Digital

The best product managers start in UX

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ProductManager_UX_Venn

Some may find this controversial, disagree or just find it to be utter rubbish, but I believe, in the venn diagram of product management, it’s the background in user experience that truly makes the best product manager. I believe that in time, it will be UXers and UX designers or folks who came up through design that will eventually come to be the best product managers. You can have an understanding of the business. You can have an understanding of the IT. In both of those cases you’re removed from what the user are looking for and what they’re hoping to achieve with the product, and focused on the other facets of the respective discipline.

I also believe that there will be a time, when those designers have to tuck their design experience in their back pocket (design and UX thinking are likely second nature at this point or maybe that was just the case for me) and start to learn about the business and the technical aspects. This pivot is the thing that will leave some designers disinterested, some may even find it unsavory, and because of that I think that many designers will stick with their respective discipline of design, but for those who have that broad-ranging curiosity about all of the moving parts of their product I think it will be the UXer/designer that will be the discipline to lead product management.

Product Management is Product Thinking

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usage_ux_product_thinking

John Cutler wrote a great article here: We Need Fewer Product Managers. — To a Product Manager, it’s a provocative, and maybe disturbing title, but I definitely get where he’s coming from.

He writes:

“…We need more product thinking, and less product managing.

You don’t need a product manager to:

  • “Get work done”, and keep the team focused
  • Manage projects, and give status updates
  • Manage a team, and advocate for the team
  • Have “accountability” for shipping features/projects
  • Facilitate standups, planning meetings, and retrospectives
  • Talk to customers and users
  • Measure the impact of work, and design experiments
  • Write user stories and requirements
  • Test work with customers and users

We have roles (hats) for these things: project managers, UX, researchers, data scientists, business analysts, team managers, coaches, etc. Do product managers often wear these hats? Sure. Do you need a product manager to wear these hats? No.”

John’s exactly right.

We have roles for these things, for these many and varied disciplines. Of course, especially in the beginning, there’s usually one evangelist wearing a lot of these hats, but as an organization matures towards a product-centric approach, the role typically known as the product manager, rather organically, becomes that of the product thinker. I’m confident that, in time, the natural evolution that brings together, seemingly disparate, disciplines like UX, IT and business needs will be thought of as a whole instead of separate parts. This is the natural outcome of truly undergoing a digital transformation. That evolution is happening, albeit slowly outside of software development organizations, but it is happening.

The Evolution of UX

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As far as web design in Lansing goes, I consider myself one of the most vocal advocates for user experience design. When I saw Ian Armstrong’s article on the evolution of UX, I was sure that other folks doing web design in Lansing would want to learn more –  Check out Ian’s article here. Additionally, I will add a few of my own points based on my reading of the article, but a full read is a must.

lean ux design lansing

Ian states that “in its purest form, UX Design is waterfall based.” These days, in most circles where folks are talking about UX, ‘waterfall’ is a dirty word that hearkens back to rigid PMBOK processes and exhaustingly long requirements gathering sessions, but Ian’s absolutely right. You have to get a sense of requirements, gather perspectives, mock things up, test out assumptions, wash, rinse, repeat. It’s waterfall. There’s no way around it.

Ian nails one of the key problems with being outcome based, what we work towards with agile vs. requirements based. This is a conundrum that many of have faced and still work to reconcile:  “Whereas classic UX is requirements based, Lean UX is outcome based… Designers found themselves under immense pressure to fill a sprint backlog before they really understood what they were building. As a result, a lot of development cycles got burned on features that never made it into the final product.”

So much development and rework lost trying to anticipate product needs… <sigh>

I’ve read a lot about the Google Ventures Design Sprint, and attended a session at an O’Reilly Design conference where they talked about it, but even then, Ian’s explanation is as succinct and spot-on as any I’ve come across:

“Google Ventures conceived the design sprint, which allowed teams to rapidly define and test a low-fidelity prototypes. This jump-started the Lean UX cycle on emerging product teams and effectively eliminated the waste and rework problem.”

I’ll put a pin it there. Check out Ian’s original article.

If you’re looking for web design in Lansing that puts your user’s experience at the center of their work, then get in touch today.

New Partner: Pam Weil and Associates

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Pam Weil Associates Matt Borghi Lansing Web Design

I’m really excited to announce that I’m going to be working very closely with Pam Weil and Associates, a highly-esteemed East Lansing tech firm led by Pam Weil. I started working with Pam and her team in her recent bid for Ingham County Commissioner and it was an incredibly satisfying experience. Pam has a deep knowledge of tech, business and how all of these things can be brought together with digital strategy.

A Deep Bench

One of the most exciting parts about working with Pam Weil and Associates is the deep bench that she’s developed. With years of experience in the East Lansing community and working at Michigan State University, she has designers, network people, system architects and all kinds of tech specialists she can mobilize in just about any type of engagement.

Mission and Purpose

However, the single greatest thing that Pam Weil understands, within the scope of how she runs her firm, Pam Weil and Associates is the soul of an organization. First and foremost, Pam has a motto that she says often: “The single greatest motivator is progress on meaningful work” and she manages her business and help people with that motto always in mind. Pam truly believes that meaningful work is the most important thing that we can be doing as referenced in another quote, from John Berger, that she shared with me:

“As soon as one is engaged in a productive process,” he wrote in an essay on Leopardi, “total pessimism becomes improbable. This has nothing to do with the dignity of labor or any other such crap; it has to do with the nature of physical and psychic human energy…. Work, because it is productive, produces in man a productive hope.”

Here’s a little more about Pam Weil and Associates from their website:

Pam Weil & Assoc. is led by veteran IT leader, Pam Weil, who holds the highest level of of DR/Disaster Recovery certification, as well as a being ITIL certified professional with extensive experience in ITIL/DevOps. With years of experience leading IT operations, management and digital strategy, Pam has an acute knowledge of how all the pieces of IT and digital services come together and the knowledge to glean insights from where they intersect.

Pam Weil & Assoc. has a strong network and a deep bench of experts in all areas of IT and digital services, because of that network we offer a wide range of services to our clients. We specialize in delivering the service and information you need to measure and improve customer satisfaction, optimize your service delivery metrics, support budget requests and to clearly articulate IT’s value to your organization. Our services will allow you to optimize your technology budget’s impact and give you the information you need for high-quality planning and vendor management.

At Pam Weil & Assoc. we use an agile, continuous integration project management methodology to provide meaningful bi-weekly deliverables, as well as continuous status monitoring. Our use of the industry standard ITIL/ Dev Ops framework means our service deliverables will dovetail with future development and vendor supported service aspects.

Our clients consist of small businesses, non-profits and schools/universities throughout Michigan.

Anyway, I’ll still be here, but the strength and diversity of skillsets that comes with my partnering with Pam Weil and Associates is quite exciting and I look forward to the amazing projects that we’ll be taking on.