Introducing … UX Research

Your new best friend for unlocking user insights & validating ideas

UX (user experience) research is the systematic study of target users and their requirements, to add realistic contexts and insights to design processes — "UX Research" @ InteractionDesign.org

Why should I care?

UX research helps answer BIG questions like: What pain point(s) does this product address? Which landing page design results in more conversions? Do users understand how to navigate the website menu? + more

Benefits of UX research include:

• Discovering opportunities for new features/products/improvements. Perhaps the next unicorn idea?

• Saving process & development costs by validating proposed features and design decisions before it’s too late (or costly) to fix

• Boosting customer happiness/loyalty

In short, UX research helps ensure you’re building the right thing, and building it right.

Think of the scenario presented at the beginning of this article. While there’s no guarantee of success, you greatly minimize the chances of your product flopping by doing your UX research due diligence.

Perhaps card sorting would have revealed that users didn’t know where to find the feature on the app, a usability test might have uncovered where users struggled to perform desired actions and a simple 5-minute interview may have unearthed that there was no true demand for the product in the first place.

Note: There are many methods for conducting user research (detailed below) but all can be categorized as either quantitative (#s, the “what”) vs. qualitative (the “why”). It’s recommended to combine quantitative and qualitative methods to best understand your users and their behaviours.

#1 Card Sorting

Sounds like a magic trick, but what is it?

A quantitative UX research method that tasks users with organizing and grouping information (written on cards, shocker) according to their mental models. A very flexible method, these sessions can be done remotely or in-person and be either moderated or unmoderated.

Open vs. closed vs. hybrid

In open card sorting users are able to create their own groups and category labels. In closed card sorting, users are supplied with pre-determined categories (well-suited for evaluating an existing structure). In hybrid card sorting, users are given categories AND the ability to create new ones.

When to use?

This method is ideal for developing information architecture and navigational structures (ex. menu organization & labelling of an e-commerce site). Insights from card sorting sessions can help you remain user-focused and to design intuitive products.

Tips & tricks (so it isn’t magic after all?)

• Performing this activity while in-person? Try using markers and sticky notes instead. Make sure to photograph the results for future reference (an iPhone pic will suffice).

• This video provides a helpful overview of the card sorting technique + step-by-step instructions on how to run a session.

• Ask your users to think aloud while sorting the cards to learn more about their mental model, particularly if any cards are left unsorted.

• Best practice: Aim to test no more than x30 cards over 15 min sessions to avoid fatigue (aim for x15-30 user sessions).

• Make sure to shuffle the cards between every session to minimize risk of sorting bias.

Tools:

• Try Optimal Workshop for a digital card sorting tool (bonus: helps with analysis, especially for open sort patterns!)

• Alternatively, use the sticky note feature in Figma or Miro to create ‘cards.’

#2 Desirability Studies

Do you love me? Why or why not?

This qualitative, attitudinal UX research method is focused on evaluating the aesthetic appeal of a design. For example, a researcher may ask users to match a set of adjectives (bold, friendly, luxurious, etc) to a design mockup (landing page or logo design). This method unlocks user preferences and emotional responses.

When to use?

The quality of a product’s UI or designed interface is extremely important to creating a positive user experience. Desirability studies inform the product team of the possible emotional responses evoked by their designs. An all-organic diaper company doesn’t want a logo that invokes fear.

Tips & Tricks:

• Combine the desirability study and survey methods to garner feedback from significantly more users on a design (the more the merrier!)

• If the session is moderated, ask the interviewee to elaborate when they experience a strong reaction to a design - this is a great time to build the 5 Whys muscle (it requires consistent exercise).

• Identify the key words or adjectives your design (aka ‘desirability criteria’) is seeking to convey prior to the sessions to compare your expectations with actual user data.

Tools:

• There’s no shortage of survey tools from Typeform to Survey Monkey to Survicate, to YesInsights.

#3 Diary Studies

No invisible ink or lemon juice needed (nor a stolen Declaration of Independence)

In this qualitative method, a user is asked to keep a log of their experience while actively using a product or undergoing a process. While time-intensive, this method can be remotely facilitated among many users simultaneously to gather plenty of information.

