Categories
Product Management

Trust Your Gut

It’s that time of year again.

Like clockwork, when the leaves start falling and the hoodies begin making their regular appearance, I find myself falling back into a weird pattern.

I begin believing that a decision holds no merit if it isn’t backed by bullet-proof, statistically significant data.

After all, a huge number of successful startup stories (and job postings) mention how they are a data-driven team.

So I’m writing this as a note to myself, and anyone else that stumbles onto this:

Not everything has to start as an A/B test.

And not everything has to be data-backed with statistical significance.

I’m not suggesting that you ignore the data, but there’s a spectrum between “trust your gut 100%” and “let the data decide”.

Especially when the decision is easy to revert.

Copy for the first version of a new landing page? It’s OK to trust your gut feeling if it’s easy to revert or update. You will analyze the results and can introduce new versions very easily if necessary.

User interface for a new feature? Put some early wireframes in front of a couple customers and gauge their gut reactions. You will analyze the results and can introduce a new version, with some work, if necessary.

Two drastically different business models for a new product? Lean more heavily on your research since this is probably a drastic shift in your positioning, burn rate and data model. These are much harder to iterate on since your customers, employees and investors may all be impacted.

It’s easy to fall into analysis paralysis, and take way too long analyzing all possible angles before making a decision.

But sometimes, it’s just a headline change or a really common UI pattern.

So it’s OK to trust the 20 years of experience and countless mess-ups in the past.

Categories
Design Product Management

Design Portfolio Site

When I’m sourcing for a Product Designer, I see a lot of portfolios.

Like, a lot a lot.

And today, it takes so long to judge if you are aesthetically a good fit for us.

In the last five years, there’s been a trend for product designers to tell more about their process. How they’ve been more helpful in other parts than just the aesthetic.

I understand why it’s like this.

Product Designers are becoming more and more product-focused (as opposed to design focused). Which is great. I LOVE a Product Designer who will be my partner in crime, not just my pixel buddy.

What I usually see on these portfolio sites, in order:

  1. Overview of the project
  2. Paragraphs about the research process
  3. Pictures of sticky notes, and other assets from brainstorming
  4. Early wireframes
  5. The final design

Problem is, when I’m searching for a Product Designer, I need to start at the final result.

Right now, I’m looking for someone who can extend our app and our brand. Not start it from scratch, not overhaul it.

And for that, I just need to see what your general style is.

Then I want to go deep on your process to see how you’d fit with us.

I also want you to talk about results. Talk about the impact your design had on the goals. Show me that you understand the spreadsheet side of your role, too.

What I want to see on a product designer portfolio site:

  1. Overview of the project
  2. The final design
  3. Research process
  4. Wireframes
  5. Results

Categories
Professional Development

Summer Sabbatical

The Great Resignation has taken another victim — me. About a month ago, I left my job with nothing else lined up.

It’s a weird feeling. I haven’t been unemployed in 27 years.

Maybe the occasional 1- or 2-week vacation between jobs, but never just straight up unemployed.

So much has been written about people taking stock in their lives as the pandemic has impacted them. I’m no different.

While I didn’t get COVID symptoms, nor lose anyone particularly close to me, the anxiety and stress of wondering if you’re going to accidentally bring a life-altering virus back to your family after just going to the grocery store starts to take a toll.

You start wondering why you needed to visit a store in person, and eventually end up down the rabbit hole wondering why you spend the rest of your day doing things that seemingly don’t matter.

This resulted in some kind of (self-diagnosed) anxiety and depression.

I found myself being very snippy with my family. This was in large part to finding little enjoyment in my day to day at work. I was an executive at a health & wellness company. Literally making a positive impact on the world.

But I had the “Sunday Scaries” every night of the week, and I had never felt this before. (I’ll write more about this later.)

I’d spend all day in my office upstairs, in a brain fog, feeling like I wasn’t making any progress. Then I’d come downstairs, stressed, and be stressed, snippy and short with my family.

The ultimate catalyst to me quitting was one of my colleagues being diagnosed with a couple of very serious medical conditions. She has young kids.

Imagine the last thing you kids or friends know remember about you is you being stressed, snippy and short with them.

I didn’t want to go out like that.

Life’s too short to hate your day-to-day, so I quit my job and am taking a little break to enjoy the summer while I can afford it, my kid is young enough to want to hang out with me (but old enough to do some fun things), I’m healthy enough to enjoy the summer, and the job market is OK.

I’m spending this summer with my family. Going to the beach. Working on my Willy’s CJ3A. Training for a half-marathon. Playing lots of golf and video games (guilt-free). Making a significant amount of ice cream and BBQ (not quite guilt-free, but close). And talking to a therapist.

I’ve been “burned out” before, but I never did anything to deliberately address that. I’d take a week off here and there, but never totally shut down, so I’m not sure I ever hit burnout escape velocity and just hung out in low burnout for a long, long time.

