In one of his characteristically brilliant essays, Paul Graham recently wrote:

I think most people have one top idea in their mind at any given time. That’s the idea their thoughts will drift toward when they’re allowed to drift freely. And this idea will thus tend to get all the benefit of that type of thinking, while others are starved of it. Which means it’s a disaster to let the wrong idea become the top one in your mind.

The importance of focus in a startup, or any other business for that matter, is such a basic principle that no one disagrees with it, but it is still such a difficult thing to get right.  One of the reasons is that you don’t want to stifle innovation, and some of the best ideas can come from a completely random project you went off to do in your spare time.

Whatever your feelings are about side projects that take you off your main focus, it is important to recognize them for what they are: distractions.  This doesn’t necessarily mean it’s bad, but let’s call it what it is — these projects distract you from your “top idea.”

For the products I’m responsible for at Yola, we have name for such distractions.  We call them “squirrel projects.”  If you’ve seen the movie Up, you’ll probably immediately know what I’m talking about.  If not, here’s a refresher:

I don’t think “squirrel projects” need more definition than that video…  So, when one of your team members go off on a sometimes-random-but-always-guaranteed-to-be-cool tangent, it’s important to do two things:

• Call it out as a squirrel project
• Determine whether or not it’s a squirrel worth hunting

Figuring out if it’s a squirrel worth hunting depends mainly on:

• The timing of the project
• The potential value of the idea

I’d say that 2 days before release day is a pretty bad time to go squirrel hunting.  But what if you’re in the beginning of a sprint and something great comes along?  Adjust.  Reprioritize. Throw some things on the backlog, and make room.  Because sometimes, it’s worth it.

It’s also important to note that “value” doesn’t necessarily mean immediate ROI.  There are different ways to get value out of a squirrel project.  Sometimes it’s the potential for revenue down the road.  Sometimes it’s the time spent now on automation tasks that will save you a bunch of time later.  And sometimes, it’s just plain cool (two words and a hint for something you should try on Yola: Konami Code).

Squirrel projects aren’t bad.  But they can be devastating to your focus and momentum if they happen at the wrong time, and/or they have no potential for value.  So go hunt the good ones, and let the bad ones go.

Almost a year ago I wrote a post to propose/summarize a universal model for product development.  I’ve now refined that model into what I believe is much closer to what the original intention was: a product development framework that is detailed enough to be practically usable, but generic enough to fit on top of any development paradigm (Agile, Waterfall, etc.).

I’ve decided to start a series of posts on software development and the Product Manager’s role in that process.  The first, this one, is a very general overview — it’s basic, yes, but necessary to lay the groundwork.  After that, I want to spend time writing down my thoughts on each of these stages in detail.

Why do this? Because I think the Product Management profession is finally starting to come into its own, and I’m hoping that through discussion we can, together, evolve a practical guide to what we do from day to day, something that is both flexible enough and rigid enough to be helpful without being constricting.  And maybe also just to force myself to think through this in detail and become more deliberate and focused on each of these steps.  I hope you’ll join the discussion!

I won’t be talking about scheduling, scrum methodology, or team organization in these posts.  The goal is to focus on the work that needs to be done — whether it’s being done by an individual or a core team is not the focus here, and will be different depending on the company, the philosophy, and the team.

So let’s start here — a diagram of a proposed universal model for software product development:

Borrowing from and expanding on my original post, I want to make a few observations. First, there are a few assumptions that are important to note about this model:

• Regardless of the development methodology, representatives from Product, Marketing, Business, Design, and Engineering should be involved to some extent from the very beginning of the process. Once detailed requirements are being written, it largely becomes an Engineering and Product effort to ensure momentum and avoid the dangers of design by committee, best summed up by Dilbert:

• Having said that, it is important for one person to own this process (i.e. be accountable for its success) from start to finish, and that person should be the Product Manager/Product Owner. A good product manager is not a dictator. He/she is a facilitator between all the different stakeholders of a product, and the really good ones are able to get through this model on time and on budget, every time and with as much consensus between groups as possible.
• The roles of the Responsible (R), Supporter (S), and Informed (I) are important to define for each of these steps.  Most important is that there should be only one “R” for each step.  This doesn’t necessarily mean it’s the person who does all the work, but it’s the person who is ultimately responsible to get the work done (with help from the “S”es).
• This model is designed to work for any organizational structure, project size, and timeline. If the project is large, more time can be spent on each step. If the project has a tight timeline, it doesn’t mean that you will skip the “Iterate” part of “Design + Iterate.” It just means that you will spend less time on it (more on that later).

