Simple products break less

In working with engineers of all kinds, whenever my modest inputs are required to help ship better products, I like to say this: “Let’s make this feature work like a drum!” This expression is not my own – I “inherited” it from a good front-end developer friend, but it represents a principle in product design that I follow (more on that later). And believe it or not, it all started with cars and drums and LSD… as in Lean Software Development. Since we happen to be humans (even the geekiest of us), it often helps to remember why simplicity is the mother of genius – because simple things break less. This notion is at the core of great products and customer experiences.

A Little history: Hardware vs. Software

I take interest in precision engineering and love to study complex devices, including telescopes, watches, and other mechanisms. Naturally, I also have worked in digital design and industrial design. Many will argue that physical objects and devices are more difficult and expensive to develop, and so it may be unfair to compare those to software in terms of approaches to measuring usability and customer satisfaction. But I say that software and hardware are identical from the product development, usability, and customer experience perspectives. This is because

• both are designed for humans;
• both are designed to serve a specific need or to solve a specific problem;
• both can be expensive to develop and expensive to market;
• both can break;
• both are less likely to break when they have fewer moving parts.

From Toyota to LSD, to Agile

Did you know that the hip word “lean” goes all the way back to Korea over 60 years ago? To be exact, in 1947, Chung Ju-Yung founded Hyundai Group Companies and then dedicated the next 50 years of his life to turning Hyundai into a global conglomerate with over 150 thousand employees. Ju-Yung, whom I once had the pleasure of meeting in Seoul, survived and prospered not because he had a rich grandfather but because Hyundai was the first to use the so-called “lean manufacturing practices,” which helped the company develop amazing economies of scope and scale, starting with the manufacturing construction (its core industrial business) and about 40 years later leading to cool things like my Hyundai Genesis Coupe or your Hyundai widescreen display.

More specifically, lean manufacturing practices have their origins in the so-called Just-in-Time (or JIT) inventory control system – a production strategy that strives to improve returns on investment by reducing in-process inventories and the associated carrying costs. By mid 1950′s, Toyota went on to “adopt” the JIT system, when Taiichi Ohno and Eiji Toyoda developed what was then called the Toyota Production System, or TPS. In turn, because Toyota officially adopted and publicized the approach, it is also historically credited for the lean practices in manufacturing, albeit incorrectly.

A few decades later, in 2001, Kent Beck studied TPS inside-out and wrote what is known as the awesome Agile Manifesto, which Mary and Tom Poppendieck dutifully and wonderfully transposed into what most people in the world of manufacturing (and software) know today as Lean Software Development – a concept that was popularized by the book with the same title, which the Poppendiecks published in 2003.

More about Lean

The textbook – and the Wikipedia – definition of Lean Software Development is this: LSD is a translation of lean manufacturing and lean IT principles and practices to the software development domain. Again, the translation started with the original (be it the chicken or the egg), and the original had little to do with software as we know it. In other words, the supposed “break” between software and hardware in the context of usability and customer experience – whether it be in the context of software development or car manufacturing or anything in-between – is superficial and purely historical. Now, for the record, lean development – or LSD specifically – can be summarized by seven principles that, according to Wikipedia, are “very close in concept” to their manufacturing counterparts (listed here in the order of importance):

• Eliminate waste
• Build integrity in
• Amplify learning
• Decide as late as possible
• Deliver as fast as possible
• Empower the team
• See the whole

How does a drum play into this? (pun intended)

The lean approach to product development, which – as we now know – started with new industrial manufacturing trends decades ago, is about simplicity. Not the kind of simplicity that differentiates a plain-text editor from Microsoft Word, but the kind that separates a drum from, say, a violin or an electronic piano or keyboard in terms of complexity.

A typical piano keyboard is a nightmare from the standpoint of lean manufacturing. It has hundreds of microchips and dozens of hardware buttons and contains a vast amount of computing capacity that translates human inputs into music, which – mind you – can only happen with speakers and only when electrical current is present. A common drum, on the other hand, has only a couple of parts and will play sounds anytime and anywhere. You get the idea: a drum is simple, while an electronic piano is not.

