Age of Product’s Food for Thought of November 29th, 2015 covers: Product mgt future, a free UX ebook, product missionaries vs. mercenaries, Amazon’s Siri, Zapier’s post mortem toolkit, how to be a good boss, and Star Trek economics.
UXPin): Free e-Book: UX Design Process Best Practices
(viaFree download: UX Design Process Best Practices presents everything you need to know about the UX design process, updated to prepare you 2016.
Medium): The Past and Future of Product Management
(viaA few months ago, I was asked to deliver a presentation for a gathering of newsroom product managers at the American Press Institute. This presentation encapsulates my feelings about the future of product management based on experience, observation, and (numerous) mistakes. It is, in many ways, my life’s work so far.
Missionaries vs. Mercenaries
:In my experience with product teams, there’s simply no comparison between the morale, speed and most importantly, the results, of a team of missionaries as compared with a team of mercenaries. So why don't more companies don't get this? There are typically three main reasons I see…
theguardian): Goodbye privacy, hello Alexa: here's to Amazon echo, the home robot who hears it all
(viaWe had Rory Carroll invite ‘Alexa’ aka the Echo into his home. There was helpful cooking assistance, endless facts and figures, an amusing misunderstanding – and concerns over what exactly Amazon does with all that interaction data
(via Zapier): A Project Postmortem Toolkit: Apps and Approaches that Help You Learn More from Retrospectives
After action reports: Your team likely isn't thrust into harm's way on a regular basis, but maximizing the benefit of every action is still crucial to your project's success. Here's how teams at SalesforceIQ, Asana, and more use project postmortems and retrospectives to learn from every task.
(via Intercom): What we learned from scaling a product team
Given the abundance of abstracted advice, primarily from advisors rather than operators, and lack of actual examples happening from fast growing startups, we thought it would be valuable to share more about how we work at Intercom. In the last 12–18 months, over dozens of releases from incremental improvements to huge redesigns, we’ve learned a lot about scaling a product building team, and the nitty gritty involved in getting valuable product out the door as fast as possible.
(via First Round Capital): Radical Candor — The Surprising Secret to Being a Good Boss
Kim Scott has built her career around a simple goal: Creating bullshit-free zones where people love their work and working together. She first tried it at her own software startup. Then, as a long-time director at Google, she studied how the company’s leaders created an environment where the joy that people took in their work felt almost tangible.
The IoT Decision Framework for Product Managers
:In this post, I share an IoT Decision Framework I developed to help Product Managers tackle the complexity of IoT products. This framework will help you organize your thoughts and think through your requirements at each layer of the IoT stack, including business decisions, technical decisions, and more.
Medium): The Economics of Star Trek
(viaThe thing that never sits quite right with post scarcity economics, though, at least the very little that I’ve read, is that it’s always sort of an all or nothing affair: you either don’t have enough of anything or you have enough of everything.