Join Me at ProductCamp Boston - May 4, 2013

ProductCamp Boston 2012 was really fantastic. The all-volunteer "unconference" format makes for some very real, gritty sessions by product people who are passionate about what they do. Not every session was as polished as it could have been, but one of the great things was that people in the "audience" jumped in with great insights. 

This year's event is May 4th at the Microsoft NERD campus in Cambridge. A lot of great sessions have been proposed this year, including mine on How to Build Roadmaps that Stick. (Please ignore the horrific typo in the title. UserVoice isn't configured to allow edits.)

In my session, I plan to build on last year's wildly successful session on prioritization. (Product people were actually out the door trying to find room to attend.) I talked about the objective scoring methodology I've worked out for prioritizing items for your roadmap. The slides are still available on SlideShare.

This year I will focus on how to translate your priorities into a transparent roadmap that will inspire your team to over-deliver and be compelling enough to keep the CEO off your back. I'll cover:

• Strategic goals 
• Objective prioritization
• Shuttle diplomacy 
• Transparent themes
• Punctuated equilibrium

I hope to see you there on May 4th, and if you have a moment, drop by the forum and vote for my session. That will help to ensure we get a large enough room this year!

Dropbox Tops Windows 8 in 2012 User>Driven Hall of Fame and Shame

You learn a lot about what inspires people's passions - positive and negative - with this kind of contest. As in past years, there were a lot of nominations (for both Fame and Shame) for things people use every day. There were loved and hated mobile devices and apps, entertainment services and devices, and productivity apps. When these more intimate products serve us well - or frustrate us - they inspire us (one way or another) to speak up.

There were 9 separate mobile devices or apps mentioned: everything from the Samsung Galaxy SIII, iPad and Nexus 4 to the Pebble ePaper Watch and Raspberry Pi micro computer. The only negatives in this category were for Apple (see below).

Entertainment services like Netflix, DirecTV, Comcast and Verizon FiOS all made the Shame list. This, I think, reflects our high-level of dissatisfaction with the entertainment distribution options available to us.

Of course, there were also nominations for business-oriented solutions like Join.Me, Nimble CRM, iBooks Author, Trello (in the positive) and Freemind and Ryma (in the negative). These generally received only one or two mentions each, though. Business is business, I guess.

Falls from Grace

The most interesting thing to me this year is how many former Fame winners were nominated for Shame this year. As a company, Apple won the Hall of Fame in 2007 with multiple nominations in many categories. This year, however, Aaron wrote:

"They've set my expectations so high over the years with wonderful and innovative products. But they've been mailing it in recently. iOS 6 and the latest round of products were.....boring. And in the case of Apple Maps, downright bad. I hope they turn it around and get back to showing me things that I never knew I needed."

And from Alexis, this:

"It doesn't seem like things can get any worse than a company CEO openly telling his evangelist consumer-base to use a competitor product until your own is fixed."

Apple wasn't the only one, though. Netflix won Fame in 2006 for their groundbreaking DVDs-by-mail service. They've clearly squandered that goodwill, though, by forcing customers to choose between DVDs and streaming and by making less and less content available via the latter.

Evernote hasn't appeared in this contest before but I was surprised to see this from Greg on the popular service (which I use daily):

"This used to be one of my favorite products, but they have clearly lost the way, although I still use it. Between removing the "new note" button, which is pretty much the only button people use all the time, and "upgrading" the app to be slow like outlook, it's gone way down hill."

Perhaps it is their former greatness that inspires people to speak up when things go wrong with their favorite products. Shame on Apple and these others for "losing the way."

Hall of Shame Winner

Apple wasn't the most frequent mention in the Shame category, however. Reading through the comments here, in a variety of LinkedIn groups I polled, and in direct communications with readers, the most shameful product of 2012 is clearly the new Windows 8 Metro interface.

"It's probably the worst user interface I've used. Extremely hard to find anything. Definitely seems like Microsoft is going backward."

"It is really bad and pretty much makes you start over using windows"

"Ugh! Is it metro or isn't it, can't it just decide?"

Hall of Fame Winner

2012 was clearly the year of Dropbox. It's been around for a while (and sharing files over networks has been around for even longer), but suddenly it seems like it's the app you can't do without.

"Now a paying user and even an evangelist, can't say enough good things about how easy and impressive this product/service super combo is."

"All my files in one place, accessible from anywhere. In particular I like it for a backup of files I develop or modify when traveling."

