This post is kind of self-explanatory. 3 screenshots that explain what makes Google what it is, and adds shame to our lives for never trying to do this in our products. Take a close look at all 3.
Tag Archives: pm_ux
5 more attributes of a product manager
It feels good to see an active product management community on LinkedIn. I was going through this post by fellow product manager Mohamed Anees Jamaludeen about key attributes of a product manager. He mentioned market knowledge, communication & product knowledge. I felt that I could add a few more traits that would be appreciated of a product manager.
Ability to sneak into the customer’s shoes
This is not the same as getting poached by a customer. A step beyond market knowledge, customer empathy is the attribute that helps a product manager sense the pain of the customer (end-user or business). Without this, he/she will never be able to come up with a solution that matches market expectations. It also lets you co-create with customers and effectively latches them to your product. After all retention is key in this world of infinite attrition, isn’t it? And empathy leads us to a focus on customer satisfaction, and a passion to deliver great user experience. A product manager should take great interest in delivering a usable product – the one that users love to use and helps retain them!
Ability to answer What, When, Why
Product managers should be able to answer who, why, what for and also know where, when and how to sell their products. The ‘what’ can be communicated to stakeholders via MRDs/PRDs/User Stories and prototypes. The prioritized feature backlog conveys the ‘when’, while ‘why’ can be answered on-demand to those (usually one of management, marketing & engineering) questioning the feature or its priority. Processing answers to these questions with some integrative thinking Continue reading 5 more attributes of a product manager
Local perspective on Product Management in India
As discussed in my previous post about responsibilities of a product manager, product management continues to remain the less spoken about profiles in the otherwise large Indian IT industry. With the growing number of products in the Indian webspace, the demand for experienced PMs is likely to peak in 2012-13. But there’s still time! For now, Product management in India is less concrete (in terms of the role), and holds huge potential as precisely summarized by Gopal Shenoy here. That post echoes the thoughts of quite a few Indian product managers. Here are my comments to few of the points:
@ #2:They manage products sold in the US
This seems quite obvious given the fact that a lot of product companies in India are either outsourced product development or developing enterprise products for global top companies and US/Europe are their biggest markets. Thus, most young PMs there will report to account managers or senior PMs posted on-site. Having said this, one cannot ignore the outburst of internet product companies catering to the local market, mainly into eCommerce & social.
@ #3: Too many titles for the same profile
Totally agree! Quite a few of us are left out of the product management mainstream because of varying titles conferred upon us: program managers, business analysts, software consultants, and what not. But no matter what how they’re referred to, they’re all doing the same thing – and some don’t even know they’re developing products (more on this, coming soon).
@ #4:Engineering & Proj Mgmt folks moving into Prod Mgmt
There’s more to it. Not just development folks, but there are freshers, folks from quality and even some from business who are keen to move in. Those who have understood the challenge & responsibility want to get at it on account of passion & enthusiasm, and not just a career ladder or salary booster.
@ #5: “They are confident, fearless and hungry“
When I think of Gopal saying that to me, my reaction is not other than that of crayon Shin Chan when he says, ‘Don’t praise me so much’ (which sounds funnier in the Hindi dubbing when he says, ‘Itni taarif bhi mat karo!‘) But that goes without saying for all of us – we are all way too passionate about our products!
Read the original post by Gopal Shenoy and some very interesting comments here: http://productmanagementtips.com/2011/02/09/india-product-management/
Why I love internet banking with AXIS Bank
Following, appreciating & criticizing change is so important in this fast moving world. Changes, especially those to internet products, is what Product managers should be keen about. One should spend time understanding 3 aspects about any product: changes, what’s good & what’s not. When it comes to internet banking, there are a ton of players out there and I know that you can’t get a sneak peak into all. And looking over the shoulder when someone’s using Net Banking is criminal. But you can always ask your friends for a tour of internet banking account (what are friends for?) with greater focus on features & design, and lesser on the numbers $$$!
Anyway, the point is that I’ve had the chance to look at quite a few online banking portals, of which AXIS stood out and had something to be written about. Somewhere around Diwali last year, AXIS Bank introduced a great new feature called NetSecure that ties your account to a computer via a special password (over and above your login & transaction passwords) which has remained unmatched. In December, they revamped their internet banking website which was otherwise constant since the UTI Bank era (Until mid 2007 AXIS Bank was called UTI or Unit Trust of India Bank). Trust me, when compared to a host of competitors (see below), this portal is a unique blend of style & a de-cluttered interface; an overall WIN in terms of the features, usability & design. Here’s what I loved, with some suggestions at the bottom.
1. A clean header that is in line with the branding (unlike the ICICI website that can be confused with the RSS portal). Another bank with excellent, consistent branding is Saraswat Bank: pleasant colors that looks great everywhere: from leaflets to hoardings to their website.
2. The landing page shows a neat summary of all your accounts Continue reading Why I love internet banking with AXIS Bank
A responsible species called product manager
Is that an amusing title? If yes, then product management (PM) has retained its title of being one of the most esoteric functions in IT. And this has reasons: compared to the epic number of service organizations, there exist only a few product companies, implying a fewer number of product managers – a breed that can’t be found in herds. Despite of a severe need for PMs within the chamber, the absolute demand compared to other profiles is minuscule, causing the profile to remain unexplored even by recruiters. Whether or not that makes PM a big deal, the ones that have tasted it will agree that it demands a unique mix of aptitude, attitude & innovation – that can’t be taught in class. And above everything else, it demands hell-a-lot of responsibility.