When to use?

Diaries studies are great for mapping a user journey (ex. process of buying a home or applying for a mortgage). Studies can run the course of hours or days or weeks or even months!

Tips & Tricks:

• Provide specific prompts for participants or leave it open-ended, either way it’s advisable to provide guidance on how frequent the entries should be (follow-up with notifications to encourage participation).

• Entries don’t have to be written, photos or videos may be more appropriate depending on the context.

• Get creative with your tools, no fancy software is required to run a diary study (participants could even send email entries!)

Tools:

• Indeemo offers a mobile diary study app (everything is mobile-first these days).

• Another option is dscout which offers their own participant pool if you’re having trouble finding people.

#4 Eye-Tracking & Click Testing

You caught my eye, so what is it?

While both quantitative methods involve watching a user directly engage with your product, click tracking generally involves embedding code into a site’s backend and eye-tracking usually calls for high-end headset equipment. These methods help answer questions like: What catches a user’s attention first on the page? What does a typical user journey with the product look like? Are the ads distracting to the user experience?

When to use?

These UX research methods are ideal for evaluating live sites and software; their insights can inform how to prioritize and organize content. A granular level of data can be collected with these methods, for example: exactly how much is this part of the page looked at? Harness these insights to increase the chances of a given user performing the desired action(s).

Tips & Tricks:

• This type of testing does NOT answer the why of user behaviour - just the what. Try pairing one of these methods with a qualitative method for more robust insights.

• Before investing in an expensive piece of eye-tracking equipment, try running a few click tracking tests to see what you can learn. Cool as it is, you may not need the fancy headset after all.

• It’s important to note that eye-tracking ignores peripheral vision. The technology is centered around foveal vision instead. Take the results with a grain of salt.

• Heat maps (from click tracking tests) are a great visual to show to stakeholders; they reveal at a glance which parts of a given page receive the most traffic.

Tools:

• Crazyegg is a software tool for running click tracking experiments that maps attention hotspots.

• Userzoom also offers click testing software.

#5 Expert/Heuristic Reviews

Speed dial a professional

This qualitative method entails a professional or ‘expert’ walking through the product and looking for issues. Each expert should review the product independently. The experts can either observe participants using your product or attempt tasks on it themselves.

When to use?

This is a fast and easy way to ensure your product follows best practices or usability principles (“heuristics”). This method can be used at any development stage but is particularly good for generating feedback on iterations - the ole’ fail fast, fail often.

Tips & Tricks:

• Aim for a handful of professionals to review your product. No one expert can catch everything - the magic number is somewhere between x3-5.

• Take some time to get familiar with Jakob Nielsen’s 10 Heuristic Principles including error prevention, visibility of system status, match between system & the real world, etc.

• Make sure you define the scope of your test beforehand: do you need feedback on an entire website or just the landing page?

Tools:

• LinkedIn is a great networking tool for reaching out to UX professionals around the world

• Heurix offers product evaluations based on the Nielsen Norman group heuristics

#6 Field Research

GOOB! Get - Out - Of - The - (Damn) - Building

The quantitative or qualitative practice of observing a user handling the product in real-life. Several UX techniques can fall under this umbrella term: usability testing, user interviews, etc. Note: Field research is more a category than a specific method but it’s SO important that it’s worth including here.

When to use?

This type of research allows for more accurate, unbiased observations of a user in real-life compared to a sterile lab environment. For example, field research provides opportunities to see how users really ‘speak’ about your product (no more BHAG jargon).

Tips & Tricks:

• It probably goes without saying, but make sure to ask permission before recording any participants.

• GOOW - Get - Out - Of - The - (Damn) - Way! Field research is most powerful when you minimize your biases and influence on participants. Avoid asking leading questions and interrupting users while they perform tasks.

• This article by the Nielsen Norman Group includes plenty of helpful tricks for conducting field research, for example: “Don’t rely on people to remember to send you promised material after the session. Get permission for someone to email them one reminder if needed.”

Tools:

• Try out some transcription tools such as Rev, Otter or Trint.

• Don’t forget the old-fashioned greats such as a notebook, sticky notes, and pencils (these never run out of batteries).

