post

Footer About

Footer Contribute

Footer Get Involved

Footer Links

Mind the Product

Product Management

Sunday Rewind: Video: Hardware vs software product management

Guest Post

How accessibility users drive better product development

B2B product management

Artificial Intelligence (AI) & Machine Learning (ML)

Building Product Teams

Business Strategy

Data Driven Product Management

Digital Transformation

Diversity and Inclusion

Minimum Viable Product

OKRs

Prioritisation

Product Design

Product Research

Product Development Process

Product Ethics

Product Discovery

Product Leadership

Product Management Career

Product Strategy

Stakeholder Management

🌎 <a href="https://www.mindtheproduct.com/world-product-day/" style="color:#FFFFFF;text-decoration:underline;">Happy World Product Day!</a> Be sure to celebrate product, yourself, and your peers today! 🎉

Why is hiring product managers so hard?

What burnout taught me: Lessons from product managers

Meet the new AI CEO: Klarna’s bold customer feedback loop bet

What I learned from building products in Africa

What does it take to build world class products today? Ezinne & Oji Udezue (Co-Authors at ProductMind, ex-CPOs of Calendly, Typeform & WP Engine)

Helene is a product manager at Neo4j, with a specialism in mobile technology. She has a holistic appreciation of what goes into building high-performing teams who can translate problems into product solutions which improve people’s lives. She likes conversations, especially the ones that challenge the obvious. You can reach out to her on LinkedIn

Product Manager

Helene Sanchez

In this November 2020 <a href="https://www.mindtheproduct.com/mtpcon/digital" target="”_blank”" rel="”noopener” noopener noreferrer">#mtpcon Digital</a> session, Cheryl Platz, a multimodal design expert and author of <a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Design-Beyond-Devices-Cross-Device-Experiences-ebook/dp/B08M4B7CMF" target="”_blank”" rel="”noopener” noopener noreferrer">Design Beyond Devices</a>, shares a framework for capturing customer context and deepening your understanding of customers inspired by her time in improvisational theatre.
Cheryl gets us thinking about the answers to questions such as:
<ul>
<li>Is your customer experience straining at the seams?</li>
<li>Have your customers moved from office to home, and your company’s charter along with it?</li>
</ul>
Designing for the next generation of experiences, she explains, requires deepening your understanding of your customer context &#8211; you need to be able to ask the right questions and set yourself up for success.
Watch the session in full or read on for the highlights.
<h3>Understanding Communication Modalities</h3>
As Cheryl explains, our customers have five senses and a small universe of devices, so why don’t we design for all of them? The mode in which our customers access our content is increasingly out of our control, so it requires us to be more flexible when we design products. Our instinct to seek a winner &#8211; like designing for mobile first for example &#8211; misses the point, there is no one true interface and most of the devices that customers use are multimodal, supporting voice, touch, and so on.
A multimodal interaction then, is an exchange between a human and a device where multiple input and output modalities may be used simultaneously or sequentially depending on context and preference. So people may choose to move from a desktop to a smart speaker, or choose to speak to Cortana when previously they typed.
There are five communication modalities &#8211; visual, auditory, haptic, kinetic, and ambient &#8211; and while we’re all working with the first three when designing products, the latter two will become increasingly important.
Cheryl says that by plotting information density and proximity on a quadrant, you can place all customer experiences in one of four categories.
These categories are as follows:
Anchored, experiences with rich physical presence where the customer is nearby, such as Fire TV, Xbox;
Adaptive, experiences that support close proximity and long-range interaction, such as Google Nest Hub;
Direct, where customer and device are in direct contact, such as a Fitbit;
Intangible, which is a hands-free experience where close proximity to the device is not required, such as Google Home.
Cheryl notes that she hasn’t listed smartphones in any of these quadrants because they’re “chameleons” and difficult to classify.
<h3>The CROW Framework</h3>
You must also understand your customers&#8217; context in order to understand which interaction makes the most sense for them, and Cheryl provides a useful framework for this. It’s called CROW and is taken from improv comedy classes. Cheryl provides a full explanation of the framework in the video but a brief outline is given below.
Character, what defines your customers? They’re defined by their attributes, attitudes, and choices.
Relationships, what connects your customer? The closer you are to someone or something the more likely you are to get emotional about it.  Relationships may be human to device, human to business, or human to human.
Objective, what drives your customers? Don’t obstruct their objective, timing and context matter.
Where, where will your customer be when you want to interact with them?
Cheryl then talks about activity models and patterns and illustrates this with the example of the questions she used to define activity patterns for Alexa Notifications.
In order to flesh out a cross-channel strategy you also need to have a device and transition strategy, a proactivity strategy, and a user data strategy, Cheryl says. “The same system that powers your website today can be extended to power a whole constellation of multimodal experiences,” says Cheryl, “meet your customers where they are by understanding their context and supporting the modalities and devices they need.”
&nbsp;

core/freeform

Prioritising customer needs with Dan Olsen

Understanding and executing effective research

Prioritised Fireside Chat: Make better product decisions with JTBD

Connecting to your customers in a remote world by Anna Lee Anda

MTP Panel: Using discovery and research to influence key product decisions

Understanding the next 100m users in India by Akhil Jayaprakash

Performing Effective User Research: Advice From C Todd Lombardo

Communicating Research with Pace Layer Mapping by Adrian Howard

Capturing Customer Context for Cross-Channel Experiences by Cheryl Platz

Iterating Your Voice Product, by Lisa Vigar

Product Management Foundations BST

Product Management Foundations ET

ProductTank Amsterdam

ProductTank Edinburgh

ProductTank Casablanca

ProductTank Des Moines

ProductTank Auckland

ProductTank Birmingham

ProductTank London

ProductTank Philadelphia

ProductTank Washington

ProductTank Reston

ProductTank Sydney

ProductTank Dubai

ProductTank Prague

ProductTank Reading

ProductTank Jacksonville

ProductTank Raleigh

ProductTank Rio de Janeiro

ProductTank Buenos Aires

ProductTank Atlanta

ProductTank Orlando

ProductTank Santiago

ProductTank Los Angeles

ProductTank Palo Alto

ProductTank Pune

ProductTank Bielefeld

ProductTank Köln

Communication & Alignment BST

Communication & Alignment ET

ProductTank Vilnius

ProductTank Paris

ProductTank Dallas

ProductTank Frankfurt

ProductTank Milton Keynes

ProductTank Tokyo

ProductTank Norwich

ProductTank Pittsburgh

ProductTank Hamburg

ProductTank Leeds

ProductTank Manchester

ProductTank Bristol

ProductTank Exeter

ProductTank Würzburg

ProductTank Columbus

ProductTank Malmö

ProductTank Chicago