My folks brought me up to remember my manners. I consider I’ve perhaps taken this a little too far when I find myself apologising to people in London who have just shoulder-barged me into the path of an oncoming bus. But manners are important, especially for a product manager, where your success relies on the help of many others.
Do you spend more time writing documents about your product than actually managing it?
Many companies with some kind of product management function become all caught up in the process, drowning themselves in increasing numbers of documents. These rapidly become overwhelming to manage, contain duplicated detail and ultimately obscure the real objective of product management, namely to create successful products.
One of the many personal challenges I’ve faced in my working life was to overcome my natural tendency towards being erratic. I’m not talking about endearing (to me at least) eccentricities, more about practical things such as a rubbish memory for dates and poor time management. Throw in a crisis and I could generally be found running around with my head on fire.
Don’t you find that it is always so hard to recover something that started badly? Whether it’s a development project, a product launch, or a new starter in your team, you can be reasonably certain that each will benefit from a good start in life.
I’m still hunting for a replacement firewall server and some low-power desktop machines, without necessarily compromising on performance. Mind you, I’m looking for a Linux-based firewall, not a gaming machine, so ‘performance’ may be overstating things. A quick hunt on the internet later and I’m amazed by how quickly the micro PC market is continuing to evolve. I thought I’d share with you a couple of the most desirable green machines I’ve found so far.
When we start thinking about the requirements for a new product version, I bet we all make the same mistake when deciding what goes in: we guess solutions rather than find problems.
In the thrilling* conclusion to this lo-fi usability testing trilogy, we get down to the nitty-gritty of how to run the tests and how to interpret and act on the results.
* It all depends on your perspective
In this second instalment of this series on lo-fi usability testing, I’ll be showing you what you need to do to prepare for your usability tests.
You can run lo-fi usability testing in a single afternoon that will uncover 80% of the problems your product has, with only a pen, some paper and access to the software or website.
Here’s a round-up of some of the presentations and discussions I attended at the recent ProductCamp London, with links to the slide decks and recommended reading where applicable.
