Business: Product Management

Product development is complex, so it’s important to have a plan. Your product roadmap serves that purpose and lets you plot the journey ahead and ensure your entire team is aligned.

While it’s crucial to have a well-defined product roadmap at the outset of development, many companies do not have a good system in place for proper project planning. In fact, last year’s Pulse of the Profession report showed that 58% of survey respondents failed to grasp the full value of project management.

A product roadmap can help clear up any confusion and outline a project’s trajectory. Abraham Lincoln once said, “Give me six hours to chop down a tree, and I will spend the first four sharpening the ax.” If only more of us in software development had that same mindset. Read More

In recent years, the perception of UX design has changed dramatically. In the profession’s early days, less mature organizations frequently treated UX professionals as another type of graphic designer, as though UX designers were synonymous with Web designers. But, in today’s leading organizations, UX design is a strategic capability that drives innovation and enhances competitiveness. Similarly, the role of UX professionals has shifted beyond creating functional—if not delightful—user experiences by applying usability, information architecture, and design principles. Now, UX professionals are applying more of their understanding of psychology and human behavior to devising design principles in the service of persuasion. Read More

The ultimate goal of any product manager is to create a better product or service. But with this role comes great responsibility because every mistake product managers make can cost their company lost revenues. That’s why great product managers reject a reliance on people’s gut instincts and subjective views and instead rely on data in making as many product decisions as possible. Thankfully, we today live in a data-driven world, which makes the product manager’s job a lot easier.

In this article, I’ll discuss a number of data-driven methods of understanding the performance of Web sites—especially their conversion rates—and how to use this data to improve their results through iterative design. Thus, these methods are equally useful to UX professionals. Read More