"It's great when I am in front of my daughter's computer and I need a file, and recently I've started sharing files with colleagues using it as well."

I listened to an interview with Drew Houston, one of the founders of Dropbox. He said that potential investors really didn't get their concept early on. People felt that online storage was just too boring, it seemed. The company launched anyway and, in Houston's words "Dropbox's simplicity has been a result of relentlessly sanding down the rough edges along the way."

This is the lesson for all of us in product development: taking something complicated (and maybe even boring) and making it great is a matter of getting lots and lots of little details right. And getting even a few of those key details wrong could make you the next Netflix.

2012 User>Driven Hall of Fame and Shame

It's that time of year and, though it's been 4 years since the last one, User>Driven is now accepting nominations for the 2012 Hall of Fame and Shame.

What is that, you ask? As before, the goal is to assemble the "top product triumphs and gaffes of the past year as nominated by you." So here's what to do:

Take 10 seconds right now and think of the one thing (product, service, website, software, gadget, whatever) that really works for you, that's so elegant in its design and operation it must be the result of a good feedback loop between the product designers and its intended market. Submit your first thought as a comment below.

And/or take 10 more seconds and think of the one thing that really irks you every time you have to use it because the product people clearly did not take the time to think about how it would really be used or try it out on a real-life person before getting it to market.

Even if your loved/loathed product or service isn't new this past year, if you discovered it in 2012, nominate it here.

As in past years, I'll be awarding something fun to the person(s) who first nominate the winning fame and shame products, based on votes (and my arbitrary opinion).

So what's it going to be? iPhone 5? Those great new pumps? Windows 8? Deadline for submission is January 15 so don't delay!

Christmas as a Product Manager

In the light-hearted spirit of You Might Be a Product Manager If, I'd like to offer some insights into what it's like to be a product manager at this festive, but sometimes trying time of year. PM skills like prioritization, active listening and clear communication can come in very handy, but can also sometimes be a little much for the organizationally-challenged (relatively) in our lives.

Without further ado, here are my observations of what it's like to be a product manager during the holidays: 

1. Your wish list is prioritized, categorized and cross-referenced by application. My inner ski bum would totally use these technical gloves!
2. You've provided use cases for the exercise equipment you'd like your spouse to research for you. As a full-time professional, I want an efficient way to fit exercise into my existing schedule so that I can avoid premature decrepitude.
3. You suggest a daily stand-up meeting to check in with your spouse about preparations for the big holiday shin-dig you host every year. S/he is not amused.
4. You ask your kids what problem they are trying to solve when they ask for a toy. (Shout out to Paul Young!)
5. You've created a house-cleaning roadmap months in advance. We shouldn't vacuum until the 24th but can we bake extra pies at Thanksgiving and freeze them?
6. You asked your spouse to produce a mockup of the planned table arrangements. We can have the kids do some user testing to determine if there is enough room for all the side dishes!
7. Family and friends ask your advice on what gadgets to buy for their spouses, how to speed up their computer or if they should buy Google stock because you "work in computers."
8. You use evite to plan a holiday party and set up a UserVoice forum to collect ideas for the theme. What do you think it means that we got 8 votes for "just Christmas already?"
9. You work to ensure there is at least one gift for your significant other in each application area, including clothing, electronic entertainment, non-electronic entertainment (books), romantic, pampering (if female) or sports/cars (if male) and food. How else would you do it? 
10. You can't resist making a list of things product managers do at Christmas while everyone else is drinking eggnog. All the other product people need something to read over the holidays, right?

Hope you found this amusing. What are your thoughts on the holidays as a product manager?

How to Interview a Product Manager

I've interviewed a lot of product managers, hired some, passed on a lot, fired a few. Product management is so different from organization to organization, is such an inexact science and requires such a broad range of difficult-to-measure skills that I have usually relied on instinct in interviews. No more.

Ken Norton has provided a terrific set of guidelines and (usefully open-ended) sample questions to elicit the right kind of interview discussion for product manager positions. If you're hiring (or looking for a job) in this space, check it out.

The one place my experience disagrees with his is that I prefer to hire people who were not engineers in prior roles. It's not a rule with me, but it is a preference. I find that if someone has a logical mind they can learn the technical bits but that being a good PM starts with the innate product instincts and leadership ability Ken describes plus good communications ability. Those things are much harder to teach.