Video: The Coolest Job in the World
Imagine being just like James Bond. When 007 walks into an exclusive bar, the barman recognises him and pours his vodka martini (shaken not stirred, of course). You don’t see Bond having to pull out his wallet to pay, he is automatically extended credit. At ProductTank January, Yuval Samet (@yuvalsamet) of Klarna talks about how they enable these “James Bond” user experiences by streamlining the checkout flow.
As Chief Product Officer at Klarna, Yuval claims to have the coolest job in the wold. He flew in from Stockholm to talk at ProductTank about how Klarna has grown to handle over 30% of Sweden’s e-commerce transactions, outlining key success factors and experiences along the way.
In this talk, Yuval demos their slick checkout process, one which has resulted in a thirty percent increase in conversion, and talks about how the strong product management culture, from top to bottom, has contributed to their success.
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UserVoice + ProdPad = Superior Customer Support
It goes without saying how important it is to listen to your customers. If you’re collecting ideas from a large group of external users, you should certainly have a look at using UserVoice.
UserVoice is a great tool for gathering ideas from your user base, and uses voting to help sound out which are the most popular ideas. Combined with a set of tools to communicate online help directly back to the folks who are asking for various features, it makes for a powerful voice-of-customer tool.
Combined with ProdPad, it’ll give you a huge advantage in providing awesome customer support while building toward your product vision.
ProdPad lets you outline your product strategy and create visual roadmaps. It also serves as an idea management and user feedback system for your team to use internally.
The new integration with UserVoice will allow you to take the most popular requests and send them into ProdPad as either a new Idea or a new piece of User Feedback. These, in turn, can be put on your roadmap, or spec’d out and sent to development, closing the loop between what users want and what you’re actually building.
Setting up the UserVoice integration
You can set this up by heading to the Integrations & API tab in ProdPad, and then clicking on the UserVoice icon underneath the “Add an Integration” option.
When setting up an integration with UserVoice, you have the choice of having it create new ideas in ProdPad, or logging it as new user feedback (which can then be turned into ideas). You’ll be asked to create a ‘trigger’ on the UserVoice side, either when a new suggestion is made, or (if you plan on curating the suggestions first), when you change the status of a suggestion in UserVoice to something specific that you decide on:
Once you’ve created the mapping between UserVoice and ProdPad, you’ll then simply need to plug your API key into UserVoice following our simple instructions, and the integration is set up.
ProdPad also has integrations available for the other tools you use, such as JIRA, Rally, Trello, Pivotal Tracker and more. Integations are available for any Plus, Premium or Enterprise account.
Getting the most out of the UserVoice integration
Connect UserVoice to User Feedback and Ideas in ProdPad
To make the most out of this integration, use UserVoice to provide an end-user portal for gathering ideas and feedback. When an idea garners enough attention, consider sending it on to ProdPad, where it can be fleshed out in more detail. In ProdPad, it can be broken down into user stories, associated with specific products or areas on your product roadmap, and included with detailed specifications including mockups and functional specs.
Suggestions from UserVoice can be turned into User Feedback in ProdPad, and then grouped into larger ideas or initiatives that your product development team might want to work on.
On the flip side, you can send these ideas or user stories on to your development team, either individually or via one of our direct integrations with tools such as Pivotal Tracker, Trello, JIRA or others. As the features gets worked on and updated in your development tool, the status for the original idea in ProdPad will get updated.
Once the idea shows as being released, you’ll know exactly which customers asked for it and when, thanks to the User Feedback integration with UserVoice!
Try the integration today, and let us know what you think in the comments below or directly at hello@prodpad.com.
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Video: Stripe uses Product as a Competitive Advantage
How can an API for payments, admittedly not the most alluring of products, still garner so much love from its users? Andy Young (@andyy) asked the same question at ProductTank January.
Andy works on UK things at Stripe, a company in the payments space that just yesterday got funded with a valuation of $1.75B, talked about how product can be a competitive advantage.
