Understanding how to ask the whys & a when gets is essential for product managers to see past the junk food of outputs & into the satisfying banquet of outcomes.
Tag: User Experience
When Consistency becomes Tyranny
“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson Let me ask you a question: As a product manager or scrum master, do you feel there is a tipping point where consistency devolves into tyranny? I posed this question to some poor unsuspecting peeps at…
Product Manager Exercise: Design a better Automated Teller Machine
Clearly, some ATM designs are better than others. Into the course of every product manager’s life falls a “design a better <whatever>” exercise. In fact, I recently stumbled on a site solely dedicated to this appropriately titled ‘Product Management Exercises.’ It was this site, along with a recent news story related ‘You no longer need a…
V is for Valuable - Part 3 of 6 of why it pays to INVEST in your user stories.
TL;DR: Why INVEST in a user story that’s not valuable? Good question. Here’s a pragmatic how-to guide to making the Value magic happen in your PBIs. Step 1 — Avoid Mission Statement Metrics One of my favorite quotes about corporate mission statements comes from Vincent Flanders, who reminds us that most can be summarized generically as “All…
N is for Negotiable — Part 2 of 6 of ‘Why it pays to INVEST in your User Stories’
TL;DR: If you’re looking to INVEST in your user stories by making them Negotiable, then for Pete’s sake don’t write them like requirements. Code by Contract As someone who prefers the Build-Measure-Learn approach to discovering and then delivering the right thing of value at the right time, nothing is scarier than reading the following words from…
I is for Independent — Part 1 of 6 of ‘Why it pays to INVEST in your User Stories’
As an agile team, we don’t want the delivery of our work on story X to be held up by story Y or condition Z. User Story As an agile team, we don’t want delivery of our work on story X to be held up by story Y or condition Z. Description Hi, and welcome…
Am I the very model of a modern product manager?
With apologies and gratitude to both Sirs Gilbert and Sullivan, I have shamelessly appropriated their famous Major-General’s Song from their popular 1879 comic opera ‘The Pirates of Penzance.’ Based on the raucous reception to my singing the first 2 verses at the end of my presentation “Five Things I Learned About Lean MVP as a…
Some methods in persona creation I learned from singing opera
Stuck writing a persona? Are your character archetypes really just surrogate synonyms for roles? Acting! It can help! One of my favorite recurring characters from Saturday Night Live was that of ‘Master Thespian’ as played by Jon Lovitz, a hilarious play on the overblown pontificating that plagued theaters up into the 19th century. It slays me…
5 Thing Product Managers can learn from Twitter’s latest UX Do-Over
TL;DR — Behold! A handful of free & valuable lessons product managers can glean from Twitter’s latest changes to their user experience. Thank goodness for ‘Jeff Bezos and Alexa buying Whole Foods by Accident’ memes. Without them, we might still have to endure the weeping and gnashing of teeth both from, and about the world’s grumpiest social…
The Convergence of Search & Machine Learning is already here.
TL;DR — In making search results more relevant & in detecting anomalies, ElasticSearch & Solr have baked-in machine learning features. The week before last I made a mistake … … I was attending a not-so hush-hush meetup of 25 Raleigh product managers, where no secret handshakes were exchanged, nor did there occur covert conversations about overthrowing our scrum…