Back to Software

To transpose an electronic piano into the product development domain, it has many complex parts that come at a great cost. Although these parts provide a great utility, they make the underlying product less dependable, more prone to breakage and malfunctions, and more difficult to learn. The same naturally applies to software products: beyond a certain point in development, many products become uncontrollably complex and result in a slew of features that a vast number of users – including many power users – can’t appreciate, which in turn increases costs, increases break points, and potentially lowers product usability and customer satisfaction. Practically speaking, there is something known as the Law of Diminishing Marginal Returns – a fundamental economic principle, which is defined as the decrease in the marginal (incremental) output of a production process as the amount of a single factor of production is incrementally increased, while the amounts of all other factors of production stay constant.

A classic example is adding more workers to a job, such as assembling a car on a factory floor: at some point, adding more workers causes problems such as workers getting in each other’s way or frequently finding themselves waiting for access to a part. In all of these processes, producing one more unit of output per unit of time will eventually cost increasingly more, due to inputs being used less and less effectively. Eventually, by increasing the product’s function you may actually be increasing its cost to a point of incurring an operating loss, directly or indirectly.

The same applies to software. In my mind, a good practical example is Skype, which I find to be a rather invasive application that I’d love to run on my MacBook Pro all the time… but choose not to because it consumes more system resources than I am willing to give up in exchange for the privilege of being easily accessible to my international colleagues.

With that in mind, I like to say – as one of my good colleagues taught me in 2006 – that all good products must start out as drum and not as a keyboard, while most products don’t ever need to turn into a keyboard. So, don’t let my odd metaphor confuse you when you hear these words from me while discussing an app, a website or a software project. For at the root of every successful digital product there lies a simple principle: if you are going to make an electronic piano, be sure that you have the advertising budget and the positioning strategy to market this baby to the people who will appreciate it. Otherwise, keep your product simple and don’t add things to it just because they are “nice to have.” The thought that “premature optimization is the root of all evil” (courtesy of Donald Knuth) also comes to mind here.

And every time you feel like questioning this logic, play with an Apple device to remind yourself that successful products don’t have to be complex, nor do they have to please everyone. Speaking of successful products that can be improved, I have written a related post about sealed batteries in Apple devices – check it out.

Do you want to continue this discussion? Message me on Twitter to start a conversation.
 

The post Business and Beyond: Toyota, Drums, and Customer Experience (a Product Development Lifecycle Whitepaper) appeared first on HyperAbsolute: Business Ecosystem Blog by Sander Nizni.

Introduction: Permanent vs. Removable Batteries

Is usability of portable devices better when their batteries can be removed on the fly? Definitely. As a business developer who has spent countless months on the road in my career, I am yet to find a way to justify preferring a portable power bank over a simple, removable battery. Still, there are many schools of thought on this topic – both regarding Apple’s products specifically and regarding product strategy in general. There are five reasons device manufacturers do this, and there are three why they shouldn’t. This is not a numbers game, but I feel in this case 3>5. Let’s explore the pros and the cons of device usability in the context of fixed – or permanent – batteries in portable devices.

Background

I walked into a cafe in Los Angeles this morning and needed to urgently get online for a Skype call with an associate in Canada: I was lucky enough to sport a tiny table in the corner, but the nearest power outlet was “half a wall” away. I like my Apple MacBook Pro, but because my fixed battery in it was at 8 percent, I had no choice but to use my Asus PC – because that one comes with a removable clip-on battery, and I always carry a spare – and sometimes two – with me. What’s the logic behind disallowing a user to take out a dead battery and replace it with a charged one on the spot instead of forcing him/her to frantically search for the nearest power outlet to recharge the device? Better yet, why am I required to make two trips to the Apple store just to change a dead battery?