#7 Interviews

Hopefully less volatile than the 2014 film

Put simply: a conversation with a user. Interviews are a go-to method for gathering qualitative feedback from users. The simplicity of the 1:1 interview format belies the art of facilitating UX interviews. The best interviewers are well-prepared but also quick to ask a user to elaborate when they make a surprising comment.

When to use?

User interviews are powerful tools for foundational or discovery research (learning more about users, their needs/pains, desires). Insights from interviews are useful for creating user personas & learning about differences in behaviours among user types.

Tips & Tricks:

• Ask open-ended questions, leave the yes/no or multiple-choice questions for the survey.

• Be aware of bias and leading questions, I highly, highly, highly recommend reading “The Mom Test” by Rob Fitzpatrick for more guidance on how to run successful interview.

• It’s best practice to offer a monetary incentive to participants if possible - after all, time is $$.

• Try to build customer interviews into your regular schedule (aim for at least x1 a week to stay in touch with your users).

Tools:

• Make scheduling interviews a breeze: Doodle or Calendly.

• For facilitating virtual interviews, try: Zoom or Google Meet or Skype.

#8 Multivariate & A/B Testing

The ABCs of A/B testing

These quantitative methods involve comparing similar versions of a product to assess which is most successful: drives most traffic, higher # of clicks, etc. A/B or “split testing” compares two versions with a single variable changed while multivariate compares multiple variables (hence the name)

When to use?

A/B and multivariate tests are ideal for optimizing live sites and products. Use A/B testing for comparing specific design features, for example: the colour of a sign-up button on a website’s landing page (blue or green?!)

Tips & Tricks:

• Similar to click-tracking tests, A/B and multivariate experiments only reveal the what, not the why. If you don’t speak to a user, you may never understand why that circle button was more enticing.

• E-commerce sites are especially ripe for ongoing A/B testing improvement. Ongoing? That’s right, A/B testing can be performed continuously to constantly improve the product.

• Note that these methods work better for products or sites with a large amount of traffic. If you only have 20 visitors a day it’s likely that an A/B test will prove futile.

Tools:

• Optimizely and VWO are two options for A/B testing tools.

#9 Surveys

Rate the helpfulness of this article from 1-5

Chances are you’ve filled out a survey at some point in your life (probably for your internet provider.) This method can wield qualitative or quantitative insights depending on the format: closed questions provide quantitative data (ex. have you used this tool in the last week?) while open questions offer qualitative information (please describe in 1-5 sentences your last experience using this product).

When to use?

Surveys are helpful for evaluating how well an existing product is satisfying user needs. Are users reporting high level of frustration - eek! Definitely something to look into. Try pairing surveys with another UX method such as A/B testing or user interviews.

Tips & Tricks:

• Keep language simple and accessible. A survey isn’t meant to be a test and confused users are less likely to complete the survey.

• Allow users to opt out or leave certain answers blank. Abandoned surveys or misleading answers aren’t helpful.

• Test your testing methods! Ask someone to take your survey before rolling it out to ensure your questions are clear and comprehensive.

Tools:

• Survey tools range from super simple to advanced depending on what you need, check out Survey Monkey, Alchemer, Google Forms, Typeform, Survicate, and YesInsights.

#10 Usability Testing

Last but never least

Highly flexible, usability tests can be moderated or unmoderated, performed in-person or remotely. During a usability test, a user is tasked with performing certain actions using a product, ex. buying a concert ticket on a website. This method can be used to collect quantitative (how long did task take?) or qualitative (how hard was the task?) learnings.

When to use?

Usability tests are best for assessing prototypes or live products - you can even use them on MVPs (minimum viable products) - don’t wait until you’re ready to ship to start testing! The key is not to wait until after launch to test usability, it’s a recipe for disaster!

Tips & Tricks:

• When a user is struggling to complete a task, avoid jumping in to help them (you want to understand the pain point).

• If possible, encourage other product team members or company stakeholders to sit in on a test - it’s a great way to foster buy-in on new features/products.

• x5-6 usability tests are generally sufficient to uncover key insights.

