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Tyner Blain

Software product success.

Great Product Manager QuestionsMarch 17

The Laudi Group and Red Canary organized and shared a great set of questions for product managers and answers from a panel of product management leaders.  Steve Johnson, another leader in our space shared his answers to the same questions, and in this article, I share mine.

The Product Manager Questions

Hat tip to Steve Johnson at Pragmatic Marketing, for extending the discussion and providing his answers to the questions.  And thanks to the folks at Red Canary and the product managers who originally shared their answers.

I really enjoyed reading their answers – thanks to all of you!

Here are the questions that were put forth and answered:

1. Tell us about the best product you’ve ever encountered.  Why do you like it?
2. How do you know a great product manager when you meet one?
3. What’s your favorite interview question?
4. When is the best time for a start-up to hire a product manager?
5. What has been the defining moment in y

Business Goals and RequirementsMarch 11

One of my colleagues got into a debate with one of his colleagues about the differences between goals and requirements.  His opponent fired the following salvo: “[That] is not a business requirement in any company of the world…”

What you call your requirements is less important than how you communicate them.

Labels

I’ve worked with a lot of companies that use different labels to describe their descriptions of the problems that need to be solved. This is not another article about requirements versus specification (specification = design constraint, btw).

If you’re not a long time reader who’s followed the debates and discussions on this topic in the past, check out these articles and comments, where we’ve had some great discussions on that topic – with particular thanks to Roger Cauvin for keeping the debate front and center.

• Requirements Versus Design: Which is Which and Why

Measuring Great Design – Mad Libs Input FormMarch 2

I came across a really interesting article LukeW.com, showing how making changes to the way an input form on a website increased interaction by 25 to 40%. The changes reflect the value of thinking outside-in, investing in user experience, and performance measurement.

Bonus: the idea is cool.

Mad Libs Input Form

[full size image available in Luke's article]

The idea being presented is to replace the old boring web input form designed for a computer. The new, fun form is a fill-in-the-blank (aka Mad Libs) layout. The article is on Luke Wroblewski’s site.  The team at Vast.com created and tested a version of this form for the Kelly Blue Book site. [Luke cites Huffduffer.com as the first place where he saw this

Complete RequirementsFebruary 23

You give your requirements to the engineering team, and they look complete.  The team builds your product, you launch it and the market soundly rejects it.  Why?  Because your requirements weren’t complete – they didn’t actually solve the problem that needed to be solved.

Complete Requirements – Revisiting

Going back almost four years, I wrote Writing Complete Requirements, as part of the Big Rules of Writing Requirements series.  That article centered on two key ideas of requirements completeness.

• Data, not opinion, is the most important input into determining completeness.
• There is no absolute way to determine the completeness of your requirements in advance.

Completeness is best measured by market acceptance, so technically you can’t know if your requirements were complete until your customers buy (or fail to buy) your product.  This doesn’t mean you should give up on this rule of requirements – you can still focus on,

Most Engaging Articles of 2009January 5

Engagement – that’s what this whole product management blogging thing is about.  Check out what Tyner Blain readers found to be the most engaging articles in 2009.

Deep Dives

If you’re new to Tyner Blain, you may be surprised by the length of the articles here.  I joke that they are long because I don’t have time to edit.  Stewart Rogers jokes that they are long because I’m incapable of writing a short article.  If you’ve been here a while, you know what you’re in for.  If you’ve been here a long while, then you’re glad (like me) that I don’t write one per day any more.

Product Management is simultaneously a broad and deep discipline, requiring us to have a breadth of perspective combined with a depth of insight.  We then have to apply that in a market context, effectively navigating the political waters of our organizations.  Most of the articles here either try to skim the breadth of a range of related topics, or plumb the depths of a single topic.  Doing that in under a thousand words is pretty hard.  Most of th