Pros (1/5): User-to-Brand Marriage | “The Big One”

I could not find better words to describe the phenomenon: by permanently sealing your device, Apple can virtually guarantee that you will go to an Apple store when your battery dies. And on that special day, something magical happens: you talk to a Genius at the Genius Bar. And one of the first things that any respectable Genius will tell you is that – hey – your device is about 3 years old, and perhaps it’s time for you to look around and to see if you should pick another one! You may or may not buy anything on that day, but you will certainly spend at least 10 minutes talking to someone who knows a lot more about Apple’s product line, and in turn you will learn a thing or two.

As a result, you will feel connected to your technology. While at it, you may buy an extra charger or a software upgrade, play with (and appreciate) a new iPad, or simply look around and see some happy faces of other Apple shoppers and users. Whatever you do, this battery replacement “adventure” will be associated with at least two physical trips to your local Apple store – usually 24 hours apart – and will result in keeping you emotionally “married” to your growing arsenal of Apple products and the culture behind it. Amen.

Can you argue against this? Not really, unless you are an educated consumer who is always researching and following trends and technology news. If you are this kind of a guy or a gal – i.e., if you know exactly what technology you need and what you will buy next without talking to a so-called genius, then this process feels like nothing more than a marketing gimmick. But one thing is clear if you are this type of person: you are the narrow minority, and you are probably a computer geek. Now, isn’t it sad that the people who can help Apple’s product strategy the most are the same people whom Apple chooses to ignore in their Market Segmentation strategy? I think it is.

Pros (2/5): Size and Weight Factors

Devices with fixed batteries tend to be smaller and lighter. A removable rugged-shell laptop battery equipped with metal-to-metal terminals weights 2-3 ounces more, while the internal battery bay and the removable door on the back cover can also add 2-4 ounces. Further, the internal space required to accommodate the replaceable battery inside a laptop can add some overall girth to the device.

Still, considering today’s sophisticated plastics and precision molds available to every serious manufacturer, the overall effect of having a replaceable battery bay on the device’s size and weight is negligible.

Pros (3/5): Product integrity

It is easily argued that if a device is permanently sealed, the user is less likely to damage it accidentally while replacing the battery – either due to improper mechanical manipulation or due to using a wrong battery. Similarly, if the device cannot be easily opened, the user is simply less likely to tamper or “experiment” with its internal components, thereby making it less likely that the device will be broken.

From this perspective, it is rather practical for all manufacturers to use permanent batteries. However, it is not difficult to seal the internal components with a sub-cover to ensure that the “guts” of the device are inaccessible when the main back cover is removed for battery replacement.

Pros (4/5): Service Income

When the time comes to replace the permanent battery in a sealed device, the user generally has no choice but to resort to the manufacturer’s recommended service channel to install the new battery, which in turn ensures that the manufacturer will enjoy the income from the sale of a new battery, as well as from the fees charged for installation and in many cases for handling and shipping. Although some users will venture to buy OEM units and to replace the battery by following instructional YouTube videos, most users will follow the path of least resistance and will turn to an authorized service provider to get the job done, as I did when my MacBook Pro battery weathered away after 2.5 years: I went to the nearest Apple store, paid $130 plus tax, and relinquished my MacBook for 24 hours into the hands of people who took about three minutes to remove the eight screws on the back cover, to replace the battery, and to screw the back cover onto its place.

The argument against this is obvious. The same logic does not apply to all manufacturers in the same way, but Apple’s example is a classic. Namely, Apple enjoys about $50 in net profit from replacing your MacBook battery. The average useful life of a MacBook is under 6 years, while an average battery works for 3 years. This means that Apple gets to enjoy this “benefit” only once in the lifetime of a typical device. The same applies to iPhones. The question comes naturally: Is Apple really preoccupied with making an extra $50 from your device? Of course not: Apple notebooks are already 30%+ more expensive than PC-based systems of similar configuration, and it can easily price every one of them about $50 higher and is unlikely to suffer a notable reduction in demand – that’s Elasticity of Demand 101. Further, the marginal cost of adding a removable back cover onto MacBooks is miniscule – we are talking $10-15 dollar difference in cost of manufacturing per notebook. This cost is lower for iPhones – under $10 per device.

