Don't forget. Your users are real people.
User experience shouldn't just be a designer thing.
Hello! Mike with Product Party here 🎉. Welcome to the Product Party newsletter. I would love to connect with more like-minded folks who love products, tech, and everything related. So feel free click the button and share. Have a great day!
Robot Overlord Joke of the Day
Q. How does a computer get drunk?
A. It takes screenshots.
We product managers always hear, “You’re not your user.”
I hear you…I agree with you. Mostly.
We may not be the intended user of the products we are creating, but we are humans who have collected years of experience as users of other products. I am firm believer that we should not forget everything we have loved (or hated…looking at you Microsoft Zune) about technology throughout our lives.
The biggest challenge that many product managers fall into is they can be overly firm in their belief that based only on their experience, their gut solution or way to fix a problem is the best.
I’ve been guilty of this myself earlier in my career. I wanted to make sure a decision was being made, and we could get a solution on the board and start working on it. However, the problem was that once these solutions began to be built and go live, I quickly realized how poorly thought-out and narrowly-minded the enhancements were. I could have saved everyone time and pain by having a couple of conversations with the people using the product.
I’m a big fan of pulling from the human-centered design process when creating solutions. I won’t go into depth on this process, but I will give you a link if you want to read more.
I struggle with always seeing the human-centered design process through when it comes to building products because, at times being in big organizations being able to prototype, test, and iterate isn’t always feasible.
However, I believe no matter the product; you should be able to have conversations with the people who are using your product, simplistically document their pain points and ideate potential solutions on how your product could evolve to help these humans no longer experience this problem.
If you are in a position where testing will be difficult to execute with actual software builds, create some mockups or process flows and share them with the people you previously chatted with. Instead of telling them, “Hey! Guess what. I solved all your problems!” consider asking them questions like, “Why wouldn’t this work for you?”
Treat your conversations and adjusted prototypes as the testing and iterations expected with human-centered design. If you put in the legwork and work on these designer-esque muscles, you will grow in your ability to understand what makes your users (or fellow humans) tick and create even better solutions for them in the future.
Video of the Day
Today's video is a Tedx talk on user experience. The importance of considering real people using your products is highlighted. Don't focus on vanity metrics; focus on the impact on the people using your product.
Article of the Day
Here’s a link to the article called “Are you the product manager you really want to be?”
Julia Nechaeiva’s article highlights how product managers can have an ever-changing list of job responsibilities. Use the model to determine where you want to be and compare it to your current position to understand your future career moves.
Here’s an example of a few images in the article that show the output of the PM Daisy form:
I would love to hear your thoughts on the topic above. Click the button to leave a comment. Let’s go!
Sincerely,
Mike @ Product Party
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PM Daisy was eye opening! Excellent way to think through your PM role.