What is a product manager? What do product managers do all day? Most importantly, why do companies need to hire them? Good questions. Well, the first confusion we have to clear up is what we mean by “product.”
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Lately, every app is “beautiful”. If you read tech news, you’ve seen this pageant: Beautiful charts and graphs. Beautiful stories. Beautiful texting. Beautiful notebooks. Beautiful battery information.
Aspiring to beauty in our designs is admirable. But it doesn’t guarantee usability, nor is it a product or marketing strategy. Like “simple” and “easy” before it, “beautiful” says very little about the product. How many people, fed up with PowerPoint, cry out in frustration, “If only it were more beautiful”?
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Many of today’s hottest technology companies, both large and small, are increasingly using the concept of the minimum viable product (MVP) as way to iteratively learn about their customers and develop their product ideas. By focusing on an integral set of core functionality and corresponding features for product development, these companies can efficiently launch and build on new products.
While the concepts are relatively easy to grasp, the many trade-offs considered and decisions made in execution are seldom easy and are often highly debated. This two-part series, looks into the product design process of Dropbox’s Carousel and the product team at UXPin shares our way of thinking about product design, whether you’re in a meeting, whiteboarding, sketching, writing down requirements, or wireframing and prototyping.
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This is the second and final article on how to sell and profit from digital products. In part 1, we covered many of the benefits of digital products over physical goods as well as the marketing philosophies to help you build an audience for your products. Today, we will be discussing more of the tactics required for a successful digital product business.
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At the end of 2012, I was talking with a good friend of mine who runs a small custom woodworking company. We were discussing business over the last year and a few things we learned. While his business did about double the revenue that mine did in 2012, I made considerably more profit.
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The true power of the web has always depended on the open nature of its technology. Anyone who’s interested can create a website, and anyone with an idea could turn out the next Facebook. Technology takes no heed of gender, creed or race, but is reduced down to code and the desire to create.
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What is “User Experience Design” exactly? Should you not start it unless you are fully dedicated, or should you embrace it in the process as soon as possible? Are all designers also user experience designers, or is it a separate expertise?
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The value you bring to any project as a designer or user experience professional isn’t only your ability to execute a series of tasks. Good clients will recognize and appreciate the guidance, recommendations and opinions that come with your experience.
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In digital culture, we are beginning to think of our output as products and of our clients as users. “Products” might be websites, apps or communities, and they might be created by startups, agencies or a couple of people at a hackathon.
This shift mainly means that we have gotten serious about asking how to better serve users, which reflects a significant change in the designer’s skill set. Designers will use the same tools they have always used, but they are now responsible for more than just the interface.
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