Pros (5/5): Cost Savings

It is clear that a device with non-removable back cover and a permanent battery is cheaper to manufacture. The argument against this is in plain sight: the savings are marginal, as referenced earlier, especially when these savings come at the expense of seriously hurting the device’s usability.

Cons (1/3): Users in Pain are Unhappy Users

As with my Skype call this morning, I often catch myself giving the manufacturers of devices with permanent batteries unspeakable names. On a plane, at a picnic, in a hotel or a coffee shop, and elsewhere away from my home and office, I don’t like having to look for a power outlet when my battery is near the zero mark. And even when there is an outlet nearby, no device can be charged instantly, and we often don’t have the time to sit and wait until the indicator reaches at least 25 percent, let alone 100. For another example, last week I had to beg someone to change seats with me on a flight to London because the power outlet near me was broken and I needed to use my MacBook Pro during the flight. What a kluster! For this reason, I – being a geek – dislike my MacBook Pro and my Google phone. And if you are a geek too, you know exactly how I feel. We hate worrying about our battery life, and people like us would rather carry an extra battery around. And when we can’t, we don’t exactly feel “emotionally connected” to the manufacturer, do we? …because we know that the manufacturer’s priorities are not in line with our needs.

I feel a similar issue is holding back electric car manufacturers from selling more cars, albeit for a different reason. Namely, the fact that batteries in electric cars take a long time to recharge prevents many car owners from switching to 100% electric vehicles. As a Tesla owner, I would much rather prefer to drive up to the power station and replace my battery with a charged one instead of sitting there for half an hour while my fixed battery is recharged. Naturally, there is simply no technical infrastructure to make this business model feasible at this time, but it clearly represents a better long-run solution in terms of usability.

Cons (2/3): Quick Disconnect

Like it or not, there are times when you just need to pull your battery out to save the notebook. The same applies to mobile phones and other portable devices. Let’s say your notebook is frozen (figuratively speaking) and started overheating (literally). There is a quick fix: you press and hold the power button to turn it off. But if that doesn’t work, your only recourse is to immediately remove the battery. But if your battery is sealed behind 8 screws on the back cover, you are… screwed.

The photo here shows exactly what happened to me: if I had been able to remove the battery, I possibly would not have ruined the laptop, or at least the damage would have been less severe. Is it fair to say that this happens so seldom that this use case doesn’t need to be addressed? Good question. Apple will argue that it’s very fair. But I will kick it up another notch and ask this: what if this battery incident also triggered an office fire that killed half a dozen people and destroyed, say, nineteen million dollars worth of equipment and other property? I think this is a no-brainer: this is a safety issue that must be addressed.

Cons (3/3): Battery not required

Did it occur to anyone that you don’t need to use a battery to work on your laptop? That’s right, you can plug it into a UPS and work just fine, while your battery rests, awaiting the time when you actually need to work without a power outlet. But when the battery is fixed, it is constantly charging… and slowly weathering away, even though you are not really using it. Isn’t it sad? You can be using your notebook strictly within the limits of your desk and be constantly plugged in, but about 3 years later, your battery will still be dead or near-dead. Thoughts to share? For starters, try thinking about the effects of this on the environment of Planet Earth.

Conclusions and Solutions

Manufacturers can find practical ways to stay in touch with their clients for marketing purposes, besides crippling their devices and limiting their practical applications just to lure the users back into the store down the road for insuring the brand’s uninterrupted relationship with its patrons and for maximizing the chances that the user will continue using the same brand. I feel this is exactly what Apple is doing. This technique only works effectively for uneducated, “sheepish” users, or otherwise for non-power users. Most mobile device manufacturers are making sealed devices for the other reasons, which were discussed above. But clearly, with only a little bit of bona fide effort, every manufacturer can comfortably afford to reward its users with the pleasure of not being dependent on free electricity in Starbucks shops around the city to keep their devices running on the go.