Andy argued that creating a product that is only ten percent better doesn’t create a sustainable advantage, for competitors can easily catch up. But by having a clear, total focus on building a better product, Stripe was able to build a significantly better offering.
In this talk, Andy discusses how Stripe was able to break traditional molds and find a product process that worked for them… including having completely transparent emails and no product managers at all!
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Video: The Future is not an Internet-Connected Egg Box
The recent trends, of everything becoming connected, show no signs of letting up. By 2020, predictions state that over 50 billion items will be Internet-connected, from lightbulbs to plugs to fridges. Even yoga mats, argued Alex Jones, a business design consultant at Fjord, at the ProductTank November event – as a rule of thumb, all devices priced more than $25 will become a connected device.
Alex indicates that the connectivity trend will start with one-way communication, and will lead through to many-to-may communication as more devices become connected. However, he cautioned that just because a device could be connected, it doesn’t mean it should be.
Connectivity is a novelty, but it doesn’t make a product meaningful by itself.
Alex provided clear tips for product managers to create meaningful products over the course of this connectivity trend.
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How Today’s Companies are Product Roadmapping to Boost Business
Manage your Product Portfolio Roadmap on ProdPad
Product roadmapping helps the product team and high-level management realize their goals by putting in place a long term plan, which will ascertain what schemes and initiatives need to be put in place for their product to be successful.
As far as product development goals, product roadmapping determines how your product’s design will be changed and altered over time and how you will utilize technology to make this happen. Roadmapping helps to sequence the steps in your business plan, without getting tied into the specific dates and deliverables that might be tackled down the line.
The Product Roadmapping Process
Building a product roadmap is a process that contains many elements and steps for it to be successful. The process of product roadmapping synthesizes information on:
- The new product lines your business will design, develop, and produce.
- The new software and tools you will require to do these developments.
- The timescale (without specific dates) and order of these developments.
- It can even help you decide which technologies to invest in, to get a design that is appropriate for your company.
Roadmapping requires a strategic approach to exploit its uses as much as possible. It cleverly shows which areas of focus will be considered, helping to broadly allocate resources while showing a plan for a product that’s gradually improved and built upon. The top-down approach, of looking at the grander product vision to give a sense of direction, is made so that any proposed projects are relevant and contribute to the image that your company has in mind. Mapping out your results and objectives in a careful and considered manner is the best way to do a strategic roadmap and will help you to achieve your goals.
The Objectives of Roadmapping
The principal aim of roadmapping is to induce an innovative and long term plan for the product, considering what the business needs, what the users and customers want, and what technology needs to be in place to get there. When building and changing your product roadmap, you should have these 3 objectives in mind:
- Examine the prospects of your company’s future in an unbiased and neutral manner.
- Progress onto the next stage after assessment to develop responses to anticipated market needs and make sure that you preempt any requirements that your customers may have in the future.
- Appreciate and align your technology development and implementation plans with the changing nature of the market.
Using ProdPad to Manage your Roadmap
Export your product roadmap so you can include it in other files
Once you capture your product vision in ProdPad, you can put your roadmap together using ideas and user stories already in your backlog, and update it with a simple drag and drop interface. You can then tag and color code your roadmap so it’s easy to understand how each area is related to the next.
The roadmap is managed by broad time horizons: Current, Near Term and Future. This helps manage stakeholder expectations by not recording specific promises on delivery dates that are too far down the line to be exact on, and allows you to outline a plan for delivering your product vision that’s anywhere from 18 to 36 months long, the typical length of a roadmap.
If you’re managing more than one product, you can manage multiple product roadmaps in ProdPad, and view either individual product roadmaps, the roadmap for a specific product line or grouping of products, or a roadmap for your entire product portfolio.
Once your product roadmap is done, you can export it easily. Export the printer friendly version to bring to meetings or stick up on the office walls, or paste a copy into an important presentation like your Board pack, or simply embed it on your site or intranet like we have: http://www.prodpad.com/our-roadmap/
Learn more about product roadmapping or start your free trial today!
