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Blog Articles
Viewing entries tagged with 'Testing'
The Most Important Thing
There are several skills and activities that are important when coming up with great products. In my last article, I argued for the absolute necessity of having good data about how our products are actually being used.
Why Traditional Messaging Fails
Back when I was a product manager for Microsoft Office, we spent hundreds of thousands on positioning research. Messaging lived for years on store shelves, so getting it “right” was important. We thought about every word and enforced consistency, summarily dismissing changes from well-intentioned copywriters.
Product Discovery With Live-Data Prototypes
In my last article I discussed the keys to product optimization including A/B testing. However, I emphasized that this type of A/B testing is not the same as the A/B testing we do during product discovery. In this article I’d like to talk more about how we utilize live-data prototypes and A/B testing to facilitate product discovery.
Pleasure is Not the Absence of Pain
This time of year always gets me thinking about the nature of great products. Recently I was forwarded an article on Apple and the caption of a photo of an iPhone had this great line "Pleasure is Not the Absence of Pain."
High-Fidelity Prototypes
In several earlier articles I have talked about aspects of prototypes. I’ve talked about using them as the basis for your product spec, and how to use them to test out your ideas on target users, and why I prefer high-fidelity prototypes to their lower-fidelity cousins. In this article I’d like to highlight the top 10 major benefits of prototyping, and talk about some of the mechanics of building and using prototypes.
Prototype Testing
Readers of these articles know that I view the high-fidelity prototype as the primary means of describing the product to be built. I have written elsewhere why a prototype is significantly more useful to the product team than the typical paper-based specification. However, that's really the secondary benefit. The primary reasons to create a high-fidelity prototype are to help you gain a much deeper understanding of your product, and ulimately so that you can actually test your ideas with real users before you have your engineering teams take months to go build something that you have no real evidence will serve its purpose.
Prototype Testing
Readers of these articles know that I view the high-fidelity prototype as the primary means of describing the product to be built. I have written elsewhere why a prototype is significantly more useful to the product team than the typical paper-based specification. However, that's really the secondary benefit. The primary reasons to create a high-fidelity prototype are to help you gain a much deeper understanding of your product, and ultimately so that you can actually test your ideas with real users before you have your engineering teams take months to go build something that you have no real evidence will serve its purpose.
Product Validation
The past few newsletters have had references to what I call "Product Validation." This refers to verifying that the product spec (PRD) is describing a product that you know will be successful, but doing so without actually building out and deploying the product.