The Power of Product Thinking

In his blog post Why Product Thinking is the next big thing in UX Design: Life’s too short to build something nobody wants… Nikkel Blaase shares: “When thinking of User Experience, we often think of a simple, beautiful, and easy to use feature-set of a product, that makes the user’s life easier. But as a … Read more

Take Part in Actuation Consulting 5th Annual Study of Product Teams

These annual ongoing studies share information that is meaningful to executives of product organizations in general and product executives in particular. Once the survey is complete, the data is shared with an independent statistician who conducts regression analysis. The result of this regression analysis are factors that are highly correlated with high performance on product … Read more

User Experience encompasses all aspects of Your Customers interaction with Your Brand

memorable experiences

User experience encompasses all aspects of the end-user’s interaction with the company, its services, and its products. It is an approach that puts the user at the center of the design process and incorporates user concerns and advocacy from the beginning. User experience includes everything that the user can experience – the visual appearance, interactive … Read more

ProductCamp SoCal Saturday, October 24, 2015 at EventPlex in Anaheim

ProductCamp SoCal is a free, user-driven, collaborative unconference for product managers, marketers and designers in Southern California. It is a one-day gathering of product professionals to share, present, network, learn, explore and discuss the latest trends and industry best practices. At ProductCamp So Cal you will: Discover best practices from many industries on state-of-the-art ways … Read more

Intervention Design and Iterative Prototyping

You all know my evangelism for iterative prototyping… Well, you can imagine my joy when I saw this month’s Harvard Business Review dedicated to “The Evolution of Design Thinking” and a great article by Tim Brown and Rodger Martin on “How to use design thinking to make great things actually happen.” According to the article, … Read more

The GE–McKinsey Nine-Box Matrix

Large organizations with multiple business units need a way to determine where to invest across all the units. The GE–McKinsey Nine-Box Matrix is a method for deciding how to share capital across multiple units by assessing each unit’s market position and profitability. This model looks at two factors: Market attractiveness and Business strength: Market Attractiveness is … Read more

How Many People Are On Your Core Product Team?

For the last four years, Actuation Consulting, has been conducting market research on what makes  product teams successful. I had the privilege of helping with the most recent study and they found that: Companies with less than $50 M in annualized revenues have between one to nine core team members. (42% of organizations have between … Read more

Sales, Service and Product Attract, Retain and Grow Customers with Personas and Journey Maps

Sales job is to find and acquire new customers. Services job is to retain and grow the current clients. Product needs to support both theses objectives. The product needs to provide features that new customers are looking for and features that retain and grow the current client base. In most cases, features that retain and … Read more

Determining the Right Sample Size for Experience Design Evaluation

Finding the right sample size is a tradeoff between the number of participants in the study and the ability to detect problems. The larger the sample size, the more problems that get uncovered. There is however a diminishing return as fewer new problems get uncovered with each additional user. And not all problems uniformly affect … Read more

Accessibility

Accessibility is a general term used to describe the degree to which a product, device, service, or environment is available to as many people as possible. Accessibility can be viewed as the “ability to access” and possible benefit of some system or entity. Accessibility is often used to focus on people with disabilities or special … Read more

Define Who, Why, What, and How: Roles, Goals, Scenarios, and Activities

The product manager must have a concise vision for the product they can clearly articulate to the product designers. Put the customers and users activities in context of the market problem the solution is solving. Markets are made up of segments. We must be able to define our market segmentations in terms of their needs … Read more

Don’t Listen to your Customers!

OK, that got your attention… Sometimes the best way to satisfy a customer’s need is to ignore their suggestions. Customers have ideas about incremental improvements to their workflow, but if we develop something that is truly innovative, our ideas probably won’t make sense to existing customers. Sometimes when we solve a market problem, our solution … Read more