Chris Jones posted a really solid overview of The Product Designer Role that’s very much worth your time:

Your next task is to define the product design role within your company. This is an important one to get right. You don’t want to simply recreate an internal version of the agency model. The way that products are created has changed dramatically in recent years and new models for design are a critical part of this.

He goes over what he believes are the 5 core responsibilities of the role:

1. Product Orientation
2. Holistic Experience Design
3. Prototyping
4. User Testing
5. Interaction and Visual Design

I can’t help but feel like this is a role we’ll start to see merge with Product Management before long.

There are a couple of interesting articles about Frank Ocean’s new album and how it’s causing a lot of waves in the music industry. The short version is that Ocean found a clever way to get out of his agreement with his label Def Jam, and sign an exclusive deal with Apple Music instead. As Ben Sisario notes in Frank Ocean’s ‘Blonde’ Amplifies Discord in the Music Business, the labels aren’t happy:

“The unprecedented run of exclusives by digital music services has put a tremendous strain on the relationship between artists and their record companies,” said Larry Miller, an associate professor of music business at New York University’s Steinhardt School. “We are seeing that play out in public now.”

In Def Jam Can’t Compete With Apple Justin Charity explains further how Apple has become a giant player in the music industry:

Today, with Iovine’s connections and industry guile, Apple Music is becoming a de facto record label of its own. In just over a year, Apple has struck deals with Drake, Future, Chance the Rapper, and Travis Scott. […]

In response, Universal Music Group, which owns Def Jam, is quickly mobilizing against Apple Music’s exclusive streaming-rights model, which naturally limits the audience for new music. Without this model, Apple Music would be back to a prolonged competition to differentiate itself from its streaming competitors. With it, there’s a new, unprecedented competition: conventional record labels, which ideally develop artists into stars, versus Apple Music, which pays stars well.

I’m going to be in the minority here, but I don’t like Apple getting into the record label business. The entire idea of “exclusive” music releases rubs me the wrong way. And I’m just going to say it — this is the kind of stuff that happens when we get rid of physical media.

Mary Choi’s Wired feature on the social media lives of teens is utterly fascinating. I don’t even know where to begin. Let’s start with this bit from Like. Flirt. Ghost: A Journey Into the Social Media Lives of Teens:

Then there is the rule about likes and comments. According to Lara and Sofia, when your friend posts a selfie on Instagram, there’s a tacit social obligation to like it, and depending on how close you are, you may need to comment. The safest option, especially on a friend’s selfie, is the emoji with the heart eyes. Or a simple “so cute” or “so pretty.” It’s too much work to do anything else. If there’s any deviation, “you have to interpret the comment,” Sofia says. “If it’s nice, you’re like, is this really nice or are you …” “… I don’t know,” finishes Lara. Is the comment sincere? Or slyly sarcastic? Formulaic responses breed zero confusion. Instagram is not a place for tone or irony.

The whole article is full of examples like this that just makes me wonder how complicated it must be to be a teen right now. Of course, it’s not complicated to them, it just seems that way to us old folk. But seriously:

But back to the ladies. After a few mutual photo likes, the flirtation often escalates to emoji. If an emoji with the heart eyes gets another one in return, he says, you’re good. Other positive responses: an ellipsis thought-bubble to convey that she’s thinking about you; the bashful see-no-evil monkey. “‘Oh, thank you! I appreciate it’ is what I get from that emoji,” he says. Any of these responses means he’ll take it to DM (as in direct message). Other emoji are suboptimal. “The thinky face is like, ‘What are you doing commenting on my pictures?’” He says this isn’t a hard no, but it’s not great. The worst emoji—easily—is one you may not expect. “The smiley face,” says Ahmad with a pained expression. “Yeah, that’s the ‘Thank you, but I’m not interested.’”

I did do quite a double-take when I read this though:

Ubakum loves her [Android] phone. Deeply. iPhones for her are too easy, a little basic. “I’m not a fan of user-friendliness.”

I don’t really know what to make of that. It’s a fascinating statement, and I wish I could follow up to understand the sentiment more. If it’s true that a new generation of users don’t want products to be easy to use, what does that mean for us as designers? My head hurts.

Andy Budd asks, Are we moving towards a post-Agile age?

Perhaps we’re moving towards a post-Agile world? A world that is informed by the spirit of Agile, but has much more flexibility and nuance built in.

