Engagement – that’s what this whole product management blogging thing is about.  Check out what Tyner Blain readers found to be the most engaging articles in 2009.

Deep Dives

If you’re new to Tyner Blain, you may be surprised by the length of the articles here.  I joke that they are long because I don’t have time to edit.  Stewart Rogers jokes that they are long because I’m incapable of writing a short article.  If you’ve been here a while, you know what you’re in for.  If you’ve been here a long while, then you’re glad (like me) that I don’t write one per day any more.

Product Management is simultaneously a broad and deep discipline, requiring us to have a breadth of perspective combined with a depth of insight.  We then have to apply that in a market context, effectively navigating the political waters of our organizations.  Most of the articles here either try to skim the breadth of a range of related topics, or plumb the depths of a single topic.  Doing that in under a thousand words is pretty hard.  Most of the articles here also link to other articles, to try and provide even more depth and context, and encourage additional critical thinking.

One measure of the quality of the articles here is how often they stimulate readers to read further, or dive deeper into the topics.  While web analytics won’t allow us to measure how thought-provoking an article is, we can look to see how many people dive into the linked articles, versus how many people move on to something else.  We can measure the bounce rate of an article to see how often people leave a page without following any of the “tell me more” links.

Looking at ~170,000 page views at Tyner Blain in 2009, narrowed down to only those articles with at least 100 page views, here is the top-ten list of most engaging (or “least abandoned” if you’re a “cup is half empty” person) articles:

1. Use Case Series: Introduction: A collection of articles on the “traditional” forms of use cases – informal, formal, UML.
2. Agile Development of Use Cases: A dive into the dynamics and cadence of an agile process for developing use cases.
3. How Do You Manage Market Data?: A collection of articles exploring different market-immersion techniques in depth.
4. Scheduling Requirements Changes – Part 2: A focus on practical techniques for managing change with an agile development process.
5. Yesterday’s BPMN Post Was A Big Fat Lie: A mea culpa and clarification of interest to folks following the BPMN Series.
6. Everything I Needed To Know I Forgot in Kindergarten: Why asking why? is important.
7. Plan Your Next Sprint by ROI – Part 1: Prioritizing by Bang for the Buck, not just Bang.
8. Ten Common Mistakes of Going Agile: A collection of articles about common pitfalls encountered when adopting agile practices.
9. Perpetually Almost Finished Projects: Organizing a project with discrete deliverables and rolling-wave planning to avoid the “90% done, 90% remaining” problem.
10. How To Use Timeboxes for Scheduling Software Delivery: One of my personal favorites.  A rational approach to making trade-offs when your “perfect” plan has to change.

OK Stewart, that’s only 519 words.

My friend Rich Mironov, chief marketing officer at Enthiosys, recently published The Art of Product Management, and was kind enough to send me a free copy.  The essays he shares in the book make great conversation starters for product managers.  Tyner Blain is giving away a free copy to someone who participates in the product management conversations.  Read on to see how you can win.

Conversation

Rich really has a great conversational style in his writing, it reads well and flows easily. Rich knows his audience well, and provides keen insights into different elements of product management.  Often, he uses analogies – like running a grocery store versus running a restaurant, to put SaaS versus licensing of software into perspective.  Even with essays so well aligned with the interests of product managers, it can be challenging to create a conversation through writing a book.  Rich can’t get real time feedback while writing his book, like he can from the readers of his blog.

Cindy Alvarez started the smarter product managers book club on booksprouts, and we’re on our second book – The Art of Product Management.  We meet tomorrow night (Wed, 11 Mar 2009) – details in the book-club area, sign up and join for free.  This will help get more conversation going around Rich’s book.  

Also, if you’re on Twitter [I'm @sehlhorst if you want to follow my tweets], you can search for “#pmbc” and find tweets that are related (usually) to the current book.  You can also search twitter for “#prodmgmt” to see tweets from/about product management.  If you aren’t on Twitter, you can still follow those links and watch the conversations, and find people to follow.

One of the most rewarding things about writing the Tyner Blain blog is the conversations it starts for me.

Contest

This contest is meant to serve two goals.  First, to give away a copy of Rich’s book, balancing out the free copy he so graciously sent to me.  Thanks again, Rich!  Second, to trigger even more conversations on Tyner Blain.  Since Rich’s book is written for product managers, the contest is structured to inspire conversations about product management.

The Rules of the Contest

There are three ways to “enter” the contest to win a free copy of The Art of Product Management.