All of that unhappiness, burnout and frustration was multiplied by being locked down for a year. My wife told me that I needed to prioritize mental health over work, and I needed to be OK with that.

But it’s not easy. Specifically, the hardest parts today are:

  • Not feeling worthless. So much of my self-identity is tied to my job, title, pay, etc… who am I if I’m not employed at some fancy company, or with a fancy title, or working on some fancy project?
  • Being OK being bored. We live near the ocean in the summer, with a little cash in our pockets. The world is our oyster, but I need to remember that this sabbatical is about recovery — not making up time for something. And it’s ok to just sit on the deck and do nothing.
  • Not rushing to find another job. See above.

So that’s what the summer is like.

I posted a thread about this on Twitter and go so many supportive, thoughtful messages that I know others are thinking about this. I’m going to continue writing about it here in case someone else needs a little extra help from the Internet.

Categories
Product Management Reading List

Product Management Books for the Junior AND Senior Product Manager

What are the best books to get started in product management? Sometimes, I’m asked: what are the best books for any product manager? This is the ultimate list.

These are my go-tos to bring anyone into product management, or to level up your existing product management skills.

Inspired – this is like The Bible for individual contributor product management. I’m sure you’ve read it by now, but if you haven’t, pick this one up! Inspired is about all the non-tactical stuff of product management, and is where the industry has been trying to move the PM role to lately. My copy is marked up, bookmarked, and highlighted – and I know lots of PMs and ScrumMasters whose copy is the same way. Can’t recommend this book more.


Escaping the Build Trap – This is kind of a companion book to Inspired. I bet you’ll nod your head alongside every page of this. Experimentation, checking assumptions, of course. But also PM management and team building. This book will make you a better product manager, but may also give you good insight into words and phrases you can use to get the attention of people looking to hire product leaders. 


Good Strategy / Bad Strategy – I just love this book. Early on in my PM career, I recognized that different people had different ideas of what “the strategy” or “a strategy” was. That’s still the case, but this book clarified (to me) what the mental model of a generic strategy was. And that enabled me to parse, analyze, and ultimately challenge the strategic ideas of others. It’s good stuff, and has helped as I’ve moved into broader roles.

Categories
Product Discovery Product Management User Research

How to See the Ads Your Competitors Are Running on the Entire Facebook Platform

Did you know that Facebook will let you search and view ads that your competitors are running on Instagram, Facebook, Messenger and the Facebook Audience Network?

Read below to see how, and skip to the bottom to see how to take advantage of it.

You can use this information to tweak your messaging, positioning or even your ads. Here’s how to do better competitive research, in real-time, using your own competitions paid advertising on one of today’s largest advertising platforms.

First, go to the Facebook Ad Library. You don’t need to be logged into Facebook to access this page.

Next, type your competitor’s name into the search box. Check to make sure that the “All” tab is checked, so you can see all the ads.

If they have run ads on Facebook you should see them presented on the next page. You can see here that UserInterviews is running a few ads on Facebook right now:

Each item on the page is a different ad they’ve run. Here’s one from Loop11:

For each ad, you can see when they started running it…

and icons for which platform where the ad ran. Here, this ad ran on Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and Facebook’s Audience Network:

You can also see the exact advertising headline and image they used to get attention.

Clicking “See Ad Details” button brings you to a details page about this ad, and the page it ran on.

In this case, you can see that Loop11 only has one ad running, but ran multiple versions of it:

So what can you do with this information?

  • Click the ad! Check out the funnel your competitors are sending their customers through. Should you change yours?
  • Take a look at the types of ads they’re running to analyze their positioning. How is this different than yours? Are they speaking the same way to the same audience you are?
  • You can assume that if the ad has been running for a month or more that it’s converting well. Assuming that long-running ads are working well for them, what combinations of headline and imagery has been working for them over the long term? How should you react to this?

BUT, hold on. Don’t spend too much time worrying about what your competitors are doing and copying it.

Instead of reading between the lines of everything your competition is doing, you’d be better of spending that time with your customers instead.

A more direct, and proven, way of understanding your customers is to talk to them directly. ListenKit makes it easy to coordinate and schedule conversations with your customers, so you can make better informed decisions before your competition.

See if ListenKit can work for you.

Categories
ListenKit Product Management User Research

How to Recruit for Your User Research Project In Less Than Three Minutes (total)

The video above proves that you don’t have to spend hours doing unnecessary setup and coordination to recruit for your user research project.

The video is 3 minutes long, so you should watch it (if not even just for the stumble halfway through).

But if you’re more of a reader, the transcript is below.

Click here to sign up for the alpha program, and see how much easier ListenKit makes recruiting for your user research.

Today, I’m going to show you how you can have real people, real users, real customers,  signing up to talk to you in less than 3 minutes of effort by using ListenKit.

