Business: Product Management

Lean methods are tempting to large organizations. The concept that product owners should shorten iteration cycles to optimize learning and minimize waste is certainly a valuable one. But when Steve Blank and Eric Ries put forth the now world-renowned build-measure-learn model, they did not frame it for the context of enterprise product management. Unfortunately, this has caused unforeseen problems for the otherwise prescient practitioners of this approach.

The primary goal of creating a minimum viable product is not to build something, but instead to learn something. For Ries, who was working at a startup consisting almost entirely of engineers, the easiest way to get their product in front of prospective customers was to build and launch an initial version of it. Hence, the minimum viable product, or MVP. Read More

In Part 1 of this two-part series on agile development, I’ll first describe the four phases of agile development projects:

• Phase 1: Conception
• Phase 2: Definition
• Phase 3: Planning
• Phase 4: Deployment

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In an ever-changing field such as User Experience, it is sometimes good to step back from the whirlwind for a moment and get back to the basics. This is especially true today, when design trends are leaning more and more toward service design rather than product design. Often, users no longer want just a product. They want an entire ecosystem that supports and enhances their experience. Thus, they’ve raised the bar. Today, for companies to achieve their business goals, we need to meet users’ high expectations, which are higher than ever before. We need to deliver an ideal user experience.

In this column, I’ll discuss how User Experience and Product Management (PM) can work together to deliver ideal experiences and create empowered, successful, loyal users. Read More