Let us know in the comments how you’re using your product roadmap, or get in touch at hello@prodpad.com any time with your feedback or questions.
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Idea Management When Developing a Product: Good Ideas are Fleeting and Need Organization
Idea management for developing products has long been a problem when the ideas come too fast and furious with no sense of organization. You’ve likely experienced eureka moments while doing other activities and scrambled to find a way to get those ideas down in a place other than a notepad. While notepads can help, a quick sketch of something complex might confuse you when referring to it later. Even other ideas or concepts you thought of afterward might have slipped your mind, resulting in a brilliant business idea being lost forever.
It doesn’t have to be that way if you choose a proper way to get things organized. Take a look at typical scenarios where idea management can go by the wayside without some special help, particularly when collaborating with a team. Fortunately, we can help all of that with our own idea management software, ProdPad.
Brainstorming from a Team
When developing a product (or bringing new ideas to an existing product), working with a creative team can be challenging if you don’t have close connections. Many of you may be too busy with other things to sit down in person and work out ideas together on a daily basis. While email can certainly help, you’re still lacking without having more sophisticated ways to share ideas using visuals and other organizational tools.
Here at ProdPad, we not only allow you to get ideas written down in a more organized way, but we also allow better team collaborations. Thanks to email integration and using discussion tools, you can collaborate with numerous people at once where ideas are easily stored and kept safe. Images of those ideas, such as wireframes, mockups, or just snaps of your whiteboard or notebook, can also be uploaded so you’ll have a multimedia center fitting all the chaotic pieces together.
When it comes to collaborations, feedback is the only way you’ll be able to fit an influx of various ideas together into something cohesive. Our tools help that immensely, along with immediate access to information stored there from other users to avoid confusion. You can even get a daily (or weekly) digest emailed to you to keep you up on what’s happening with particular discussions if you haven’t logged in for a while.
Capturing Ideas Before They Disappear
As noted above, the best ideas can ultimately be fleeting. You need something that can preserve them in a way that’s comprehensible for your personal reference or for your team’s perusal. We offer you the ability to instantly email an idea directly into our software so it doesn’t get lost or forgotten when you’re on the go. It’ll stay safe there until you have the time to focus on it. In the meantime, your collaborators can look at it and give you immediate feedback once you return.
Plus, when you’re browsing the Internet while on the go and happen to get one of those eureka moments, you don’t even have to sign in to our software to get it in writing. With the Google Chrome extension, you can instantly get the idea written down as part of your product backlog.
It’s time you stopped those bad habits of forgetting good ideas that could have turned into a world-changing business innovation. Contact us here at ProdPad to learn more about our software and the myriad organizational features you’ll be able to enjoy. We’ll help you turn the chaos of multiple ideas into something that forms a very clear picture.
Don’t have a ProdPad account yet? Just sign up for a free trial and try it for yourself today!
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Video: How to love A/B and Multivariate Testing
Running a multivariate test or even a simple AB test can be daunting. With each variation, there are additional tests to be run and measured, and it can all get overwhelming very quickly. At ProductTank October, Alex Smith, the Site Development Manager at Charles Tyrwhitt, showed us what he measured and why, and talked about how he came to love running MVT and AB tests to learn more.
Alex talked about the A/B and multivariate testing program at Charles Tyrwhitt, outlining what they measure at and how the test results feed back into optimisation of the website.
He explained a simple formula for figuring out what to test, comparing traffic and expected benefit. In his case, this left key pages like product listings and product pages, as well as the early and last steps of the checkout flow, to be the most ripe for optimisation through MVT and A/B testing.
Alex outlined the steps taken in the testing process, from benchmarking existing pages through to developing and testing your hypothesis, through to deploying changes based on the experiment results. He also outlined a number of simple ways to define success based on the results of an experiment.