This post-Agile world draws upon the best elements of Agile, while ditching the dogma. It also draws upon the best elements of Design Thinking and even — God forbid — the dreaded Waterfall process.

People working in a post-Agile way don’t care which canon an idea comes from, as long as it works. The post-Agile practitioner cherrypicks from the best tools available, rather than sticking with a rigid framework. Post-Agile is less of a philosophy and more of a toolkit that has been built up over years of practice.

This is certainly true for how our team works as well. We took the parts we like about Agile (like autonomous teams, flexible roadmaps, daily standups, small pieces of work), left out the parts we don’t like (like rigid sprints, long backlog grooming meetings), and then mixed in some spicy goodness from other methodologies (like deploying whenever a feature is ready). I’m sure strict Agile works for some teams — particularly in large organizations — but this approach works much better for us. It speeds us up and makes us all much happier human beings.

Giff Constable writes about The difference between design and product management and makes this good point about the nature of the PM role:

A big difference is where they spend their time. You’ll hear me call design and engineering “deep dive” roles, while PM is a multi-tasking role, which is why it is relatively easier for PMs to assume more of a leadership role. Even though we work in very collaborative ways (“rough draft culture”) at Axial, both design and engineering require getting into a “flow state” on a problem. Design takes a lot of iteration and trial and error to get something right. PMs, on the other hand, are bouncing around a million tasks, from clarifying a user story, to managing communication inside and outside the organization, to doing whatever it takes to un-bottleneck the team, to all the things listed above.

This is one of the things that makes Product Management such a challenging role. It’s not just about switching tasks, it’s about developing the ability to switch focus really quickly as well. There is no time to meander from one task to the next. Once you switch to the next thing you have to be in it right away.

This NYT report on the massive political news force Facebook has become is quite something. From John Herrman’s article Inside Facebook’s (Totally Insane, Unintentionally Gigantic, Hyperpartisan) Political-Media Machine:

But truly Facebook-native political pages have begun to create and refine a new approach to political news: cherry-picking and reconstituting the most effective tactics and tropes from activism, advocacy and journalism into a potent new mixture. This strange new class of media organization slots seamlessly into the news feed and is especially notable in what it asks, or doesn’t ask, of its readers. The point is not to get them to click on more stories or to engage further with a brand. The point is to get them to share the post that’s right in front of them. Everything else is secondary.

This is the crux of the matter:

Such news exists primarily within users’ feeds, its authorship obscured, its provenance unclear, its veracity questionable. It exists so far outside the normal channels of news production and distribution that its claims will go unchallenged.

Diana Budds does some great reporting in How Urban Design Perpetuates Racial Inequality — And What We Can Do About It. It’s startling to see how deeply ingrained racism is in the way cities are designed. One of the most effective ways to change this? Diversity and immersion in the needs of users…

Justin Moore, an architecture professor at Columbia University, believes that while designers focus on creative solutions for urban problems, issues that are rarely broached are shortfalls within the profession, like diversity, a deep understanding of the communities in which they’re building, and the methodology of design education.

”There is a need to redesign the designers, and to give them the tools and competencies to work within social constructs and spatial contexts that they are meant to serve. Designers spend much of their academic and professional training to build the spatial, technical, communication, and critical-thinking skills that are needed to do the difficult work of transforming spaces and places. They use their skills, often with good intentions and ‘best practices,’ toward results that may not align with what is needed or wanted in a given context.

Laurent-Pierre Baculard makes some great points in WhatsApp Grew to One Billion Users by Focusing on Product, Not Technology:

Examples such as WhatsApp demonstrate that real-world innovation, in many ways, looks like an assembly line. At one end is a customer pain point or a potential new market. At the other is a product or service that solves the problem or addresses the market in a way nobody has thought of before. In between, people sit down and force themselves to examine the problem from a variety of fresh angles. Sometimes they tap the lab and bring a radical new technology to bear. But much more often they reach for pieces of technology that already exist and assemble them with new (or old) capabilities to produce a solution that turns the pain point into a delighted customer. Think of it as high concept meets whatever is lying around — an unconventional combination.

The problem comes when we reach for technologies that seem “cool” but can’t actually be linked to any real customer problem.

Yes, after a long break I’m giving the blog another shot. Let’s see how it goes…