Part of the Process

First day of a new conference - SofaConf 2020 "A stay-at-home conference"  - that came about in reaction to COVID-19 and lockdown/travel restrictions. Overall very good content so far, lots of sessions that speak to real issues in doing product development in the real world. Slight technical issue with quality of Andy Budd's broadcast that was quickly sorted. The Secret Weapon to Finding Focus - Melissa Perri Melissa explained the build trap, where features are not seen as "what is the business value I want to provide" but rather "here are some features we want as  output". Netflix realised that they were in the build trap with Roku, and getting into competition with hardware companies that they could partner with. So they spun it out and so that they could then double down on their core competency. Now is the time to focus, what can we do to win? .... first you need a good product Strategy framework. alignment builds autonomous teams. The right level ...

Last night was the latest installment of ProductTank in Brighton . We were lucky to have an overview of continuous discovery from Teresa Torres. She started off by discussing how discovery and delivery should be more intertwined and not separate phases - this can be a problem with “dual track” as it can be impression it gives. She then asked " Continuous discovery ... are you really doing it like this?" Or is it research with a project mindset? Getting better week after week The question to guide setting up product discovery is “How do we get better week over week” We make product decisions every day, so if we want to be truly customer centric then we need to engage with our customers every week so that our decisions are infused with their input. Need to avoid cognitive bias because we are thinking about product all day every day, check the decisions with what our customers expect.  Shooting here for co-creating with a product mindset. Otherwise you...

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...

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...

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 Man...

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 ...

I was going to write about SEO and Bashfully , but is usual on software projects other things cropped up. In tandem with my day job I have mainly been thinking about maintaining delivery momentum.One of the downsides of small projects teams is the lack of capacity and time. However, the upside is focus and alignment. We manage this by: Keeping a Small backlog , we're open to opportunity but don't fill a backlog for the sake of it. Each completed feature is usually an avenue to learn and build. Referring to the vision and remembering YAGNI , there have been times that we have rejected ideas as they aren't core to what we are trying to achieve. And others that just aren't right yet (which we immediately discard, no clogging up the backlog!) Talking before starting dev, really simple but not relying on story formats or mock-ups. We talk through what we are trying to achieve and what success looks like. That's the good things that I have learned in this pha...

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 too...

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...

Three varied viewpoints and interesting talks at tonight's ProductTank, around what Product Managers usually forget. First up was Mark Rodgers sharing how they overlooked things in the first iteration of the new image search functionality at Brandwatch. I can completely relate the situation in my own work. That thing where when you see the product with real data and a real usage situation you suddenly notice something and think "how did I miss that?!", since it now seems so obvious. This made me feel a bit better that if someone, as experienced with Mark and with his team at Brandwatch, can make that mistake it's not surprising I do. Next was Ben Sauer from ClearLeft. His talk was a more abstract look at companies culture. For example, how it is all around us but that we don't notice it. And consequently (or maybe because of?) we don't discuss it enough. He recommended a couple of books to read Creativity, inc  by Ed Catmull  and  Nonviolent Communi...

So in my last post on the " untitled side project " I said that I would elaborate more on the idea. When we started the project we had a strong idea of the kind of project that we wanted to do. And after settling in the area I started doing some reading around and thinking about who we could help. What change were we looking to make in the world? How were we looking to alter behaviour? (a litmus test for innovation)  The project is called Bashfully . Partially a play on the concept of being bashful and shy about talking about your achievements. Partially because the name could be part of the domain in the .ly TLD ;-) This project is to provide an online resume to help people shine in ways that the current sites do not. To help them be proud of what they have achieved. Finally, to allow them to see their career development as a journey and set their own narrative. The Trello card entitled "what are we hoping to learn?" says: MVP is to test the hypothesis that...

I've had this book on preview as each chapter came out and I've finally had a chance to read the full release version. So before it gets officially launch at MTPCon on June 13th here is my round-up... Formats : Paperback, DAISY, ePub, Mobi, PDF Where can I get it?  From  O'Reilly , Amazon or .... any good bookshop, although I think there are currently only 500 physical copies left world wide!     Who is it for?  Anyone involved in a software product development team or a startup founder thinking about which roles to hire next.  What's it about?  Product management, product leadership, not just the overlap but also the differences. How to grow your career as you grow into product leadership and how to hire the role for senior management. What's the book like?  The book is divided into three sections: The Product Leader The Right Leader for the Right Time Working with Customers, Agencies, Partners, and External Stakeholders The ...

Looking at my notes I forgot to blog about November's meetup "From Startup to Corp: The differences, and how to adapt to the change ." sponsored by 15below . There were three very good talks on the difference between very small companies and massive ones . Some highlights from the three talks: Don't feel like you have to aim for moonshots if you aren't Google Ventures - you only get a limited number of bets compared to GV, so a 10% incremental improvement every year is nothing to be ashamed of ! Don't feel too embarrassed by your peers - if you start of at the same time as JustEat but have a much more niche market it's OK to have more modest growth . Just because you can see everyone doesn't mean that they know what you are doing - large organisations have the privilege of knowing communication is poor so actively do things to encourage it, in a small startup you have to make ensure people are informed . Large organisations ca...