Product Management Blog

Design Thinking...the video

Just stumbled across this...  Apparently Tim Brown gave this presentation at the MIT Sloan School (not sure why he didn't do this at HBS).

 

Dear Groupon PM

This is what happens when I click on the unsubscribe with one click link at the bottom of your emails.  Why do I need a username and password to unsubcribe to the daily email newsletter (esp if it's labeled one click)?

 

 

 

Dear FB Pages PM

I clicked on the "Insights" tab for the Always be Shipping Facebook Page and saw this chart.  What does it mean?  It makes my head hurt.

 

Dear AdCenter PM: Why is it so hard to give you my money?

This is a true story from last week and an example of a less than delightful UX.  I speculate this is the partially the result of too many PM's owning little pieces of complex end-to-end UX and maybe a product culture that isn't fanatical enough about customer delight.  

Truth be told, I recently started a skanky UX jihad about one of my company's products so I'm just as guilty of committing customer abuse and can tell Adcenter has made some improvements over the years.  That said, it's been a while since I've been this fired up (probably because you'd think payments is the one thing that should work every time).  Here's how I spent ~2 hours over several days trying to give them more money.

1. Decide to increase my wife's SEM spend for her Seattle condo blog and after having paused adcenter during the recession, decided to resurrect it -- especially now that we don't need to go to Yahoo overture anymore and business is starting to pick up again.

2. Try to log in to adcenter on Chrome and it gives me a big "we don't support this browser" sign. Manage to find IE on my machine and log in to adcenter from IE and select the campaign and hit the unpause action from a drop down.  Done!  Much like the beginning of a Dateline crime story, things weren't all that they seemed...

Dear Cable News PM's

Clearly, no usability studies were done with your graphics guys.  I'm gonna venture a guess the team that produces these convoluted visuals is a political junkie ("let's add more data") and a visual designer ("no problem, i'll make it red, white, and blue).  

Bringing in a UX expert with experience in data vizualization would be awesome ("what does the viewer need to know?").  Setting aside the actual politics (ABS PM is an Obamacan), look at this obscene lack of editing and elegance from both CNN and Fox News.

If you ran an eye tracking study here, it would look like a bunch of mice on malt liquor with red beacons on their feet mating in the dark.

 

Ummm, I was told there would be no math.  Sudoku is so 2005.   

Dear Specialty's Bakery PM

First of all, nice job on the web ordering interface and your mobile experience is pretty sweet as well.  It was so easy to use, nice looking, and effective that someone on my team emailed it around as an example of a delightful experience.

Since ABS PM is never satisfied and can't help but play backseat PM (yes, that does sounds dirty),  here are some use cases and features I'd like you to add at your next convenience:

 

I've got 25 minutes for lunch, now what?

1. Average wait time counter (so I don't bother if you're backed up)
2. List of any pre-made or orphaned sandwiches ready immediately
3. Webcam into my favorite store to see how many people are there

I wonder if they have any fresh cookies.

1. Hot cookies status meter (just out, coming in <5 mins) -- surfaced in app and alerts
2. Current age of cookies available
3. Webcam at cookies

I wonder if they have any cheap cookies.

1. Special deals on old cookies or you're about to close cookies
2. Deals surfaced in app in and in alerts    

I wonder what today's special is.    

1. prominent pitch for today's special with a Groupon like summary of the history of the sandwich, a video of them making it, and some nice pics.

I wonder if anyone else at the office wants something from Specialty's.

1. Email people an expiring link which allows them to add their requests which you then review and submit from the elevator as you're on your way to the store.

 

Dear Google Search PM

As much as I like Instant Search on Google, I've found it really painful to see more search results once I've hit Enter.  

Currently, there's a little blue arrow next to the first result; if you scan the screen and if you want to see more results, you may be tempted to hit the down arrow.   Good luck.  

 

Beautiful Design without Customer Insight: Useless

I wrote a guest post on OnProductManagement.net today about PM's taking credit for great UX. Below is an except, feel free to check out the full post here.

I recently had a fun chat with a former colleague about UX versus PM. We were talking about how I thought the Analytics Pro app PM did a great job delivering such a great customer experience; the design was intuitive, and everything worked seamlessly.

My UX friend said (with a bit of a smirk) “‎90% of what you describe as product management sound a heckuva lot like design to me.”

Oh no he didn’t. Sometimes I think he just likes to set me off on a rant. And if that was intention, he was successful.

1) Design without Customer Insights is just modern art (useless).

I’ll be the first to give credit to UX designers for the actual designs but I think PM’s play two very important roles.

First, they help define the requirements which, if they’re good, represent what users want and need most as well as map to the long-term vision for the product and strategic considerations for what will build a durable, high-growth business. Moreover, while great UX is about elegant, clean, and simple designs — great PM’s help identify latent needs and ideate corresponding product ideas .

Good PM’s come up with the very first scribbles on a white board or on a piece of copier paper that are the seeds of what eventually could be a ground-breaking feature design.

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A Letter From the FaceBook PM

 
Dear FB User:

You just logged in and want to put a quick status message?  Yeah, we're gonna make you click on "Status" so we force you to see all the new stuff we're offering like "Question."  We think it's ok to cause billions of uneccesary clicks on the "Statue" link a day because we don't want to have the status text box open by default.  

Love, 
FaceBook PM 

p.s. Imagine if Google made you click on a "Search" link to get to the search box so you would see their Buzz and Gmail links.  Wouldn't that make so much sense?   

Dear AnalyticsPro PM...I think I love you.

Normally, I write open letters to the PM's of products that do things that bother me or seem like they're missing something really important or cool.  Today I will write a PM love letter (a man crush in fact).

Dear AnalyticsPro PM:

Ever since I installed your app on my phone (which wasn't a no-brainer btw b/c it wasn't cheap), I have been extremely delighted.  Why you ask?  Well, it's not rocket science but let me count the ways: