Business: Product Management

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

As software products have expanded over the decades, companies have had to apply a fair amount of effort to managing their customers’ experience. Since companies have added more and more features and functions to their software products, customer engagement has begun to fluctuate. Managing customers’ expectations had become complicated. These products have continued to grow because customers desired more features and the software companies wanted to offer more value—for a nominal fee, of course. Now, these companies confront the challenge not only of how to design and build the new features but also how to manage and release them.

Several companies—for example, Google—have managed these changes fairly well, but many have a lot of room for improvement. The days are over when we can honestly say, “If we build it, they will come.” We must do the work necessary to truly understand our customers’ needs. If we understood our customers, we would understand that we can’t just jam new features or functions into our software and expect customers joyfully to accept them. Read More

As organizations become more customer obsessed or user centered, we are seeing greater specialization in the delivery of user experiences. We are also experiencing significant changes in how organizations are delivering user experiences. A role that has recently risen in importance and shares some overlap with User Experience is that of Product Management. Specialization and modern forms of project management are encouraging these changes.

Rather than following the traditional waterfall process of software-project management, more and teams are adopting agile methods of software development. For organizations who may still be at an early stage in their UX maturity and user-centered thinking, it is still quite common to have a single UX professional working with a standing team of generalist developers who divide their time across multiple projects. However, as agile methods have become more common and in today’s world of scrum teams and agile sprints, it has become necessary to consider more specialized roles. Read More