1. Add a non-trivial comment to this article, about one or more of the essays in The Art of Product Management.  You can either start a conversation or join an existing one.  ”Non-trivial” is solely up to my judgement.  If you’re contributing to the conversation, then I’m happy.  ”Me too” won’t cut it.
2. Add a non-trivial comment to any of the 200 Tyner Blain articles in the “product management” category.  You can either join a conversation or start a new one related to the article.  Feel free, of course to be critical of any of those articles – just make sure you’re conversational, and I’m happy.  ”You stink, Scott” isn’t good enough.
3. Write a blog post on your own blog and either use a trackback or link it to this article or one of the product management articles on Tyner Blain.  The same conversational rules apply.

You’ll get 1 point for each comment or blog post you make as you participate in the conversations.  You can write multiple comments / posts, you’ll get credit for all of them.  Your comment needs to include the email address you want me to contact you at when you win, or I need to be able to find a way to contact you if your blog post is the winner.  You can select to be notified by email whenever a new comment is added to any article you’ve commented on – just check the box before submitting your comment.  I’ve found that to be a fantastic way to participate in conversations!

The contest starts immediately after the first comment I post to this article, and ends either when we get to 100 qualifying comments/posts, or one month from today (April 10th, 2009).  I will randomly select a winner from all of the entries, and contact you after the contest is over. [Note: Comments by Scott Sehlhorst are not counted in this contest.]

But I Already Own The Art of Product Management!

OK, if you already own a copy, you can accept the cash equivalent (the current Amazon price on April 10th, 2009), and choose to buy something else, or get another copy of the book and give it to someone (or run your own contest).  Your choice.

Thanks

Thanks to Rich for writing this really enjoyable book for product managers, and thanks to everyone who contributes to the product management conversations here and on the other great product management blogs that I read.

Gravatars Make Your Comments Stand Out!

A GR avatar is a globally recognized avatar. This is an image that you’ve associated with one or more email addresses – and when you make a comment on a blog or in a forum that supports gravatars, your comment will appear like this:

When you don’t have a gravatar, your comment looks like this:

And even though you may say something brilliant, it loses a little something, so set up your gravatar today – it’s free and easy!

Check out our detailed instructions for setting up a gravatar today! Or just click the “Gravatar” menu item at the top of any page at Tyner Blain.

Testing the functionality of Tyner Blain after a major infrastructure overhaul. Sorry for the interruption.

Here is the body of the post, after the <more> tag. It should not be visible on the indexing pages, but should show up in the RSS feed, and on the individual article page.

The article should be in the Administrivia category. The RSS feed should include “Administrivia” and “RSS” as tags.

Here is a link to a previous article. For feed readers that support it, there should be an expansion to show the link to that article.

1. First
2. Second
3. Third

• Item
• Another item
• And another

And quotes

So much time, so little to do.

<cite>Bill W.</cite>

Should look the same

We’re dedicating our “blogging time” this week to doing some infrastructure upgrades – we have to address some security issues on the site. Until we get through these changes, we’ll be recycling some of our existing content. For our recent readers, it will be “new to you” and for our long time readers, we appreciate your patience. Today we look at one of our better received articles on active listening.

Ten Supercharged Active Listening Skills To Make You More Successful [15 Mar 2007]

Active listening is about more than gaining understanding. Active listening is about giving. Giving assurance that you understand someone’s needs. Giving confidence that you will address those needs. Giving feedback and acknowledgement that someone’s input is valuable. If you haven’t tried active listening, you may think it is a passive, receptive activity. Here are ten active listening skills that will help you, your customers and your team.

Our active listening article goes into details on the following 10 Active Listening Tips:

1. Acknowledging
2. Restating
3. Reflecting
4. Interpreting
5. Summarizing
6. Probing
7. Giving Feedback
8. Supporting
9. Checking Perceptions
10. Being Quiet
11. [Bonus] Extending

I hope you enjoy them and put them to good use – they really do make a difference

Hooray Us

We’re taking the day off to tip back a couple cold ones and celebrate a great year as a community! Tip a glass or two with us, and thanks for being here! Technically, we’re cheating – we don’t turn two for two more days. But here we are just the same.

Tyner Blain History

Tyner Blain was formed in May 2005, and we started the blog on Nov 24th 2005. New to the whole blogging thing, we started out with a free site on Wordpress, realized that we had an opportunity to create a great community, and moved everything to our own domain in January 2006. We changed providers once since then, although we were able to do it without affecting any of our URLs or our readers.

