The Buzzfeed News article Behind Twitter’s Plan To Get People To Stop Yelling At Each Other is not the kind of thing I usually link to here, but I found it really fascinating from a product management perspective. Author Nicole Nguyen goes deep into the research and development process of the team responsible for “twttr” — an external, public prototype to experiment with new features. The sections that give us insight into the thinking of Sara Haider (Director of Product Management) and Lisa Ding (Senior Product Designer) are particularly interesting:

Haider and her twttr team are hoping to “nudge” people’s behavior in another way. Their hypothesis: Making the design for replies as minimal as possible, in addition to revealing how the conversation’s participants are related to you, may encourage people to read the entire back-and-forth before they react.

“We have this opportunity to learn about how not having likes and retweets could potentially change how people read things,” said senior product designer Lisa Ding. “Does it make you read something that you maybe would have guessed to be popular but actually isn’t that popular? How does that change the way you interact in a conversation? That’s super interesting.”

I also love Lisa’s sketches of the layout of twttr, and wish I could see more of that notebook!

Andy Johns wrote a 4-part series on product growth that is worth digging into. In Part 1: A Single-Minded Perspective on Growth he points out the trap many product companies fall into:

The point I’m making is that today’s startups very quickly fall into the optimization trap where they think future growth will largely come from optimizing their existing product. The better approach is finding the right balance between optimization and innovation since both methods can produce future growth.

This is why I am still, after all these years, such a big fan of the Kano model. It forces teams to think about these two questions separately: (1) what can we do to make our existing product better (optimization), and (2) what can we add to or change about our product to create unexpected value for customers (innovation).

This interview with Ryan Hoover from Product Hunt on how to develop products people love is really interesting. For example, here he makes a really good point about the importance of systems thinking in product management:

Most products can be broken down into a math equation, where multiple variables need to be true for it to work. Many newer product managers don’t break this equation down as much as they should. Then, they don’t test some of their hypotheses soon enough. If you have x, y, and z, and you’ve figured out the x and the y but you failed to resolve z, then it won’t work.

Sometimes people focus on the easier things. They resolve two hypotheses that are easier to figure out, and then defer the last one. A lot of people don’t think about user acquisition. They think, “We’re going to build an awesome product, we’ll get press, and we’ll launch it on Product Hunt and that’s it.” They should probably reverse it — think about distribution and marketing first, and then figure out how to build that into the product itself.

I also love their approach to experimentation, which can basically be summed up as “do it as cheaply as humanly possible.” Great interview.

This is an older article, but it was brought up in a recent thread on the Elezea Community (join us!) and I hadn’t seen it before. In Applying Leverage as a Product Manager Brandon Chu explains how PMs can have the biggest impact in an organization:

Managerial leverage is the idea that some things a manager does creates more output than others, and for each possible thing, the amount of output created per unit of time is its leverage. That’s the basis of how you should decide whether to do activity A or activity B.

When internalized, these concepts impart on PMs a sense of what matters most in their role. They have lots of choices in what they can do everyday — all of which produce some positive output- but developing awareness of where they have leverage is critical to their long term impact.

The crux of it is this:

Product managers exert the most leverage through vision and strategy — the rest is optimization.

Brandon shares a very helpful framework about the different types of work product managers do, and the best way to balance that work.

I’m a big fan of the product forces aspect of the Jobs-to-be-Done framework to help teams think through the challenges they need to overcome to get customers to adopt their product. In Product adoption: how to get customers to embrace your product the Intercom team discusses the product forces, as well as some strategies for overcoming those forces. For example, on decreasing attachment to the status quo:

What can you do to draw your prospects’ attention to your benefits over their feelings of belonging? It may be as simple as promising a feature they’re desperately missing (like online privacy) or mentioning the support options you have in place (so they don’t have to ask a friend for help).

Google UX Designer David Hogue shares his thoughts on How to Reverse Over-Complication in Product Design and How to Avoid It Altogether. It’s a very good read for product managers. Here he describes how do build a process to avoid over-complication:

Critically evaluate every new and existing feature for the value it provides weighed against the costs of including in a product or service. Does a feature introduce friction or ambiguity? Does adding something more make flows, paths, and choices harder to understand? What are the potential positive AND negative outcomes of adding something, and is it worth it?

Constant vigilance against entropy, scope creep, and the accumulation of friction is necessary. Pausing for review after major releases, conducting retrospectives after updates or changes, critical analysis of product performance before and after a change, and ongoing quantitative and qualitative research can all provide information about and indicators of increasing and unintended complication.

Training company Onfielder published a comprehensive list of learning resources for new product managers called PM Starter Pack. Topics include what the role is about, overviews of the skills required (such as strategy, user experience, and analytics), and how to apply a job hunting strategy. Each section provides an overview of the topic as well as links to external resources. Highly recommended for new product managers.

It’s pretty interesting to see how different industries are adopting the product management role. In Product teams have taken national news organizations by storm. What’s happening locally? Christine Schmidt discusses how product is impacting newspapers and magazines:

“Product managers are the ones trying to think holistically and bring people together on how to move forward with a big idea,” Becca Aaronson, Chalkbeat’s director of product, said. “Anyone in a newsroom can do product thinking. It’s really about trying to think holistically about the needs of the audience, the mission and business interests of the organization, and technically how you’re going to get things done and bringing that together in a holistic way to create a comprehensive strategy for your organization.”