Tag: UX/UI

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Product design fundamentals every product manager should know

I’ve been building products for nearly three decades and one of the things I wish someone had told me early on is this: you don’t need to be a designer, but you need to understand design well enough to have an opinion.

A “this flow is going to confuse people and here’s why” opinion. That’s a fundamentally different skill, and it’s one that separates good PMs from great ones.

Design Literacy Is a Product Superpower

Most PMs I’ve worked with fall into one of two camps. Either they defer entirely to the designer (“you’re the expert, I trust you”) or they micromanage pixels without understanding why.

Neither works great.

The best PMs I know can open a Figma file, look at a proposed flow, and say: “This solves the problem, but I think we’re going to lose people at step 3 because there’s too much cognitive load.” That’s product judgment informed by design principles.

Here are the fundamentals that have made the biggest difference in how I work.

Visual Hierarchy Drives Behavior

Every screen has a job. The user lands on it and their eyes need to go somewhere. If everything is bold, nothing is bold. If there are six calls to action, there are zero calls to action.

This sounds obvious, but I can’t tell you how many product reviews I’ve sat in where the page is trying to do five things at once. The conversion data always tells the same story: users don’t know what to do, so they do nothing.

The principle is simple: every page should have ONE primary action. Everything else is secondary.

When I look at a design now, the first question I ask is “what’s the one thing we want the user to do here?” If the designer can’t answer that in one sentence, we have a problem.

Consistency Reduces Cognitive Load

This one took me a while to internalize. Consistency is about reducing the mental effort required to use your product. (If you haven’t read it, Schneiderman’s Eight Golden Rules is a great foundation for this.)

When a button is blue in one place and green in another, when the save action is top-right on one page and bottom-left on another, when confirmation messages look different everywhere, each inconsistency is a tiny tax on the user’s brain. Individually they’re nothing. Collectively they’re the reason people say “this product feels clunky” without being able to explain why.

As a PM, I’ve learned to flag consistency issues early. They compound. And they’re 10x easier to fix in design than in code.

Feedback Loops Build Trust

Users need to know their action worked. Every single time. No exceptions.

Click a button? Something should visually change. Submit a form? Show a confirmation. Trigger a process that takes time? Show a loading state.

I still see products that leave users wondering “did that work?” And every time that happens, trust erodes a little. I’ve started treating feedback loops as a product requirement, not a design nice-to-have.

Whitespace Is Not Wasted Space

My instinct as a PM was always “we have this space, let’s use it.” More features visible, more value communicated, more reasons to convert.

That instinct was backwards. Whitespace is what makes the important things important. It’s what gives the user’s eye a place to rest.

Some of the most effective design changes I’ve seen were about removing things. Taking away a sidebar. Eliminating a secondary nav. Letting the content breathe. The metrics almost always improved.

Accessibility Is Just Good Design

I’ll be honest, I used to think of accessibility as a checkbox. Something we needed to do for compliance. I was wrong and it wasn’t until I reached mid-forties that I started to recognize why they are necessary.

High contrast text is easier for everyone to read. Clear labels help everyone navigate.

Keyboard support benefits power users as much as it benefits users with motor disabilities. When we improved accessibility on our platform, our overall usability scores went up across the board. For everyone.

The PM’s Role in Design

My job is to define the problem clearly enough that the designer can solve it well. I challenge designs that optimize for aesthetics over usability. I push back when a beautiful mockup doesn’t account for edge cases, error states, or the reality of what happens when a user has 500 items instead of 5.

I don’t draw wireframes or pick colors or argue about border radius.

The best design partnerships I’ve had were two people with different expertise looking at the same problem and making it better together. That only works when the PM speaks enough design language to have the conversation.

I wish I’d started learning design fundamentals earlier. You don’t need a course. You don’t need to learn Figma (though it helps).

Just start asking “why” when you see a design decision, and pay attention to the answer. That habit alone will make you measurably better at your job.