Since then, we’ve published over 600 articles, covering topics throughout the software development life cycle, with a common theme – delivering software product success. We hope you’ve enjoyed them, and thanks to all who have contributed to the fantastic conversations that have started in the comments on many of the posts. We’re not going anywhere, and hope you aren’t either.

Your Favorite Posts

Last year, we crunched the numbers to find the top ten posts. In February of this year, we updated our site software to track which articles have been read the most. You can see the Top Twenty at any time (click to the left, or in the menu bar at the top of every page).

Here’s the top ten from that list (traffic since Feb 17*):

• Five Measures of Product Manager Performance (3613 Visits)
• Product Manager Role Definition (3405 Visits)
• Free BPMN Stencils for Visio 2003 and Visio 2002 (3221 Visits)
• Software Testing Series: Black Box vs White Box Testing (3186 Visits)
• Top ten tips for preventing innovation (3067 Visits)
• Ten Supercharged Active Listening Skills To Make You More Successful (2396 Visits)
• How To Use Timeboxes for Scheduling Software Delivery (2381 Visits)
• Software development process example (2274 Visits)
• 5 Return On Investment Calculation Tips (2245 Visits)
• Software Cost Estimation With Use Case Points – Introduction (2111 Visits)

Thanks to everyone who has read, commented on, contributed to, inspired, linked to, criticised, or otherwise been involved in everything we do here. You can’t imagine how appreciated it has been, is, and will continue to be. Thank you!

* The visit numbers are low, because we started tracking so lately. When we look at our full stats, for example, the innovation post had over four times as many visits.

It’s All About You

I had a great discussion with a reader and fellow blogger offline a couple weeks ago. He wanted to know why we publish full articles in the RSS feed – wouldn’t that reduce traffic to the site, he wondered?

Maybe. Probably not. But it definitely increases traffic for the ideas – and that’s the half the point. We get less discussion on articles when people read through their feed readers, but we get more people reading.

Where Are You From?

When we look at the numbers, half of you came from links on other blogs (thanks!), a third of you came from search engines, and the remaining sixth of readers typed in the URLs directly. Yahoo and Google have provided about 75% of the search traffic, and the largest provider of traffic from links has been Pragmatic Marketing (with about a 3% share). Thanks to y’all too!

You’ve come from 179 different countries, according to Google Analytics – here are a couple slices of the numbers:

By Country

1. 54.9% United States
2. 6.1% Canada
3. 6.0% United Kingdom
4. 4.6% India
5. 2.8% Australia
6. 2.1% Germany
7. 1.4% Philippines
8. 1.2% Spain
9. 1.2% Netherlands
10. 1.2% Malaysia
11. 1.0% Singapore
12. 1.0% France

The remaining countries are under 1% of traffic, with only one visitor from Liechtenstein – we need to work on our marketing there. 91% of you read the site in English.

How do You Visit?

On average, you spend 2 minutes and 30 seconds on each visit to the site, looking at 2.5 different pages in a visit. Almost 60% of all visitors look at one page and then leave the site – so the people who stick around are staying longer and looking at more pages. Just over 2% of you have been to the site more than 100 times. Just under 1% of the visits involved looking at 20 or more pages. 16 people visited the site more than once, but with over a one year gap between visits. I’m guessing the second return was accidental, or else they are really busy.

And you visit a lot. You’ve viewed over 100,000 pages per month all year, and we’re sustaining a long term steady growth in subscribers as well as visitors. No “hockey stick” traffic for us – although we were growing much faster in traffic per day when we still published five articles a week, our growth in subscribers has been unaffected. Hopefully this pace is easier for you – it sure is for me!

Thanks

This is a good day for giving thanks, so thanks. Any of our “original readers” still around? You qualify if you were one of the handful of people who were reading in 2005. Shout out and say howdy – here or offline. And have a great one, and stick around!

This is an administrative post, to help organize the articles in our agile software development experiment. The feedback has been positive so far, so here we go…

Agile Project Article Category

All of the articles in this series will be tagged with “Agile Project: Ratings” as a category.  That page will show the articles in reverse chronological order.  As we go, or after we finish, we may add a separate page (like the foundation series index) to organize the articles logically.

I don’t have a particular graphic in mind yet, nor a logo or product name, so there will not be a common image to tie the articles together.  Articles will still be tagged with other relevant categories – for example, the “scope and vision” article will be tagged with “product management” and “project management” in addition to the “Agile Project: Ratings” tag.