Tools:

• There’s a whole gamut of tools including: Usertesting, Usabilla, Userzoom, UsabilityHub, Loop11, etc.

Sources

Ready to learn more? I’ve got you covered:

• “7 Great, Tried and Tested UX Research Techniques” @ Interaction Design Foundation

• “9 UX Research Methods Product Teams Should Know” @ uxstudio

• ”Card sorting: a powerful, simple research method” @ Medium.com

• “Card Sorting Best Practices for UX” @ Adobe

• “Desirability Studies: Measuring Aesthetic Response to Visual Designs” @ XD Strategy

• “Desirability Study” @ Product Discovery Methods

• “Eye Tracking and Usability: How Does it Work?” @ Adobe

• “Field Studies” @ userinterviews.com

• “Field Research” @ uxdesigntemplates.com

• “How to Conduct Heuristic Evaluation” @ Medium

• “How to Conduct a Heuristic Evaluation” @ Neilsen Norman Group

• “This is all you need to know to conduct a UX Survey” @ UX Planet

• “UX Research” @ InteractionDesign.org

+ bonus: this article includes an awesome diagram of UX research tools

**Note: Article originally posted on October 25th, 2021 on brandcereals.com, migrated to Mirror in Jan 2022

Earlier this summer I read Marty Cagan’s newest book “Empowered,” the companion piece to “Inspired.” Marty Cagan is a partner at the Silicon Valley Product Group and a former product leader at eBay, Netscape and HP (truly gold standard product credentials). Fun fact: I linked to one of Cagan’s articles “Behind Every Great Product” in my March 2021 blog post “What Did I Read This Week? Chipotle Makeup, Billionaires, Tik Tok & Killing Brands.” Since then, I’ve read dozens of posts on the SVPG (Silicon Valley Product Group) blog - stay tuned for a potential blog post about the SVPG blog!

“Empowered,” is a crash course for product leaders in how to staff, organize, coach and empower product teams to do their best work. It is also singlehandedly the best product management resource I’ve ever encountered. It probably goes without saying, but I’ve already bought “Inspired” (sitting next to me on my desk as I write this).

Side note: It was particularly interesting to read this book as a relatively junior product person at a startup that is actively building from scratch its product function. This book has taught me what to look for in a product leader for the rest of my career and how to identify if I’m part of an empowered team.

I can confidently say I haven’t annotated a book as much as this one since I read “East of Eden” in grade 9 (lots of symbolism in the Salinas Valley, if you know … you know). This book was read in Ubers, in a pool, before going to bed and during lunch break. It was marked up with napkins, highlighters, sticky notes found in the bottom of an old backpack and about 25 different crappy pens. I fully intend to keep this book permanently at-hand and within reach on my desk. While this post is by no means a substitute for reading the book yourself, I did want to share my key takeaways. Without further ado …

1. To Build Powerful Products, Build Empowered Teams

What is an empowered product team?

So ‘Empowered’ sounds like a great buzzword, but what does it really mean in practice? Cagan explains the difference between empowered product teams and feature teams in Part 1 of “Empowered.” While at first glance they may superficially similar, the work they do is radically different.

A feature team …. is output-driven, told what deliverables are expected and generally do minimum product discovery work. These teams have a low sense of ownership and can’t be adequately held responsible for the results. Are you primarily in charge of managing a backlog of requests (ex. new landing page, translate app into Spanish, set up two-factor authentification)? If so, you may be on a feature team.

Meanwhile, an empowered product team …. is given problems to solve and the freedom to discover, iterate, build, and launch the solution. Product leaders provide the team with strategic context but not exact deliverables. These teams can and should be held accountable to the results.

With that in mind, evaluate if you’re really on an empowered team or doing project management with the title of Product Manager. In the words of Lizzo, sometimes “Truth Hurts.”

And why does it matter if the team is empowered?

Cagan makes the case for empowered product teams at the very outset of the book, I’ll list just a few of the crucial reasons here:

1. Risk of Stagnation - There’s very little chance of innovation if your product teams are hacking away at a backlog of unproven suggestions instead of doing valuable product discovery work and prototyping

2. Talent Retention - High talent product people are eventually going to leave and go elsewhere to companies where they feel more ownership and passion about their work

3. Ignored Customers - Without a product team serving as the voice of the customer, your users are going to flock to your competitors who understand and practice customer-centricity

In other words, your company is ‘ripe’ for disruption and high talent turnover. Convinced? Let’s proceed.

