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)

With his background in technical editing, community building and product marketing, Chris' approach to product management is inherently centered around user narratives. He spent the first few years of his career working with the B2B developer products, prototyped an experimental technical publishing platform along the way, and then kick-started the Mind the Product platform. You can find him at ProductTank, or on twitter as @camassey.

Product Manager

Chris Massey

<p><a href="http://twitter.com/DrAnnaLCox" target="_blank">Anna Cox</a> is Reader in Human-Computer Action (HCI) at UCL Interaction Centre. She and her colleagues investigate how best to design technologies to make them usable, useful, and to create a positive user experience in the context of the real world.</p>
<p>What she and her colleagues have found (And this shouldn&#8217;t surprise any of us) is that how people react to and use digital products in the real world is a far cry from how the behave in controlled environments! In this talk, Anna shows us how even a basic understanding of human psychology can be a huge advantage when it comes to design digital products that people love.</p>
<p>Modern smartphones, smart watches, and even smart rings are pushing the interfaces of digital products further and further into our physical world, to the point where it&#8217;s actually quite challenging to disentangle yourself from engaging with your digital products, even when you want to. Dr Cox&#8217; research has been exploring how these kinds of ubiquitous notification systems have impacted the way we use our devices and services.</p>
<h2>Digital Products Mix Contexts</h2>
<p>One of the most obvious examples of this impact is the blending of work and non-work activities &#8211; specifically, notifications from one context interrupting you while you&#8217;re in the other (e.g. work email notifications while you&#8217;re having dinner, or a dinner invitation from your friend while you&#8217;re writing a report). Of course, in some cases, these cross-overs can be hugely valuable (such as an alert that your child has had an accident).</p>
<p>The challenge here is that these interruptions force us to make decisions about the relative importance of the incoming information, and if we do engage with the alert, then we&#8217;re disengaged with whatever is happening wherever we are physically present (e.g. a meeting, dinner, etc.). More importantly, human attentional capacity is fundamentally quite limited. Context switching costs us a significant amount of time and cognitive energy.</p>
<p>Interestingly, we don&#8217;t only lose attention when our devices alert us &#8211; we typically volunteer our attention to our devices readily (often when we&#8217;re bored, or not particularly interested in our current task, or when we&#8217;re concerned we might miss out on something at work).</p>
<h2>Different People, Different Preferences</h2>
<p>Some people actively enjoy managing multiple different kinds of tasks, in different kinds of environments and at different times. These so-called &#8220;Integrators&#8221; do not have rigid boundaries between work and non-work, and so find notifications and alerts extremely useful.</p>
<p>On the other hand, &#8220;Separators&#8221; maintain strong boundaries between the different parts of their lives (as an example, it&#8217;s difficult for a surgeon to take her work home!). Of course, it&#8217;s likely that people&#8217;s personal preferences along these lines actually lead them to certain professions, so it&#8217;s likely that the vast majority of (in this example) surgeons are naturally &#8220;Separators&#8221;, and that they found medicine a perfect vocation.</p>
<h3>The Shape of Boundaries</h3>
<p>People draw boundaries around different parts of their digital lives using different accounts, devices and apps. As a simple example, almost everyone has multiple email addresses, and they use different addresses for different parts of their lives. You could easily substitute &#8220;email address&#8221; for &#8220;devices&#8221;, and in this way you can see how &#8220;separators&#8221; create boundaries, or equally how &#8220;integrators&#8221; will pool everything into a single email account or device.</p>
<p>What&#8217;s more interesting is the people somewhere in-between Integrators and Separators &#8211; their approach was to use multiple apps, allowing all their information to be on a single device but separated into different applications (even if it&#8217;s different browsers with particular login details saves!)</p>
<h2>Summary</h2>
<ol>
<li><strong>Read the research</strong> &#8211; check out &#8220;<a href="http://theconversation.com/uk" target="_blank">The Conversation</a>&#8221; &#8211; academic research can be very dry, but that is slowly changing. Given how much insight academic research can give, it&#8217;s worth digging into, or even just asking the right academics!</li>
<li><strong>Study adoption</strong> &#8211; Test your products in the lab, but it is essential that you study how your product is adopted in the real world &#8211; what it is used alongside, etc.</li>
<li><strong>Enable personalisation</strong> &#8211; as we&#8217;ve seen, people often have wildly different preferences for what information they get from their digital products, and when. It&#8217;s worth enabling multiple ways (or at least thoughtful ways) for users to personalise what kind of information alerts your products are sending them.</li>
</ol>
<p>Finally &#8211; your team is also split up into separators and integrators! They will react to information differently, and you should understand and respect that in order to form the best possible relationship with them.</p>


core/freeform

What good product design looks like – Miguel Fernandez (VP of Product Design, Slack)

10x Product X Design: Product and research team collaboration by Jane Austin

Learnings from London: What is it like to hold Google in your hand?

Learnings from London: How to build a billion dollar app

Product Systems: How to manufacture lightning in a bottle by Oji Udezue

Product management meets UX design by Tanmay Goel, Emi Kwon, Simran Kaur

Designing a sustainable future by Leyla Acaroglu

Making Hard Product Decisions for All the Right Reasons

Product Vision 2020

The Importance of Empathy, By Jack Sheppard

Managing Interruptions = Better Digital Product Design

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 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