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 â the whole nonsense of âproduct managers are responsible for the what and not the how.â
- ââOn Greatnessââ
- ââOne Of Usââ
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."
Thereâs 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 âreset passwordâ. 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 itâs 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 âthe Instagram shotâ at all costs every day or multiple times in a day. It doesnât cheapen photography like Instagram has done for years.
Thatâs why I hope Glassâs founders/developers will resist feature creep. Resist user objections like: I donât think Glass is offering that much for the subscription price theyâre 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. Itâs 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 Iâve 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 âThe Hot Potato Process,â 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
AÂ Fragment by Jiaona ZhangSay youâre trying to test whether people like pizza. If you serve them burnt pizza, youâre not getting feedback on whether they like pizza. You only know that they donât like burnt pizza. Similarly, when youâre 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
AÂ Fragment by Amanda MenkingConsider, for example, how âbroken world thinkingâ 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.
Gods of the Word
Imagine that we had no voice and no tongue
Socrates: Imagine that we have no voice and no tongue, but want to communicate with one another. Wouldnât we like the deaf and the dumb make signs with the hands and the head and the rest of the body?
Hermogenes: There would be no choice, Socrates.
Socrates: We would imitate the nature of the thing: lifting the hands to heaven would mean lightness and upwardness. Heaviness and downwardness would be expressed by letting them drop toward the ground...
Hermogenes: I donât see that we could do anything else.
Socrates: And when we want to express ourselves with the voice or tongue or mouth, the expression is simply their imitation of what we want to express?
Hermogenes: I think, it must be so.My name
âI am the utterance of my name.â
â Thunder, Perfect Mind, The Nag Hammadi Library
Reference and Is-ness
There are at least two aspects to what we have traditionally called the meaning of a word. One aspect is reference, and the other is something I will call âinherent meaningâ following Ullman (1963). Inherent meaning is âIs-nessâ meaning. Inherent meaning is a wordâs identity, and reference merely its resumĂ©, where it has gone and what it has done, an itemization of its contexts. âIs-nessâ is unifying. Each word has a single pronunciation, a single inherent meaning. But reference is divisive. It makes what was one thing â the word â appear to be many things â its senses. It is inherent meaning which gives all those multifarious senses the power of being a single word.
It flows out and fills
This deeper meaning of a word isnât confined to what we think of as a dictionary definition. Rather it flows out and fills all the space available to it. Although a basic sense does affect the dynamics of a word, it has no power over its essence. Like the captain of a ship, it can control the crewâs actions, but not their minds. Each word has an aspect of meaning which lies deeper than any of its senses, and it is fundamentally on this meaning that all the senses depend.
No less than a Zeus
I too am a true believer in the autonomy of the archetype. A
/t/
or an/h/
is no less than a Zeus. The consonants are not essentially physical, but they live, evolve and influence human affairs. We overlook something essential if we deny that they can get up and walk around. This is not to say that their existence is independent of the human psyche. But then everything depends on everything.Like a prism
When you look at phonemes, you look through the perspective of morphemes, which are one linguistic level higher. The higher level is like a prism that splits the light in two. What was one thing, like âlengthâ at the phoneme level, looks like two opposite things âlongâ and âshortâ from the perspective of the morphemes. In practice, when you find both a word and its opposite, then the phoneme is not about either of these two things, but about what is common to them.
Fracturing
If we step back and view from afar this process of One-ness and Is-ness to fracturing and interpretation â of inherent meaning to reference, it follows that what lies at the foundation of language is simply what it is â sound â free of reference and interpretation. What makes what we know as language from its sound is fracturing and interpretation or using a word for a function other than what it simply is.
To evolve the language itself
So in the process of talking, we might say we are putting words in slightly new contexts, and then testing them against our peers to see if our experiment in juxtaposition had âmeaning. If we succeed, we have introduced new contexts for the words we use. These contexts will be taken up by our listeners, and will gradually become clearly enough defined to be thought of as referents. Once our words gain new referents, they start affecting the underlying phonosemantic structure of the language, the clustering patterns, the network of semantic relations. That is, the purpose of talking in the long run is to evolve the language itself.
Scooting over
There is at this point no evidence that acquired characteristics can be inherited. It is held that all changes to a genome are random, and cannot be subject to any higher principle. However, when a word is used in a new context, as it is whenever we say something new, a new sense is permitted. This does affect the phonosemantic structure, the linguistic DNA. Words in the vicinity of this word âscoot overâ to make room and allow themselves to be influenced by its philosophy. The language itself is now different.
The element becomes a sign
Each unit can be seen purely as form, as what it is. Or it can be viewed as having a function. Its function is only understandable within the next higher level of organization. And in every case, function must succumb to the constraints of form. Once this worldly function is assigned, the element becomes a âsignâ. It falls into the realm of concept. There is a mapping from one thought system to another.
The demand of a new word
Why are these phonosemantic classes enough, and we need neither more nor less? Why are these consonants enough, and we need neither more nor less? What determines the need for a new word? How is this demand âfeltâ by a language? How did the metabolic pathways of American English recognize that âjerkâ and âtwerpâ and âpunkâ and ânitwitâ and âdorkâ and âassâ and âgoonâ and âtwitâ and âdodoâ and âbumâ and ânerdâ and âdunceâ and âturdâ and âboobâ and âchumpâ and âbitchâ and âbastardâ and âprudeâ and so on and so forth simply were not equal to the task? We had to add âturkeyâ and âsquirrelâ as well?