Summary of the different aspects of the model

The rest of this series will be devoted to detailed discussions about this model. My goal with this post is to be general and make one or two points about each aspect. So let’s look at some definitions and implications of the model:

• The starting point - identifying needs. At the beginning of any project (new or iterative), it is important to gather and synthesize input from three different sources:
  • User needs. Everyone needs to have a good understand of the market, the target segments, and their behaviors and attitudes. There’s not enough room to go into detail here, but it is important to look at four sources of user input: market research (segmentation, etc.), user experience research (usability studies, ethnographic explorations), site analytics (behavioral analysis), and customer support (call transcripts, interviews with CS reps, etc.). Having this common understanding allows the organization to build products that matter to users.
  • Business needs. User experience practitioners too often neglect the fact that well, your site has to make money! Revenue goals are not a good excuse for bad design, and that attainable revenue goals are essential to push the organization to design good product.
  • Technology needs. Engineering needs to be at the table from the start. They know the limitations of the product, they know what needs to be fixed, they know what technical debt needs to be paid down. Having engineering and product working together is essential in good product development.
• Requirements gathering. Pragmatic Marketing, in a post entitled “On Reqs and Specs: The Roles and Behaviors for Effective Product Definition,” proposes some solid definitions for the three different documentation outcomes in this model: Requirements, Functional specifications, and Technical specifications. The first outcome from the discussion and synthesis of needs is a common understanding of the problem statement you are trying to address, which takes the form of Requirements. A requirement is simply a short statement of the problem, and Pragmatic Marketing recommends the following format: “Our preference is the Requirements That Work format: [Persona] has [problem] with [frequency]. It forces product managers to explore the problem, not the solution, and helps the design team understand the context of the problem.”
• Solution brainstorming. Once the problem has been defined and agreed upon, the team starts thinking about solutions, usually through some form of design thinking or abductive reasoning. There are three important aspects of this phase, which is often called Product Discovery:
  • Start with blue sky ideation (divergent thinking). At this point, don’t limit solutions by what is technically or otherwise feasible. Spend time dreaming about the product - this is where innovation happens!
  • Relentlessly prioritize (convergent thinking). This is the part of the process where nonsensical ideas are thrown out, and the team consolidates around a few possible solutions to the problem that can be further explored. Remember: there is no commitment to implementation or specific designs yet at this phase.
  • Apply the technology filter only after the ideation phase. There is a very important technology filter that needs to be applied during prioritization. What is technically feasible? If something is currently not feasible, what would it cost to build the right architecture? Those early inputs can save a lot of headache down the road.
• Flow charting and wireframing. This phase starts to put some flesh around the second output document, Functional specifications, which Joel Spolsky defines as follows: “A functional specification describes how a product will work entirely from the user’s perspective. It doesn’t care how the thing is implemented. It talks about features. It specifies screens, menus, dialogs, and so on.” At this point visual design is still left out of the picture, all you are doing is defining flows and interactions.
• High-fidelity mockups. In this phase, visual design gets involved to design the experience as it will look on the screen.  If there are pre-defined patterns and standards (as is hopefully this case), this could be a pretty light step, but I do believe it is important, even in an agile environment, not to leave this part up to chance.
• Technical specifications. Development can start before the full designs have been completed.  Once the flow and interaction are sorted out, you do in most cases have enough information to start task breakdown and implementation.  Quoting Joel Spolsky again, “A technical specification describes the internal implementation of the program. It talks about data structures, relational database models, choice of programming languages and tools, algorithms, etc.”
• Build, discuss, iterate. Everyone designs a product, but it is sad to see that when time/budget gets tight, iterating on it before it goes live is often the first part of the process to fly out the window. It cannot be overstated how important it is to prototype and test your designs before they go live. And not having time is really no excuse. If you have no time, make a paper prototype and test it with three of your friends over coffee in the evening. You’d be surprised how much value this can add. Boxes and Arrows has a great article on prototyping and how to integrate it with your design process that’s well worth the read.
• QA, release, assess. After the thrill of releasing, the assessment phase is extremely important and often overlooked. It is important to define your measures of success upfront, and then follow up to see if you’ve met those goals. How do users respond to the product? Are we meeting revenue/engagement goals? What can we learn from how users interact with the product to give us ideas for new products? I’m also an advocate for using the same four sources of input we discussed earlier (market research, user experience research, site analytics, and customer support), as opposed to relying on only one methodology, like a 3-week A/B test. More on the dangers of that in one of my earlier posts.

