Are your clients repeatedly working outside of normal hours? Are they regularly adopting new features or still slogging along in older workflows? How is the time they spend within your application changing over time?
Meaningful product metrics should reveal user behavior patterns.
The platonic ideal for your product’s user interface is that it’s so intuitive that it requires little to no explanation. It just works.
Remember, however, that sometimes you can end up being a bit too clever for you and your clients' own good in this regard.
Elegant simplicity is hard.
Consider how the Apple Watch’s focus shifted fashion accessory into a heavy emphasis on providing fitness and health tracking metrics.
You should always start by solving a small - yet meaningful - problem exceptionally well. Then build upwards and outwards from that essential kernel.
Remember to consider the cost of NOT building something whenever you’re prioritizing features in your backlog.
What happens if you wait?
Something terrible? Nothing at all?
We are raised on fables of ants and grasshoppers and the harsh winter that’s looming up ahead of all of us.
We put things off because it seems responsible and - of course - there will be ample time left in the future to get around to it.
Remember, my fellow ants: tomorrow is never promised.
“People who offer bad advice are trying to relive their old glories.”
-Mike Maples Jr.
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“The most useful piece of learning for the uses of life is to unlearn what is untrue”
-Antisthenes
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Your product is not for everyone. This is a totally acceptable state of affairs.
Define your personas. Know who the product is for and - equally important - who it’s not for.
BONUS: This will also help you figure out how to talk with them about the value you’re creating.
You focus on building understanding first and foremost. Then go build new features.
Your product’s biggest cheerleader should be you.
If you’re not excited about it, why should anyone else be?
Your product team’s biggest cheerleader? Also you.
If you’re not excited about what they’re doing, who will be?
I’m constantly impressed whenever a product introduces changes that address the micro-frictions in my daily work that I’ve barely registered.
Good product design makes your clients say “Wow!”
Great product design makes your clients say “Of course!”
Your product’s growth is often limited by your ability to scale your customer support and success processes.
Ignore this at your own peril.
“The disease of our time is that we live on the surface.”
-Steven Pressfield
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”The greatest discovery of all time is that a person can change their future by merely changing their attitude."
-Oprah Winfrey
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What’s a sign of an effective product managers?
Someone who consistently turns constraints into catalysts for further creativity and innovation.
Your product’s user experience can spark joy and create emotional connections while also solving meaningful problems.
These aren’t mutually exclusive concepts.
One of the highly science fictional bits of “When Gravity Fails” (Effinger’s early cyberpunk novel published in 1986) was the protagonist’s phone which was - gasp! - small enough to easily clip to his belt and carry around.
Remember: right now we are dreaming up the future we may one day inhabit.
Sometimes you receive the most valuable feedback when you lose a client.
Great features can be born from the most frustrating user experiences.
“The farther back you can look, the farther forward you are likely to see.”
-Winston Churchill
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”The mind is not a vessel that needs filling but wood that needs igniting."
-Plutarch
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