Articles of Note
“There is great value in building products through experimentation. The continual optimization, systematic testing, and incremental validation can help you avoid costly mistakes and enable you to reach your goals faster. However, as our experience demonstrates, without the right organizational culture, you will constantly be facing challenges from within. If you want to make product experimentation a core capability, you must establish a learning culture. Only then will you be able to focus purely on the work that has the most significant impact.”
by Tristan Kromer (@TriKro)
“Non-verbal communication can be quite telling, but it’s a tricky note type to record. Often the signals you are looking for happen in a split second: a little smile, eyes widening, someone shying away, etc. But when you recognize it, body language provides a powerful signal. Watching someone react to what you are telling them is like taking the filter out of the equation. So whether it’s positive or negative body language, make note of it. You might just find more truth in that than in the words of your customers.”
by Chloe Evans
“Another unexpected benefit of remote research may be greater attention to misrepresentation. An ethical and epistemological benefit from participant-made videos, for example, is that this approach can help us address some of the issues of representation and the power dynamics of the ethnographer having the privilege to describe another person’s lived experience. By relying on the videos sent to me by participants rather than filming them, they have more control in how they want to present themselves to the world.”
by Mark Dalgarno
“I first came across the concept of a service line when consulting in government 3 years ago and have used the concept ever since. It’s a good organising principle when thinking about sets of related services. A service line is simply a set of services that work together to enable a user to complete an end-to-end journey. I’ve seen a few examples of service lines over the past years and the different organisational structures that deliver them … I’ve come up with the following design for the organisation around a service line.”
by Milena Correa, Stephanie Lu, Jenna Kim, Natalie Erjavec, Rohan Shaiva and Shandler Mason
“How do you design a digital game with people you have never met in person? … The team typically develops new game prototypes every month to test with Times subscribers. They assigned us — a team of six interns with skills in design, tech and data — an ambitious task for our summer internship project: to design and prototype a digital game in three weeks. To do this remotely, we had to get creative with our design and playtest approaches.”
Worth Another Read
“Today we see rising appetite for customizing innovation methods and interconnected is deeper interest in better understanding innovation methods history…. where various techniques, exercises and method ideas came from … It might surprise some to know that How Might We? does not originate in the Design Thinking community but rather comes from the Applied Creativity community of practice. These have been and remain two rather different communities with very different histories, heroes, leaders and knowledge.”
Something for You To Watch
(Rob Hayes, 20 mins)
“This strategy consists of a vision, strategic objectives, a roadmap and tasks … The top tier (vision) has a horizon of years in most cases and outlines and the bottom tier (tasks) focus on what is going on at a granular level from today to next week … The key takeaways are the benefits of a good product strategy. It provides a clear line of sight between day to day work and the overall vision. Product managers can know that things will go in the right direction without micromanaging, and provide them with more freedom to focus on other things.”
(Carol Righi, Lisa Bruce, Jim Moore & Janice Meissner, 26 mins)
“How do you apply the principles of human-centered design Agile (HCDAgile) to data projects? 1904labs employs our HCDAgile process for all of our projects, many of which focus on data engineering and decision science, where there isn’t necessarily a user interface. Knowing this was also a challenge many enterprises face, in October 2019 we brought together practitioners to discuss this very question.”
(Teresa Torres, 13 mins)
“The vast majority of times when a company feels like they need both roles, it’s usually because they’re still stuck in this project-based discovery model, where they have one foot in the old waterfall, traditional product management model, and one foot in this more customer-centric discovery model. And because they’re trying to do both jobs, it’s just slowing them down. I really encourage teams and companies to step that foot out of the traditional model and step fully into a continuous discovery model.”
NY Product Conference 2019 Redux
There were some great sessions during last year’s NY Product Conference. We think you will find these of particular interest:
The rest of the sessions are well worth a look too.
Upcoming Events
Managing Product = Managing Tension, 4 November, Online
#mtpcon digital, 18-19 November, Online
Why Are Soft Skills the Hardest When Managing Products?, 18 November, Online
How to Write OKRs That Don't Suck, 1 December, Online
Managing Products: A Reality Check, 2 December, Online
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