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25 Skills Every Product Manager Should Be Building in 2026

Product Manager sitting in his home office reading

There’s no shortage of “skills for PMs” lists on the internet. Most of them read like a job description, technically correct, but practically useless.

This isn’t that list. These are the 25 skills I’ve seen separate the product managers who move the needle from the ones who stay busy. I’ve organized them by the areas where I see the biggest gaps, not by some theoretical framework. Some of these are timeless. Some are specific to right now. All of them are things I wish someone had told me earlier in my career.

I. Customer Obsession

These are the skills that everything else builds on. Get these wrong and nothing else matters.

1. Deep Customer Knowledge

You can’t fake this one. The best PMs I’ve worked with can describe their top customer segments in vivid detail – not just demographics, but the actual daily workflow, the frustrations, the workarounds they’ve built, the language they use when they’re annoyed.

This doesn’t come from dashboards. It comes from sitting with customers, watching them use your product, and resisting the urge to defend your design choices when they struggle. Do this monthly, not quarterly. The PMs who “don’t have time” for customer conversations are the same ones who build features nobody uses.

2. Jobs-to-be-Done Thinking

Clayton Christensen’s framework has become so mainstream that people name-drop it without actually applying it. The real skill isn’t knowing what JTBD is, it’s being able to articulate the job your customer is hiring your product to do in one sentence.

If you can’t do that, you don’t understand your customer well enough yet. Every feature decision should trace back to that job. If it doesn’t advance the job, it’s noise.

3. Continuous Discovery

Teresa Torres literally wrote the book on this. The skill isn’t “doing user research” – it’s building a rhythm of weekly customer touchpoints that inform your decisions in real-time, not once a quarter when the research team delivers a 40-page report nobody reads.

The PMs who do this well talk to 2-3 customers every single week. Not formal research sessions with screeners and discussion guides. Quick, focused conversations that answer specific questions about specific opportunities.

I have “virtual coffee” times available on my calendar and invite users on our emails to book some time with me. It’s fantastic and gives me tons of insight into our customers.

4. Knowing When to Ignore Feedback

This sounds counterintuitive after three skills about listening to customers. But one of the hardest skills in product management is knowing WHICH feedback to act on and which to file away.

Not every customer request is a product insight. Sometimes a customer wants something that serves them but hurts the broader user base. Sometimes they’re describing a symptom, not the root cause. The skill is triangulating. When you hear the same pain from multiple segments, supported by data, that’s signal. When one loud customer demands something, that’s noise.

5. Empathy That Goes Beyond Platitudes

Every PM claims to have empathy. The actual skill is translating empathy into product decisions. It’s the difference between saying “I understand the user’s frustration” and redesigning the onboarding flow because you watched someone struggle for 8 minutes trying to complete a task that should take 30 seconds.

Real empathy is uncomfortable. It means watching your product fail in real-time and sitting with that feeling instead of explaining it away.

II. Strategic Thinking

These are the skills that determine whether your team is building the right things.

6. Product Vision

A compelling product vision describes what the world looks like 2-5 years from now if your product succeeds. Not a feature list. Not a technology roadmap. A picture of a better future for your customer.

The skill is making this concrete enough to inspire and vague enough to allow room for discovery. “We’ll be the leading platform for X” is not a vision. “Every pastor will have a personal AI-powered sermon preparation assistant that cuts their weekly prep time in half” – that’s a vision.

7. Product Strategy

I wrote about the 10 most common strategy mistakes recently, and the biggest one is teams that have no strategy at all — just a backlog they call a strategy.

The skill here is making choices. Real ones. Strategy means explicitly deciding what you will NOT do, who you will NOT serve, and which opportunities you will walk away from. If your strategy doesn’t make someone uncomfortable, it’s not a strategy.

8. Ruthless Prioritization

This is the skill that separates senior PMs from everyone else. You will always have more opportunities than capacity. The question is never “should we build this?” Everything on your list is probably worth building. The question is “should we build this INSTEAD of that?”