Most people destroy the niche status of product management (PM) by confusing it with project management. I would say, planning, execution & reporting is only a minuscule part of the PM profile. PM is everything about the product from vision to release which is not a simple 1-step transition. At least, it involves:
- Envisioning a product that solves a problem or improves some productivity parameter
- Understanding the market for the product & preparing a market requirement document (MRD)
- Creating a concept to get management buy-in; At senior levels with P&L responsibility, it may accompany projecting numbers
- Detailing the product functionality & behavior through prototypes & product requirement document (PRD)
- Maintaining a prioritized feature roadmap Continue reading A responsible species called product manager
Strategies to Log & Retain Activity Data
My previous article The Need to Log & Retain Activity Data argued the very need of logging & retaining data. In this post, I am listing out various logging strategies along with some brief explanation, utility, associated constraints and effectiveness of each method. As highlighted before, most people fail to understand the difference between logs/traces, audit trails and database time-stamps. Each of Log/Trace, Audit Trail & Timestamping has its purpose, pros and cons.
Log or Trace
When I think of a log, the first thing that comes to my mind is a trace consisting of developer injected SOPs (SysOuts), messages/exceptions generated by the server or any third-party component used. This trace could be written to a flat file or a database table.
Example:
2009-31-12 23:59:59 ::: LoginServlet >>> john.doe >>> Incorrect Password
192.168.10.101 – 10/Nov/09:13:55:36 -0700 “GET /logo.gif HTTP/1.0” 200 2326
instantiated Bean: com.detangle.ejbs.whatever
Java.Lang.NullPointerException at …..
Connected to ProductionDB: Saved record #862
Executed Query: INSERT INTO SUPPLIERS… : 1 row affected
inside getSuppliersForCategory: Category = “Laptops” Continue reading Strategies to Log & Retain Activity Data
The Need to Log & Retain Activity Data
In the current age of On-Demand & SaaS combined with multi-tenant hosting, we are likely to generate tons of activity data every hour. For this data to be useful to administration & support teams, IT has to plan for its conversion to information. The strategy to implement information logging should be built right into the development process.
The Confusion
However, to most people, that I have communicated with while developing systems,
- the terms Audit log, server log, audit trail, time-stamping, change history are synonymous
- implementing ‘soft-delete’ probably appears a development overhead
I don’t know if it is because of exposure to ERP or otherwise, but unlike these people, I am overly sensitive to recording audit trails. Are you one of these? Are you not convinced about implementing a logging strategy? Then this post was written thinking about you. Continue reading The Need to Log & Retain Activity Data
Google Transliteration: Type Indic languages in any text-box
Last week I stumbled upon this amazing service called Google Transliteration that can be accessed through a bookmarklet (jargon explained at the bottom). You can use this to type in one of the Indic languages in any text input box on the internet! (whether it really gets saved depends on the website 🙂 ) Language currently supported: Arabic, Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Nepali, Persian, Punjabi, Tamil, Telugu & Urdu.
Update (21-Feb-10):
After reading this post, one my valued readers questioned the utility of this service! And this is what I wrote back:
Few years back acquiring Indic fonts, and learning to use Indic keyboard layout was a challenge. Google eased that with a web service which takes away reluctance to reply in local languages.
With such a service, an application developer need not provide for transliteration as a feature (its a feature in Gmail). Creating a database with double-byte storage is enough to record input in any language.
Also, Transliteration can help people understand how words are pronounced when they are familiar with a different script. However, this may not work when the same word is spelled in multiple ways. eg. Mohammed [Read more]
With CJV languages, transliteration will often yield only an approximate result.
Continue reading Google Transliteration: Type Indic languages in any text-box
Face Tagging in Picasa
After uploading a few pictures last week, I spotted the ‘Add Name Tags’ link on my Picasa page. I knew this had to do with mapping faces to people, but what I had wrongly assumed was the simplicity. It took me less than a couple of hours to map about 2500 faces. I thought of sharing the accuracy of the tool & conditions that baffled it.
Unlike Orkut, where you have to mark faces yourself, Picasa automatically extracts faces. It took less than 5 minutes to extract some 5500 faces from about 3800 pictures. Another differentiator in the approach is that instead of mapping many faces on a photo (like Facebook, Flickr, etc), faces from many photos are brought together to be mapped to a person. This is what really saves time & effort and retains interest. Statistically speaking, atleast 60% of all my photos (about 1800 Nos) feature one from my family of four. So in the ideal case, I will finish mapping 1800 photos in 4 clicks instead of 3600 clicks (assuming 2 faces per photo). That makes Google what it is: not just an applications company, but a technology company.
I don’t know if people tagged by me will be suggested a priori to others in their photos.
The tool started off with my photos, possible because the count was the highest. I showed me about 12 full sets (x16) of my pictures. A couple of photos in the first set were quite old – about 12 years back. Soon, it started suggesting my name for all my photos.
Nokia E71: Missing & Suggested Features
After a fortnight with my new Nokia E71, I realized that there is a lot of feature addition possible with basic features. Despite of the E71 being feature rich, it has a great number of issues with basic functionality. If you know Pareto’s Law, these issues are in the 20% of all applications, which are used 80% of the time. I have listed down these issues in my ‘After a week with my new Nokia E71’ post, have a look. Here are a few suggested/missing features… Continue reading Nokia E71: Missing & Suggested Features