Product Vision: Make A Trailer And Not A Movie
I have worked with many product managers on a product vision exercise. In my observation the place where the product managers get hung up the most is when they confuse product vision for product definition. To use an analogy, product vision is a trailer and product definition is a movie. When you’re watching a movie […]
A Design Lesson: Customers Don’t Remember Everything They Experience
My brother is an ophthalmologist in a small town in India. In his private practice, patients have two options to see him: either take an appointment or walk in. Most patients don’t take an appointment due to a variety of cultural and logistics reasons and prefer to walk in. These patients invariably have to wait […]
How to Avoid a Common Product Mistake Many Teams Make
I’ve been involved with technology product design in one form or another for nearly 25 years and seen one mistake consistently repeated. The single biggest mistake most product teams make is building technology for what they believe the user would want rather than what the actual end-user needs. From the experience in my earliest days […]
Eleven Secrets of SaaS Product Design
SaaS product management professionals should always remember that there are four P’s in marketing, one being product. Unfortunately, software companies have a bad habit of thinking about product in isolation from the rest of the marketing mix. This is a particularly costly mistake in SaaS and is the root cause of many a SaaS Don’t. […]
Objectively Inconsistent
During his recent visit to the office of 37 Signals, Jeff Bezos said, “to be consistently objective, one has to be objectively inconsistent.” I find this perspective very refreshing that is applicable to all things and all disciplines in life beyond just product design. As a product designer you need to have a series of […]
Design for the Novice, Configure for the Pro
I recently wrote about my philosophy of minimalism that “less is more” with the mantra “when in doubt, leave it out.” I’ve had a long-standing rule of thumb in product design, which I call “design for the novice, configure for the pro.” I started saying this back in 2001/02, long before the era of Web […]
