I was with Mind Candy yesterday at the SiliconMilkRoundabout looking for some new talent 
It was a great day and it was really exciting to see so many London startups in one space. I haven’t seen anything like it in London before. What really pleased me was that all the companies were product companies. I remember the first dot com boom and London was a buzz on agencies that were growing like crazy to build websites for everyone and anyone.
Product companies are far more interesting in my eyes, they get to create and learn about market fit. They need to do Agile, Customer Discovery and focus on user experience to be successful. Which is all the stuff I love.
I am really looking forward to the next one.
posted by Dharmesh
As a product manager you are with a product throughout its whole lifetime. One of things to be mindful of are the different mental phase transitions that you must go through to ensure that your product’s first slice gets out of the door.
The last 10% is a key point where you must double or triple your efforts otherwise you will never ship. It is the point where your stories are complete and it kinda feels like it is done. That is the moment where people want to go to the new exciting project and it is the time when as a product manager you must start to really push.
This is the moment where you are regression testing, bug fixing, performance testing and working with ops to ensure that it can go into a production environment.
Remember to keep super focussed and to keep everyone on track. This is the hard bit and you also have to become harder and bloody minded about it otherwise you will never ship. Once you ship you will change mindset again and you can start getting real learning that will help you iterate your product and generate maximum value and revenue.
posted by Dharmesh
A lot of companies and teams say they are doing agile or scrum and it turns out it is scrumbut (Scrum without the core processes that make it work). In my experience the biggest reason for ScrumBut is that the company as a whole hasn’t bought into the cadence that scrum, agile, kanban (whatever you want to call it) requires to function well.
When development teams use Scrum to protect themselves from the rest of the business you might have something better than before, but you are not going to reap the rewards of agile processes. In smaller companies it should be easier to get the whole company to buy into the process. You just introduce it for the development team and then start shipping frequently. If they were not agile before they will very quickly see the benefits and as everyone is so close the company will adjust.
In larger companies this is much harder and the timescales for change might take a long time as there are people that can cause ScrumBut who are not even aware of the difficulties of software development. This is where someone has to hold that vision and has the patience to slowly push the company in the right direction.
A good way is to take a small self contained project and demonstrate the value and then use that as a model for other projects.
The thing is the value of Agile is pervasive and once you start on the journey eventually everyone is one over. Just as long as someone keeps pushing it along.
posted by Dharmesh
I have decided to work for a great company called MindCandy that make www.moshimonsters.com in London as a Technical Product Manager. Sardinia has been great for many many things, but I couldn’t refuse the chance to work there. Everything changes as they say.
posted by Dharmesh
One aspect of product development that is really important is to find partners or clients that are willing to pay for your final product. Without this level of feedback it is difficult to get a sense of whether you are going in the right direction. Another factor that is extremely important is to get the pricing right. Price it too high and you may get some clients but maybe not enough to sustain the business, too low and it won’t cover your costs. By seeking out potential clients early in the process it can drastically change the direction you may take and can give you invaluable information about pricing.
Add to this a regular feedback loop with end users and you have a much better chance of arriving with a product that people will love and will pay for.
posted by Dharmesh
One of the big changes that has happened since I started my new role is the addition of interaction designers (3 in fact!!) into the company. It was interesting trying to explain to the business what they actually do, but they thankfully took my word for it. It turns out that Sardinia has just started an Interaction Design Masters full of new talent wanting to work (it is funny how things work out like that). So I am very happy that we got to pick some of the top students.
As a product manager, the interaction designer backs me up in trying to think about the user and also frees me up to handle the great juggling act between development, design and business. They are necessary to create great products.
It is also amazing how after 4 months the interaction designers are seen as important and needed members of the group. Very satisfying.
posted by Dharmesh
I learnt a lesson the other day. I am involved in 3 projects at the moment, 2 of which we started from scratch and were started with product opportunity assessments. The third project had already been running when I joined. I mistakenly made an assumption that the questions in the assessment were asked and the project had moved forward from there. The other day, once I noticed a few issues come up, I organised a risks meeting and out popped some fundamental problems that I would have looked to identify (and hopefully resolved) much earlier in the process. My mistake was too think that what seems obvious to a product manager (who is thinking in a certain perspective) is obvious to everyone (who actually may have different perspectives).
posted by Dharmesh
I just finished building a flash website for a very talented Sardinian photographer friend of mine. Check it out at www.antoniosaba.com and let me know what you think.
posted by Dharmesh
We are currently developing a new product and are busy analysing all the data we have gathered from interviews and statistical data to create our personas.
My aim as a product owner (in my agile hat) is to arrive at a product backlog that has user stories that are fine grained enough that we can estimate how long things will take. The problem is that often it is difficult to get to the this breakdown as we lack information.
A natural fallout of creating personas is that you often have a set of large stories that describe how a user will use the product. This is agile speak is called an Epic and can then be broken down into smaller chunks for estimating.
Storyboarding is a powerful, tried and tested method of thinking about epics and I like to work with the interaction designers to visualise the Epics. This way we are also thinking about the interface and the interaction which is the next phase for the interaction designers anyway.
The storyboards are quick sketches that I will then breakdown into a set of user stories that can be estimated and hence be actually developed.
So an epic maybe something like:
“George wants to choose where to go on holiday as he has two weeks off at christmas”
which may breakdown to
“George wants to search for a beach holiday because he needs some sun and sand”
“George want to go from the 12th to the 30th of June because that is when his holidays are”
…
I will also add Epics to the product backlog but at a lower priority while they need to be expanded with detail.
posted by Dharmesh
