Product Management Zen

I don’t know about you, but for me Steve Krug’s first book, Don’t Make Me Think, was life changing. True to its subtitle, this book takes a common sense approach to web usability and really made me appreciate the beauty of simple designs.

Hence, I was thrilled to learn that Krug had released a new UX book called Rocket Surgery Made Easy. The book’s layout, fonts, and fun cartoons make it a pleasure to read and it is designed to be consise enough to be read on an airplane ride. Perfect for those of us where UX is only one of many hats we wear in any given day.

Rocket Surgery Made Easy is focused on Krug’s specialty: finding and fixing usability problems. He takes a casual approach to usability testing. I.e., it’s better to do a little of it than none at all. You don’t need a fancy test lab, expensive software, or years of experience. And that’s a good thing, because who has all of that?? Krug also emphasizes the importance of starting testing early in the product development life cycle. In fact, it should be an integral part of all phases of a development project.

The book then goes on thoroughly, but simply, to outline the different steps in conducting usability testing:

• Creating Test Scenarios
• Recruiting
• Checklists for before, during, and after tests
• Scripts for facilitators
• How to handle observers
• The Debrief
• Using the results
• Tweaking (not redesigning)

Everything you need. Nothing more. Nothing less. If you are just starting out with usability testing, this book will be a gold mine. However, even if you have some experience with usability testing, you will learn something new or, if nothing else, be inspired to do more of it.

Your users and customers will thank you.

I recently came across a cool UX site called Simplifying Interfaces. Here is a link to a recent blog post called “What is simplicity.” Check it out!

Simplicity in UX design is key.

Of course, it helps the user experience when PMs focus on including fewer features that are super useful, rather than a lot of not so useful features. Cluttering the UI with unnecessary functionality is simply distracting.

Also, a simple workflow will keep your users happy and save you support costs. Don’t make your users think.

Simplify, simplify, simplify!!

I recently wrote a post on my personal blog called “Making Time for Things That Matter.” As I was thinking about what to write here, I thought it would be kind of fun to write a sister post to above mentioned entry. I don’t know if there is such a thing as a sister post, but here you go:

Do you feel like you’d like to advance in the field of Product Management but that you’re all caught up in the tactical day-to-day grid with little time to spare for strategic fun? You’re not alone. I would say most product managers feel like this at one time or another. When this happens, it’s time to figure out if you are working on the things that matter.

Here are some ideas for figuring out if you are spending time on the wrong activities:

• Start tracking how much time you spend in meetings, especially meetings that would function just fine without you. I go through my list of standing meetings quarterly to make sure they still make sense. Get out of the ones that don’t matter.
• Similarly, evaluate how much time you spend on email. Email is one of the biggest time suckers ever. There are ways to cut down. Read this post for some email management tips.
• Are you the production support process impersonated? If so, not good. Work with your support manager to come up with a simple process that will work for everybody, get issues resolved more quickly, and make customers happy. Make sure the development team is on board and understands that they need to set some time aside for production support (unless you’re lucky enough to have a separate team for this).
• Speaking of development, are you perhaps spending more time managing developers than talking to customers and potentials? Again, not good. You are supposed to be the expert on the market and its problems, not on the latest agile development process. Have a chat with the dev manager and explain that in order for you to do your job, he or she is going to have to do his/hers. I know this can be scary, but it’s the only way for you to become the market expert that you were meant to be.
• Are you the Demo Boy or Demo Girl (to use Steve Johnson’s terminology) at your company? If so, there are a few different ways to deal with that. 1) Lobby for a sales engineer (or sales support). 2) Train the sales people to do their own demos. 3) Tell them there won’t be any new product releases this year if you have to do demos every week. Now, I do recommend that you tag along on sales calls every now and then for a variety of good reasons. However, it should be because it’s useful to you and your work.

Still can’t find time to do it all? Of course not. You never will. The point of this post is to encourage you to spend more time on work that matters and less time on work that doesn’t (at least not for your job description). It will not be 100% perfect, but it will enable you to go out there and be a great product manager, and hopefully get you to the next level (if that’s what you want!).

I was happy and honored to find that my blog post Email Management Tips made it into Christopher Cumming’s Top 10 Product Management Posts of 2009. I certainly appreciate the encouragement.

If you haven’t already checked out Chris’s Product Management Meets Pop Culture, please do so. It’s one of my faves.

I’ll be back next week with some tips for how to set goals and follow through.

Happy 2010!