I’m not associated with BrandDoozie in any way, but I know a good solid splash page when I see one.  This site pulls together the core best practices into a good-looking home.  Without the consumer knowing anything about their product, they convey professionality, security, and value.

Let’s look at the elements that lead to the good cohesive experience:

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Here’s a metric most people don’t think of: hour by hour traffic breakdown.

Google Analytics shows hour by hour traffic breakdown to your site.   It also shows (with some degree of accuracy) where your users are coming from.  By combining those datapoints, you can get a good sense for when your users are most likely (and least likely) to visit your site.

To understand why this matters, think about the way you visit websites.

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Sometimes I feel like a broken record. Certain themes - something is better than nothing, you are not your user, always be asking questions, action drives more action - find their way into most things I write. At the king of that hill is “it’s all about execution”.

The blunter way of putting it is, no one cares about your great ideas. Because as long as they just sit there, good ideas aren’t any better than bad ideas or silly ideas or ridiculous ideas or insulting ideas.

Free Ideas. Just Add Execution. (Laserlike)

Share your ideas. Doing so will make you feel like you need to go do them, because of the small risk that someone will take your idea now that it’s “out there” and beat you to it. Sharing your idea will expose you to diverse feedback on it. Your idea will get pressure tested.

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You had a great idea and you’ve worked hard and built it into something real, something that you’re confident has value and utility. You launch it and you’re on top of the world… until you realize no one’s using it. Visitors to your site - and there aren’t many - trickle away without realizing what they’re missing

Last weekend, I presented a talk at Startup Camp called “Why should I use your product?” It came from my experience with TechCrunch and other industry blogs, reading a write-up of a new service, clicking over, and then seeing nothing to explain why I should try it out.

Most early-stage startups don’t have in-house expertise in user experience or marketing, and that’s the right call for them. But I realized as I was talking that my tips for them can be every bit as applicable for product managers within larger companies. Having full teams in user research, design, or marketing doesn’t necessarily mean that those resources are accessible for day-to-day projects. In an ideal world, you’d probably have an experienced marketer survey your users; you’d probably have a Photoshop whiz design your homepage - in your world, do with what you got.

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It’s an absolute mistake to think that art is not practical - or that business cannot be creative. The best artists are extraordinarily practical…they make use of everything they have at their disposal.

I just read an interview with Twyla Tharp in Harvard Business Review and found myself wanting to highlight practically everything she says.

In my experience, there are two big forces driving product success. Both are hard to pin down, but I’d roughly describe them as “business savvy, knowing the market, having the right focus” and “creativity, problem solving, identifying the open spaces and finding interesting ways to fill them.” They overlap, as you can tell. The latter is often called Innovation, and as a product management practitioner I read a lot of articles about it. I do not walk away from those articles wanting to highlight much in them.

There’s no secret to fostering creativity in a product management organization, and there’s no process that you can neatly clip out and import into your team to turn them into Innovation machines. It’s kind of like losing weight - it’s a series of habits, done daily, reinforced, stuck to even under duress. It’s hard to start but it gets easier. It comes easier to some people than others, but listen to Twyla:

…I don’t like using genetics as an excuse - “I can’t do this because I don’t have that particular genetic gift.” Get over yourself. The best creativity is the result of habit and hard work.

So how do you start building the creative habit in your product management organization? And what can we hope to gain from this?

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A roundup of good articles inclining you towards action:

Plan for the present and likely future (Ask a Good Product Manager)

A “good enough” solution might perform well for several months or years; unfortunately, those looking for the “perfect” answer will reject what is “good enough” and insist on a solution that is usually more complicated, more complex, and more expensive.

Not only is perfectionism risky and expensive, it’s an effective silencer of communication. As the bar for ideas gets higher, fewer junior product managers or engineers or QA folks feel empowered to contribute and lots of potentially “good enough” ideas go unheard.

“Analysis paralysis” and “utopia myopia” (On Product Management)

We all know that “analysis paralysis” is the state where one cannot make a decision because they get stuck trying to figure out all the possibilities…On the other end of the scale are those situations where a decision is made by someone with little or no debate, research or analysis…

Utopia myopia - I sincerely hope that phrase catches on, by the way - usually comes from either over-relying on domain expertise or feeling that analysis has to be all-or-nothing. Often the best tactic is to temporarily throw out the big goals and start with “what thing, no matter how tiny, can we learn/question?”

Set your priorities (Joel on Software)

So if you want to get things done, you positively have to understand at any given point in time what is the most important thing to get done right now and if you’re not doing it, you’re not making progress at the fastest possible rate.

Joel’s team used a variant on ordinal prioritization, giving team members a set amount of currency and allowing them to allocate it towards “buying” features.