To be constructive, I propose this elegant solution, which should work wonderfully for Apple:

1. Equip all notebook computers with replaceable battery modules, which will cost Apple under $15 per unit.
2. Sell all notebooks for $100 more ($15 to offset the cost of manufacturing, plus $60 for the cost of the battery plus a $25 premium for Apple’s margin) and offer all users one free in-store battery exchange when the original battery dies.

This simple approach

• will keep power users happy;
• will impress non-power users;
• will reduce battery utilization in desktop mode;
• will ensure that non-power users return to the store in 2-3 years; and
• will indirectly reduce Apple’s costs in connection with older batteries – because a user whose battery is only year old, for example, will be less likely to complain about the battery’s short service life if he/she receives a new one on demand – without having to pay for it and with no questions asked.

Do you want to talk about this? Do you know of a more elegant solution? Please message me to start a conversation.
 

The post Non-removable Apple Batteries. Why? appeared first on HyperAbsolute: Business Ecosystem Blog by Sander Nizni.

Why Product Management

At a recent technology Meetup in San Francisco (which I attended with a friend exclusively for the free doughnuts, but of course), I learned that many aspiring product designers (people in software, in fashion, in real estate, and everyone in-between) would love to explore careers in Product Management but don’t know where to start. This is a natural trend of thought among progressive thinkers in many disciplines, including the IT specifically: those who have mastered a singe technical domain often want to broaden their career horizons by applying their talents and experience in a strategic context, which is in fact how many good product managers are born. In this discussion, I offer my personal insight into the science of Product Management, as well as an extensive list of resources for those who aspire to become product managers.

Background

As a business analyst at heart, but also as someone with experience in managing a wide range of physical and intellectual assets (including SaaS/PaaS products, investment portfolios, inventories, and retail product lines, among others), I have been actively engaged with product managers throughout my career. My personal experience is that the best of the product management folk are people who are good at finding synergies between product design (engineering, usability, data analysis, etc) and product marketing. In the course of my career, I have lived through a good number of business scenarios and have come across a great number of resources that in part shaped me into who I am today.

Product Management in Three Bullet Points

Product Managers aren’t born and aren’t simply trained to become such. Some of the best product managers I have met evolved from engineering or marketing specialists and as a result tend to have blended backgrounds that offer a balance of at least two of the following (in no specific order): (1) marketing skills, (2) data analysis skills, (3) engineering skills, and (4) product design skills. But let’s crystallize Product Management in three manageable bullet points (again, INPO):

1. Product Management Starts with Marketing

Whether you like it or not, product management is “married” to product marketing. So, if you want to be a product manager, you need to understand the principles of marketing. Start with learning about the “4 Ps of Marketing” – Product, Pricing, Promotion and Placement.

To start, accept one fact: nine out of ten good-looking and perfectly functional products fail – usually within a couple of months after deployment… because they are not marketed properly; this applies to shoelaces and to space rockets and to everything in-between. Moreover, two out of three marketable, successful products happen to be not-so-good-looking and don’t do “everything” – because successful products are good at reaching and connecting with (targeting) their audience and addressing that audience’s needs. A product can target more than one audience (e.g., college students vs. veterans vs. divorced females with two or more children), but it doesn’t have to target more than one audience in order to be successful! To identify your target audience (also known as “target market”), you perform a market segmentation analysis and a competitor analysis, and you define a positioning strategy, among other things.

As a result, in managing a product, you don’t only develop and iterate it – as that way you would be either a project manager or a product developer or designer. Instead, you look for (and hopefully find) ways to market the product effectively to your target audience. Long story short, if you want to be a successful product manager, you absolutely have to understand marketing: know your audience, know your competition, and know how to connect your product’s value offering to your audience’s needs without over-developing or prematurely optimizing the product, as – love it or hate it – “premature optimization is the root of all evil” (Donald Knuth).

2. Evangelize the Product

This one is obvious: you must know what your product or service does, and you must know its strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats (SWOT analysis), as well as its competitive advantages (that is/are sustainable, hopefully); this applies whether you are making and selling floor tiles or a software platform to manage real estate rental properties. And finally, you must understand how your product fits in your overall marketing strategy. But how do you “really” evangelize it? You take responsibility: you become the voice of the customer/user and you take pride in ensuring that your product does what it is supposed to; and you make solid, systemic effort to grow your user base and to understand (and correct) the pain points of your existing user/customer base, thereby reducing churn and contributing to your brand’s customer success and loyalty.

You need to know the product inside out, like the back of your hand. And you need to be prepared to defend it with arguments and examples that can effectively dissolve any doubt in your target audience’s mind that your product is the best.

In other words, you must “own” your product and you must (really) believe in it – evangelize it inside your head, on paper, at trade shows, in your promotional materials, in face-to-face interaction with prospects and clients, as well as when working with engineers, designers, business developers, and stakeholders in your company to deploy and iterate the product.

3. Be a specialist in at least two fields

That’s right. No one likes product managers that have minimal or no technical skills. If you have zero technical skills but want to be in charge and have a classic Type A personality, become a salesperson. But if you want the responsibility of managing the product’s strategy, you need to be technical.

My personal background includes business development, product design and marketing, investment analysis, software development, and real estate brokerage skills, plus a college degree in marketing, extensive experience in project management (including agile/scrum), and training in process design and BPM (business process management). It also helps that I know quality assurance and testing routines, data analysis, and economic analysis. For me, managing a product is a natural way of applying my diverse skills to contribute to my team’s performance and to customer success.

If you have at least two technical skills (for instance, data analysis and interaction design, or finance and visual design) and understand marketing, you can be an effective cross-functional player – capable of leading products to success by productively collaborating with other team members in your organization – i.e., you will “speak” their language, understand their needs, and communicate your needs to them in order to successfully design, deploy, improve and promote your product(s) together.

Learning About Product Management

Few accredited colleges offer degree programs in product management. Further, self-study materials are rather limited due to the young age of the product management discipline – particularly in the digital domain. Where does this leave you if you are eager to become a hot product manager but have never managed a product? This is the easy part. If you are in fact passionate about product management, I can offer you these educational resources to help you become an ace of product leadership.

The list is organized in sections sorted in ascending order by complexity. Enjoy.

Product Management 101: What is Product Management?

• Product Manager You Are… – Mat Balez
• What Product Management is Not – Marty Cagan
• PM at Microsoft – Steven Sinofsky
• What exactly is a Product Manager? – Martin Eriksonn
• What is Product Management? / Slideshare version – Sachin Rekhi
• Product Management vs. Product Marketing – Marty Cagan
• Use your Product Powers for Good – Bruce McCarthy
• A Product Manager’s Job – Josh Elman
• Product Managers: Who are these ‘mini-CEOs’ and what do they do? – Ken Yeung

Product Management 102: The Philosophy of Product Managers

• The DNA of Product Management – Hunter Walk
• 3 Skillsets for PM Success – Kenton Kivetsu
• How to hire a Product Manager – Kenneth Norton
• Ode to a Non Technical Product Manager – Hunter Walk
• Should nice people be Product Managers – Alex Pukinskis

Product Management 103: Product Management as a Career Path

• How do I become a Product Manager? – Multiple authors
• So You Want to Manage a Product – Rohini Viba
• The 4 ways to break into Product Management – Jackie Bavaro
• 12 things Product Managers should do in their first 30 Days – Kenneth Norton
• 4 mistakes new Product Managers make – Matt Schnitt
• Do Product Managers really need a background in CS – Jackie Bavaro
• Starting and maintaining a career in Product Management
• Cracking the PM Interview
• PM Interview Questions

