Part of the Process

Photo by  Sasha • Stories  on  Unsplash This is a follow up to my post on roadmaps and themes . I wanted to talk about experience in a B2B context with a platform product and SaaS-style model a bit more. Most articles out there tend to be from B2C or app products. So about the time I wrote about theme based roadmaps, I was using a combination of spreadsheets, Trello, and JIRA ... all OK for their intended purpose, but all have limitations around use and structure for product people.  Limitations that possibly are blockers in increasing flow and transparency in the product development process. S o, why are flow and transparency important? I think this tweet by John Cutler sums it up PM tip: Help foster an environment where great/better decisions are made...not where you are the decider.  #prodmgmt   #ux   #design — John Cutler (@johncutlefish)  October 4, 2018 The flow aspect allows feedback and course alteration as new info is uncovered. The transparency aspect all

The past couple of weeks have given me opportunities to reflect on what I like about my job and previous experience. Partly because we are expanding the team at 15below , partly from doing a bit of coding. I have written a bit about becoming "post-technical"  in the past, but now is the first time I have done much code in years. The thing that I enjoy most is solving problems and helping people. Throughout my career solving business problems to help create positive outcomes has always been fulfilling. Now I get to help do that, then go back and refine the solutions. You don't always get to do that as a developer or in a project focused role. Side project Code wot I wrote The first bit of coding is on my side project . Martyn has created a great architecture and I contributed the project import from LinkedIn ( almost) all by myself. It feels to brilliant to code on a side project - you get a sense of achievement from seeing an idea come to life. It also provides

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. I have already written about Venturing into the world of SEO where I setup the infrastructure on the site, like metadata and adding a sitemap. Then a little later When SEO meets the MVP process on Bashfully , where I revisited how search results appear and what I hoped for Bashfully. Photo by  Annie Spratt  on  Unsplash This has been the hardest part of the project so far. As much as you can setup the structure and hint to search engines, if people aren't finding your site organically then they're unlikely to find it. So, how to get organic searches ? Taking a look in the search consoles the closest searches that appeared were “Bashful github” and &q

Photo by  rawpixel  on  Unsplash My journey with writing new R scripts had taken a bit of break recently. It started with exploring Text-mining. Then creating my library of reports for Product Management . Although R takes a bit of getting used to, it is like Excel x100 once you do. It is great for repeatable analysis and report generation. Saving a lot of the hassle of the export, format, and save cycle that I was going through. The problem When I needed a new report though I took the chance to expand my skills. I wanted an automated report that showed progress in the product process. This was to show the pipeline to meet strategic goals in the product ideas worked on. This should be in a suitable format to share with senior management. An be understandable especially to those outside the Product team. The solution I had been manually noting figures from the ProdPad UI when I remembered that there was an API. I took a look and it is a nice RESTful API with a JSON pa

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  Nathaniel Shuman  on  Unsplash New short term goal One of the bigger things to happen to the project in the past month is creating a new short term goa l to  “make it as easy as possible to get resume info in and a PDF out”. This came from engaging with a potential user on Twitter that really bought this use case out as a good hook. As a follow up to that we also got four new  users  organically . Finding our product/market fit has been very heavily influenced by a) how we show the complexity of the product and b) how opinionated we make the process of using it. Succeeding in this short term goal then opens up a path to some more long term aims, whi

This week I've been having a bit of think about products for an older audience, prompted by this tweet by Tom Peters ("The red bull of management thinking") Old people get short shrift in the marketplace. STUPID. Old people have the money—effectively ALL the money. AND, these days, years and years left to spend it. Virtually none of marketing budgets are aimed at the oldies. REALLY REALLY STUPID. #ExcellenceDividend — Tom Peters (@tom_peters) June 12, 2018 which prompted questions about how appropriate it was to target digital products and services to older people. I then contributed my (non-scientific) observation Well, just 1 data point but my grandad was in first wave of computer usage in UK accountancy and my grandmother LOVES Skype for talking to her grandchildren, has a better tablet than mine, and is always on the lookout it upgraded her phone, plus I have loads of 70+ FB friends — Neil Chalk (@_neilch) June 12, 2018 The response to that was about ho

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  Etienne Boulanger  on  Unsplash Following on from my post on  Building an onboarding process for a green field product  we have building the experience. One of the lessons I pulled out previously was about launching something to get feedback . Even if you don't feel ready. It's easy to know the theory, but hard to put yourself out there! I'm really glad that we did as it allowed some feedback and integration issues to be tested while we polished. Background  One approach that we have taken is to slowly refactor the experience as we add functionality into the edit screens. To start with we had a limited set of data editable. Basically the

Super short post to tell you about today's MIT Sloan Review hosted webinar "Five Strategies for Getting the Most From AI " based on the blog post of the same name  by Jacques Bughin. This shared the results of various surveys and research by McKinsey & Co. From this research, the highlights on developing a successful AI strategy are: you need to be digital based and native already, no leapfrogging straight from an analogy business don't try and do it on your own - they are not mature technologies yet, so use an ecosystem with startup partners and academia be bold - take the chance to reinvent your products The other theme running throughout was that when developing strategy you should think about growth as this lead to bigger profit gains than cost cutting. The advice was also to do it soon, from the companies survey there was a bigger boost from early adopters who innovated. Finally, it's about humans as much as technology. The top three reasons f

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 after getting the SEO infrastructure sorted out we are back into an experiment and observe phase.  LinkedIn on Google  LinkedIn is the yard stick that we need to beat. The features that we are honing in on based on the MVP process are discoverability, customisation, and guidance. These allow us to add value as a David fighting the awesome network effect of the LinkedIn's Goliath. As an example to the left is a search result for me going to my LinkedIn profile. There are a couple of points that I like - my name, job title, location, and current employer are all easy to read. The thing that I don't like is that the description is very impersonal. Is the fa

Great look here at Product Analytics . Think I use about 5 tools altogether, and even with Google Analytics, I layer other tools on top to help make the data usable  Life Beyond Google Analytics: Pick the Best Tools for the Job Thinking about product culture started with the start of a new series on Medium from FutureLearn -  Using agile principles to develop company culture Part 1: Introduction  and it promises to be a great look at how a successful organisation in delivery can live the values of the agile manifesto. It was then a short step to  Stop Blaming, Start Innovating  a great article that teaches us that Innovation , like charity, begins at home. Thoughtworks have a similar take and say that  "Innovation is the key to unlocking a best practice culture" Thoughtworks, 2017 Next up were two posts that cover more of the nuts and bolts of Product Management work . The first was a round of top tips on  How to become a great Product Manager, according to 16 of them

It has been a bit of a voyage into the unexpected in looking at SEO this month. For my side project Bashfully , which is to create an online profile for people early in their careers that has three guiding principles. That it should be: Discoverable - people need to be able to find the person based on their skills, experience, and aspirations. Personalised - the skills and experience need to have the ability to be tailored for specific job applications. Guiding - given the above, give enough structure that allows the profile builder to tell their story in the best way possible. Also a longer term goal here is to provide feedback based on other profiles that match their aspirations. The features that we develop tend to rotate around each of these goals to keep the product balanced. We hadn't done much in the discoverable area, apart from setting meta data required for creating the cards used in sharing to Facebook or Twitter. Since this came up in our user research we

Photo by  Andres Urena  on  Unsplash This week I'm going to reflect on a year and bit of using two voice assistants - Alexa and Siri. Although much the same would apply to Google Home. I must start by saying I love Alexa and the echo dot. She does just enough and is unobtrusive enough in my life that I'm not a slave to her ... in the same way as a smartphone. Last month I wrote about one aspect that "we" have not looked into enough - privacy.  “I think it will make for a perfect alarm clock”  Trusted Reviews - Amazon Echo Spot Here it looks like part of the problem with technology is the uncritical approach of what could go wrong, in building and selling. There is no mention of privacy concerns apart from throw away comment about a "mute" feature. As well as the obvious issue of an internet connect camera in our bedrooms. I have been thinking about other issues related to a mindset used to personal in more common use areas. So I have done some di