Step-click. Step-click. Step-click. Step-click. Step-click.

At the top of the steps I paused, and balancing on my crutches for a second, surveyed the Caltrain platform. In front of me was the one crosswalk where pedestrians could cross from one side (trains headed south to San Jose) to the other (trains headed north to San Francisco, which is where I need to go). But which side was which? There was not a sign in sight.

So I started crutch-walking the 200 yards or so to the other end of the platform where people were waiting. I’m pretty good on crutches but it’s still slow-going: step-click, step-click, step-click. I get three-quarters of the way to the other side of the platform and there is a sign: San Jose (Southbound). Oh no!

Now I have the information I need to make my decision - oh, but there’s no crosswalk here, I have to turn around and go back to where I started to cross over. By the time I had navigated back to the crosswalk, crossed to the other side of the platform, and started towards the ticket machines, I had missed my train.

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The job posting. The press release. The “team/bios” page of your website.

What do these things have in common? They’re all false conversation starters - companies offering up some information to reel customers in, then clamming up when customers want to respond or dig deeper.

Very web 1.0 - heck, very pre-web:

• Highly structured: constrained formats, language, and/or length limit creativity. (Customer: “Read one, you’ve read them all.”)
• Suspiciously positive: only successes are socially acceptable in these formats (Customer: “Hmm.. what aren’t they telling me?”)
• Emphasizing the uneven relationship: you only know what we want to tell you (Customer: “I guess they don’t value my input…”)
• Infrequent and static: you only get information when we have enough to it to publish, and then it never changes (Customer: “Is this still relevant?”)

It’s time to give them a social makeover.

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5 Quick Tips on Pitching… (Instigator Blog)

When pitching investors you have a captive audience. But they won’t stay captive for long unless you can hook them.

Ben Yoskovitz’ article is centered around pitching to angel investors and venture capitalists - something that a lot of product managers may never do. But his tips apply just as well to a pitching potential customers.

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“This is far too specific! How did we know that we had users like this? What if our users were actually 45 years old, or not college-educated? We can’t risk thinking like this - what if we think these are our users and then they aren’t?”

The origin of this outburst was sharing one of my team’s sample personas with a marketing manager.

Persona Analysis is the process of identifying individual person representatives for your target audience and fleshing out their traits, likes and dislikes, frustrations and limitations. For most designers, this is an invaluable tool for remembering “you are not your user”.

For product managers, personas provide a framework for writing use cases, justifications for feature requirements, and an easy way to educate other teams (engineering, QA, customer care) on the “why” of what they’re building and supporting. It’s so easy to think, “this is important to me, so it must be important to my customers,” but having those clear personas is a great gut-check. If someone on your team who loves tweaking website preferences is pushing really hard to support CSS skins, it’s not hard to look at “Donna” and realize that she will never, ever take the time to switch skins or customize a page layout - she doesn’t have the time and that’s not her priority.

In an ideal world, the personas for your products are based on measurable evidence. You look at usage patterns, look at the market for your industry, and you do some primary research with customers, and based on that, you can draw up a very accurate picture.

In a non-ideal world, you take whatever you have. In our case, our personas originated from three sources of feedback: our beta user community, the in-house usability tests we conducted, and voice of the customer feedback from one of our biggest clients. These sources painted three distinct pictures - a “hard core” early tech adopter type, a “time poor” household manager type, and a “high net worth” investor type.

Are these personas the most accurate pictures of our users? Probably not. But - here’s the important part - they are not us. Having the intellectual discipline to think not just as “yourself” or “teamself” is a difficult thing, maybe a scary thing. But what choice do you have?

Let’s go back in time: high school, out with friends.

The only available form of asynchronous communication was leaving a message on the answering machine. That meant that your message had to be good - you had to communicate where you were, when you would be home, why your parents shouldn’t worry, and anticipate and proactively answer their questions - all within the sixty-second message limit.

Screw up and leave them worrying? Consequence: next Friday night you’re stuck at home.

Since declaring email bankruptcy isn’t an option for me (at least not with work emails), I’ve tried to instill the “only one email” philosophy in my communications and am hoping it will catch on. It takes some getting used to, and requires an extra read-though before you hit ’send’ (which is always a good idea anyways).

After writing, I re-read and check:

• Did I cover the reason for writing this email in the first place?
• Did I make it clear what (if any) response I expect from the recipients?
• Did I anticipate likely follow-up questions and proactively provide answers?
• Is the email visually easy to scan? (adequate whitespace, appropriate use of CAPS or rich-text formatting?)

It only takes a few extra seconds, and even if it doesn’t lead to any new trends in email writing among my contacts, it has already saved me from a number of sheepish “oops, forgot the attachment” emails.