Where we go from here

So now that the stage is set, what happens next?  Over the next weeks and months, I’d like to write a detailed post on each of these phases, particularly from a Product Management perspective, and what the role of the PM/PO is during each of the phases.

There are, of course, lots of resources out there for Product Managers, but I’m hoping to talk more practice than theory here, and hopefully generate some discussion (and disagreements!) to help us reflect on our chosen profession.

PS Big hat tip to @justinspratt who gave me the nudge I needed to start this series.  He is the real deal, despite being Australian.

“DStv: so much more user-friendly,” says the ad in the background as I try in vain to press the button on the remote control just right so I can pause my show and go get another cup of coffee. It probably has something to do with last straws and camels and stuff, but that ad finally put me over the edge and onto the computer to write about the user experience of DStv’s remote control for their HD PVRs.

It is often much easier to figure out which companies practice user-centered design and which don’t when they produce physical products as opposed to online interactions. Think about Target’s redesign of the prescription drug bottle as an example of deliberate design, and America’s 1040 Tax form as an example of what happens when there is little to no design input on a product.

In the past I’ve had the pleasure of using the Logitech Harmony 880 universal remote, pictured below beside the DStv remote, and that showed me that it is, in fact, possible to design a remote that even my mom can use. So I’d like to write about the differences between DStv’s remote for the HD PVR’s, and the Logitech Harmony 880 universal remote. Both are shown below:

DStv HD PVR remote

Logitech Harmony 880 remote

The DStv remote - Why it’s bad

The DStv remote control breaks many principles of user interface design, but mainly this one: Recognition rather than recall. To quote Jakob Nielsen:

Minimize the user’s memory load by making objects, actions, and options visible. The user should not have to remember information from one part of the dialogue to another. Instructions for use of the system should be visible or easily retrievable whenever appropriate.

The principle applies mainly to online design, but it can be applied to the DStv remote in the following ways:

• Several buttons have no proper affordance and mean nothing to the user. There are 5 different-colored buttons with no mapping to the real world, and some labels are confusing. As examples of interactions that are not obvious to the user without either reading the manual or extensive trial-and-error:
  • To view your recorded shows, you have to press the red button.  How am I supposed to know that?
  • To make matters worse, once you see a list of your shows, this same red button is used to delete the show.  And that’s how we lost the latest episode of 30 Rock.
  • To edit certain (but not all) settings, you have to press the white button within the menu system.
  • At other times, the white button is used to edit your favourite channels.
  • When you pause or rewind a show, you go back to live TV by pressing the “TV” button.
  • The “up” button brings up your favorite channels, while the other direction buttons bring up all available channels.
• Several buttons don’t do anything at all. I haven’t seen the blue, yellow, and green buttons used for anything. It’s not uncommon for remote control buttons to be “reserved for future use,” but I maintain that this is a bad idea because it just introduces unnecessary user complexity.

In addition to that, the play/pause/forward/rewind interaction is awkward. To pause live TV, you have to press the button exactly in the middle, otherwise you might actually start rewinding or forwarding.

Making the fast forward action a pull action instead of a button you press might sound like a good idea, but doing that limits its function. Now you can only fast forward on one speed. If this becomes a push-button, or something other than “hold to fast forward”, you’d be able to fast forward at different speeds.

And this is only the remote… once you get to the on-screen experience the interaction reaches a whole new level of “what the…!?” Maybe we can dig into that at another time. But first, here’s how it should be done:

The Logitech Harmony 880 remote - Why it’s good

• Beautiful, ergonomic design that makes you actually want to use it and not hide it under a pillow.
• Progressive disclosure of features — depending on your activity the “soft keys” at the top of the remote perform different functions, with clear language on the display to indicate which button does what.
• Online programming of the device — no need to remember device codes to set up the features for each component.
• Thoughtful key layout with no ambiguity about which button does what.
• Several smart features, like starting the backlight when you lift the remote off the table.
• User language incorporated throughout — simple commands such as “Activities” and “Watch a DVD” instead of technical references.