Publishing Frequency

We will still try and do daily articles – although some days may have more than one article.  Each article will focus on a single element in the process.  Carmen requested (in the discussion on yesterday’s article) that we share the created documents.  That is an excellent idea.  Since we’re sharing them with you, they will probably only be in “blog format” and not created as formal word documents.

Part of the software development process is brainstorming / idea seeding, and iteration.  Individual ideas may get posted as articles that are otherwise not interesting – feel free to share feedback on any of those, or propose better ideas!

Helping Out

Join the discussion (and don’t forget to subscribe by email to the articles where you’re involved).  Provide feedback, and if we publish polls as a means to gather some data, please participate.

In lieu of an article today, we’re updating our theme. There are a bunch of minor improvements, and two major ones. New visitors and regular members of the community should both benefit from the changes.

New User Benefits

We’ve updated the navigation fairly dramatically (and some additional tweaks will quietly sneak in over the coming days).

• Easy to find items at the top of every page, including:
• Explanations about subscribing to Tyner Blain.
• Our “About” pages.
• A handy link to the Foundation Series articles where you can find introductory posts that support most of the articles here.
• An “all articles” link – this one is a monster, showing every article under every category. Hundreds of links, but fun for topical browsing.
• A “top twenty” link, showing the twenty articles that have been viewed the most (since Feb 17th). This list is dynamically calculated, so check back every once and a while to see if there’s a new “winner.”

Community Member Benefits

We’ve made it easier to join in on the conversation!

When you comment on an article, you have the option of being notified whenever someone else comments on that article. You don’t need to worry about forgetting to come back and check to see if anyone has responded – now we’ll tell you.

Other Minor Improvements

We’ve made a handful of other improvements

• New fonts and sizes to make it easier to read, especially on higher resolution monitors or with older eyeballs.
• Changed the layout to make it easier to focus on the articles.
• Updated the sidebar to get the most important links in the easiest to find places.
• Optimized some queries and page structure to improve rendering times.
• Slightly improved the layout when printing an article (more improvements to come in the future).

Give Us Your Feedback

Let us know what you like, what you hope we’ll change next, and please let us know if there was something you liked better “before.”

Also – please submit any “bugs” you see – we can’t test every browser on every platform, and we may have missed something.
Thanks all for your continued reading and participation in the great discussions. It is exciting and humbling to be a part of this!

I’m taking a vacation thru the end of the year.  Hooray!  We’ve already written a series of short articles about migrating a development team to an agile process.  Those articles will appear over the next several days – we hope you enjoy them.

When I can get online, I will respond to comments and emails – thanks folks for the increasing levels of interactivity – you’re making Tyner Blain exactly what we want it to be – a place where folks share and learn and succeed!

Have a happy holiday and a fantastic new year, and enjoy the series

Hooray Us

We’re taking the day off to tip back a cold one and celebrate a great year as a community! Tip a glass with us, and thanks for being here!

History

Tyner Blain was formed in May 2005, and we started the blog on Nov 24th 2005. New to the whole blogging thing, we started out with a free site on Wordpress, realized that we had an opportunity to create a great community, and moved everything to our own domain in January 2006.

Since then, we’ve published over 300 articles, covering topics throughout the software development life cycle, with a common theme – delivering software product success. We hope you’ve enjoyed them, and thanks to all who have contributed to the fantastic conversations that have started in the comments on many of the posts. We’re not going anywhere, and hope you aren’t either.
Your Favorite Posts

When we look back at the stats, here are the posts that have received the most page views:

1. Top Ten Tips for Preventing Innovation (thanks to Scott Berkun for the super-powers of your link!)
2. Software Testing Series: Black Box vs. White Box Testing (thanks Yahoo for sending several people here every day)
3. Death By A Thousand Cuts – Usability Problems Add Up (thanks to the spam-bot that hit this page thousands of times in July)
4. Foundation Series: Black Box and White Box Software Testing (Google and Yahoo combined to make this a winner – thanks guys)
5. Top Five Requirements Gathering Tips (pure organics at play. thanks to everyone who’s linked to this page)
6. Foundation Series: Structured Requirements (almost everyone who read this came to it to get background info in support of another article – proof that the Foundation Series idea is working)
7. How to Use Timeboxes for Scheduling Software Delivery (thanks to Pragmatic Marketing for publishing an extended version of this one last month)
8. Requirements Vs. Design – Which is Which And Why (Our standard-bearer in the great debate)
9. Foundation Series: Business Process Modeling (We’ve had a lot of attention, both supporting and criticising our BPMN series)
10. Requirements Document Proliferation (the first of our attempts to describe the way-too-many-different-ways to document requirements)

Thanks to everyone who has read, commented on, contributed to, inspired, linked to, criticised, or otherwise been involved in everything we do here. You can’t imagine how appreciated it has been, is, and will continue to be. Thank you!

