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  • The Thing-deadline calculus

    Now, I understand deadlines. I understand that the plane will take off whether or not I’m on it, or the importance of beating the holiday retail rush, or that "the show must go on". It is perfectly clear to me how people use timekeeping technology to coordinate social activity. It’s actually quite remarkable when you step back and look at it. But, over the years, I have observed that there is a difference between those examples and the ones around the delivery of Things, which tend to be completely arbitrary. When you wrap an arbitrarily complex endeavor up in a neat launch date, the goal seems to be more about coercing the people beneath you to absorb the overhead of all the details you left out—that or sweating it yourself. As a tool for coordinating human activity, I have come to believe that the Thing-deadline calculus is, considering more sophisticated alternatives, unnecessarily crude.

    Dorian Taylor, On the "Building" of Software and Websites
    1. ​​Deadlines are bullshit​​
    2. ​​Never enough time​​
    3. ​​Driving engineers to an arbitrary date is a value destroying mistake ​​
    • planning
    • products
  • Ensuring Excellence

    An Article by Marty Cagan
    www.svpg.com

    …in so many of the best product companies there is an additional dimension that goes beyond individual empowered product teams, and even goes beyond achieving business results.

    It has to do with ensuring a level of what I’ll refer to here as “excellence” although that is clearly a very ambiguous term.

    Over the years, this concept has been referred to by many different names, always necessarily vague, but all striving to convey the same thing: “desirability,” “aha moments,” “wow factor,” “magic experiences,” or “customer delight,” to list just a few.

    The concept is that an effective product that achieves results is critical, but sometimes we want to go even beyond that, to provide something special.

    Maybe it’s because we believe this is needed to achieve the necessary value. Maybe it’s because the company has built its brand on inspiring customers.

    Often this dimension shows up most clearly in product design, where functional, usable but uninspiring designs can often achieve our business results, but great design can propel us into this realm of the inspiring.

    1. ​​Do they really need it?​​
    • quality
    • craft
    • products
    • software
  • Putting Thought Into Things

    An Essay by Oliver Reichenstein
    ia.net

    Building structure requires serious listening, serious reflection, and serious imagination. All this requires experience, and no matter how experienced you are, it costs you. We spend our time and nerves to save users their time and nerves. Well-designed things give us the invaluable present of time. Well-designed products do not just save us time, they make us enjoy the time we spend with them. They make us feel that someone has been thinking about us, that a nice person took care of the little things for us. This is mainly why we perceive well-designed things as more beautiful the longer we use them, and the more used they become.

    1. ​​By the handling of human hands​​
    • craft
    • products
    • age
  • To anticipate all the uses and abuses

    Success depends wholly on the anticipation and obviation of failure, and it is virtually impossible to anticipate all the uses and abuses to which a product will be subjected until it is in fact used and abused not in the laboratory but in real life. Hence, new products are seldom even near perfect, but we buy them and adapt to their form because they do fulfill, however imperfectly, a function that we find useful.

    Henry Petroski, The Evolution of Useful Things
    1. ​​So that you can get feedback on it and make it better​​
    2. ​​The most rewarding iterations​​
    • products
    • iteration
  • Signing party

    An Article
    www.folklore.org
    signatures.jpg

    Since the Macintosh team were artists, it was only appropriate that we sign our work. Steve came up with the awesome idea of having each team member's signature engraved on the hard tool that molded the plastic case, so our signatures would appear inside the case of every Mac that rolled off the production line. Most customers would never see them, since you needed a special tool to look inside, but we would take pride in knowing that our names were in there, even if no one else knew.

    1. ​​All the way through​​
    2. ​​Devoid of ambition​​
    3. ​​Real artists sign their work​​
    • art
    • products
  • Research, empathy, simplicity, speed

    An Article by Matthew Ström
    matthewstrom.com

    As Nosrat provides a simple list of essential ingredients for any great meal, can we describe a simple list of essential components for digital products?

    Here are four elements that I believe are the foundation of great digital products: Research, Empathy, Simplicity and Speed.

    1. ​​Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat​​
    • design
    • software
    • products
    • balance

    The key, Ström observes, is not simply to deploy these elements, but to find the correct balance in each case between too much and not enough.

  • To read things that are not yet on the page

    My passion has been to build an enduring company where people were motivated the make great products. Everything else was secondary...the products, not the profits, were the motivation.

    Some people say, "Give the customers what they want." But that's not my approach. Our job is to figure out what they're going to want before they do. I think Henry Ford once said, "If I'd asked customers what they wanted, they would have told me, 'A faster horse!'" People don't know what they want until you show it to them. That's why I never rely on market research. Our task is to read things that are not yet on the page.

