Product Management

Customer Feedback is important

Posted on by will

We all know it’s important to think of our users first, and that user feedback is important; however all of us have to deal with products, processes and systems in our day-to-day lives in which the user was likely at the bottom of a long list of other priorities during the design phase. Anyone who has been through customs in an American international airport as a non-US citizen can understand what I’m talking about.

In Beijing International Airport, however, they appear to value feedback from travelers. Attached to the booth under the window on every customs desk is a small box with 4 buttons. The text above the buttons reads: “You are welcome to comment on my work”, and you’ve invited to press “Greatly satisfied”, “Satisfied”, “Checking time too long” or “Poor customer service”. In full transparency the custom officer’s identification number is shown directly on the display.

Collecting user feedback at Beijing International Airport

Collecting user feedback at Beijing International Airport

It would be interesting to know what they do with the results: whether they use the outcome to performance manage the staff member, or to identify patterns of satisfaction across different demographics of traveler. Either way, it’s refreshing to see an area that appears to be traditionally nonchalant about user satisfaction take an interest in what people think for the purpose of making the system better.

Advertising – the good and the bad

Posted on by will

We all want to get paid.

As ‘free’ continues to become the norm for data, information, apps and services, developers reach to advertising to fill the ‘P’ part of their profit and loss statements. Internet revenue hit $7.3 billion in Q1 this year, according to PwC – so someone must be clicking those ads.

With advertising, more clicks means more cash. We all want more cash – and the two most common ways to get high Click-Through Rates straight away seem to be:

  1. annoy, trick, deceive, or
  2. make the ad, and with it the experience, meaningful and contextually relevant (that is, give me ads that are relevant to what I am doing that might actually help me complete the task I am performing)

#1 might get you a higher CTR over the short term, but #2 has a much better chance of providing real value to your users and leading to a long-term, sustainable relationship.

When a visitor comes to your webpage, or a user interacts with your mobile app, you have been granted the ever-so-brief attention of a human being. This is a rare and important moment; this is an opportunity for you to build a meaningful relationship with them.

Don’t waste it.

SCRUM User Stories, Part 2: User value over business value?

Posted on by will

My last post about User Stories and putting the value for the user first in any product decision generated some great discussion on Twitter. As with anything there are some varying views on the topic, and as one example I was pointed to Liz Keogh’s post on user stories.

Liz argues that User Stories should be better named “Stakeholder stories”, as the things you build are addressing the needs of varying groups of stakeholders, only some of which are the end user.

In the creation of any product there are of course many stakeholders who need to be satisfied: the CEO, shareholders, investors, marketing people, the legal department, and so on. In the design of the business, of course the internal stakeholders have the most important requirements. What sort of market are we going into? What segment will we serve? What problem or user need do we attempt to address with this product?

But when you start designing the product that the user will have in their hands, then the user needs to be at the heart of that design solution. Here, the user needs have to come first.

But what about all the stuff that you have to build into products that users don’t want, or even hate? Stuff like CAPTCHAs during registration processes, or advertisements? If the user’s needs come first, why does this stuff exist? To answer this, let’s take a step back and look at where user stories come from.

User Stories are not immaculate conceptions: they don’t just appear out of the blue, but they are thoughtfully created to address needs of the product and the business. On other words, they are derived out of the product vision and the surrounding business model.

If your business model involves monetisation through advertising, then you have a problem to solve: “how can I enable advertising in my product?” It’s clear that the user is not at the heart of the decision to enable advertising, but business models are complex and have to satisfy many stakeholders and solve many problems. At the business strategy level, the end-user is only one of multiple players, and the user doesn’t always come first.

So you have this problem: you have to enable advertising. How do you solve it? Do you slap a full-screen takeover banner for some random personal hygiene product on your start screen? Probably not. Do you enable Google AdWords to show advertisements relevant to the content in a meaningful way? Getting warmer. Do you study the user’s interaction on the page to determine where the advertisements should be placed and how they should be visually displayed to ensure that users understand what is a sponsored link and what is your own content, to avoid frustration and confusion from the end user and maximise the meaning and value they get when they interact with the advertising? Better still.

What is at the heart of each of these decisions? The user. This is where the user comes first – in the design of the solution to the problem. In the User Story.

User-centric design doesn’t absolve you (regrettably) of the need to be aware of the business context or the constraints of your business or industry: it merely proposes that the user is at the heart of how you solve your product problems and how you work with the constraints. Keeping the user at the centre of your user stories by insisting they start with “As a User…” helps you stay focussed on the people who will be interacting with the stuff you’re building.

Move fast

Posted on by will

The world moves fast. Your competitors move fast with it.

Users move fast, too. Users are more fickle than ever before. This month’s UK WIRED magazine rated Twitter as “tired”. This for a service that’s only five years old with a still-growing userbase. Ouch!

