam that personal responsibility is an essential quality for any developer — and PM, and designer, and human being, for that matter.  But personal responsibility is just not going to get you all the way there.  And by there I mean a product that is successful in the eyes of the company and its users.  I’m not arguing for the perfect product — there is no such thing.  But there is such a thing as desirable products that work the way they are supposed to and meet customer needs.  And for that, you need more than personal responsibility.

It is a mistake to think that process/compliance slows down development or inhibits innovation.  Compliance puts boundaries around what is within scope, and allows you to know when the product you’re working on is ready to launch.  Compliance also doesn’t mean that you don’t trust your team, or that you think people aren’t capable of working on their own.  It’s not about keeping tabs on people, it’s about making sure the product doesn’t get out of control.

By compliance I don’t mean an inability to roll with the punches and remain agile, but that a certain degree of process is needed.  In an earlier post on the software product development lifecycle I go into more detail on what I believe is a good process for product development.  I also discuss three outcomes recommended by Pragmatic Marketing: Requirements, Functional Specifications, and Technical Specifications.  I do believe we need this level of process, and compliance to it, to build great product.  We should embrace it, not fight it.  You know, dance with it.

As a Product Manager, I understand the Minimum Viable Product (MVP) concept, decisions to de-scope rather than delay, etc.  But too often MVP’s go out into the wild missing that all-important middle “V”, so you end up with, well, minimum products.

An example I came across recently is the sign-in process on Comcast.com.  First, a little background.  Comcast recently deployed a product they call mySIGN-IN.  According to their FAQ page:

mySIGN-IN is a unified sign-in system that lets you use your existing email address and password to access participating Comcast sites. When you sign in to any participating Comcast site, you’ll be conveniently signed in to the other sites that you use.

That all seems well and good, but the actual sign-in experience shows what happens when features go out without proper integration.  The sign-in process now happens on two separate pages:

Step 1: Enter email address

Step 2: Enter password

Two things struck me immediately about this experience:

• There is no reason to split the sign-in process into two screens.
• The visual design of the two pages are completely different.

Wanting to give Comcast the benefit of the doubt, I started looking into this a little more (because, you know, what else am I going to do on a Sunday afternoon apart from listening to Amos Lee on vinyl).  I thought that maybe this was an acquisition, and they are just taking some time on the integration.  But no, as far as I can tell, mySIGN-IN is not an acquisition — it is an internally developed product.  So I think this is what happened:

• A separate Comcast division designed and developed the mySIGN-IN feature
• The different Comcast properties started implementing the feature onto their sign-in pages
• Due to technical reasons, the pages had to be split for Comcast.com
• There was no UX oversight to ensure design consistency (or no resources available to make necessary changes)

Now, it does appear that someone at Comcast realized that this is not an ideal experience, and decided that explaining the changes to users is in order.  It’s a noble idea, but as we know, most users don’t read anything that’s not inside or next to a text box.  Either way, here are some of the tool tips that were added:

That first tool tip really bugs me:

Due to some recent security improvements, we now require you to enter your user name and password in two separate steps.

That just doesn’t seem right to me.  Due to “security improvements”?  I may be missing something from a security perspective, but I just don’t see why the sign-in information can’t be passed through securely without splitting up the pages.

What this means for product managers

I don’t mean to pick on Comcast.  This type of thing is very common, and I’m sure I’ve made similar decisions in the past that results in a user experience that’s not ideal.  But I do think this example can teach us a few things about product management:

1. Product owners (those responsible for individual features) need Product Strategists to ensure UX consistency (see this article from Pragmatic Marketing about different Product Management roles).  mySIGN-IN was clearly design in a vacuum, which could have been ok if there was someone who made sure the user experience stayed consistent across properties.
2. Don’t leave out the “V” in the MVP.  I believe that Comcast didn’t launch a minimum viable product.  Splitting the login pages into two screens is unnecessary and confusing to users.  The MVP might be an incomplete product, but it should never feel incomplete to users.  Users shouldn’t be able to notice that something is missing.  There is clearly something missing here.
3. Tool tips won’t solve everything.  If I had a penny for every time I heard the phrase “We’ll just add some content to explain that to users…”  As a general rule, if you need a tool tip which links to an FAQ page to explain something to users, your design is probably not intuitive enough.  It cannot be stressed enough that users really don’t pay attention to a lot of text.  The average user sees a form field, and starts typing.  Your user experience should support that behavior, not try to change it.

I have no doubt that Comcast had the best of intentions here, and that mySIGN-in is probably a cool feature.  But without proper product management, even inherently cool features can become frustrating user experiences.  Let’s be the users’ champions when it comes to launching new features.