All Articles

Don't Overcommit to a Bad Idea

This post is part of a series about making better product decisions. At the World Domination Summit 2013, Jia Jiang gave an amazing talk about his experience following his dreams. When he was young, he saw Bill Gates speak, and he dreamed of starting a company someday. But like many

You Probably Suck at Estimating (And What You Can Do About It)

This post is part of a series about making better product decisions. You probably estimate every day. How long will it take to build a given feature? What impact will it have on your customer base? How will it impact business outcomes? It's too bad you probably aren&

Help Others Make Good Product Decisions Too

This post is part of a series about making better product decisions. You've got a clear vision of where your product is headed. You can describe it three months out, six months out, maybe even ten years out. As you start to see success, you need to grow

You Only Prefer It That Way Because It's Familiar

This post is part of a series about making better product decisions. Tell me how many times you've experienced the following: You've just introduced a new concept design - maybe it's a new way of doing an old feature or maybe it's a

How the 10/10/10 Rule can Lead to Better Product Decisions

This post is part of a series about making better product decisions. Three customers are at risk today. You don't have a feature they want and your sales team is concerned they will switch to your competitor's product who does have the requested feature. What do

Is Your Idea a Viable Business?

This post was written for Startup Edition. Almost everyone has at one point in their life thought, someone should make a something or another, or why doesn't this product exist in the world. This is exactly how products are born. It really is that simple. It always starts

Turn Your Inside View Outward

This post is part of a series about making better product decisions. One of the most common questions I get at my company, is why don't we have a mobile app. We are in the age of mobile, how can we possibly survive without a mobile app? There

Why You Only See What You Want to See

This post is part of a series about making better product decisions. You arrive at the office one morning, excited to tell your team about a new idea you had the night before. They look at you nonchalantly. One of them says, "that might work." You were expecting

Find Someone Else Who Has Solved Your Problem Before

This post is part of a series about making better product decisions. I was recently working with our interaction designer on the design of our job posting creation form. Like many job services, we ask for the location of the job, but the design of this section wasn't

How To Make Better Product Decisions

This post is part of a series about making better product decisions. "The remarkable thing about your mental life is that you are rarely ever stumped.”  - Daniel Kahneman It's Thursday morning. You settle into your office chair, you crack open your laptop, you take a deep breath

Start An Idea Journal

This post is part of a series about making better product decisions. I have a friend (a skier) who decided that snowboarding needed to be more like skiing. He thought that snowboarding looked fun, but he didn't want to give up the precision of two skis. Being an

Stop Asking "Whether or Not" Questions

This post is part of a series about making better product decisions. Recently during lunch, our Director of Sales mentioned that one of our customer's was at risk because we didn't support a specific feature. He asked if we were going to build it. He argued,

Be Prepared To Be Wrong

This post is part of a series about making better product decisions. As startup founders, product managers, designers, it's often easy for us to come up with all the answers. Should we add this feature? Will users take this action? Will changing this copy increase conversions? And of

Setting Product Goals

Each quarter, I set goals for my team. I start by asking, what's the most important thing we can accomplish this quarter that would create the most value for the business. Q3 will be my fourth quarter with my current company and once again our goals this coming

Google Reader Is Going Away On Monday, Don't Let Product Talk Go With It

Dear Readers, Let's cut to the chase. There are several hundred of you who are still using Google Reader to read Product Talk. I know that life is busy. There aren't enough hours in the day. And, of course, you'll get to it later.

Grinding It Out

As I mentioned last week, I'm working with a design intern this summer. We were talking about the over all design process, when I argued, when you get to the ideation stage you have to grind it out. I like this metaphor. You can't just have

Introducing My Intern to Interaction Design Is Fun

I'm working with a design intern this summer. It's a lot of fun. She doesn't have a design background. She's right out of college, a dual major in Linguistics and Brain and Cognitive Science. She didn't even know what interaction

Read Lean Analytics

If you haven't read Lean Analytics by Alistair Croll and Ben Yoskovitz, stop reading this blog post and go pick up a copy. No really. It's that good. For those of you who didn't stop reading to go buy the book, I'll

It's Not Enough To Know What To Measure, You Also Need to Get The Time Increment Right

Do you know how much money you've made over your entire lifetime? Probably not. Or how many miles you've ran since the day you were born? Maybe. If you aren't a runner. I can only think of one person who might know the answers

How Do You Measure Success?

Now that I've told you to measure what matters, let's talk about what that means. A good place to start is by asking, what does success look like? It varies with every product. Let's look at a few examples: An e-commerce site. When

Measure What Matters

I met with a designer yesterday who shared with me that she wants to learn user experience design and asked for my advice. I asked her what she was reading and if she had joined any local groups. What had she found useful so far? She was reading Alan Cooper.

5 Steps For How To Develop Empathy

Empathy made my list of Top 7 Traits of a Good Product Manager. So let's take a look at what it is and how to develop it. As we learned in that article, empathy is the ability to feel another person's feelings. It is often confused

The 7 Core Traits of a Good Product Manager

What makes a good product manager? I've been obsessed with this question. It's why I started this blog. As a practitioner, I want to master my craft. As a consultant and coach, I want to help you master your craft. But how do we do that

What We Can Learn From Facebook About Managing Change

Does this sound familiar? You spend weeks researching a problem. Your team whiteboards multiple solutions. You user test each one. You build the best one. And despite great feedback from your users along the way, when you finally release, all you get are complaints. Change Is Hard The reality is,

How to Write Product Requirements Iteratively

You have an idea. You write it down. Maybe you sketch it on a white board. You talk to some engineers. You write user stories. And away you go. You start building. That sounds right. Isn't that what we are all doing? It's what many of