In the world of web products, building and releasing beautiful and delightful products and user experiences is only half of the battle. The other half is winning (and keeping) your userbase. Your product could have a net promoter score of +80, but if it still only has 10 users, is it really successful? If you build it, they won’t necessarily come.

Users want stability and reliability. Once they have settled in to a product that solves a particular need, it’s that much harder to get their attention to yours. At the same time, and perhaps contradictorily (who said human beings were simple?), users also crave the new. New updates, new versions, new features. News, blogs and social channels thrive on the new.

The web has sped up business dramatically and continues to speed up software product innovation. It’s a race to the bottom – at some point we won’t be able to go much quicker – but we’re not at the end of that race just yet. The strategy to compete in this space, I think, has two major components:

1. Work fast. Build fast, iterate fast: improve fast.
2. Be ready for when we hit the bottom. When we can’t go faster, on what track will the next race be run? Which race can you win?

Important note: fast doesn’t mean chaotic and unplanned.

Classic product management wisdom from one of the fathers of industrial design

Posted on by will

In 1955 Henry Dreyfuss, one of the most influential industrial designers of the 20th century, in his book “Designing for People” wrote the following :

“The successful performer in this new field is a man of many hats. He does more than merely design things. He is a businessman as well as a person who makes drawings and models. He is a keen observer of public taste and he has painstakingly cultivated his own taste. He has an understanding of merchandising, how things are made, packed, distributed, and displayed. He accepts the responsibility of his position as liaison linking management, engineering, and the consumer and co-operates with all three.”

Clearly this sentiment is as relevant for designers today as it was 55 years ago when it was written. It’s also interesting how the description rings true for product managers. In fact, I couldn’t have come up with a better description of the modern-day product manager if I tried.

Product management is more than schedules, roadmaps and powerpoints. Product management is about identifying a need and building a solution. It’s about understanding people (users) and understanding “how things are made”.

Designing for People - Henry Dreyfuss - Many hats sketch“From the book Designing for People – Dreyfuss’s sketch of the multi-skilled designer.

User testing: an input to innovation, not a source of it

Posted on by will

Benz “Velo” model (1894)

It’s hard to imagine a life without cars. Before the automobile was invented getting around was a costly and particularly time-consuming business. That quick drive to the hardware store that takes 15 minutes in the car might have taken several hours on horseback, or an entire day in a horse-drawn carriage. Looking back, it’s hard to imagine how anyone was motivated to move anywhere at all. (In fact, most people didn’t… before the automobile, and particularly before rail, it wasn’t uncommon for people to spend their whole lives in the town they were born in.)

So if you could go back roughly 130 years and show someone the automobile, they would love it, right? If you asked someone the question, “is this product something you would buy and use?” the answer would be a resounding “Yes!”. Right?

Well… not really. When the first automobiles rolled onto the streets in the late 1800’s, they were met with skepticism and fear. People (and horses) were terrified by the noise, and people just couldn’t understand why anyone would need to go so far or why they would be in such a hurry. In other words, the automobile was an invention for a problem no-one had. Or, to be potentially more precise, a problem they didn’t yet know they had.

If you had shown concept drawings of the automobile to a focus group in 1885, or a working prototype to a user testing group, you might have walked away thinking that you’d be better off working on putting a clock radio* in your range of horse-drawn carriages.

The point is, you can’t expect users to know what they want. Innovation doesn’t come from asking a customer focus group “what products do you want that haven’t been invented yet?”

The iPad was a solution to a problem that no-one really had. Companies and products that innovate are successful because they can predict user behaviour before the users go anywhere near it. They are also good at convincing (selling) users that they have problems that their products can solve. No-one had a standing-motorised-transport-problem before the Segway was invented, but the company behind the gyroscopically controlled contraptions still managed to ship over 50,000 units by 2009.

We recently ran some early user testing on a product concept that we are working on. Based on the results, some members of our team were hugely disheartened: most of our test users, when asked if they could imagine them getting major value out of one of our concept’s major use cases, said “no”. Some thought we should go back to the drawing board. I think they missed the point…

User testing is one input to product design; one of many. Getting the input and responses of potential users early in the design process is crucial; however to make the results really meaningful you need to interpret them in relation to the test user’s context… and sometimes I think you just need to take the responses with a grain of salt. You also, I think, need to understand that innovation often comes from having the courage to challenge users on what they think they need and what problems they have.

* I’m of course aware that there were no clock radios in 1885. The first transistor radio wasn’t invented until 1954 by Sony in Japan. Call it poetic licence.

Release it: now

Posted on by will

Release your software to real users as early as possible.

Building software for years without ever releasing any of it is like working in a kitchen and letting the food go cold and mouldy before serving it up.