Frameworks like RICE scoring help, but the real skill is having the conviction to say no to good ideas because they’re not the BEST idea right now. Warren Buffett’s two-list strategy applies: identify your top 25 priorities, circle the top 5, and treat the other 20 as your “avoid at all costs” list.

9. Outcome-Focused Roadmapping

The shift from output-based roadmaps (“Q2: Ship feature X, Y, Z”) to outcome-based roadmaps (“Q2: Reduce trial-to-paid time from 14 days to 7 days”) is one of the most important evolutions in modern product management.

The skill is framing your roadmap around the problems you’re solving and the metrics you’re moving, not the features you’re building. This gives your team room to discover the best solution instead of being locked into a predetermined one.

10. Saying No (and Making It Stick)

Every PM knows they should say no more often. The actual skill is saying no in a way that maintains relationships and builds trust. “No, because our strategy is focused on X, and here’s why that matters more right now” is dramatically different from just “no.”

The best PMs I’ve seen turn a “no” into a learning moment by explaining the reasoning, sharing the data, and making the person feel heard even when the answer isn’t what they wanted. I’ve found that people can disagree with a well-reasoned decision. What often causes stress is ambiguity.

III. Execution and Delivery

These are the skills that turn strategy into a shipped product.

11. Rapid Experimentation

The ability to test ideas in hours or days instead of weeks or months is a superpower. This means prototyping. Not pixel-perfect mockups, but rough, testable concepts that answer specific questions.

Can users find this feature? Does this flow make sense? Will anyone actually use this? You can answer all of these questions with a prototype and 5 users in a single afternoon.

12. Writing Clear Requirements

This is an underrated skill. The gap between “what the PM imagined” and “what engineering built” is almost always a requirements problem, not a competence problem.

The skill is writing requirements that are specific enough to build from but flexible enough to allow engineering creativity. I’ve found that focusing on the PROBLEM and the SUCCESS CRITERIA while leaving the implementation approach to engineering produces the best results.

13. Data Literacy

You don’t need to be a data scientist, but you need to be dangerous with data. That means understanding statistical significance (so you don’t kill an A/B test too early), knowing which metrics actually matter for your product, and being able to query your own data when the analytics team is backed up.

AI has made this dramatically easier. You can now describe what you want in plain English and get a SQL query back. That’s a genuine unlock for PMs who previously had to wait days for a data pull.

14. Delivery Management

Understanding how your team ships code, whether it’s sprint cycles, deployment pipelines, feature flags, rollback procedures, makes you a better PM. Not because you need to manage the process (that’s engineering’s job), but because understanding the constraints helps you make better tradeoff decisions.

“Can we ship this behind a feature flag to 10% of users first?” is a much better question than “when will this be done?”

15. Technical Literacy

You don’t need to code, but you need to understand enough about your technology stack to have meaningful conversations with engineering. What’s an API? What are the database constraints? Why does this “simple” change actually require refactoring three services?

The skill is asking good technical questions, not having the answers. When your engineering lead says “that’s a 3-month project,” you should be able to ask “what makes it 3 months?” and understand the answer.

IV. Communication and Influence

These are the skills that get people aligned and keep them there.

16. Stakeholder Management

Your stakeholders have competing priorities, different incentive structures, and varying levels of product literacy. The skill is navigating all of that without losing your strategic direction.

The best approach I’ve found: radical transparency about your decision-making process. Share the data, explain the tradeoffs, make a clear recommendation, and invite disagreement before the decision, not after. People support what they help create, even if they don’t get everything they wanted.

17. Executive Communication

Executives don’t want details. They want: what’s the problem, what’s the recommendation, and what do you need from them. That’s it.

The skill is compression, taking a complex product situation and distilling it into a 2-minute narrative that leads to a clear ask. If you can’t explain your strategy in the time it takes to ride an elevator, you haven’t thought about it clearly enough.

