Most articles about product management and startup strategy just rehash content that originated elsewhere or are about winning the lottery. Here’s some that I go back to often: Startup Metrics for Pirates by Dave McClure of 500 Startups is a classic because it quantifies successful product design (Another, medium format; a longer format. The One… Continue reading Product management articles
Category: product management
A/A/B/B split tests for improved certainty
When split testing with a web tool like Optimizely or MixPanel, you may sometimes see inconsistent results, even with relatively large result sets. At OpenSky, we sometimes see test cases’ performance converge and then swap places over time. This is arguably the most likely outcome of a test: inconclusive results. (See Evan Miller’s “How not… Continue reading A/A/B/B split tests for improved certainty
Developer team structures, and growth
Working with a dev team? Check out Scott Porad’s The Best Developer Team Structure blog post. Notes that I’ve also found to be true: Let people work on their passion WIP is deadly (I’ve begun to recognize it as a likely indicator of problems with the goals, design, or passion) 1 PM to 3-5 devs… Continue reading Developer team structures, and growth
Models for defining a social network user experiences
As we’re making OpenSky more social I’ve been spending a lot of time looking at social networks and recently realized that social interactions on social networking sites can be reduced to verb-noun-verb definitions that: Outline a share-object-consume chain Have simple, well-defined verbs Here are some examples of those definitions: Twitter Tweet links to click Facebook… Continue reading Models for defining a social network user experiences
Growth School
A few months ago, I began to focus heavily on driving organic member growth at OpenSky. Since then we’ve seen significant gains to viral coefficient and we’ve only begun to scratch the surface. Step #1 for anyone should be a hyper-detailed cohort report. Looking at organic growth, I maintain a day-by-day funnel report of how… Continue reading Growth School
Dropbox product design
There’s a great thread on Quora about why Dropbox is more popular than it’s competitors. The answers are not surprising but they are a great reminder of the product design essentials. Here’s a magic quote from a competitor who tried to beat them in the market: I ran into the CEO of Dropbox and asked… Continue reading Dropbox product design
35 tips for writing for online and mobile UIs
Writing for web- and app-based UIs often means breaking traditional grammatical “rules,” which were derived from different user contexts (slower publishing/delivery cycles and longer attention spans). Here are some rules for better interface writing, courtesy of Jakob Nielsen and my own interactive product design experience. Nielsen’s reader research demonstrates that people scan UIs and apps… Continue reading 35 tips for writing for online and mobile UIs
More Kathy Sierra
A few more Kathy Sierra links, because you should have more Sierra in your brain: A video of Kathy Sierra at Carsonified 2008 – How to grow and nurture your community Notes from a presentation by Kathy Sierra in 2008 – Storyboarding for nonfiction
Notes from Kathy Sierra’s Business of Software 2009 conference presentation
I’m a huge Kathy Sierra fan, so I was delighted to have this chance to watch her speak. You’re better off watching this video of Kathy Sierra speaking at the 2009 Business of Software conference, but it’s an hour long, so if you’re in a rush you may find these notes useful – I took… Continue reading Notes from Kathy Sierra’s Business of Software 2009 conference presentation
Producty goodness – May 13, 2010
Interesting post by Andrew Chen: http://andrewchenblog.com/2010/04/07/minimum-desirable-product-and-lean-startups-slides-included/ Min desirable vs. Min viable product. He advocates that a desirable product is better in some cases (high growth consumer-facing) than a viable product at the outset. From his slideshare: the IDEO human-centered design toolkit. They offer 2 free downloads as part of the HCD: HCD Toolkit (PDF) HCD… Continue reading Producty goodness – May 13, 2010