Building software is a collaborative process – not just amongst you and your colleagues – or between you and your partners – but between you and your users. Feedback from real users helps you guide the future of your product and your immediate investments. It helps you prioritise and optimise. Making product decisions without real user feedback is quite often, I think, guesswork. Yes, it’s (hopefully) educated guesswork – but it’s guesswork all the same.

You can learn a lot from user testing and user research prior to release – and there’s no way you would want to skip these steps – but nothing can replace the feedback you get when real people use your product, with real use cases, under real load.

If you see that you’ve been sitting on the latest version of your product for months without any of it hitting a user, or if you find yourself wanting to squeeze “just one more feature” in before you drop the release, then stop and think: can I give my users meaningful, measurable value with this release? If so, then release it. Now!

Let the team decide…

Posted on by will

In a typical agile development team a few hundred decisions get made every day, by everyone. Should we build this user story first or that one? Should I refactor this method now or do it later? Is this bug more important than that user story? Should I call that meeting for this week or next week?

Every decision that gets made, in the end, makes its mark on your product. Every decision impacts the team’s velocity or productivity, the product quality, the product features and the user experience.

If you’re planning a trip in your car, every decision you make along the way will impact where you arrive at, how long it takes and how many dents you have on your car when you get there. Do you want to get there quickly, or is time not so important? Do you want to avoid dirt roads, or do you prefer them? Is there a particular landmark you want to see on the way? You have an idea of what your journey will be like before you leave, and your decisions are based on that vision of your journey.

Back to the development team: every decision made will impact where and how you arrive at your destination. So the question is: does everyone in the team have the same vision of what your journey will look like?

One of the Product Owner’s most important roles is to define and communicate the product vision. The more the team understands and buys into the product vision, the more likely it is that each decision they make will lead the journey in the same direction you want to go.

Here’s a concrete example: a lot of POs spend a lot of time prioritising things: bugs, stories, meetings, etc. Many POs I know want to be involved in every decision the team makes. What makes one thing more important and/or urgent than another thing is all about vision and context. What would happen if the PO spent all the time she spent prioritising bugs on communicating the product vision? If the team understands the vision and context, then they should be able to make the right priority decision based on that vision and context.

Time invested making a single decision for the team has little return beyond the decision itself. Time invested in communicating vision will repay itself over and over with better decisions across the team, fewer bottlenecks and less wasted time.

Darwin and the theory of software evolution

Posted on by will
Bower bird

Female bower birds prefer males with colourful blue tail feathers and an impressive nest filled with lots of blue ornaments. To a bower bird, the brightness and quality of your tail, as well as your ability to gather a stunning assortment of blue nest decorations, indicates how healthy and strong you are, and how likely your genes are to produce equally strong and healthy offspring. In other words, a bigger tail and a cooler house equals more sex, which equals more children. Your genes live on.

Generation after generation the strongest genes survive, the weakest ones are killed off, and the species evolves – better and better. It’s survival of the fittest. Or, perhaps even more apt, survival of the most effective.

Good software product development tends to emulate Darwin’s evolution. Software is built, released, used and measured. The successful features, the heavily used features, the most often talked about features receive more development, more design, more attention; the least used are left alone, watered down or removed entirely. Survival of the most effective.

On the web we have the powerful ability to accelerate the evolution. We can release software updates multiple times per day. Design – code – release – measure – rinse. Repeat. Techniques such as A/B testing accelerate it even more: which is more effective? Text link or graphical link? Blue feathers or green feathers? Big nest or bigger nest? Survival of the most effective.

For the male bower bird, just as for software products, the audience (user) is critical. Every decision the bower bird makes will be judged by the female. It doesn’t matter if the nest is made of wire instead of twigs, or if the bower produced a new nest creation framework. The female bower doesn’t care; that’s not what she makes her decision based on.

Is your product evolving? Who is your audience, and who are you making your product decisions for? Are they the same?

Maximise success

Posted on by will

Many processes and organisational controls are set up to minimise failure. They are set up to minimise the number of times a team releases bad software; minimise the number of customer complaints; minimise the server crashes or minimise the failed product launches.

What if instead of trying to minimise failure, your organisation focused on maximising success?

What would it do for your product or consumer offering if instead of trying to minimise the bad software releases, you focused on maximising good ones? What would it do for your organisation if instead of focusing on minimising failed product launches, you focused on maximising good ones?

The problem with focusing on minimising the bad is that it creates roadblocks instead of opportunities. When a conversation starts with the question “do we have a reason to not ship this?” it sets the expectation that not shipping is okay. A focus on bad minimisation discourages risk taking and rewards the status quo.

The easiest way to minimise bad releases is to not release anything at all – so when you incentivise and reward the act of not shipping bad releases, either nothing will get shipped, or what does get shipped will be safe and unremarkable.

There will always be a reason not to ship if you look hard enough. Instead of focusing on trying to find it, try investing that energy into shipping it the best way you know how.