Inaki Berenguer, MBA '09

The best habit of a Product Designer is to be a user of the product you are designing

From Quora. Good habits of Product Designers:

Good habit #1:

The best habit of a Product Designer is to... be an avid and pragmatic user of the product you are designing.

Good habit #2: Constantly and continually simplify.

Iterative product design is a lot like subtractive sculpture. You start out with a big block of marble and you have a general idea of the form you want to carve it into. So you get out a bandsaw and start removing huge slabs of rock. Now you have the rough form. This is your initial product specification. Now you get out the big chisels and start to discern head, arm, legs. Now you have your working prototype.

Good Habit #3: Listen to the users.

Constantly get feedback. Read ALL the customer service emails. Drop your defenses and really really listen to criticism. Learn to discern when criticism is valid, and when it is aberrant (this is hard).

Good Habit #4: Iterate. Iterate. Iterate.

Make lots of small and fast changes. Make the versioning cycles as fast as possible.

Good Habit #5: Plan conservatively.

Realise that all great things take time, and that design of new products is truly fret with unknowns. Make conservative and realisable milestones, and simultanously push for more every time you feel slack in the process.

Good Habit #6: Deliver agressively.

In my game development studio we used to have many a late night codefest. One of our engineers was famous for having an intuitive grasp of the state of code. And sometimes, at 4am, he would simply throw down his mouse, and yell "Ship it!" It was ballsy, and it was usually right. Nothing tests the mettle of a product like getting it into the hands of users.

Good Habit #7: Revisit the product roadmap often, and adjust the sails accordingly.

A product is a living thing. A roadmap is a long term plan which ideally translates big vision into material function. As you recieve user and marketplace feedback, you will inevitably need to adjust your roadmap. Do this on a regular basis so that the document stays alive. Reviewing the roadmap also can help you stay on strategic track for the long term.

 

 

Collective wisdom and serendipitous conversations when building a product

Michael Katz (founder of Interclick) talking about the advantages of working from the office when you are a startup and you need to make a lot of decisions:

Working from home may be convenient for some but it represents a huge opportunity cost to the team, especially a team that's trying to turn things around.

The value in human interaction is greater collective wisdom as a result of improved communication & collaboration.

It's really all about improving the likelihood that meaningful interaction will translate to meaningful (shareholder) value.

 

Bill Gates wants to fix world problems with data analytics

You need analytics and KPIs in order to get better. If not, you will only have erratic progress. 

"You can achieve incredible progress if you set a clear goal and find a measure that will drive progress toward that goal. 

Measuring tools allowed inventors to see if their incremental design changes led to the improvements—such as higher power and less coal consumption—needed to build better engines. There's a larger lesson here: Without feedback from precise measurement, invention is "doomed to be rare and erratic." With it, invention becomes "commonplace.""

Read more here

Product managers and CEOs need to be obsessed with product quality

The importance of eating your own dog food, being obsessed with your product quality, and how Reid Hoffman got convinced that Jeff Weiner was the right one for the CEO position at LinkedIn (I have seen this in many successful startups and big companies for CEOs and product managers):

"Jeff went above and beyond to immerse himself in Linkedin. For example, just a few months after Jeff joined LinkedIn, several engineers were sitting around at midnight in between bug fixes for what ultimately turned into a very late night product launch that extended into the early morning. One of the engineers decided to pull a graph of their new CEO’s login activity on LinkedIn.com. People were shocked: the only time period during the launch when Jeff was not consistently logged into the site was between 3:30 – 4:00 AM. It turned out he was obsessed with the product quality — just like a true founder. To this day, Jeff is renowned for being one of LinkedIn’s most active users and is known for his ability to catch bugs before our developers."

Read more here.

 

The mobile apps I used the most in 2012

The mobile apps I used the most in 2012, kind of expected:

• Pixable
• Facebook
• Native email
• Twitter
• Camera+
• Whatsapp
• Skype
• Google Maps
• Kayak
• My Trips from Kayak
• IMDB
• Spotify
• Nike+
• Flipboard on iPad
• Hockeyapp

I used frequently

• Netflix on iPad
• Signeasy
• Dropbox
• Viber
• Amazon
• Evernote
• Tripit (although now I use My Trips from Kayak for that)
• Seamlessweb
• LinkedIn
• Airbnb
• Flixster
• Shazam
• Yipit
• Pandora
• CadenaSer
• Instapaper (although I have stopped using it)

Apps I may use more in 2013

• Uber
• Viber
• Voxer
• Snapchat
• Contactive
• Photofeed
• One of the to-do list apps (like clear)

Apps I wished I had used more

• Path
• Summly
• Mint

Apps I wished I had on mobile

• Mixpanel

Happy New Year!

The entire Pixable team wishes you a great entry into 2013 which will be a great year. I want to thank you for being there with us but especially for making Pixable your daily addiction to browse the photos that matter to you the most. Without you we would not have reached more than 5 million users (and growing). For 2013 we have prepared many new features and products. Stay tunned. Happy New Year!

 

Making your own luck through networking

Very useful advice by Kathryn Minshew about making your own luck through networking:

• ‎"Hand in hand with this philosophy comes another, highly complementary strategy: When you want something, broadcast that to everyone you meet."
• "Always say yes to invitations, even if it's not clear what you'll get out of the meeting"
• "Show up, and often. This should be obvious, but as a busy entrepreneur it's amazing how unappealing it is to socialize with people you don't know when you're working 16-hour days. But everything starts with showing up"
• "Be the person they saw yesterday as often as possible. They will think of you if there is an opportunity the next day"

Opportunities or hurdles?

According to a possibly apocryphal story, the head of sales of a multinational apparel company dispatched two salespeople to open a new territory in a predominantly rural country.

After scouting a few villages, the first salesman rang the head office. “I’m returning on the next flight,” he said. “We can’t sell shoes here. Everybody goes barefoot.”

Meanwhile, the second salesman was busy e-mailing the head of sales: “The prospects are unlimited. Nobody wears shoes here!”

In a professional setting, the successes teach people (not failures)

"Best companies succeed because they have proprietary knowledge on how to be successful. Over time, the knowledge of what it takes to succeed is passed down from senior to junior employees and becomes part of the companies’ institutional memory. In a professional setting, it’s not the failures that teach people the most, but the successes. Failures teach us a lot personally, but that's a different story", from Techcrunch

Decisions

"When you are faced with a decision, the best thing is to do the right thing, the next best thing is to do the wrong thing, and the worst thing is to do nothing."