18. Cross-Functional Leadership

PMs lead without authority. You can’t tell engineering what to build, design what to design, or marketing what to say. You can only influence.

The skill is making other teams WANT to follow your lead because you’ve earned their trust. That means understanding their constraints, respecting their expertise, giving them credit publicly, and never throwing them under the bus when something goes wrong.

19. Writing as a Leadership Tool

Product managers who write well have an outsized advantage. Strategy docs, product briefs, stakeholder updates, customer communications – writing is how PMs scale their influence beyond the meetings they attend.

Jeff Bezos banned PowerPoint at Amazon for a reason. Clear writing forces clear thinking. If you can’t write a coherent one-page strategy doc, your strategy probably isn’t coherent.

20. Storytelling with Data

Data alone doesn’t persuade anyone. The skill is wrapping data in a narrative that makes people care. “Churn increased 3%” is a data point. “We’re losing 40 paying customers every month, and here’s what they’re telling us on the way out the door” is a story that drives action.

Every dashboard metric should have a “so what?” attached to it. If you can’t articulate the “so what,” the metric isn’t useful yet.

V. Personal Mastery

These are the skills that compound over time and separate the good from the great.

21. AI Fluency

This is the new table-stakes skill for 2026. Not building AI products (though that’s increasingly common) but using AI tools to accelerate your own work.

I like Dell computers tagline of: “It’s a you-multiplier.”

Customer research synthesis, competitive analysis, PRD drafting, experiment design, data analysis, all of these are dramatically faster with AI assistance. PMs who aren’t using AI in their daily workflow are leaving massive productivity on the table.

The skill isn’t prompting. It’s knowing which parts of your work benefit from AI acceleration and which parts still require human judgment. Strategy, customer relationships, and cross-functional trust can’t be automated. Research synthesis, first-draft writing, and data analysis absolutely can.

22. Product Evangelism

Your product needs a champion, and that’s you. The skill is inspiring genuine excitement in your team, your stakeholders, and your customers without crossing the line into hype.

The best product evangelists I’ve seen lead with the customer problem, not the product solution. “Let me tell you about a pastor who spent 12 hours preparing a single sermon because our tools weren’t good enough” hits harder than “let me show you our new feature.”

23. Managing Your Energy, Not Just Your Time

PM burnout is real. The role pulls you in every direction: stakeholder meetings, customer calls, sprint planning, strategy reviews, fire drills. You can optimize your calendar perfectly and still burn out.

The skill is recognizing which activities give you energy and which drain it, then structuring your week accordingly. For me, customer conversations and strategy work are energizing. Back-to-back status meetings are draining. I protect my calendar accordingly.

24. Continuous Learning

The product management discipline is evolving rapidly. The frameworks that worked 3 years ago might not work today. The best PMs read broadly, attend selectively, and most importantly apply what they learn immediately.

Books that have shaped my thinking: Inspired by Marty Cagan, Continuous Discovery Habits by Teresa Torres, The Lean Startup by Eric Ries, Escaping the Build Trap by Melissa Perri, and Chief Customer Officer 2.0 by Jeanne Bliss. But reading without applying is just entertainment.

25. Intellectual Humility

This might be the most important skill on the entire list. The willingness to say “I was wrong” or “I don’t know” is what separates PMs who keep growing from ones who plateau.

Every strong opinion you hold about your product, your customers, or your market should come with an asterisk: “based on what I know right now.” New data should change your mind. Customer feedback that contradicts your hypothesis should make you curious, not defensive.

The best product managers I’ve worked with hold their strategies with conviction AND their assumptions with humility. That balance is the whole game.

The Thread That Connects All 25

If I had to distill all of these into a single principle, it would be this: the best product managers are relentlessly curious about their customers and brutally honest about what they don’t know.

Every skill on this list is either about understanding customers more deeply or making better decisions with incomplete information. That’s the job. Everything else is just technique.

The good news? Every one of these skills is learnable. None of them require a specific degree, a specific title, or a specific number of years in the role. They require intentional practice and the willingness to be uncomfortable while you’re learning.

Start with the ones where you have the biggest gap. Work on them deliberately. And be patient with yourself. The best PMs I know are still working on all 25.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the most important skill for a product manager?

Deep customer knowledge is the foundational skill that enables everything else. Without a genuine understanding of your customers, their workflows, pain points, and goals, no amount of strategic thinking, technical literacy, or stakeholder management will produce great products. Build a habit of weekly customer conversations and the other skills become dramatically more effective.

How do product managers use AI in 2026?

Product managers use AI primarily for research acceleration like synthesizing customer interviews, generating competitive intelligence, drafting PRDs and experiment hypotheses, and querying data with natural language. The key skill is knowing which tasks benefit from AI assistance (research, analysis, first drafts) and which still require human judgment (strategy decisions, customer relationships, cross-functional trust-building).

What technical skills do product managers need?

Product managers don’t need to code, but they need enough technical literacy to have meaningful conversations with engineering. This includes understanding APIs, database constraints, deployment processes, and architectural tradeoffs. The goal isn’t to make technical decisions, it’s to ask informed questions and understand the implications of technical choices on product capabilities and timelines.

How do you transition into product management?

The most common entry points are from engineering, design, data analytics, or customer-facing roles like support or sales. Each background brings a natural strength: engineers bring technical depth, designers bring user empathy, analysts bring data fluency, and customer-facing roles bring direct insight into user pain points. Focus on building the skills in whichever category you’re weakest. Most transitions fail not because of lack of domain knowledge, but because of gaps in communication, strategic thinking, or customer understanding.

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25 Skills a Product Manager should focus on in 2025

I’ve been in product leadership long before the term ‘Product Management’ became a common buzzword. Over the past eight years, I’ve held various titles with ‘Product’ in them, and yet, every day brings new lessons and insights. As I approach 2025, I’ve realized the importance of grounding myself in the principles that have guided me so far. This list serves as a personal reminder—a collection of foundations I’ve built upon, shaped by insights from books like Crucial Conversations, INSPIRED, The E-Myth Revisited, and The Mom Test.

I. Foundational Principles

  1. Embrace the Product Mindset: Product management is not just a job; it’s a mindset 1. It requires a passion for solving customer problems and a commitment to continuous improvement.
  2. Deep Customer Knowledge: Become an undisputed expert on your customers2. This involves understanding their needs, pain points, and desires through both qualitative and quantitative data3.
  3. Data-Driven Decisions: Be comfortable with data and analytics4. Use data to understand how customers are using your products, analyze A/B test results, and inform product decisions.
  4. Master the Product: Be an expert on your actual product and your industry. Share your knowledge openly and generously.
  5. Continuous Learning: Stay intellectually curious and quickly apply new technologies to solve problems for customers5.

II. Team Dynamics & Collaboration

  1. Build Strong Product Teams: Focus on building and nurturing strong, collaborative relationships with your product team. A product team typically includes a product manager, a product designer, and engineers.
  2. Empowered Teams: Champion empowered product teams that are equipped to solve business problems. Ensure your team understands the company vision and how their work contributes to the larger purpose6.
  3. Cross-Functional Collaboration: Work effectively with product designers, engineers, and product marketing managers. Ensure product marketing is embedded with the product team7.
  4. Effective Communication: Communicate product learnings clearly and consistently. Keep stakeholders informed and engaged8.
  5. Delivery Management: Recognize the importance of delivery managers in removing obstacles for the team. Their work ensures that the team can focus on building valuable products9.

III. Strategic Product Development

  1. Product Vision: Develop a compelling and inspiring product vision10. Use it to articulate your purpose and inspire the team11.
  2. Product Strategy: Define a clear product strategy that serves as a path to achieving the product vision. Ensure alignment between the product strategy and overall business strategy12.
  3. Product Principles: Complement your product vision and strategy with a set of guiding principles that define the nature of the products you want to create13.
  4. Outcome-Focused Roadmaps: Shift from output-based roadmaps to those focused on business outcomes14. Ensure every roadmap item is tied to a specific business objective.
  5. Embrace Discovery: Prioritize product discovery, which involves collaboration between product management, UX design, and engineering. Tackle risks before writing any code.
  6. Prioritize Ruthlessly: Focus on a single, scalable idea rather than jumping on every good one15.
  7. Problem-First Approach: Focus on solving the underlying problem. Don’t get caught up in the solution before you’ve fully understood the problem16.
  8. Customer Discovery Programs: Use customer discovery programs to ensure that you’re building a product that customers love.

IV. Product Discovery and Delivery

  1. Master Discovery Techniques: Utilize various discovery techniques to understand customer needs and validate ideas. This includes opportunity assessment, customer letters, and startup canvases.
  2. Rapid Experimentation: Use prototypes to conduct rapid experiments17. Test ideas with users, customers, engineers, and business stakeholders in hours and days, not weeks and months18.
  3. Usability Testing: Conduct regular usability tests to identify friction points in prototypes. Use these tests to learn about how customers use your products19.
  4. Continuous Delivery: Strive for frequent release cycles to ensure teams move quickly and release with confidence.
  5. Iterative Approach: Understand that it typically takes several iterations to get the execution of an idea to the point where it delivers the expected business value20.

V. Leadership & Growth

  1. Product Evangelism: Become an effective evangelist for your product. Inspire your team, stakeholders, and customers by “selling the dream”. Use prototypes to communicate the product vision21.
  2. Adaptability: Be prepared to adapt to changes in the market and new trends22. Be flexible with the details, but remain stubborn on the overall vision.

Conclusion

Product management in 2025 will demand a combination of deep technical knowledge, strategic thinking, and a genuine passion for solving customer problems. By focusing on these 25 areas, product managers can position themselves for success and contribute to the creation of truly impactful products. It’s not about having all the answers, but about asking the right questions and embracing a continuous learning mindset.

  1. “The art of Product Management is the art of life itself. Surround your-selves by great people, focus on your mojo, build great stuff with integrity, hold strong opinions but lightly. And Marty is one of the best teachers of this art.” —Punit Soni, Founder and CEO, Robin, Former Google APM ↩︎
  2. “you need to become an acknowledged expert on the customer: their issues, pains, desires, how they think—and for business products, how they work, and how they decide to buy.” —INSPIRED, Marty Cagan ↩︎
  3. “Without this deep customer knowledge, you’re just guessing. This requires both qualitative learning (to understand why our users and customers behave the way they do), and quantitative learning (to understand what they are doing)” —INSPIRED, Marty Cagan ↩︎
  4. “… product managers are expected to be comfortable with data and analytics. They are expected to have both quantitative skills as well as qualitative skills. The Internet enables unprecedented volume and timeliness of data.
    A big part of knowing your customer is understanding what they’re doing with your product. Most product managers start their day with half an hour or so in the analytics tools, understanding what’s been happening in the past 24 hours. They’re looking at sales analytics and usage analytics. They’re looking at the results of A/B tests.” —INSPIRED, Marty Cagan ↩︎
  5. Be “intellec-tually curious, quickly learning and applying new technologies to solve problems for customers, to reach new audiences, or to enable new business models.” —INSPIRED, Marty Cagan ↩︎
  6. “The product teams need to have the necessary business context. They need to have a solid understanding of where the company is heading, and they need to know how their particular team is supposed to contribute to the larger purpose.” —INSPIRED, Marty Cagan ↩︎
  7. “… because that’s where they are connected to the experience that the customer is having an opportunity to engage with.” —INSPIRED, Martina Lauchengco ↩︎
  8. “Evangelize continuously and relentlessly. There is no such thing as over-communicating when it comes to explaining and selling the vision. Especially in larger organizations, there is sim-ply no escaping the need for near-constant evangelization. You’ll find that people in all corners of the company will at random times get nervous or scared about something they see or hear. Quickly reassure them before their fear infects others.” —INSPIRED, Marty Cagan ↩︎
  9. “In growth-stage and enterprise companies, many product managers complain that they have to spend far too much of their time doing project management activities. As a result, they have almost no time to address their primary product responsibility: ensuring that the engineers have a product worth building.
    Delivery managers are a special type of project manager whose mission is all about removing obstacles—also known as impediments—for the team. Sometimes, these obstacles involve other product teams, and sometimes they involve non-product functions. In a single day, they might track down someone in marketing and press them for a decision or an approval, coordinate with the delivery manager on another team about prioritizing a key dependency, persuade a product designer to create some visual assets for one of the front-end developers, and deal with a dozen other similar roadblocks.” —INSPIRED, Marty Cagan ↩︎
  10. “The product vision describes the future we are trying to create, typically somewhere between two and five years out. For hardware or device-centric companies, it’s usually five to 10 years out.
    Note that this is not the same as the company mission statement. Examples of mission statements are “organize the world’s information” or “make the world more open and connected” or “enable anyone any-where to buy anything anytime.” Mission statements are useful, but they don’t say anything about how we plan on accomplishing that. That’s what the product vision is for.” —INSPIRED, Marty Cagan ↩︎
  11. “Start with why. This is coincidentally the name of a great book on the value of product vision by Simon Sinek. The central notion here is to use the product vision to articulate your purpose. Everything follows from that.
    Fall in love with the problem, not with the solution. I hope you’ve heard this before, as it’s been said many times, in many ways, by many people. But it’s very true and something a great many product people struggle with.” —INSPIRED, Marty Cagan ↩︎
  12. “Communicate the strategy across the organization. This is part of evangelizing the vision. It’s important that all key business partners in the company know the customers we’re focused on now and which are planned for later. Stay especially closely synced with sales, marketing, finance, and service.” —INSPIRED, Marty Cagan ↩︎
  13. “Where the product vision describes the future you want to create, and the product strategy describes your path to achieving that vision, the product principles speak to the nature of the products you want to create.” —INSPIRED, Marty Cagan ↩︎
  14. … focus “on outcome and not output. Realize that typical product roadmaps are all about output. Yet, good teams are asked to deliver business results.
    Most of the product world has the same definition for product roadmap, but there are a few variations. I define product roadmap as a prioritized list of features and projects your team has been asked to work on. These product roadmaps are usually done on a quarterly basis, but sometimes they are a rolling three months, and some companies do annual roadmaps.” —INSPIRED, Marty Cagan ↩︎
  15. “Startups are about focusing and executing on a single, scalable idea rather than jumping on every good one which crosses your desk.” —The Mom Test, Rob Fitzpatrick ↩︎
  16. “This is another reason why typical product roadmaps are so problematic. They’re lists of features and projects where each feature or project is a possible solution. Somebody believes that feature will solve the problem or it wouldn’t be on the roadmap, but it’s all too possible they are wrong. It’s not their fault—there’s just no way to know at the stage it’s put on the roadmap.
    However, there very likely is a legitimate problem behind that potential solution, and it’s our job in the product organization to tease out the underlying problem and ensure that whatever solution we deliver solves that underlying problem.” —INSPIRED, Marty Cagan ↩︎
  17. “… use prototypes to conduct rapid experiments in product discovery, and then in delivery, we build and release products in hopes of achieving product/market fit, which is a key step on the way to delivering on the company’s product vision.” —INSPIRED, Marty Cagan ↩︎
  18. “If we can prototype and test ideas with users, customers, engi-neers, and business stakeholders in hours and days—rather than in weeks and months—it changes the dynamics, and most important, the results.
    It’s worth pointing out that it isn’t the list of ideas on the roadmap that’s the problem. If it was just ideas, there’s not much harm in that. The issue is that anytime you put a list of ideas on a document entitled “roadmap,” no matter how many disclaimers you put on it, people across the company will interpret the items as a commitment. And that’s the crux of the problem, because now you’re committed to build-ing and delivering this thing, even when it doesn’t solve the underlying problem.” —INSPIRED, Marty Cagan ↩︎
  19. “You will need to define in advance the set of tasks that you want to test. Usually, these are fairly obvious. If, for example, you’re building an alarm clock app for a mobile device, your users will need to do things like set an alarm, find and hit the snooze button, and so on. There may also be more obscure tasks, but concentrate on the primary tasks—the ones that users will do most of the time.
    Some people still believe that the product manager and the prod-uct designer are too close to the product to do this type of testing objectively, and they may either get their feelings hurt or only hear what they want to hear. We get past this obstacle in two ways. First, we train the product managers and designers on how to conduct themselves, and second, we make sure the test happens quickly—before they fall in love with their own ideas. Good prod-uct managers know they will get the product wrong initially and that nobody gets it right the first time. They know that learning from these tests is the fastest path to a successful product.” —INSPIRED, Marty Cagan ↩︎
  20. “…even with the ideas that do prove to be valuable, usable, feasible, and viable, it typically takes several itera-tions to get the execution of this idea to the point where it delivers the expected business value that management was hoping for. This is often referred to as time to money” —INSPIRED, Marty Cagan  ↩︎
  21. “The product vision needs to inspire. Remember that we need product teams of missionaries, not mercenaries. More than anything else, it is the product vision that will inspire missionary-like passion in the organization. Create something you can get excited about. You can make any product vision meaningful if you focus on how you genuinely help your users and customers.” —INSPIRED, Marty Cagan ↩︎
  22. “Determine and embrace relevant and meaningful trends. Too many companies ignore important trends for far too long. It is not very hard to identify the important trends. What’s hard is to help the organization understand how those trends can be leveraged by your products to solve customer problems in new and better ways.” —INSPIRED, Marty Cagan ↩︎
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Four Questions to Ask yourself when developing a Brand

  1. What does our brand stand for?
  2. Based on the product selection and website, what would people think our brand stands for?
  3. Does our brand serve a need?
  4. Could a shift in brand serve this product in a better way?

It may be time to audit your website or communication in general. Often these audits are done by third-party consultants who don’t have the history or office politics and can ask Why? without offending colleagues. If you need help with an audit, contact me today and lets work together.

The full article with background details for each of the questions can be found here

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User Experience and the ease of usability

The definition of usability is sometimes reduced to “easy to use,” but this over-simplifies the problem and provides little guidance for the user interface designer. A more precise definition can be used to understand user requirements, formulate usability goals and decide on the best techniques for usability evaluations. An understanding of the five characteristics of usability – effective, efficient, engaging, error tolerant, easy to learn – helps guide the user-centered design tasks to the goal of usable products.

  • Usability means thinking about how and why people use a product. 
    Good technical writing, like good interaction design, focuses on user’s goals. The first step in creating a usable product is understanding those goals in the context of the user’s environment, task or work flow, and letting these needs inform the design.
  • Usability means evaluation.
    Usability relies on user-feedback through evaluation rather than simply trusting the experience and expertise of the designer. Unlike conventional software acceptance testing, usability evaluation involves watching real people use a product (or prototype), and using what is learned to improve the product.
  • Usability means more than just “ease of use”
    The 5 Es – efficient, effective, engaging, error tolerant and easy to learn – describe the multi-faceted characteristics of usability. Interfaces are evaluated against the combination of these characteristics which best describe the user’s requirements for success and satisfaction.
  • Usability means user-centered design
    Users are satisfied when an interface is user-centered – when their goals, mental models, tasks and requirements are all met. The combination of analysis, design and evaluation all approached starting from the user’s point of view creates usable products.

Read the well written, in-depth post by Whitney Quesenbery on her site here: http://www.wqusability.com/articles/more-than-ease-of-use.html