Walmart just had its Q1 earnings call, and CEO John Furner wants you to know that the company is "becoming AI-native." Sparky, Walmart's shopping agent, is apparently driving higher order values, quadrupling unit sales through the bot, and generally ushering in a new era of AI-powered retail. Great! Except the metrics they shared to support all of this are, to put it charitably, not very…
I wrote a thing recently on LinkedIn. I’m reposting it here, as well. For reference, here’s one of the many articles about the policy that I’m writing about. As with all tech reporting, I have no idea if the policy is accurately reflected in the article, but I’ve seen lots of similar programs, and I’m writing about how they can be implemented badly. Recently DoorDash announced that they were going…
In my last post , I walked you at length through the creation of a pretty simple task flow. It was exhausting! This time, I’m going to walk you through an even simpler one, but this one has a few interesting twists. In this flow,, we’re going to design the Create Playlist module I talked about previously. If you recall, the final flow looked like this: You see that box with lines down the side?…
When you’re done here, Read Part 2 in the series! In our podcast, Kate Rutter and I talk a lot about task flows and how helpful they can be when designing a product interaction. The problem is, I’ve rarely met a designer or product manager who understands how to make them well, and I haven’t found a very good guide to building them online. So, I guess I’m writing one? You’re welcome. Please note,…
A few years ago, I wrote a book called Build Better Products. This is a lightly edited excerpt from Chapter 5. You can buy it at Rosenfeld Media . If you buy it before June 30th 2020 and use the code BBP20 , you will get 20% off! There is a persistent myth about Silicon Valley that great products spring fully formed from the brains of geniuses like Mark Zuckerberg or Steve Jobs. There is a…
A little while ago, I asked a lot of designers what product managers did that annoyed them the most. For the sake of fairness, I also asked PMs the same question about designers. I thought maybe I’d get a few responses and write up a quick blog post about some of the worst offenders. I’m going to be honest here. I dramatically underestimated the number of responses I’d get. This is the second in a…
Recently, there has a been a big shift in the focus of Product teams from outputs to outcomes. In other words, some companies are starting to care a little bit less about the fact that a feature got shipped and a little bit more about whether that feature had a positive impact on user behavior and metrics. This is a great development. Shoving out 10 new features, none of which improve anything,…
A little while ago, I asked a lot of designers what product managers did that annoyed them the most. For the sake of fairness, I also asked PMs about the most irritating habits of designers. I thought maybe I’d get a few responses and write up a quick blog post about some of the worst offenders. I’m going to be honest here. I dramatically underestimated the number of responses I’d get. This is the…
Interviewing people is hard. If you’ve been a hiring manager for more than a few years, you’ve almost certainly run into somebody who seems great in the interview but can’t do the work. And you’ve probably missed out on some amazing talent who, for whatever reason, weren’t impressive in their interviews. It’s tough on the other side, too. When you’re looking for a job as a product manager, you…
Before the printing press was invented in the 15th century, the vast majority of people around the world were illiterate. Which makes sense. Before the printing press, there wasn’t much to read. Miniature from Liège-Maastricht area, ca. 1300-1325 [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons Even after the press, it took hundreds of years before a majority of people in Europe were literate, and more than…
I gave a keynote at Lean Startup Week 2017 in SF, early in November about some of the most common problems that large companies have implementing Lean Startup. Here's a little blog post I wrote up for the Business Talent Group blog summarizing the talk. If you’re responsible for launching new products, you’ve probably come across Eric Ries’s best-selling book, The Lean Startup . The Lean Startup…
Products that people love and incorporate into their everyday lives tend to have two things in common: they’re both useful and usable. In other words, they’re things that people people want to use because they fill a particular need, and they’re things that people can use, because they’re not prohibitively complicated. Unfortunately, a lot of products fail one or both of these tests pretty badly.…
Once upon a time, I worked with a designer who refused to use any tool except Illustrator. Everything got made in Illustrator, whether he was building a visual design mockup, a task flow, or a discussion guide for a user research session (seriously). All of his deliverables were gorgeous. He was also the slowest designer in history. Every single thing he did took five times as long as it would…
I've been thinking a lot about building better products lately. After all, I'm writing a book called Build Better Products , and it'll be out this autumn, so I haven't been thinking about anything else, really. The hard part about building better products is often knowing what better means. This is especially true when building MVPs or first versions or experiments or whatever you want to call…
For this installment of my series on good user research practices within companies, I spoke with Adam Nemeth, UX strategist at UXStrategia.net, a UX research firm based in Hungary. He shared his perspectives on how teams should think about user research and when they should get help. Why You Should Be Doing Research Yourself There are a lot of reasons that your team should own and run user…
Almost every time I give a talk, I get asked how people can convince their companies to adopt more user research or pay attention to the research that’s being done. I’ve always given various answers, ranging from “quit and go to a better company” to “try to make research more inclusive,” but I realized that I was giving advice based on too small of a sample set. So, earlier this year, I became…
This post appears in full on the Rosenfeld Media blog. Those of us who conduct user research as part of our jobs have made pretty big gains in recent years. I watched my first usability test in 1995 then spent a good portion of the 2000s trying to convince people that talking to users was an important part of designing and building great products. These days, when I talk to companies, the…
As part of my ongoing series about how user research is being done in organizations, I asked Dorian Freeman, the User Experience Lead at Harvard Web Publishing to answer a few questions. She shared her experiences working in UX design since the late ‘90s. See the rest of the series here . Owning Process vs. Owning Results When I asked Dorian who on a product team should own user research, she…
This is a post I wrote for the Rosenfeld Media blog in preparation for the PM+UX conference. Some of the research I did will also be covered in more detail in my upcoming book, Build Better Products . When we started talking about putting on the PM + UX Conference , the first thing we asked was, “What sorts of things should we talk about?” Since the folks at Rosenfeld Media are, not surprisingly,…
As part of my ongoing series where I try to find out who is doing user research in organizations and who should be, I spoke with Susan Wilhite. Susan is a lead UX researcher. She was incredibly helpful in explaining how teams work best under different conditions. This is the third post in the series. Strategic vs Tactical When we talk about ownership of the research function, we have to start with…