International

The top 10 (of 170+) countries from which our visitors read Tyner Blain:

1. United States of America ( 63%)
2. Republic of Korea (3%)
3. Brazil (2.7%)
4. India (2.2%)
5. United Kingdom (2.1%)
6. Canada (1.9%)
7. Taiwan (1.4%)
8. Thailand (1.2%)
9. Japan (1.1%)
10. Germany (1%)

If you want your country to make it to the top ten for next year, spread the word :)

Big Numbers

The surprising and humbling stuff…

• Global reach with readers from over 170 countries.
• Over 300 links from other bloggers according to Technorati.
• Over 400 comments from the awesome people who are part of our community.
• Over 500 subscribers to our RSS Feed (as reported by Feedburner on weekdays), 70 by email (Feedblitz)
• Over 500 file downloads (presentations and bpmn visio stencils)
• Over 750,000 page views, from over 300,000 visitors, from just under 50,000 unique IP addresses. Wow. That’s insane.

ConclusionSome ridiculously low percentage of blogs die in the first year. We haven’t – thanks to you! We’re not going away any time soon, so stick around and enjoy the fun!

Performancing.com is a well established company that is building their ad network as we speak. They’ve already signed up several hundred bloggers, and advertisers. They have a refreshingly different approach to advertising – the advertisers pick the sites they want to advertise on, and the bloggers / publishers pick the ads they want to run.

The new network is called the Performancing Partners network.

Publisher Goals

As a publisher, Tyner Blain has one main goal

• 1. Build a community around software product success.

To achieve this, we do a lot of different things – we cover important topics, create original content, start discussions with the experts who are writing great stuff, and help people find great products or services that help them do their job better. We also try and write both for people new to the domain, and help push the envelope to extend the domain.

Joining the new network will help us provide / control the product and services ads that show up on Tyner Blain.

Advertiser Goals

Advertisers have two main goals:

• 2. Reach the right audience with a targeted message for that audience.
• 3. Manage the costs of customer acquisition (and by implication, manage the cost of advertising)

Performancing Partners Addresses These Goals

We’ve had reasonably good success with contextual ads – they seem to generally provide links to suppliers of related products and services, but many advertisers are companies we have not heard of. And with hundreds of articles in our archives, we can’t monitor and inspect every supplier.

Goal # 1: As a publisher, Tyner Blain will only show ads that are pre-approved. This gives us quality control, and allows us to make sure that only advertisements that would benefit our readers will be displayed. With a consistent ad placement in the sidebar, our readers can easily say “not interested” by “not looking” – without disrupting the flow of articles. This choice actually reduces revenue for us, but our primary goal is community – advertising just helps cover our costs.

Goal # 2: Advertisers will select specific blogs on which they would like to show their ads. Instead of defining keywords, and hoping that their promotions will be displayed to their target audience (based on article content), the advertiser will select a publisher and request that their ads be displayed. This is perfect control for a site like Tyner Blain – where we have a consistent and loyal audience, in a targeted niche.

An added benefit for advertisers – Tyner Blain will be showing their ad in the sidebar, which means that for the month that it is displayed, it will appear on every page. Advertisers don’t have to predict and compete for “high traffic” pages on the site, or worry about ads being “clicked out” and disappearing as soon as their budget is gone – the ad will appear for the entire month, for the entire site.

Goal #3: Advertisers can control costs with a flat monthly fee – instead of paying per impression or per click. This completely eliminates the incentive for bad people to game the system, increasing advertiser confidence that the generated leads are credible. It also allows for perfect forecasting and complete control of advertising spending. Performancing also has a completely transparent pricing and payment policy – no secrets for anyone.

Conclusion

• This new network is good for Tyner Blain’s readers, because we will be able to improve the quality of ads that show up on the blog.
• This new network is good for Tyner Blain’s current advertisers because they can target and manage their advertising spending more effectively.
• This new network is good for potential new advertisers, who want to get their message out to a select audience – and we have one!

Signing Up

Advertisers that want to join the Performancing Partners network can get more info or sign up easily.

Publishers can join the Performancing Partners network too. Read for more info, or to sign up in a minute or two.[Update: faq]

Disclosure: If you sign up via a link from Tyner Blain, Performancing will pay us a 5% referral fee at no cost to you. If you don’t want to do that, just manually navigate to their site.