    Steve Jobs, Steve Jobs
    • products
    • innovation
  • The other way to build a massive tech company - doing it slowly

    A Podcast by Howie Liu
    www.secretleaders.com

    I like to think about the early years of [Airtable] as not only a great time for us to be patient and to get a lot of details right in the product. I think some of those details had to be done in a slow, deliberate way with a small team. You can't necessarily parallelize the design and development of a really detail-oriented product.

    • details
    • products
    • slowness
  • Eating your own dog food

    Eating your own dog food or “dogfooding” is the practice of using one's own products or services. This can be a way for an organization to test its products in real-world usage using product management techniques. Hence dogfooding can act as quality control, and eventually a kind of testimonial advertising. Once in the market, dogfooding can demonstrate developers confidence in their own products.

    Wikipedia
    en.wikipedia.org
    1. ​​Designer, implementor, user, writer​​
    2. ​​The reflective craftsman​​
    • quality
    • products
    • design
  • What happens to user experience in a minimum viable product?

    An Article by Ryan Singer
    signalvnoise.com
    Screenshot of signalvnoise.com on 2021-09-05 at 1.22.31 PM.png

    "Feature complexity is like surface area and quality of execution is like height. I want a base level of quality execution across all features. Whenever I commit to building or expanding a feature, I'm committing to a baseline of effort on the user experience."

    There’s a distinction to make: The set of features you choose to build is one thing. The level you choose to execute at is another. You can decide whether or not to include a feature like ‘reset password’. But if you decide to do it, you should live up to a basic standard of execution on the experience side.

    Features can be different sizes with more or less complexity, but quality of experience should be constant across all features. That constant quality of experience is what gives your customers trust. It demonstrates to them that whatever you build, you build well.

    1. ​​Minimum Awesome Product​​
    • quality
    • products
    • features
    • ux
  • August short No. 2: Glass

    An Article by Riccardo Mori
    morrick.me

    Glass looks and feels perfectly tailored to my photo sharing needs and expectations. For me it’s even better than pre-Facebook Instagram in the sense that it pushes me to select and share what I think are good photos (same as it happens with Flickr), rather than making me obsess with getting ‘the Instagram shot’ at all costs every day or multiple times in a day. It doesn’t cheapen photography like Instagram has done for years.

    That’s why I hope Glass’s founders/developers will resist feature creep. Resist user objections like: I don’t think Glass is offering that much for the subscription price they’re asking. There are a lot of people who will gladly pay for having a cleaner, simpler, focused experience.

    • features
    • simplicity
    • products
    • photography
  • Software that nobody wants

    An Article by Gandalf Hudlow
    iism.org
    Image from iism.org on 2020-08-17 at 9.31.09 AM.jpeg

    Finding value is the result of enabling individual and group-level discovery attempts. It's not the result of everyone following one leader's gut.

    What just happened is a new software product/feature was created that no customer wanted. This happens way too often. In fact, most hyper important software projects that must be done by date certain or else, have deep flaws that cause some variation of this phenomenon, flaws that include:

    • Not wanted - Company specified a solution to a problem that customers don't actually have
    • No Rarity - Company is pursuing an iKnockoff of existing products. The market already has two scaled competitors with working solutions, customers naturally spend budget on products that are already successful to avoid risk
    • Incorrect Packaging - Customers need a website, but the company created an iOS app instead
    • Incorrect Pricing - Customers need SaaS pricing, but the company created a shrink wrapped, on-premise solution with CapEx and maintenance agreements instead
    1. ​​The 'date scrum' anti-pattern​​
    • software
    • agile
    • products
    • features
  • Apps Getting Worse

    An Article by Tim Bray
    www.tbray.org

    Too often, a popular consumer app unexpectedly gets worse: Some combination of harder to use, missing features, and slower. At a time in history where software is significantly eating the world, this is nonsensical. It’s also damaging to the lives of the people who depend on these products.

    ...Maybe we ought to start promoting PMs who are willing to stand pat for an occasional release or three. Maybe we ought to fire all the consumer-product PMs. Maybe we ought to start including realistic customer-retraining-cost estimates in our product planning process.

    We need to stop breaking the software people use. Everyone deserves better.

    1. ​​It begins with craft​​
    • ux
    • software
    • products
  • To love deeply a world of things

    Care brings the worlds of action and meaning back together, and reconnects the necessary work of maintenance with the forms of attachment that so often (but invisibly, at least to analysts) sustain it.

    ...What if we care about our technologies, and do so in more than a trivial way? This feature or property has sometimes been extended to technologies in the past, but usually only ones that come out of deep folk or craft traditions, and rarely the products of a modern industrial culture.

    ...Is it possible to love, and love deeply, a world of things?

    Steven J. Jackson, Rethinking Repair
    • care
    • craft
    • products

    There's a bit of irony in the realization that, at least as I read this in 2021, what are often the most deeply appreciated technological things—e.g. Apple's products—are often the least repairable.

    This is in stark contrast to, say, the car-tinkering and fixit culture of those who grew up in 1950's and 60's. Irwin's cherry hot rods and Pirsig's motorcycles.

  • Broken world thinking

    A Fragment by Amanda Menking
    www.arenasolutions.com

    Consider, for example, how “broken world thinking” can benefit product design. What if the person (or team) who invented a new technology collaborated with the person (or team) who would one day repair the same technology? What if the innovation stakeholders and the infrastructure stakeholders collaborated closely with the end users? What if every new product designed by a technology company was designed in such as way as to factor in what happens to the product after planned obsolescence?

    • technology
    • repair
    • products
    • design
  • Don't Serve Burnt Pizza

    A Fragment by Jiaona Zhang
    review.firstround.com

    Say you’re trying to test whether people like pizza. If you serve them burnt pizza, you’re not getting feedback on whether they like pizza. You only know that they don’t like burnt pizza. Similarly, when you’re only relying on the MVP, the fastest and cheapest functional prototype, you risk not actually testing your product, but rather a poor or flawed version of it.

    1. ​​Minimum Awesome Product​​
    • products
    • ux

    One of Zhang's often-used analogies – the Minimum Lovable Product.

  • Product owner vs. product manager

    A Product Owner is focused on output i.e. how quickly can we build these features?

    Product Management, on the other hand, is focused on outcomes i.e. why are we building these features in the first place?

    Henry Latham, Why Scrum is killing your product
    • agile
    • products

    Typically I've heard these defined exactly opposite.

  • Why Scrum is killing your product

    An Article by Henry Latham
    uxdesign.cc
    1. ​​Product owner vs. product manager​​
    2. ​​We optimize what we measure​​
    1. ​​Beware SAFe, an Unholy Incarnation of Darkness​​
    • agile
    • management
    • software
    • products
  • The Hot Potato Process

    An Article by Dan Mall
    danmall.me
    Image from danmall.me on 2021-08-10 at 9.44.22 PM.svg

    The big misconception I’ve seen designers and developers often fall victim to is believing that handoff goes one way. Designers hand off comps to developers and think their work is done. That puts a lot of pressure on the designer to get everything perfect in one pass.

    Instead, great collaboration follows what Brad Frost and I call “The Hot Potato Process,” where ideas are passed quickly back and forth from designer to developer and back to designer then back to developer for the entirety of a product creation cycle.

    1. ​​Just-in-time Design​​
    • design
    • process
    • collaboration
    • products
  • Framing vs. Shaping

    An Article by Ryan Singer
    world.hey.com
    Image from world.hey.com on 2022-05-21 at 2.00.58 PM.png

    Framing is all about the problem and the business value. It's the work we do to challenge a problem, to narrow it down, and to find out if the business has interest and urgency to solve it.

    The framing session is where a feature request or complaint gets evaluated to judge what it really means, who's really affected, and whether now is the time to try and shape a solution.

    • products
    • problems
  • The Nature of Product

    An Article by Marty Cagan
    www.svpg.com

    Too many product managers and product designers want to spend all their time in problem discovery, and not get their hands dirty in solution discovery – the whole nonsense of “product managers are responsible for the what and not the how.”

    1. ​​On Greatness​​
    2. ​​One Of Us​​
    • ux
    • products
    • problems
    • design

    See also: "UI is not UX!" designers.


See also:
  1. software
  2. design
  3. ux
  4. agile
  5. features
  6. craft
  7. quality
  8. problems
  9. management
  10. planning
  11. art
  12. age
  13. technology
  14. repair
  15. care
  16. process
  17. collaboration
  18. simplicity
  19. photography
  20. innovation
  21. balance
  22. iteration
  23. details
  24. slowness
  1. Henry Latham
  2. Ryan Singer
  3. Marty Cagan
  4. Gandalf Hudlow
  5. Dorian Taylor
  6. Oliver Reichenstein
  7. Amanda Menking
  8. Jiaona Zhang
  9. Steven J. Jackson
  10. Dan Mall
  11. Tim Bray
  12. Riccardo Mori
  13. Steve Jobs
  14. Matthew Ström
  15. Henry Petroski
  16. Howie Liu