2. A Few Thoughts on Thoughtful Staffing

Okay, so you’ve decided to empower your teams - where do you begin? Hiring.

Hiring lesson #1: Don’t outsource your product teams. The very nature of the product manager role requires intimate knowledge of the product, the user, the stakeholders, business constraints, competitive landscape, etc. Take shortcuts here and you’ll pay for it later.

On a similar note, product leaders should be deeply involved in hiring. A tech lead should hire an engineer, a design lead should hire a designer and a product manager should be hired by a product leader. You wouldn’t ask the cruise ship captain to hire the entertainment acts or sous chef.

Hiring lesson #2: A compelling product vision is a great recruiting tool for strong product people. Don’t underestimate the power of an inspiring product vision, it’s probably more persuasive than the fancy sit-stand workstations (not to discredit ergonomic design).

Strong product people want to work on something meaningful. They want to work on something larger than themselves. They want to be missionaries and not mercenaries. So, while you can talk about nice employees benefits and show the candidate the foosball tables, the best product people care more about your product vision than anything else (197).

Hiring lesson #3: Avoid hiring primarily for domain knowledge. If you hire a competent, bright product person they can get up to speed on domain knowledge quickly. It’s easier to catch up on industry knowledge than product skills.

A note on team topologies

How you organize product teams internally can make all the difference in the level of innovation that results. High talent product people incorrectly allocated will not save the day. Cagan dedicates the entirety of Part V of this book to team topologies and how to optimize for empowerment.

3. Behind Every Great Player is a Great Coach

So you’ve recruited high talent product people and organized teams, what now?

Don’t for a second fool yourself into thinking that it’s less work to manage an empowered product team - that you can set it up with talented people and step away. Ongoing management and support is still very much needed for empowered teams. (P.S. weekly 1:1s are only the tip of the iceberg).

I like to tell product leaders that they are only as strong as their weakest product manager (359).

In Chapter 8, Cagan explains how to assess a product manager’s current skill level and create a coaching plan for professional growth. There should be weekly progress check-ins on this coaching plan. Potential areas of development could include: user & customer knowledge, data knowledge, industry & domain knowledge, product operational knowledge, product discovery techniques, team collaboration skills, etc. A strong product leader cultivates a culture of #continuousimprovement (the theme of this blog!) in their empowered product teams.

If you’re a product leader, coaching is not a ‘part’ of your job - it’s at the very heart of it.

A note on feedback

A major focus of this book is the importance of consistent, timely and actionable feedback:

Just to be perfectly clear here, at the performance review, nothing should be a surprise - everything should have already been discussed in depth, likely for months (71).

If you’re properly coaching your product people and providing actionable feedback, no direct report should be blindsided during a performance review. If they are, it’s a direct reflection of your coaching (or lack thereof). Looking to learn more about feedback? I highly recommend “Radical Candor” by Kim Scott.

4. Assign Problems to Solve, Rather Than Features To Build*

*This is the exact wording of a sub-section in Chapter 53; it’s so perfectly worded it required repeating here.

How work is assigned matters. A lot. Like a LOT.

While every great product person needs a great coach, it’s important to avoid the command-and-control style of leadership - that’s a surefire way to kill innovation and ownership (and motivation as well).

As mentioned above, one of the major differences between a feature and empowered product team is whether they are tasked with deliverables to output or problems to solved. For example, a product leader at a job market company (ex. LinkedIn, Indeed, etc.) may task one of their empowered product teams with decreasing the amount of time it takes a job seeker to find a new job. Notice that the task is not to improve the UI or launch an app - how does the product leader know that would solve the problem? They don’t.

The best people to determine the appropriate solution are those closest to the problem, with the necessary skills - the product team. We want the team to take responsibility for achieving the desired outcome. If we tell the team the feature we want them to build, then if that feature doesn’t provide the necessary results, we can’t hold the team accountable (275).

Okay I’m convinced … so how do you lead?

It’s your job as a product leader to evangelize the product vision, set expectations, remove barriers to progress, coach your teams and share strategic context. Objectives and direction will be top-down although the solutions and implementation will be bottom-up.

A few final notes and suggested further reading

It’s worth mentioning that Cagan includes interviews with product leaders at the end of every part. Featured leaders include April Underwood, Debby Meredith, Christine Wodtke, etc. These excerpts are goldmines of wisdom based on extensive industry experience.

+ Look out for “Transformed” and “Loved” - two books by other SVPG partners hitting shelves later this year.

**Note: Article originally posted on August 16th, 2021 on brandcereals.com, migrated to Mirror in Jan 2022

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I’m no stranger to Udemy, I’ve previously used the site to take a Google Analytics certification course, refine my copywriting skills and learn a bit of HTML and CSS coding. I was struggling with cabin fever during Toronto’s recurring lockdowns and decided to sharpen my product management skills. Over the last few months I’ve been taking the Become a Product Manager | Learn the Skills & Get the Job Udemy course.

Become a Product Manager Udemy Course Info: Instructors: This course is taught by Evan Kimbrell (Founder of Sprintkick, Ex-VC, Ex-startup founder) and Cole Mercer (Sr. Product Manager @ SoundCloud, Ex-Bonobos, Gen. Assembly). Pricing: The course price is $109.99 normally but often as little as $14.99 when on sale. Includes: 13+ hours of content with a dedicated Slack channel and linked resources for extra reading. This course is divided into 17 different sections. Rating: This course has earned 4.5/5 from > 32,000 ratings Check out the course here!

I investigated several different courses and finally selected this one after reading the glowing reviews. A major benefit of this course is the included access to a Slack workspace where you can discuss the course content and network with aspiring PMs from around the world.

Disclaimer: Udemy offers major sales ALL the time, like seemingly every other week! I have bought classes worth hundreds of dollars for as little as $14.99. Also, this post is not sponsored in literally any shape or form.

Without further ado…

1. Lean vs. Agile Vs. Scrum vs. Kanban - What’s the Difference?

These buzzwords are bandied around a lot in startups, so it’s important to know the difference. This course does a fantastic job at breaking down these key concepts in layman’s terms from the outset.

• Lean = A cost-effective development approach, involves prioritizing initiatives and avoiding spending BIG money on projects unless you absolutely have to. See “The Learn Startup” for more info. Think of it as DIYing a home improvement project rather than outsourcing to an expert unless required.

• Agile = Generally refers to software/digital products specifically (compared to “Lean” which is not software-exclusive). “Agile” means to apply a lean approach to software, it’s an iterative method of grouping tasks into small batches and prioritizing top features.

• Scrum = A four-step process of development that seeks to maximize efficiency:

  • Step #1: A sprint planning meeting that reviews the product backlog, prioritize features to move into the sprint backlog. Time to discuss scope of work.

  • Step #2: Start developing said product, most common time-box for sprints is two weeks.

  • Step #3: Daily stand-up meetings (idea is that standing will expedite meetings) of approx. 10-15 minutes to align the team and identify pain points.

  • Step #4: Retrospective meetings (opposite of sprint planning) to perform a product post-mortem: what went well, what didn’t? These are generally led by the PM.

• Kanban = A framework for implementing agile software development; does not use sprints or timeboxes. Once a task is completed, start work on the next ticket from the product backlog. This system does not use sprints and is ideal for customer service teams.

Bonus! Agile vs. Waterfall: The waterfall development process is ideal for features with dependencies or mission-critical softwares (ex. braking engines for cars). It’s less collaborative than the agile software development process as everything is designed up front and passed in stages from team to team.

2. Five Key Criteria for Understanding Competitors

This course has an entire section dedicated to “Competitive and Market Analysis.” As a product manager it is important to understand your company’s primary competitors. You should have a sense of their:

• Product Core: Who is their product team? Who makes the product: physical engineers or developers? How good is their product team? 1 great engineer is better than hundreds of ‘good’ engineers.

• Size of User Base: Companies with a larger user base have certain advantages - when they launch into new markets they have the potential to dominate, an easier time getting press coverage, and they can strike deals with other companies more easily. For example, Apple easily entered the music streaming market to compete with Spotify and SoundCloud.

• Design: Products that are aesthetically pleasing tend to be better received. For example, Apple is a threat to any market they enter because of their emphasis on design. Imagine the streamlined design of an Apple toaster…

• Brand: Positive brand perception brings many benefits such as high prices, more press & funding, and the benefit of the doubt from consumers.

• Speed: How quickly can your competitor build and ship new products? This is most relevant in situations where the competitor is significantly larger (more bureaucracy = slower, less agile).

Not all competitors are equal; there are different types to watch out for. Direct competitors offer the same solution for the same problem. Think UberEats and DoorDash. An indirect competitor offers a different solution for the same problem and may have a different target customer group. An indirect competitor of UberEats would be HelloFresh. A potential competitor would offer something to the same/similar target group but addresses a different problem (aka a peripheral competitor). Amazon could be considered a potential competitor to UberEats. A substitute competitor solves the same core problem in a totally different way. A substitute competitor for UberEats could be a private chef or more realistically, a roommate who dabbles in cooking.

As a product manager, it’s important to understand the competitor landscape of your product. The course facilitators list various digital tools to monitor your competitors such as Mention.com, Google Alerts, Crunchbase.com and more!

3. Feature Tables & How to Make Them

A feature table is a comparison chart used to compare your product vs. your competitors. The X-axis lists the competitors and the Y-axis tracks dimensions (features & factors). Try making a feature table comparing your product to its direct competitors (as discussed above) first. Choose to evaluate the features and factors that are important to your product group.

As a PM, you need to know what’s considered competitive or cutting edge in your product’s market. Competition is an ever-changing landscape, so you’ll need to consistently monitor your competitors. Your job is to make sure your solution is obviously (not subtly) better than your indirect, potential and substitute competitors for your target consumer base. Use the feature table framework to make sure your product is obviously better. Your product vision is how you win over the market.

When monitoring your competitors, keep tabs on the following:

1. Funding. Watch out for venture capital in the startup space. More $$ = more people, more ads, more resources. Crunchbase will be your new best friend.

2. Acquisitions: A company could be buying another company to acquire their product team, integrate their user bases, etc.

3. New features/product launches: These are major maneuvers. Here, Mention will become your second best friend.

4. A Crash Course in Customer Development & Interviews

The definition = The practice of establishing a continuous and iterative communication line with your customers. The framework of communication known as “Customer Development” is a major tool for PMs to evaluate if they’re building the right product. After all, you can’t come up with great products in a vacuum (Dyson vacuums are amazing products though - don’t get me started on their haircare line!)

Customer development is useful for risk mitigation and opportunity recognition. Customer Development can be broken down into the following stages: discovery, validation, creation & building. The key to Customer Development is the user interview.

There are 4 main types of interviews:

1. Exploratory Interview: Most free-form interview; the intention is to discover pain points, assess the urgency of a problem and evaluate potential customer segments.

2. Validation Interview: These interviews are meant to test a specific hypothesis and are hyper-sensitive to bias. Avoid introducing your product idea until the very end (if at all), do not elevator pitch or hype your idea. Only honest feedback is helpful, junk data helps no one.

3. Satisfaction-Oriented Interview: Designed to gauge the customer’s feelings about the product, ex. “What’s one thing I could do to make this better for you?” These interviews can reveal the priorities of your users.

4. Efficiency Interview: Meant to discover how an existing product fits into a customer’s life, aka contextual learning. Often product features are used in unexpected ways. Watch how customers interact with your product and ask them to walk you through how they perform different actions.

If you want to learn more about how to effectively run a user interview I suggest checking out “The Mom Test” by Rob Fitzpatrick. It’s an excellent and fast read that was recommended to me by my manager.

5. Hot Tips: Finding Interviewees & How to Cold-Email The Right Way

So you’re ready to interview, but where do you find people to interview? If you’re a PM of an existing product, you already have a pool of active users to reach out to. Try targeting customers who are active on social media, have contacted customer service or are highly engaged (whether that’s # of purchases, # of likes, etc.) with your product. That last group would be considered your power users.