Product Management 104: Product Development

• How to build great products – Slava Akhmechet
• Make things as simple as possible but not simpler – Adam Nash
• 10 essential steps to create products that customer love – Laurence McCahill
• The power of the perfect slice – Alastair Lee
• How to build products users love – Kevin Hale
• Ten principles on the journey to building great products – Avid Larizadeh
• Quality is not a tradeoff – Julie Zhuo

Product Management 105: Advanced Practices

• Listen to customers – Kenneth Norton
• The customer is always right. Except when they aren’t – Wade Foster
• Your MVP is about discovery not product – Kevin Dewalt
• Beginning Customer Development – Kevin Dewalt
• How do Customer Development and Product Management fit together – Cindy Alvarez
• The 4 steps to the Epiphany – Steve Blank
• How to structure and get the most out of customer development interviews – Jason Evanish

Product Management 106: Working for Requirements

• The end of requirements – Marty Cagan
• Requirements are not – Marty Cagan
• Feed the beast – Marty Cagan
• Painless functional specifications – Joel Spolsky

Product Management 107: Planning, Strategy and Roadmapping

• You don’t need a product roadmap – David Heinemeier Hansson
• The opportunity backlog – Marty Cagan
• The dirty dozen roadmap roadblocks – Bruce McCarthy
• The pyramid model & what it means for PM focus – Kenton Kivetsu
• How am I going to move my product forward today – Sachin Rekhi
• The seven deadly sins of product planning – Marty Cagan
• Magical thinking and the zero-sum roadmap – Rich Mironov
• Drop feature-based product roadmaps – Teresa Torres
• The inconvenient truth about product – Marty Cagan
• Product strategy means saying no – Des Traynor
• Product priorities start with strategic goals – Bruce McCarthy
• Software Inventory – Joel Spolsky
• What are the best ways to prioritize a list of product features – Ian McAllister
• Before you plan your product roadmap – Des Traynor
• Rodmaps focus on vision benefits, not features – Bruce McCarthy
• The one cost engineers and Product Managers don’t consider – Kris Gale
• Guide to Product Planning: Three Feature Buckets – Adam Nash
• Product Management Hierarchy of Needs – Joe Dempsey

Product Management 108: Collaborating with Developers, Engineers and Designers

• 5 things Product Managers wish they could tell developers – Brandon Satrom
• How to work with PMs – Julie Zhuo
• Peopleware – Tom DeMarco
• Team Geek – Brian Fitzpatrick
• How to work with designers – Julie Zhuo
• How to work with engineers – Julie Zhuo
• How to work with software engineers – Kenneth Norton
• The Iceberg Secret, revealed – Joel Spolsky
• Leading cross-functional teams – Kenneth Norton
• The care and feeding of software engineers – Nicholas C. Zakas
• The ten project management commandments – Slava Akhmechet
• Nerds, get the Product Management you deserve – Jeff Enderwick
• Joel on Software – Joel Spolsky

Product Management 109: Living for Feedback

• Thirty percent feedback – Jason Freedman
• How to run a design critique – Scott Berkun
• You won’t regret positive feedback – Zack Holman

Product Management 110: Shipping Win-Win Deliverables

• Always be defining success – Jackie Bavaro
• The only metric that matters – Josh Elman
• The lost art of the soft launch – Wade Foster
• The Mythical Man-Month – Frederick Brooks
• The blind Product Manager – Paul Adams
• Great product leaders win games – Adam Nash
• How to deliver more software projects on time – Mark Suster
• Shipping beats perfection explained – Ben Kamens
• Measure twice, cut once – Rick Klau

Product Management 111: Building Solid Product Management Teams

• Product organizational structure – Marty Cagan
• Enter the Matrix – Organizing Product Management – Mark Tattersall
• Good product team, bad product team – Marty Cagan

