products
Eating your own dog food
To anticipate all the uses and abuses
To read things that are not yet on the page
To love deeply a world of things
Product owner vs. product manager
Ensuring Excellence
The other way to build a massive tech company - doing it slowly
Framing vs. Shaping
The Nature of Product
An Article by Marty CaganToo 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.”
Why Scrum is killing your product
An Article by Henry LathamWhat happens to user experience in a minimum viable product?
An Article by Ryan Singer"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.
Research, empathy, simplicity, speed
An Article by Matthew StrömAs 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.
August short No. 2: Glass
An Article by Riccardo MoriGlass 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.
Apps Getting Worse
An Article by Tim BrayToo 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.
The Hot Potato Process
An Article by Dan MallThe 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.
Signing party
An ArticleSince 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.
Software that nobody wants
An Article by Gandalf HudlowFinding 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
Don't Serve Burnt Pizza
A Fragment by Jiaona ZhangSay 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.
Broken world thinking
A Fragment by Amanda MenkingConsider, 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?
Putting Thought Into Things
An Essay by Oliver ReichensteinBuilding 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.
A City Is Not a Tree
- Strands of life
- Impending destruction
- The right overlap
- The difficulty of designing complexity
- Political chains of influence
Strands of life
For the human mind, the tree is the easiest vehicle for complex thoughts. But the city is not, cannot, and must not be a tree. The city is a receptacle for life. If the receptacle severs the overlap of the strands of life within it, because it is a tree, it will be like a bowl full of razor blades on edge, ready to cut up whatever is entrusted to it. In such a receptacle life will be cut to pieces. If we make cities which are trees, they will cut our life within to pieces.
Impending destruction
In any organized object, extreme compartmentalization and the dissociation of internal elements are the first signs of coming destruction.
The right overlap
Overlap alone does not give structure. It can also give chaos. A garbage can is full of overlap. To have structure, you must have the right overlap.
The difficulty of designing complexity
Designers, limited as they must be by the capacity of the mind to form intuitively accessible structures, cannot achieve the complexity of the semilattice in a single mental act. The mind has an overwhelming predisposition to see trees wherever it looks and cannot escape the tree conception.
Experiments suggest strongly that people have an underlying tendency, when faced by a complex organization, to reorganize it mentally in terms of non-overlapping units. The complexity of the semilattice is replaced by the simpler and more easily grasped tree form.
Political chains of influence
In Chicago, formal chains of influence and authority are entirely overshadowed by the ad hoc lines of control which arise naturally as each new city problem presents itself. These ad hoc lines depend on who is interested in the matter, who has what at stake, who has what favors to trade to whom.
This structure, which is informal, working within the framework of the first, is what really controls public action. It varies from week to week, even from hour to hour, as one problem replaces another. Nobody’s sphere of influence is entirely under the control of any one superior; each person is under different influences as the problems change. Although the organization chart in the Mayor’s office is a tree, the actual control and exercise of authority is semilattice-like.
Same name in the same basket
Does a concert hall ask to be next to an opera house? Can the two feed on one another? Will anybody ever visit them both, gluttonously, in a single evening, or even buy tickets from one after going to a performance in the other?
In Vienna, London, Paris, each of the performing arts has found its own place, because all are not mixed randomly. The only reason that these functions have all been brought together in Lincoln Center is that the concept of performing art links them to one another. The organization is born of the mania every simple-minded person has for putting things with the same name into the same basket.
Separation of concerns
Another favorite concept of the CIAM theorists and others is the separation of recreation from everything else. This has crystallized in our real cities in the form of playgrounds. The playground, asphalted and fenced in, is nothing but a pictorial acknowledgment of the fact that ‘play’ exists as an isolated concept in our minds. It has nothing to do with the life of play itself. Few self-respecting children will even play in a playground.
Play itself, the play that children practice, goes on somewhere different every day. In a natural city this is what happens.
Structural complexity
The idea of overlap, ambiguity, multiplicity of aspect, and the semilattice are not less orderly than the right tree, but more so. They represent a thicker, tougher, more subtle and more complex view of structure.
Neighborhoods
We cannot get an adequate picture of what Middlesborough is, or of what it ought to be, in terms of neighborhoods. When we describe the city in terms of neighborhoods, we implicitly assume that the smaller elements within any one of these neighborhoods belong together so tightly that they only interact with elements in other neighborhoods through the medium of the neighborhoods to which they themselves belong. Ruth Glass herself shows clearly that this is not the case.
Cities which are trees
Columbia, Maryland
Greenbelt, Maryland
Greater London Plan
Mesa City, Paolo Soleri
Tokyo Plan, Kenzo Tange
Chandigarh (Le Corbusier)
Brasilia, Lucia Costa
Communitas (Percival and Paul Goodman)
Roman town evolved from military campsIn the worst cases, the units of which these cities are composed fail to correspond to any living reality; and the real systems, whose existence actually makes the city live, have been provided with no physical receptacle.
In a tree structure, it means that within this structure no piece of any unit is ever connected to other units, except through the medium of that unit as a whole.
Sets and systems
When the elements of a set belong together because they cooperate or work together somehow, we call the set of elements a system.
From a designer’s point of view, the physically unchanging part of this system is of special interest. I define this fixed part as a unit of the city.
Whatever picture of the city someone has is defined precisely by the subsets he sees as units.
Natural and artificial cities
I want to call those cities which have arisen more or less spontaneously over many, many years natural cities. And I shall call those cities and parts of cities which have been spontaneously created by designers and planners artificial cities. Siena, Liverpool, Kyoto, and Manhattan are examples of natural cities. Levittown, Chandigarh, and the British New Towns are examples of artificial cities.
It is more and more widely recognized today that there is some essential ingredient missing from artificial cities.
Trees and semilattices
The tree of my title is not a green tree with leaves. It is the name of an abstract structure. I shall contrast it with another, more complex abstract structure called a semilattice.
Both the tree and semilattice are ways of thinking about how a large collection of many small systems goes to make up a large and complex system.
A collection of sets forms a semilattice if, and only if, when two overlapping sets belong to the collection, the set of elements common to both also belongs to the collection. That is, if [234] and [345] belong to the collection, then [34] belongs to the collection.
A collection of sets forms a tree if, and only if, for any two sets that belong to the collection either one is wholly contained in the other, or they are wholly disjoint. Every tree is trivially a simple semilattice.
We are concerned with the difference between structures in which no overlap occurs, and those structures in which overlap does occur.
The semilattice is potentially a much more complex and subtle structure than a tree. It is this lack of structural complexity, characteristic of trees, which is crippling our conceptions of the city.