Our goal today is to get interviews on the books with as little effort as possible. 

This is where we want to drive people. This is a signup page on listenkit.com with a list of dates and times that you’ve said your users can book with you. 

They simply click the date/time they are willing to talk to you, and they’re done. You both get appointments added to your calendar at the right time, with a meeting link.

So how do they get there? Two ways.

Let’s say you already have an existing list of users. My friend Eric used ListenKit last week to schedule interviews with trial users of his app. He had a list of 180 users, and wanted to have 10-15 interviews to gather feedback on the trial experience. 

He logged into ListenKit and uploaded a list of customers from his internal tool. 

Just like that, he emailed a customized link to each of them. (Wait for the email)

They click the link in the email, schedule a time, and boom. All he had to do was upload a CSV into ListenKit. As his users sign up, he AND they got meeting invites on their calendar, with the Zoom link, so everyone knows exactly when and exactly where to show up.

OK. But maybe you don’t have an existing user list yet. Maybe you’re doing discovery work on a new user research recruiting tool. [look] 

but you DO know where to find the people you want to talk to. This is what i’ve been doing a lot lately. I’m using Listenkit to do research about ListenKit, so I have been asking PMs, designers, founders and researchers to talk to me for 30 minutes on Zoom. (In fact, if you are one of these people, click the link in the description below and let’s talk.) I share my signup link in communities where I know the people I want to talk to are spending time.. like LinkedIn, Twitter, Reddit, IndieHackers, wherever…. 

When someone there clicks the link, they are taken to my signup page, they enter their info, and they can select a time. Boom, done. 

Then, all I have to do then is show up in the right Zoom link at the right time and you’re talking to your user. You share a link, ListenKit handles everything.

And thats (CLOCK)

This isn’t smoke and mirrors. This is all functional on listenkit.com today. And it works. 

If you have a research project coming up in the next couple of weeks, or are willing to start one, you can use ListenKit for free in exchange for your brutal feedback.

Click here to sign up for the alpha program, and see how much easier ListenKit makes recruiting for your user research.

Categories
ListenKit

Starting a New Company In the Middle of a Global Pandemic

After five great years of working on software (and hardware!) to help teams win, I’ve left my stable job at Hudl to start something new.

There’s been an idea kicking around in my head for a little while now, and I want to bring it to life.

So, as of yesterday, I’m self-employed again and starting a new business.

That something new is listenkit.com.

Categories
ListenKit

It’s Been a Funny Week

This is not actually my desk or office.

The number of days until the end of my time at Hudl are in the low single-digits.

Which means that the number of days until I am officially self-employed and entirely reliant on myself for income are in the low single-digits.

It’s exciting and terrifying to be starting something new.

I’ve tried this before, with mixed results, so I’m not worried about that.

But this time feels a little different … in a positive way.

I’m 100% confident that the problem I’m starting a business to solve is a problem that is big enough for people to pay for.

And I’m confident that I can build the product in a way that will solve it for them.

What’s new this time is that I set a goal and a deadline for myself: 20 paying customers by March 1. I don’t want this to be a side project unless that’s the best outcome for it (but I don’t think it is).

So that’s added pressure, but in a good way. It provides focus.

Something I’ve never had a problem with was understanding that effort = results. If I write code, if I create ads, if I’m talking to leads, I will get results. I don’t mind this at all.

And to hit that goal, I am going to have to make trade-offs between those things.

If I’m talking to leads, I can’t be writing code to get the demo done. If I’m writing code to get the demo done, I can’t be working on planting the seeds for SEO.

This is fun stuff. I know people want this. I think it can be big enough to sustain my lifestyle the way that I want it to. I believe I can get it there with effort.

More on the business and the product soon (days, not weeks). Gotta get back to it. Just needed to get this out of my head, for some reason.

Categories
Uncategorized

How to Have a Bad Day

If I do any of these things, I usually end up having a bad day:

  • Skip my morning run
  • Start my day before reviewing my list of priorities
  • End my day without reviewing progress against those priorities
  • Have a day full of meetings
  • Create nothing (usually related to the day-full-of-meetings thing)
  • Only have work conversations with co-workers during the day
  • Talk to an asshole
  • Let self-doubt creep in (related to the asshole-thing?)
  • Spend the entire day indoors
  • Read literally anything about the current President or upcoming election
  • Open Morning Reader more than 2 or 3 times during the day (usually means I don’t know what to do and am spiraling)
  • Drink the night before

A surefire way to make sure I have a good day is to avoid having a bad day, so today I’m going to have a good day.

Categories
Reading List

Spleet the Animals

I’ve been in an extremely creative mood this week – from drawing to even a little music production. Computers are amazing creative machines and I’m glad we live in the age we do.

Here are a few creative things I enjoyed this week: