Part of the Process

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...

This post is the story of a personal journey. It starts with a legacy product. Both powerful and flexible having grown to meet needs over time. But it is my view on steps to improve the process in my context - so your mileage may vary. Phase 1: Transactional DB as source Started with looking at the transactional data. Some things were obvious, one option in the UI is recorded as true/false in the DB. Some were more complicated and required more investigation. To back this up we conducted a user survey. Followed up by a workshop to find the most important user journey to concentrate on. This highlighted three related journeys. The key characteristic of activity in this phase was mining different structures of data. The format of the data coming from custom reports. Getting to the questions to ask was guided by a user survey to almost the whole user base, a smaller workshop looking at the "job to be done" for the platform. Other than that the skills needed where accessib...

This post has had a long gestation period, starting after I attended the BCS PROMS-G Spring Summer School on Risk in 2013! I've been thinking a lot recently about process and why we do it and what we hope to achieve. In my experience there are a large group of people who cringe when they even hear the word "process", seeing it as a command and control mechanism. But I believe that for every necessary process there is a positive by product that we should be focussing on, and working with, for improvement. To illustrate this I will discuss a design review process. Say an organisation has issues with the introduction and evaluation of new technologies and techniques. So the re-action is to introduce a formal design review process, with feedback from various stakeholders and sign-off before the change gets the go ahead.  The tale of the 6 blind men and the elephant where different perspective and views on an issue, we need to see the bigger picture and get a common p...

Woah, the past six or so months since I last posted to this blog have been a bit hectic in my personal and professional life! I still have about seven draft posts to write up. So hopefully I'm back on track for about one every week or two :-) mild warning for tenuous link and conclusions jumped to ;) Last week I had two conversations on very different subjects that boiled down to the same thing - constraining options (or ways of working) to ensure quality without change the quality of any other part of the system. The first one was entirely work related. One of our project teams is extending a feature that had been sent for design review for input, in my role as an internal technical consultant and as probably the last person to do extensive work in this area (about six years ago!) I followed up and had a chat with the team's senior dev and his team mate. We talked through the possible options and the technical debt that could be repaid. The option with greater opportunit...