The Hungry Ant

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.

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).