It’s clear that Logitech did some user research to find out what the underlying user needs were before they developed this product. A lot of the features can be directly linked backed to complaints I’m sure we all have about remote controls. A couple of examples:

• “I can never see the buttons on the remote when it’s dark in the room, but I also don’t want the light from the remote to disturb my viewing.” Solution: motion sensors that turn on the backlight when you pick up the remote, and turns it off after it’s been sitting still for a while.
• “I don’t want to have to struggle with device numbers and complex remote programming”. Solution: build an online interface where the user can program the remote, and then send the commands to the remote through a USB connection.

There’s probably more to say, and yes a lot of arguments to be made for why DStv’s remote isn’t that good. But in today’s user-centered world, there shouldn’t be excuses any more. Companies need to make products that are useful and usable so that people can enjoy them without frustration. Good user experience = good business.

I do want to end on a positive note and say that I think the DStv iPhone app is a solid piece of user-centered design.  It doesn’t go overboard on features, and it keeps focused on the one thing users need it for — checking TV schedules.  I just think the app designer needs to take a look at the remotes, that’s all.

I’ve been thinking about Evernote and Dropbox, and the characteristics that make them successful freemium businesses.  Of course, a lot has been said about freemium, and Ning’s recent decision to drop that business model has placed it under renewed scrutiny.  But I don’t think it’s time to bury freemium just yet.  I wanted to write down some quick thoughts on what I believe are three essential characteristics of a successful freemium business:

1. Be patient with users.  Evernote’s cohort analysis shows that initial conversion rates are at about 1%, but once users have been with the service for 18+ months, that jumps to 4% — more than enough to be profitable.  And it’s not actually a bad thing to have free users for that long — at that point they are so invested that they’re not going to take their data elsewhere.  They know and love the product, so when they hit the storage limit, they’re comfortable with paying.
2. Have a natural (and inevitable) path to upgrading.  With both Dropbox and Evernote, if you use the product long enough, you’re going to have to upgrade — at some point you’re going to run out of storage.  If you don’t have a natural path to upgrading you need to create one, or you’ll find yourself in trouble.  Users will use your free product for forever and be happy with it.  You need to make it inevitable that a certain % users will hit one of your limits.
3. Have a great free product.  It might sound contradictory, but if your free product sucks, the switching cost will be very low.  Dropbox and Evernote are successful because users love the free product, so when they run up against the limits, the decision to pay is an easy one.

To put it another way, I think that to be successful as a freemium company you need to (1) have a free product that users love, (2) be ok if those users don’t convert to paying customers for months, but (3) make it inevitable that at some point, they will have to upgrade if they want to keep using your service.

If you haven’t seen these great talks on freemium, I highly recommend you invest the time to watch it - very informative:

• Dropbox CEO on Startup lessons learned
• Evernote’s CEO discusses how to make freemium work

I read quite a few excellent UX/PM posts this week, and wanted to make sure you don’t miss out.  So here are some excerpts from my favorite posts of the week.

User Experience Design in the Agile context

In Agile UX and The One Change That Changes Everything, Anders Ramsy writes about how user experience design can be adopted to fit the agile mold a little better.  He calls for less design up-front to basically embrace the MVP approach instead of fighting it:

The first and probably most fundamental change to flow out of starting to build earlier is that of chopping your up-front design phase down to a fraction of what it might be in a traditional model to allow for establishing a foundation of working software, and then evolving the rest of the product on top of that foundation. In other words, we go from Big Design Up Front to Just Enough Design Up Front.

The rest of the post is devoted to how to do that, including thoughts on lighter, conversation-centered documentation, and the importance of collaborative design.

Enough with the “chicken & pig” story

Speaking of Agile, David Bland wrote an impassioned post arguing that Our Divisive Scrum Terminology Needs to be Deprecated:

Scrum teams succeed or fail as a, well, a team.

If the Product Owner is confused about the role or not living up to expectations, it is the ScrumMaster who should be helping them along the way. If the ScrumMaster is failing at coaching up the Product Owner on the framework, then wouldn’t the ScrumMaster be to blame? But wait, since the team has appointed the ScrumMaster, would they not have failed by choosing one who is incompetent?

W’ll just run in circles pointing fingers because there is no easy answer, and using the Product Owner as the scape goat does nothing to help resolve the situation.

Measurement-driven Product Management

The always brilliant Pragmatic Marketing has a post entitled Measurement-Driven Product Management that should make all of us a little uncomfortable.  But good uncomfortable.  Getting better at your job uncomfortable.  Read the post for details on the proposed ways to measure the success of PM, but this is why they make the case for it:

The long term benefit of Product Management becoming measurement-driven is higher team performance, improved predictability and increased credibility. The ultimate benefit is developing the ability to reliably create outstanding products and market breakthroughs.

