After linking to her previous post on product management and pointing out how in my experience the tough thing to know is when to kill a product, Laura Klein has graciously dug into that very problem in another post, well worth reading: To Kill or Not to Kill. “Killing a feature or product is exceptionally […]

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Hope To Better The Person is a nice post by Brandon Leedy on the aim of product design, in which he examines a video by Charles Eames and draws parallels with Apple and others. His thesis: “Ultimately, that’s what a good product does, it hopes to better the user. Not with technical specs or price, […]

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Lots of good and potentially controversial ideas in here, a blog post by Laura Klein: Users Know: Expect More From Product Managers: “Whatever their strategy, good product managers validate their features before they build them, and that’s why their ideas are so much more likely to improve the bottom line of the company. They don’t […]

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For your weekend reading: one of the most comprehensive and insightful articles you’ll ever read on SaaS (software as a service): SaaS Metrics 2.0 – A Guide to Measuring and Improving what Matters. Written by David Skok of Matrix Partners. It lays out everything you need to know, from the overall model of SaaS to […]

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On a vast majority of UI design projects, the initial user experience is an afterthought. Yet, the first steps a user takes are critical for several reasons. First, the initial experience gets any data loaded or necessary setup done. Second, and perhaps as importantly, the initial experience teaches users how to use the software and […]

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From Pete Warden, a good list of things that users don’t care about: How long you spent on it. How hard it was to implement. How clean your architecture is. How extensible it is. How well it runs on your machine. How great it will be once all their friends are on it. How amazing […]

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Humans make decisions by comparing options…the better you can help people compare your product with what they’re already using the easier their decision will be (or the more likely they’ll make the right decision). Here’s a good example of a nicely-designed comparison page: Breeze: Compare Breeze with the rest. via @brilliantcrank

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Building a business? Here’s a good place to start: Justin Jackson’s What Amy Hoy taught me about starting a business. In it, Amy Hoy shares a good framework to start with: Define what you want to achieve Forget ideas, study a market Target people with money Make sure you like your customer Identify where you’re […]

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Brad Feld asks Who Owns Your UX Philosophy?. “I’ve come to appreciate the important of a single person in the company owning the UX with this person being the arbiter of discussion around how to implement the UX. There’s nothing wrong with lots of different perspectives, but a single mind has to own it, synthesize […]

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Cheap vs. transformative: The easiest way to lower costs is to make something cheap. Cheap components, cheaply assembled, cheaply packaged, with cheap software and services, and cheap support, sold at razor-thin margins, results in a really cheap price tag. Nothing exemplifies this better than the netbooks of the last decade. Sold at unprecedentedly low price […]

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