Product management

5 Essential Product Design Books That Aren’t About Product Design | PandoDaily “What are some good books about product management?” is a frequent question for designers and engineers, especially those who are first-time founders. While there are any number of volumes you can peruse about agile development, team building, roadmaps or whatever skill you want to acquire, the art of product design is more elusive. If you’re really going for 9th level blackbelt Caine kung-fu, you need to head off the beaten path and find not tips, tricks and tactics, but inspiration and anthropology. Absorb truths about science and people to identify needs based on the human condition, not a market analysis.

One of Clay Christensen’s favorite concepts is that instead of dividing your customers into segments and asking which features each segment would like, you should think about what “job” the customers are “hiring” you product to perform. Here is an example: A fast-food restaurant chain wanted to improve its milkshake sales. The company started by segmenting its market both by product (milkshakes) and by demographics (a marketer’s profile of a typical milkshake drinker). What job are users hiring your product to perform? - Chris Dixon

5 Things a Good Product Manager Should Think About | Joseph Puopolo's Site 1. Minimal Viable Product thinking can be a trap – there has recently been a huge movement toward creating a “minimum viable product” and then going out to market as quickly as possible. I would argue it is important to temper this trend. This has turned into a tendency to quickly roll out half-baked functionality because developers believe they are following the MVP mantra. Well thought out features that deliver value, even if they take a bit longer to come to market, will (in my opinion) deliver more ultimate value to the product and to the user experience.

Anthony Tseng on why rounded-corner rectangles in Web design are attractive, and it’s not just because they’re a current design trend. Why Rounded Corners are Easier on the Eyes - UX Movement

Multivariate testing involves testing many factors on the same page. At its simplest, multivariate testing is simply a bunch of A/B tests running concurrently. Instead of testing just one button color or one headline, you could theoretically test different headlines AND button colors AND product shots AND calls to action. And, while you might be inclined to think that multivariate testing will save you a ton of time by lumping together all kinds of on-page factors and speeding up your results, you’ll likely find that multivariate testing doesn’t show a clear on-page “winner”, but gives you a broad idea of what improvements worked. You can then narrow down these tests into different A/B tests to get a clearer picture of what, exactly, made the customer take action. What Should You Test On Your Landing Pages For Maximum Conversions?

A/B test

Game Mechanics: Sounds dry, actually fascinating.

But, by using the following techniques or approaches, it might just help. Again, your product should be around a key, simple and interesting concept to start with : broadcast your location to your friends, keep track of your interactions with your social graph, ask questions to a panel of experts, ... But once you've got that down, here's how it might take off. In search of the perfect viral social app - Laurent Kretz on Posterous

Viral Cycle Time - Gabriel Weinberg's Blog Cycle times are pretty important in other areas too. For example, the lean startup movement talks about reducing the cycle time of getting code out the door and into customers' hands, based on the idea that the faster you iterate, the faster your product will achieve market penetration. Another way to optimize is to shorten the times between sign up and invite, e.g. by making it part of the process and/or by making it accessible from every page.

The Seven Principles You Need to Know to Build a Great Social Product For even the most experienced product designer, social products prove an elusive lover. While there are many obvious truths in social products, there are also alot of ways to design them poorly.

Lessons Learned: The visionary’s lament which was pretty unusual – a visionary with data? He carefully explained that he had conducted a number of one-on-one customer interviews, showing them an existing product and then documenting their reactions. His conclusions were well thought out, coherently based in the data he was presenting, and painted an alluring picture of a new way forward.

Product market fit

Minimum viable Product

The next big thing will start out looking like a toy cdixon.org This does not mean every product that looks like a toy will turn out to be the next big thing. To distinguish toys that are disruptive from toys that will remain just toys, you need to look at products as processes .

I need to be conversant in best practice across sales, marketing, engineering, finance, and general management as well as form a view on markets and opportunities for startups generally. Reading stories like these, and their equivalents in other areas (many of which I post on this blog) is one of the ways I try to stay on top of this challenge. Collecting best practices | The Equity Kicker

The Ten Golden Principles For Successful Web Apps Note: I've been updating the presentation based on feedback in the comments.

This reminds me of an idea I've been pondering from time to time about Web apps, and that's the perception of speed. The design of a Web app can go a long way in how users perceive its speed. Luke Andrews of Dabble DB spoke about this very topic at last year's mesh conference , a Canadian Web conference. Make Those Web Apps Run Fast! (Or At Least Fake It) - ReadWriteS

Monetizing your product

1) Premature optimization – Optimization is about improving the path that users take to reach a certain destination within your website. For most sites it’s ultimately about getting people to experience and buy your product. While this seems like an important goal from the beginning, it’s not. If the value of your core product is weak, doubling the percentage of users that get there won’t help much. Optimization Mistakes that Kill Startups