213 Search Results for Product Discovery

Recently a friend of mine sent me a link to this short video from totally outside of the technology field.  The video is called “Why You Need to Fail” and it’s by Derek Sivers.  Even though the examples are from...

In this article I wanted to try to make the case that as an industry we need to expand the focus of User Experience well beyond usability. Most of you hopefully already know that User Experience is much more than...

Believe it or not, there are still people out there that think that a technology company is really about two types of people: engineers and sales people.  People to write the software, and people to go sell it.  Everyone else...

I work with quite a few product teams, and after a while you start to see patterns.  Many organizations are frustrated because they believe that it takes far too long to move from concept to delivery.  They often just blame...

There’s a debate that’s been going on in the design and user research community because the legendary Don Norman wrote an essay in which he did an about-face and decided that doing user research to start a project was mostly...

One of the great things about startups is that they are so small that there’s almost no organizational structure to speak of.  Basically everyone there is just trying to create something people want. But as organizations grow, people start spending...

For those that haven’t heard the term before, “feed the beast” refers to one of the most common problems with product teams, and one of the top reasons for failed projects.  It’s very easy to spot.  If you find a...

In the last couple articles I discussed product portfolio planning lessons we can learn from the Venture Capital industry. In this article I wanted to discuss a similar but different type of mechanism for managing product portfolio investments, known as...

In my last article on “Lessons From the VC Industry” I included some thoughts suggested by a VC friend of mine, Josh Kopelman of First Round Capital.  In his thoughts he shared with me he had another insight that I...

In earlier articles we discussed the purpose of product portfolio planning and the frustrations with current product portfolio planning.  In this article I’d like to look outside the typical world of product companies to a related industry that is in...

Last week I ran into two different software technology companies (neither in Silicon Valley) that had just recently brought in Six Sigma consultants. This caught me by surprise because it¹s been a very long time since I heard of a...

Many of you probably saw that eBay recently had a lay-off, and given the condition of the economy they are not likely to be the only one doing so. What I wanted to talk about in this article was what...

I picked up this phrase “left of the line” from my friends at the e-commerce site kbb.com. At the highest level, creating software products involves figuring out what to build, and then building it. This line distinguishes those two fundamental...

I have already written about all the common roles in a product team, but in some companies, there is another role that exists and it goes by various titles including Subject Matter Experts (SME) or Domain Experts. The defining characteristics...

The job of the product manager is to define the products that the product development organization will build. Even with the greatest product ideas, if you can’t build and launch your service, it remains just an idea. So your relationship...