Product Management and Design: Writing Requirements and Validating Solutions

Product Management writes requirements that identify the problems in the marketplace and quantifies opportunities for their solutions. Product Design assists Product Management in validating the solutions. Information Architects or Usability Specialists develop, conduct, and analyze surveys, interviews, and/or observations. The data from these studies helps identify problems and opportunities that are realized in the requirements. … Read more

Product Management and Design: Identify Problems and Quantify Opportunities

Product Management identifies problems in the marketplace, conducts analysis, and quantifies opportunities for solutions to the problems. Product Management develops a better understanding of the market, customers, and the customers’ end-users, to create Buyer and User Personas. Personas are a stand-in for a unique group of people who share common goals. They are fictional representatives—archetypes … Read more

Product Design: Bridging the Gap between Product Management & Development

I was recently asked by Good Experience to present a webinar on Product Design: Bridging the Gap between Product Management & Development, an article I wrote for Pragmatic Marketer magazine. Here it is (basically)… Product Design is the bridge between Product Management and Product Development. Product Management quantifies the problems, writes requirements, and validates the … Read more

Develop Visual Designs that Support the Brand and Enhance the Ease of Use

Once you’re confident you understand various customers’ workflow, activities, and tasks, it’s time to develop visual design—color scheme, fonts, iconography, branding, and all graphic elements. Visual designers develop the visual design elements that support the company’s brand and enhance the ease of task completion and efficiency. Medium-fidelity prototypes are developed based on wireframes and visual … Read more

Activity Diagrams and Task Analysis

Product designers have tools they use to define activities, tasks, actions, and operations such as activity diagrams, wireframes, and prototypes. Activity diagrams divide the activities into tasks needed to complete the user’s objective. A task is a unit of work. The task itself may be a single step in the process or multiple steps or … Read more

Define Who, Why, What, and How: Roles, Goals, Scenarios, and Activities

The product manager must have a concise vision for the product they can clearly articulate to the product designers. Put the customers and users activities in context of the market problem the solution is solving. Markets are made up of segments. We must be able to define our market segmentations in terms of their needs … Read more

Don’t Listen to your Customers!

OK, that got your attention… Sometimes the best way to satisfy a customer’s need is to ignore their suggestions. Customers have ideas about incremental improvements to their workflow, but if we develop something that is truly innovative, our ideas probably won’t make sense to existing customers. Sometimes when we solve a market problem, our solution … Read more

Emotional Design

Emotions have a crucial role in our ability to understand the world. Studies have shown that an object that “pleases” us appears to be more effective. This is due to the affinity we feel for an object that appeals to us – an emotional connection. In his book Emotional Design, Dr. Donald Norman proposes a … Read more

Customer Community

A customer community is where customers gather to share ideas, advice, experiences and feelings. Customer communities allow the organization that host the community to “listen” to the groups talk about their industry, brand, products, and competitors.  Customer-focused organizations create these communities to gain deep insight into their customers’ interests, decisions, and needs.  Customer-focused companies listen … Read more

Customer Experience Management

Customer Experience Management (CEM) is a strategy that focuses organizations around the needs of their customers. Moving customers from satisfied to loyal to advocate. As brands become increasingly commoditized, companies look to CEM to maintain their competitive advantage. CEM solutions integrate external and internal customer interactions to create a unified, consistent, end-to-end customer experiences. By … Read more

Customer Experience

A customer’s perception of an organization is formed from their interaction across multiple-channels. Customer experience is the sum of all experiences a customer has with these many “touch points” – advertisements, website, marketing media, sales call, customer visits, package design, instructional material, products, services, support, billing, etc. A great customer experiences creates loyalty, grow sales … Read more