Can Product Management operate with this high level of maturity, using a reliable measurements and metrics system with more predictable results in a company?

This “holy grail” of product management performance is doable, but often many cultural and process gaps must be addressed first. An organization fosters a measurement-driven culture by reinforcing other aspects of the process, such as tightly coupling rewards, recognition, compensation and promotion to attainment of operational results. Does yours?

Research and Design, sitting in a tree…

In The product of a healthy relationship, Paul Golden discusses the sometimes rocky relationship between researchers and designers:

Hana Thomas of design consultancy Smallfry agrees that while market research can play a crucial role in product design and development, there are dangers. “There can be an over-reliance on market research, which leads to it being used either as a scapegoat for poor decisions or employed too soon in the creative process, stopping ideas in their tracks before they have even had the chance to be realised.”

Thomas refers to the value of ethnographic research to her company’s work in product development and describes studying people in their own environment, under a relevant context, as the “ideal way” to truly unearth latent needs and desires.

According to Reon Brand, the responsive and listening brand that engages its audiences in the creative process as well as in dialogue has a major advantage in our increasingly social-media driven world. However, all research methodologies have their limitations. While consumers can react to what exists and relate back to what they know, some of the designers surveyed by the Design Council felt that consumers were less able to contribute to the development of completely new product or service concepts for the future.

I just became the mayor of someplace you’ve never heard of

On a slightly different note, I found this RWW called Why We Check In: The Reasons People Use Location-Based Social Networks very interesting.  It presents some research on why we use services like Foursquare and Gowalla, and there are definitely some surprises, like using it to keep track of history:

The thing that surprised me most when I asked people why they use location-based social networks is how many of them say they use it primarily to track their own personal history. It’s a lazy diary, people say.  Some people say they use it to help with their expense tracking on business travels.

Happy reading!

I just read an interesting New York Times article on “social reading” (Yes, People Still Read, but Now It’s Social), and it got me thinking about the future of reading, and the e-reader battle that’s currently going on, particularly between the iPad and Amazon’s Kindle.  And then I upgraded my Kindle software to v2.5 this morning, and it made it clear to me why I think the Kindle is a far superior reader to the iPad.

No one will deny that the iPad’s iBooks app has a nicer user experience than the Kindle.  It’s colorful and pretty, it has a nice bookshelf, you can turn the pages with your fingers, and, uh…  Well, that’s where it stops.  The two major issues with iBooks are:

• Since it’s a back lit display, it starts hurting your eyes when you read for too long.
• The battery life is, you know, not ideal…

Now consider the Kindle.  Though not as pretty to look at, you can tell that Amazon decided to focus on the reading experience.  You don’t have to plug it in all the time, and you can read it for hours without hurting your eyes.  But it is v2.5’s forays into social reading that really starts to set the device apart.  There are two features in particular that I think are brilliant:

• First, Amazon allows you to opt in to viewing popular highlights. This allows you to see when passages of a book you’re reading were highlighted by others who have read the same book.  It’s like a virtual book club, but instead of trying to get 6 people to agree on a book to read, you can connect with 100’s of readers who are already reading the same book.  This kind of connection really is where the Internet is at its most useful.
• Amazon also allows you to link your Twitter and Facebook accounts to your Kindle.  This means that you can highlight a passage that you’re reading, and share it with your followers, like I did this morning:

That is powerful.  It not only allows you to share what you’re reading and thinking about in real time, but it’s also great business for Amazon, since it provides a way for your followers to purchase the book right away.  Of course, even the Kindle packaging tells you that this is an experience built around passionate readers:

The differences between the iPad and the Kindle have larger implication as well, particularly in the field of Product Management.  Look, the iPad is gorgeous, it really is.  But it is an experience designed to contain so many different uses, that it is not possible to focus on doing one particular thing (like reading a book) extremely well.  The Kindle is singularly focused on readers, and that is why it beats the iPad hands down as an e-reader.

Dropbox did exactly the same thing to beat out their competitors — they focused on making file sharing as easy and convenient as possible.  They didn’t have all the features, but they made sure the features they do have has a superior user experience.  On that note, if you haven’t watched this 23-minute talk by Dropbox’s CEO where he discusses their business model, you really should.  It is inspiring and well worth it.

