Why Product Managers Should Avoid Product Complexity

July 13, 2011 By

I recently came across a blog post by The Cranky Product Manager about product-line complexity. It’s an entertaining post. More importantly, it makes good points regarding the pitfalls of complexity. In this post, I will share my thoughts on this.

Product and product line complexity happens when we add too many features or when we add overly complex features. Often this happens over time as a product “matures”. It can also happen because of lack of rigor when writing requirements. When it happens, both your customers and your company suffer.

Here is a short list of… [Read more...]

Filed Under: Product Management, Product Roadmap, User Experience Design

Should User Interface (UI) Be a Part of “Requirements”?

November 20, 2009 By

Just a quick post to address a question that seems to come up quite frequently.

Should “User Interface” (UI)  be a part of requirements? Do UI specs constitute requirements?

Here is my quick answer to this question…
[Read more...]

Filed Under: Product Management, Requirements Management, User Experience Design

Personas are Great – For Wasting Time!

October 15, 2009 By

I’ve been meaning to write this post for a while. Recently, I saw a couple of blog posts on this topic (here and here) from bloggers I respect a lot. This spurred me to finally get around to writing this post.

This post is about using “personas” as a part of software requirements process. It’s not about marketing, sales or other activities.

At most companies, personnel with the job title of “product managers” or “business analysts” write Requirements Documents. These documents are then used by engineering teams to build and test the software.

There’s a school of thought that says that Personas are a very useful concept as a part of gathering and documenting requirements.

Having been a part of a few teams that tried to use personas in their requirements process – I consider personas mostly a waste of time. Here’s why…
[Read more...]

Filed Under: Product Management, Requirements Management, User Experience Design

Why I Switched From Tweetdeck to Seesmic – And the Lessons for Product Managers

September 15, 2009 By

An hour ago, I did something without much conscious thought at all. I uninstalled the Twitter client I used to like (Tweetdeck), and installed a new one (Seesmic). And there I went, merrily tweeting.

Then, I caught myself and started thinking why I did that. The more I thought, the more I realized that there are a few valuable lessons in it for all of us who are involved in building software or products in general.

Here is my story, followed by the lessons…
[Read more...]

Filed Under: Product Management, User Experience Design

Product Management – SaaS vs Traditional Software

September 9, 2009 By

Mark Kromer at TechProdo blog recently wrote a nice blog post titled SaaS Product Management: Is there a difference?

In his post Mark poses the interesting question (applicable to a lot of product managers):

I was wondering what differences I would find in my role as a product manager if the products that I was managing moved to the software-as-a-service model…

As our company makes a popular SaaS tool for product management teams, we have good first-hand experience in this – and I’d like to share my thoughts here.

My short answer to Mark’s question is… [Read more...]

Filed Under: Product Management, User Experience Design
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