SEO, Search Engine Optimization, is an area that every online website needs to think about. The idea is that the more traffic you can get to your website, the more products you’ll sell. Just because you can lead a horse to water doesn’t mean you can make him drink. What […]
Design-Free Requirements
Design-Free requirements are important for two reasons, and hard for two other reasons. Design-free requirements are hard because you “know what you want” when you should be documenting “why you want it.” Writing design-free requirements can be hard when you don’t trust your development team to “do the right thing” […]
Agile Prioritization: Which Widget?
Your company is building out a toolkit to support third-party developers. You’ll need a bunch of different types of widgets – combo-boxes, text entry fields, domain-specific controls, etc. You’ve got a long list of desired controls from your customers. You’re agile. What do you build first?
Modeling User Competency
Perpetually intermediate (competent) users. Users who briefly exist as novice users and never become experts. Most of your users are competent, and you should design for them. Competent users have different needs and different expectations than novice or expert users. How do you know your user’s competency levels, so you […]
Strategy and Product Roadmaps
Steven Haines, author of The Product Manager’s Desk Reference, recently gave a webinar on effectively using product roadmaps for the Technology Product Management Council at Forrester Research. You should check it out.
Kano Analysis for Product Managers
Kano Analysis, while initially created to understand customer satisfaction with features, can be used by product managers to better understand customer problems. I gave a presentation last week for the Product Management View webinar series on Kano Analysis for product managers.
The Conversation Circles
In the previous article on the Conversation Ecosystem, I introduced a hierarchy of increasingly valuable conversations. Some great feedback from you inspired a better visualization.
The Conversation Ecosystem
The previous article, The Conversation Economy, lays out a perspective of approaching the success of your business, and of your product, in light of the conversations that flow around them. You can view the ecology that defines your market in terms of the kinds of conversations you’re having with your […]
The Conversation Economy
The industrial age is behind us. It was surpassed by the knowledge economy, rapidly evolved into the attention economy. Successful companies realize that attention comes as a result of conversation. We’re now in the conversation economy.