I’ve just published Principles of Product Design, a list of ideas and principles that I try to keep in mind when designing products. I’ve been collecting these over the last couple of years while building product at HubSpot and working on the What to Wear daily report. I created it in the same fashion as […]

Continue Reading: New resource: Principles of Product Design

My good friend Christina Wodtke has been writing a lot of great pieces on OKRs recently. OKR stands for Objectives and Key Results and is a framework for determining and reaching goals that many companies including Google and Zynga now use as part of their product development. OKRs are a great way to marry product […]

Continue Reading: Good intro to OKRs

If you haven’t yet read Mills Baker’s recent post Designer Duds: Losing our seat at the table, you should. Mills makes some excellent points, including this one that I regard as his thesis: “In order to avoid losing its place atop organizations, design must deliver results. Designers must also accept that if they don’t, they’re […]

Continue Reading: Design duds != business duds

I like this idea by Dave Morin: Super Normal: “When you set out to create a new product, you usually do not start by trying to think of something completely new. You think of a product or concept that is already “normal” to the world, and then try to make it better. You make it […]

Continue Reading: Super normal product design

An interesting framework from Grace Ng in which startups(products) are categorized along two axes: the level of pain you’re solving and the frequency of use: When should your startup focus on UX?. I think this is an interesting way to talk about products and their real value. A lot of mobile apps I’ve tried are […]

Continue Reading: Is your product a vitamin or drug?

In his post Facebook massively overpaid for WhatsApp, Albert Wenger makes an interesting assertion: “the switching cost for users on a phone number based messaging services is at or near zero”. Think about that for a minute. People can switch these services in the blink of an eye and basically start using another one tomorrow. […]

Continue Reading: Accessing the address book: why mobile apps can grow so quickly

Facebook’s acquisition of WhatsApp turned more than a few heads last week. To help explain why Facebook thought the startup was worth $19,000,000,000, Jim Goetz of Sequoia Capital wrote Four Numbers That Explain Why Facebook Acquired WhatsApp. It’s well worth a read, and the growth numbers are just astounding: 450. WhatsApp has more than 450 […]

Continue Reading: WhatsApp’s focus on UX

There is often a difference between what you want people to use your product for and what it’s actually used for. Don’t confuse the two. Don’t be happy simply because people are using it…know exactly what they are using it for. Be honest about how people are actually using your product and interact enough with […]

Continue Reading: Actual vs desired use

An exceptional post by Stewart Butterfield, founder of Slack, the new team collaboration tool that just exited beta: We don’t sell saddles here. He wrote this last July as his team was readying the first version of the tool. It’s an excellent example of product vision, going way beyond what the software technically does to […]

Continue Reading: What product vision looks like

When building new products, the best way to ensure that your product will be adopted is to solve existing problems. If that doesn’t sound glamorous, consider these companies: Netflix solved three existing problems: the pain of return fees, lack of video selection, and the chore of driving to the video store. The iPhone solved the […]

Continue Reading: Solve existing problems