Part of the Process

Photo by  Annie Spratt  on  Unsplash I never used to see the point of "end of year round up" blog posts. But the journey that I've been on during the past year has lead me to reflect on what I have learned. The beginning of the year started off with me thinking about being data informed . This was balanced by a survey that showed this work had paid off . Since then I have put in processing to help collect and report on what we guided us to detect changes. Learning R and creating a repo to share the data processing recipes  has been the culmination of this. Data isn't just an important topic for product management, combined with ethics it's a topic that is increasingly touching our lives. My interest was first piqued in my reading during April .  Later in the year as GDPR started to loom on the horizon I took a course on Ethics and Law in Data and Analytics . This was a great course that covered not only some philosophical exploration of what it means to

Photo by  Andy Kelly  on  Unsplash This week I attended a webinar on AI in the aviation industry. I don't envy anyone in doing a summary of AI in under an hour leaving enough time for the rest webinar! IT's a shame that one bit that gets missed is the role of supporting technology or ecosystem in innovation. Looking back one of the big factors allowing AI to become useful has been the supporting technology. Namely, speed of processing power and availability of memory. Taking a different industry, the Netflix business model was helped by increasing broadband speeds, encoding formats, and again processing power. The change in the shape of overheads was probably a key enabler. Switching to an internet streaming business allowed the delivery mechanism to scale on demand. Going to the root of both of these, Get off the grass by Hendy and Callaghan had the best history that I have read of Silicon Valley. The innovation didn't come from research into completely new techn

Photo by  Štefan Štefančík  on  Unsplash Since my previous blog post I have made some progress on being able to replace most of what I currently use Excel for with R scripts. I have also launchjed a project to collect together some useful recipes for other Product Managers on GitHub called " R for Product Management " So far I have samples that cover the following data sources: Google Analytics - to my previous learning have added analysis of browsers used by site visitors and an example Shniy app for data exploration. InfluxDB - Working with time series data generated by the product, the two examples here are API response times and feature usage. This includes an example of manipulating time series data to set missing values to 0 for plotting. UptimeRobot - Simple example of taking error data and using a pivot table to explore the data, after some cleaning and filtering. This kind of workflow can be useful with large data sets. One thing that I really wa

Like a lot of Product Managers I use Excel with tools like Google Analytics a lot. Probably like many people I find Excel very frustrating. So having been technical in a previous life , I decided to give R a try . What is R?   R is an open source programming language and software environment for statistical computing and graphics that is supported by the R Foundation for Statistical Computing. The R language is widely used among statisticians and data miners for developing statistical software and data analysis. After taking a simple intro course, I started to look around at examples of doing more interesting things. From a work point of view Topic modelling seemed really interesting. Unfortunately a lot of the example code missed a large step (or two) in being useful!  So I forked the most complete example that I could find in GitHub called " Text-Mining ". This did lead me down a bit of a rabbit hole but eventually I had an R script that collected data, cleaned

A meetup that was a bit different for me last night, organised by the Monzo bank's community team. They have had events in their office in London and have expanded this to a roadshow visiting different locations around the UK. Luckily for me they came to Brighton a couple of streets away from my office. Monzo is a new take on banking that makes use of technology to innovate. It's similar to  Root , which is really bare bones "build your own bank", or Entropay , which is going for those that want to easily create online virtual cards. But Monzo is going for a standard bank product, at the center of your finances and re-imagined in a swish app way. It's an overused cliche, but in terms of experience it's like Uber comparing to traditional taxis. I like the product and what they are try and do to help people . The two talks were “Inside the Partnerships Team” by a developer in that team and "Working from home - not remotely difficult!" (Remote worki

This is  part of a series  about my side project  Bashfully , which aims to give graduates and other new entrants to careers a seasoned professional level way of expressing themselves through the super power of story telling. Following the core principles of being discoverable, personalised and guiding in approach. Since writing about Public beta and starting the MVP process I have gained more insights about our Bashfully launch. These are around what we have got right vs wrong. Successes Having a pre-release landing page Having a baseline twitter campaign  Using the above to get a baseline conversion ratio The Twitter campaign had a segment list, budget, and set of content we could re-run. This allowed us to see that the Twitter engagements this time weren't being matched with similar conversion rates. Exactly what we got wrong is what are trying to prove. But one thing is that we inadvertently changed a variable on the landing page. This took the logo away from

This is  part of a series  about my side project  Bashfully , which aims to give graduates and other new entrants to careers a seasoned professional level way of expressing themselves through the super power of story telling. Following the core principles of being discoverable, personalised and guiding in approach. So deciding to "go live" shouldn't be a difficult decision ... in fact getting people interested enough to use an early stage project is hard enough! This is the latest instalment talking about going through the MVP process with Bashfully  - my side project that hosts online profiles. Once we did though we got to see some real behaviour. So far this has lead to us: Cutting two stages from the on-boarding process Improving the layout and language in on-boarding Adding a page describing the profiles in Bashfully Made the "Call to actions" more prominent on the home page Prioritised some mobile layout fixes after seeing higher than expecte

This is  part of a series  about my side project  Bashfully , which aims to give graduates and other new entrants to careers a seasoned professional level way of expressing themselves through the super power of story telling. Following the core principles of being discoverable, personalised and guiding in approach. Photo by  Riku Lu  on  Unsplash Onboarding is an important part of B2C and pure "pay to play" SaaS. With so many tools to use, why would any user put effort into getting up and running? With B2B SaaS platforms that include professional services to get up and running then this isn't important. The same impact comes through the service that accompanies the product. I have been lucky to experience a great onboarding experience when evaluating product management software for work. The best by a country mile was ProdPad. This had two elements, the first was the trial and flow to get up and running. The second was the emails the accompanied it. My previous po

This is  part of a series  about my side project  Bashfully , which aims to give graduates and other new entrants to careers a seasoned professional level way of expressing themselves through the super power of story telling. Following the core principles of being discoverable, personalised and guiding in approach. Brand is a large part of what people see and remember about products and services. Here I talk about the first couple of iterations of building a brand for Bashfully. Initial logo When starting out I created a logo in one evening from some clip art and an online tool. It was this rather fetching and bashful apple to the left in purple. This was used to give the twitter and git accounts some character. But it was always known that it was a placeholder logo. This became more obvious when the first version of the landing page was created and it didn't really fit anywhere. As we have prepared the design for launch day we have solved both problems, A bit mor

It's now about 4 years since I started to think that the "As a ..." user story format wasn't the best starting point for building long running products. One of the things that I found and liked was the jobs story format . The situation When collecting the data I didn't do proper JTBD interviews as such. But I did extract the info from pre-sales calls, product demos, and talking to users. Plus enriching the collected date with the known strategic goals 15below as motivation , i.e. reduce support overhead. I have adapted it a bit and marked it up for our dev teams here. But here is an example for a password reset function. Main thing is that as a B2B supplier we have four distinct groups that could appear in the stories. 15below (us as supplier) as an org,  our clients, their users,  and the client's customers  Here is a simple example for a password reset function all the words in bold are entities that have a defined meaning in a glossary,

This is  part of a series  about my side project  Bashfully , which aims to give graduates and other new entrants to careers a seasoned professional level way of expressing themselves through the super power of story telling. Following the core principles of being discoverable, personalised and guiding in approach. Photo by Songeunyoung on Unsplash Rectifying my previous mistake - not building community by using email engagement - has proved to be a learning experience! Since our investment is minimal (and we have no real users yet!) the tools that we use all come with some constraint/trade-off. This next bit explain this is going to be slightly technical ... With Heroku it has surfaced as putting in CNAME records in the root of the domain. With register.ly this then stops us adding any other root records, for example mail servers. Cloudfare has a service that will flatten CNAME records for you into A records so everything plays fits together. So a switch of nameservers and

This is  part of a series  about my side project  Bashfully , which aims to give graduates and other new entrants to careers a seasoned professional level way of expressing themselves through the super power of story telling. Following the core principles of being discoverable, personalised and guiding in approach. So to validate an idea you need to have people be aware of you. The first step in  Introducing bashfully  was a Twitter account. This provided someway of people finding out about project, promoting the survey, and getting to the landing page. Publishing the survey was one of the first pieces that I had available to promote. It was also vital in starting to get some evidence for the problem that we were trying to solve and the audience. The landing page was a very important piece in getting started. When this was created it gave us a way of sharing progress, to explain the concept in more detail. This then meant that when we directed people to the survey from the landi

Bit of an update on cloud working and the tools that I'd picked out to investigate over the past three months: Codeanywhere and Cloud9 (online IDE and dev environment VM),  Caret (simple text editor in the style of Sublime), Pixlr Editor and Polarr (online photo editor in the style of photoshop), WeVideo (online video creator and editor) Office Online (Microsoft's free online version of Office, inc editing ability) Draw.io Desktop and Mockflow Draw.io is a great alternative to Visio, although working in a Microsoft dev and productivity stack I'd still stick with Visio. It's missing some extra collaboration features that would give it the edge. Which brings me onto Mockflow. This is a great wire-framing tool. The collaborative element allowed for some "paired designing". Each with our own laptop to look things up while the other added elements that we'd agreed to. Pixlr editor is a good replacement for what I need in an image editing tool. H

This is  part of a series  about my side project  Bashfully , which aims to give graduates and other new entrants to careers a seasoned professional level way of expressing themselves through the super power of story telling. Following the core principles of being discoverable, personalised and guiding in approach. The first guest post here on "Part of the Process" from Martyn Osborne as he explains the Infrastructure side of bashfully, a parallel concern to testing the vision . Since we've recently publicly unveiled Bashfully, it seems prudent to run through the technology stack and why we chose it.  I’m hoping it may also at least partially explain why starting a side project was appealing to me! Backend stack Naturally, there were some elements I wanted to focus on when selecting the language: Fun.  As it's a side project (in addition to a full-time development job), I wanted something interesting to play with in my free time. Different.  Dur