Product Management 112: Becoming a Guru

• Stakeholder Management – Marty Cagan
• Managing Up – Marty Cagan
• Top hacks from a PM behind two of tech’s hottest products – Todd Jackson
• Bad Managers Talk, Good Managers Write – Walter Chen
• Court scribe or Hand of the King – Bruce McCarthy
• Influence without authority – Sachin Rekhi
• Management clichés that work – Steven Sinofsky

Product Management 113: Becoming a Monster

• Be a great product leader – Adam Nash
• How a football coach taught me to product manage like a boss – Mike Su
• How to hire a Product Manager – Kenneth Norton
• Top 10 product leadership lessons – Adam Nash
• What distinguishes the top 1% of Product Managers from the top 10%? – MacAllister Ian
  
• Good Product Manager, Bad Product Manager – Ben Horowitz
• What innate traits do great internet product leaders share? – Chris Wetherelle
• Musings on Product Management – Mike Sukmanovsky
• Hiring a great product leader – Sutha Kamal

Do you want to talk about this topic? Message me on Twitter to start a conversation.
 
Service Sponsor of this Article: Master Mobile Notary (LA)
 

The post Selling Rocket Engines? Houses? Twinkies? Do better as a Product Manager! appeared first on HyperAbsolute: Business Ecosystem Blog by Sander Nizni.

Is Afghanistan at the top of your country list?

Are your users annoyed because the dropdown country list on your registration page starts with Afghanistan? They may be… do your research! And if they are, is this problem worth solving? The answer is far from obvious. And it has nothing to do with the stigma of “George Bush vs. Osama bin Laden.” Let’s start with Usability 101: about 6% of the 31-million Afghanistan population use the internet: that’s under 2 million… most of whom don’t speak English and/or don’t care about your site. Sorry for bluntness, but this is a business discussion. So, should a typical social networking hub or a retail site place Afghanistan at the top of the list? Or should it force its primary target markets (e.g, USA) to the top of the list?

Indeed, Afghanistan happens to be the first country in the world, alphabetically speaking. Still, many sites – especially those whose primary market segment is defined as either “USA audience” or “English speakers” – force the United States and/or United Kingdom to the top of the list. Problem solved? Not really. Because this may imply that any country or countries that appear above Afghanistan is/are “cool and important,” while other civilized nations (e.g., Australia, Brazil, France, Spain, Zimbabwe, etc.) are not. Not a politically correct solution then, is it?

In other words, if you are a Canadian, for instance, and your country dropdown on the registration page starts with United States, followed by Afghanistan, you are left wondering: “Am I welcome here?” Due to this concern, most global sites just leave Afghanistan at the top. What is the problem with that? Apart from the many sentimental implications, many users simply don’t have the patience to scroll down to choose their country and instead choose a random country near the top of the list (e.g., Afghanistan). In fact, I conducted my own research on this topic that involved analyzing a statistical sample of over 10 million web registrations across 11 retail and social sites, and the number of these “phantom” users is staggering – over 22%. Do you want your users doing that?

So, is there an elegant solution? Of course! The most intuitive one is – grow up! Don’t ask the user living in the United Kingdom or in Zimbabwe to click on the dropdown field and then scroll all the way down – that could involve 4-5 clicks and is inefficient. One may argue: “Even children know that you can type the first letter of your country, and then the selection will jump to the respective section in the country list down below, where you can further navigate using the arrow down key.” And I say, “Exactly, Ringo!” If your visitors are expected to use a letter key just to get closer to their country in the dropdown list, why not give them a chance to just type their country name in that field in the first place? This is why we have Ajax: when the user types the first letter or two of the country name, a list appears giving him/her all the countries that match. And, if you want to kick it up another notch, look up the visitor’s IP address and pre-populate the country field accordingly (but leave it modifiable so that users can override the value if they are registering while traveling in another country). Problem solved.

Do you want to talk about this? Do you know of a more elegant solution? Message me on Twitter or using the contact form on this site.
 

The post Web Form Usability: Afghanistan at the top? Really?! appeared first on HyperAbsolute: Business Ecosystem Blog by Sander Nizni.