Better Product Managers, and Product Management

For one thing, our household finally has one of the former (you may have noticed this blog was on hiatus for a few weeks).

What else?  Generally, users are afraid of doing something wrong that will damage them.  They tend to give obscure (if any) feedback on how well you’re handling them. It’s hard to tell whether a little quirkiness is normal or an issue you should be rushing to customer support for emergency help.

The other thing they have in common is that product managers tend to react with a “more information is better” attitude.  Here! Read this incredibly dense user manual / 500 pages of What to Expect The First Year!

Because, of course, nothing says reassurance like making an already distraught user think and filter and worry while they’re trying to cull out that piece or two of information they need to feel okay.

So the product/design geek in me was incredibly pleased by the worksheet that Kaiser sent us home with.

Here’s what it does right:

• PRIORITIZES.  Only TWO things that you need to worry about with a newborn.
• KEEPS IT SIMPLE: All you need is a pencil and the ability to draw circles.  (Now is NOT the time to make your users worry about forgot passwords or flaky internet access!)
• CONTACT US: The phone number if something goes wrong is prominently placed and easy to remember.

It’s easy to get caught up in the technology and think with an all-or-nothing approach – we need to provide interactive help / online and searchable / beautifully designed.  What would our users think if we included a plain, simple, black-and-white text-only sheet of paper?

They’d probably be grateful.

I’m happy to report that we’ve made it through Day 14 and circled all the circles.  It’s good to be back!

Whether it ended in a job offer or a “no thanks”, when is the last time you had a job interview for a Product Management role that you felt actually addressed your ability to do the job?

Asking about past accomplishments doesn’t separate out your role from the environment (could you do it again in a different team, in a different industry?).  Asking for PRD writing samples proves that you’re literate, but doesn’t tell you anything about how well those requirements were understood or implemented.

As Eric Ries writes in a recent VentureBeat post:

I’m not interviewing for the right answer to the questions I ask. Instead, I want to see how the candidate thinks on their feet, and whether they can engage in collaborative problem solving. So I always frame interview questions as if we were solving a real-life problem, even if the rules are a little far-fetched.

These 8 questions are things I’d want to know if I were hiring a product manager.

They are biased towards smaller companies/more startup-like environments – they assume a breadth of responsibilities that may not be relevant for a big-company Product Manager.  But since there are no “right answers”, and since I’d expect any capable Product Manager to be able to think on their feet, I’d say they’re all fair game.

1. (more…)

How can you change people’s perceptions?  Show them (or hint to them) that other people feel differently.  Think of the classic Tom Sawyer, making whitewashing look so appealing that soon he has half the town bribing him to take their turn at it:

“Like it? Well, I don’t see why I oughtn’t to like it. Does a boy get a chance to whitewash a fence every day?”

Scarcity makes things more appealing.  A couple weeks ago, there were Girl Scouts camped out near the BART exits on Market Street – with commuters lining up to buy boxes.   I know, because I was one of them.

Feeling like other people know something you don’t – also makes things more appealing.

IBM banner ad with a "replay" prompt

I was flipping between browser tabs yesterday when I saw this ad.   I hadn’t seen what played previously and I don’t particularly care about travel congestion or IBM.  But that “replay” call to action jumped out at me immediately – did I miss something? There must be some reason why I’d want to watch this!

It’s funny that this would work on me (yes, I clicked replay and watched the ad) – because I’m testing out the same concept in Loomia’s recommendations module.

I know that “popularity” is a strong driver for people to read an article or watch a video – but I’ve also seen through A/B testing that a predictive algorithm that takes context and similar readers’ behavior into account is a stronger driver.  What if we could combine them?

For all articles over a certain “popularity threshold”, we added an X People Viewed This annotation.

What this implies: not only is this probably something you want to read, but lots of other people read this.

What users think: 25,000+ people can’t be wrong.  What if I’m missing out on something useful?

The potential social cost of not being “in the know” outweighs the time cost of reading the article.