Hey, South African tech industry?  Meet me behind the rugby field at 15:00.  We need to talk.

I’ve been back in South Africa for 3 months now after 6 years working in Silicon Valley, and I think I finally figured out what’s been bothering me about the tech industry here ever since I got back.  The problem is that we have some serious Goldilocks issues going on right now.

This one is too cold

The first problem we have is a severe inferiority complex.

Remember: just because we’re not in Silicon Valley doesn’t mean we don’t know what we’re doing.  Like Morpheus says in The Matrix: “Some things are true whether you believe in them or not.”  We’re good at what we do.  We’re really good.  Why does it matter if anyone knows it at this point?  They will, soon enough.

I know that many of those dudes in San Francisco treat us like the little brothers of the world — adorable but not to be taken seriously.  But that doesn’t mean we have to grovel.  Who cares what they think?  Haven’t you heard?  Silicon Valley is dead.  You can be brilliant anywhere.  So we might as well be brilliant in the most beautiful place on earth.

This one is too hot

But we also have a second problem.  Some of us tend to overcompensate.  You see, since we have this inferiority complex, there is a danger in wanting to “show them a thing or two.”  So we livetweet from events that we’re not attending.  We write reviews of products we haven’t seen.  We fight about what the definition of a startup is, as if that matters.  We show up at conferences and give talks on who we are instead of what others can learn from our experience.

No, not cool.  There is no need to overcompensate.  We have some very unique skills, and we have the benefit of the element of surprise.  No one thinks the next Facebook is going to come from South Africa.  Let’s keep it that way — don’t let them know we’re here!

This one is just right

But there is an alternative.  We can make great products, build great companies, and take over the world without anyone even knowing where we’re from.  Does it matter where WooThemes are from?  It matters to us.  It doesn’t matter to anyone they sell their products to.

So, please.  Stop being apologetic about our skills.  Stop wishing we were Silicon Valley.  Stop pretending to be in Silicon Valley.

Instead, follow Seth’s advice.  And forgive me for quoting verbatim, but no one says this better than him:

Yes, I know you’re a master of the web, that you’ve visited every website written in English, that you’ve been going to SXSW for ten years, that you were one of the first bloggers, you used Foursquare before it was cool and you can code in HTML in your sleep. Yes, I know that you sit in the back of the room tweeting clever ripostes when speakers are up front failing on a panel and that you had a LOLcat published before they stopped being funny.

But what have you shipped?

What have you done with your connection skills that has been worthy of criticism, that moved the dial and that changed the world?

Go, do that.

One of the hardest parts of Agile development, but also one of the most powerful and rewarding, is figuring out how to make the process work for the team you’re part of.  Even though the guidelines are clear, there is simply no “one size fits all” approach when it comes to Agile.

We as Product Owners need to loosen up a little when it comes to pre-determined process, and work with our development teams to design an Agile process that works for everyone involved.  With this in mind, developer @darb and I evolved the following sprint guidelines for one of the applications we are responsible for here at Yola.

The ingredients of a good sprint

Every two weeks we sit down and discuss the next sprint, and we make sure the following ingredients are included:

• 1 x silly name. Darb is partial to automatic Linux-generated names like Thundering Tuatara.  I am partial to non-silly names like “Sprint 3”.  But he won this argument — it’s all a game of give-and-take.
• 1 x revenue-related. Every sprint has to include at least one bug fix, enhancement or feature that will improve our top-line revenue.  We are a business, after all, and this part is too often neglected by Product Owners.
• 1 x front-end maintenance. With every sprint we have to make an improvement that customers will notice.  This can be small visual tweaks to increase usability, or bigger overhauls of the interface based on customer feedback and analytics.
• 1 x back-end maintenance. Performance improvements and general back-end maintenance get put on the back burner way too easily - and as Product Owners we are often very guilty of deprioritizing maintenance because you can’t immediately see the effects of working on this.  But balance is extremely important, and paying down technical debt needs to be part of every sprint.
• 1 x error messaging/UX improvement. This is related to front-end maintenance but different in that these tickets aim to address user experience and usability improvements mainly through changes in the interaction, not necessarily the visual design.

It’s important to note that these buckets aren’t mutually exclusive, so some tickets will address more than one issue — and that’s even better.  This is also the minimum requirement, usually we try to get a good balance of all kinds of tickets into a sprint.