As a result of this A/B and multivariate testing program that was put in place, Alex was able to show how it helped him get closer to the customer, give creativity room to breathe, removed some of the uncertainty from the development process, and helped to bring departments together.
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Video: Using Data & Insight in Developing New Products
Taking an idea from crazy pub conversations to launch can be a daunting and difficult process. At ProductTank October, Jo Binding, the former General Manager of Strategy & Product Development at BT Sport made a case for using analytics effectively every step of the way.
Jo covered off the analytics that were involved in the launch of these new products, from the idea stage, through to the launch and review.
She explained how product drivers and strategic drivers differ at the idea stage, and how to measure market impact and feasibility in the business case stage.
At the concept stage, she explained how theory is turned into action through the process of feature definition, prioritisation and roadmapping.
Jo also went into how final tweaks and changes come into play to prepare for the final launch in the development stage, and how to effectively review product performance once you’ve reached the launch stage.
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Creative Product Management – A Story of Open Source Success
Prescience, brilliance, or just incredible fortune; Google’s decision to enter the mobile marketplace with an open-source operating system, based on another open-source operating system, is quite likely the reason why they are now blowing the doors off their rivals who famously keep their software tightly locked down. This system, Android, owes some of its success to a thriving third-party developer community, and this community has some success stories of their own.
Steve Kondik was a not-so-typical late night tinkerer who was more than just a little pleased with Google’s decision to go open-source. On May 25th, 2009, he innocently posted his custom version of Android on the well-known Android forum, XDA. What followed is a lesson in creative, albeit organic, product management.
Steve learned that uploading his code to XDA quickly created a pool of users who would provide him feedback in near real-time. These users would also take Steve’s code and change or expand upon it, and then post their changes. It was game on. As Steve himself puts it:
Sometimes I would upload multiple versions in a single day to fix bugs. And the competition was fierce – lots of original work, and also mods of your mod, and mods of your mod’s mod. It was a lot of fun. We all shared the same idea – there was a product we wanted, nobody would make it, so we did it ourselves at any cost. This idea became the ethos of our community.
Steve began publishing his new work on Github, other developers began contributing directly to his work, and a team was born. Named after Steve’s whimsical XDA username, CyanogenMod became a team, within a community, in the midst of an open-source success story. (Steve calls it a revolution…)
Open Source: Product Management on Steroids
Open source product management inherently results in building what the users want, rather than building towards a potentially misguided company vision. Coupled with the ability to make their own changes, this results in the ultimate customer development feedback loop.
Years of collaboration using Github for the code, and XDA for the community support, was product management genius. The team became so efficient that a new version of their code was (and is) published every single night—a very rare occurrence in any industry. It did not go unnoticed.
In late 2012, Steve was introduced to some potential investors in Silicon Valley; it went well. A meeting was scheduled, papers were signed, a large sum of money was designated, and on December 12th, 2012, Cyanogen Inc. was born. Less than a year later, Oppo, a Chinese cell phone company announced the very first factory phone with Cyanogen.
This story is far from over but probably never would have gotten off of the ground floor had Steve not made the product management decisions that he did. ProdPad can assist you in making some of these very same decisions, allowing your team to collaborate in real time, edit, submit new ideas and feature requests, stay up-to-date on progress, and more.
Is your team going to be the next great success story? Why not? Contact us for more information and follow us on @ProdPad for news and updates.
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Video: Data-Driven Nonsense
At ProductTank October, Lee Duddell, the Founder & Head of UX at WhatUsersDo, spoke about some of the potential pitfalls of using analytics. He argued that data is often incomplete, and that blindly following data can lead to incremental improvements that may actually hinder progress on your product. What’s more, he demonstrates how it’s easy to interpret analytics all wrong.
Lee then gave a number of alternative ways to generate customer insight, such as using LiveChat on a single page for a day, running guerrilla usability tests, or simply talking to your customer service staff.
In light of this, he argued that organisations should ditch the data-driven term and become insight-driven.
Watch the video above, or check out Lee’s slides on SlideShare.
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