Product Management Toolbox

My approach to creating product requirements

What's a good product requirements template for a web 2.0 startup? I get asked this question a lot, so here's my attempt at an answer.

I've done product management for over 10 years for small and big companies, and what I consider to be a good way to outline product requirements has evolved a lot over the years.

Back in my early Yahoo! days, product requirements (PRDs) were long and detailed docs that we handed off to engineering in a traditional Waterfall manner. Then came Scrum and we traded the PRDs for long spreadsheets (Backlogs). That was faster but lacked a bit of color. Another approach was during my time at eGroups, where I was just sitting down with my rockstar engineer du jour, telling him what I needed, he'd code and add his own magic, I'd try it, give feedback, and we'd build a great product that way. That was nice but it stops working the minute your team is bigger than 5 people.

So here's something that works well in a rapid and iterative development process, with overall product/dev teams of about 5-20 people. If you are in a big company, your team may be much bigger, but chances are the actual team working on the part of the product you're in charge of is not that big.

Single-Page Websites: Examples and Good Practices - Noupe

The TapTapTap website uses JavaScript to load information about each of their products without loading a new page.

via www.noupe.com

Interesting concept and some pretty cool design examples.

Why you only need to test with five users (explained)

The five user number comes from the number of users you would need to detect approximately 85% of the problems in an interface, given that the probability a user would encounter a problem is about 31%

via www.measuringusability.com

I didn't know there was a scientific explanation for this, but from experience the "5 users is enough" rule has always worked for me.

Google's SEO Report Card: a gold mine of real life SEO examples

These optimizations are intended to not only help search engines understand the content of our pages better, but also to improve our users' experience when visiting our sites. Simple steps such as fixing 404s and broken links, simplifying URL choice, and providing easier-to-understand titles and snippets for our pages can benefit both users and search engines.

via googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com

The Google SEO report card is a great resource for anyone interested in SEO.

The end of the page view?

Elsewhere, eMarketer reports on the metrics that marketers care most about, and the results support the notion that the page view is declining in relevance. The data, which was collected in the second half of 2009, indicates that ‘time on site’ is now the metric marketers are most interested in, followed by unique page views, click-thru rate, and the traditional page view.

via mashable.com

It's about time! Marketers have finally understood that plain old page views isn't a great indicator of success in the social media world. "Time on site" (a basic but decent proxy for engagement) is becoming the number one metric they care about.

I remember our team having to educate people about this back in the early days of the new Yahoo! Mail...which was in 2006. Well, it only took 4 years :-)

The Differences between Usability and User Experience

By far the easiest (and probably most over-cited, please forgive me) to distinguish these two comes on lauded usability expert Jakob Nielsen's homepage, useit.com. Jakob has dedicated a lifetime to the study of usability, and his website represents a page that is extremely easy to interact with. Everything is front and center, easily searchable, with important ideas stressed through bold text. Yet despite its high level of usability, the lack of interesting layout, design, or even typography makes the site rather boring and feel uninspired. I can accomplish my goals here easily, but I probably won't have much fun in the process.

Usable for certain.

via www.insideria.com

A nice write up and examples on how usability differs from user experience. That said, while these are 2 different professional disciplines, keep in mind that users don't make a difference. They enjoy or don't enjoy using your site and that's really the end result a product manager will strive for.

Cleaning products with a sense of humor

via www.bee.net.nz

Very interesting example on how to inject fun and personality in a totally non sexy product. I wonder if these have made their way to the U.S. yet.

Clients From Hell

I have printed it out, but the animated GIF is not moving?

Can you make it half a pixel?

We like neutral colors, like lime green and purple

via clientsfromhell.tumblr.com

Thanks to .Tiff for pointing out this blog. Hillarious!

iPhone paper mockups made easy

via www.uistencils.com

This iPhone stencil from UI Stencils makes paper mockups a breeze. If you are really lazy you can even buy their iPhone Sketch Pad.

This looks fun, but my drawing skills are so bad that I'd probably mess this up very quickly. I think I'll stick with Balsamiq.

A new blog on product management

The world may not need another product management blog, but it's a free world after all.

Since I still haven't found a good way to keep track of the articles, presentations or tools that I find relevant to my job as a product manager, I'm going to start aggregating these here.

Blogs being social by nature, I hope this can inspire some good conversation.