The recipe for a good sprint

In addition to these minimum requirements of what should go into each sprint, we put together the following guidelines:

- Leave time for ad hoc planning and work.  Other stuff will always come up.  Don’t let it make you miss your deadlines — leave room for it so that you have “planned outages” in your sprint work.

• Make sure there is a good mix of big and small size/complexity tickets.  Momentum is so important.  Seth Godin talks often about the importance of shipping often, and to do that, you have to bite off manageable chunks of work.  Make that small text edit that’s been on the backlog for months because it’s just too small to schedule.  And couple that with bigger tasks that get you closer to your overall product vision.
• Make effective use of priority. We use Jira to track our projects, and we use Priority to schedule the order of work.  We have to get P2 and P3 projects done in the sprint.  P4 and P5 projects are nice to have, and we do them if there is time.  For P1 work, see the first bullet…
• Stir Rian into vitriol. I’m not sure why it is important for Darb to find new ways to freak me out every week, but he seems to thrive on it, so this remains in the recipe for now.
• Simmer in QA by mid 2nd week.  It’s such a simple thing, but so many organizations forget that for something to release on Thursday, it doesn’t mean that first round development is completed by Thursday morning.  It means that at least some first round development needs to be completed by Tuesday morning so that QA can start.
• Rinse and repeat.  And then we do it all over again.

The “ingredients” and recipe are very specific to the application that Darb is the lead developer on, which is our payment system — with all its many back-end and front-end complexities.  Obviously different applications need different ingredients.  On our website, for example, we place a lot more focus on front-end than back-end.

And I think that’s the point I’m trying to make — that the best product development process is the one that Product and Engineering agrees on, and it never looks exactly the same across all applications.

Last night I attended my first Cape Town GeekDinner, and I have to say that I will definitely be back next time.  Good food, good wine (thanks Delheim!), great atmosphere and discussions, and a few 10-minute geeky talks sprinkled in between… yes, this is an idea I can get behind.

I also got to do a short talk on 5 things I’ve learned about website redesigns from being involved in various projects at eBay and Yola.com.  The slides are posted below.  As I mentioned in my talk — since you can’t say a whole lot in 10 minutes, I went with breadth over depth here.  There are obviously a lot more that goes into redesign projects (and yes, I know Content Strategy is about more than not using Lorem Ipsum in your designs…).  But these are a some things I’ve learned going through the process a few times:

The highs and horrors of website redesigns

View more presentations from Rian van der Merwe.

I am moving countries with my family in 3 weeks, so I have been doing a lot of account canceling over the past week or so.  For the most part, it’s a pretty smooth process.  But that changed when I encountered the labyrinth that is the Microsoft Billing department. Describing how I was eventually able to cancel my Xbox Live account would take way too long, so let me just focus on one part of the experience that is indicative of a company stuck in late 90s Information Architecture.

In order to get to my payment options for Xbox, I have to follow this sequence:

1. Go to www.xbox.xom
2. Click on “Marketplace” at the top (this automatically shows the “Xbox LIVE” link in the second tier navigation as selected)
3. Hover over “My account”
4. Click on “Manage payment options”

Here is the screen with the major areas called out:

There are a variety of issues with this navigation structure, including:

• No connection (visual or otherwise) between the three navigation tiers. There are non-navigation elements between the tiers, so there’s no way to know how they are related.
• No visual hierarchy.  What is the main navigation on the page, and what is sub-navigation?
• Inconsistent “selected” link states.  The top tier doesn’t even show you what’s selected.  The middle tier uses black links that turn white.  And the third tier uses the tab metaphor.

The thing is that fixing this navigation isn’t that difficult.  It will take some time, but it requires a simple user-centered design strategy similar to what you would use to design any IA:

1. Compile a site map of all the links and page names.
2. Get a content strategist to write/edit link names so that they are understandable to users, and in line with the brand voice.
3. Do a card sorting study to understand how users would group the site’s content and links together (adjust link names as necessary).
4. Get a UX designer/engineering pair-up to design a single 3-tiered navigation structure.

I don’t understand why Microsoft can’t do this.  But there is simply no excuse for it.  It’s not like there aren’t plenty of resources and design guidelines for site navigation.  Here are just a few:

• 5 Navigation Bar Best Practices
• Tabbed Navigation, and What Makes It Useful
• Navigation Menus: Trends and Examples
• 25 Examples of Creative Navigation
• 30 Creative Javascript Navigation Menu Examples