If you’re launching a new product, you’re going to need to look for interviewees externally. Explore LinkedIn, Reddit, Quora, Twitter and even your competitors (go to their SM and see who is engaging there). When you contact potential interviewees there are a few best practices of cold-emailing you should abide by:

1. Be brief. Time is a precious resource and everyone is busy. Stick to 4-7 sentences. Seriously.

2. Be personal. Avoid sounding like an auto-generated email. Easy tip: add context for how you found them (ex. via Twitter or customer support).

3. Appeal to their self-interest. Cater to their sense of altruism (or incentivize monetarily). Give people a reason to help you.

4. Schedule a specific time. Ex. 3:30 pm EST next Wednesday. Avoid the back and forth of scheduling friction. Level up with a calendar integration that allows people to pick available times.

5. Frontload your email with a personal introduction to capture the reader’s attention before they send your message straight to spam. Bonus: clarify that you’re not from Sales (people may let their guard down) - assuming you’re not of course.

Keep in mind that cold emails have a 3:1 (or worse) ratio, in other words you’ll need to send at least 3 cold emails to garner one response. This part of the course reminded me a lot of Seth Godin’s blog post “Email Checklist.” I bet there are at least 5 ways everyone could improve how they draft emails, myself included.

6. All About MCSs & MVPs

An MVP or minimum viable product is “that version of a new product which allows a team to collect the maximum amount of validated learning about customers with the least effort” (“The Lean Startup” by Eric Ries). An MVP is designed to test a hypothesis and can take many forms (from a landing page to a form to a video, etc).

The stages of a MVP experiment:

1. What is the problem/solution? What is it addressing? (Hint: what is the experiment testing?)

2. Identify the assumptions (find the riskiest)

3. Build a testable hypothesis around your assumptions

4. Establish a MCS (minimum criteria for success) - otherwise how do we know if the experiment has succeeded or failed?

5. Pick an MVP strategy type (discussed in next section)

6. Execute MVP experiment

7. Evaluating and learning from the experiment

There are three possible outcomes of a MVP test:

• #1 the hypothesis is proven false and future work in this direction is futile

• #2 your hypothesis is true by a wide margin

• #3 is somewhere in the middle

As a PM, you’ll find that ~ 90% of your MVP experiments will end up as #3. To avoid conflating #2 and #3 it’s important to define a MCS or minimum criteria of success.

7. Be the VIP of MVPs

Different types of MVPs (minimum viable products) that you can use to gauge interest. In simplest terms, MVPs are a simulacrum of a real product, not a complete product themselves. MVPs come in various forms:

1. Email MVP: Simplest of MVPs, it can take the form of an email that pitches a new product. This is especially easy to implement for established companies that already have a list of users. Unfortunately, this MVP can be perceived as sloppy and dent brand reputation. Email MVPs are best suited for smaller organizations without brand anxiety. Try pairing this with a landing page or concierge service (discussed below) for a better customer experience.

2. Shadow Button MVP: Requires more resources than an Email MVP but is still relatively easy to pull off. Put a button in an existing (digital) product that links to the “new feature” and track the click rate to measure interest. A Shadow Button MVP is useful for mid-size startups to triage nice-to-have features. The downside? It creates a universally negative response and can confuse consumers. Avoid seeming like a bug by acknowledging/thanking users for clicking and strive to limit the # of users exposed.

3. 404/Coming Soon MVP: The 404 and Coming Soon pages are slight variations of the same concept; both are webpages with a message (whether it’s the 404 error or a friendly “Coming Soon!”). Amazon uses this technique every day and tracks interest against their MCS (minimum criteria of success). Oculus Rift started this way with a pre-order page when all they had was a rough prototype of the product. Companies with tons of webpages can better get away with 404 pages (eCommerce). The best practice is to design the page that matches company branding; avoid generic templates and proofread, proofread, proofread. Like the Shadow Button, strive to shorten the horizons of this experiment to avoid users running into these pages repeatedly.

4. Explainer MVP: A video-format MVP that either pitches a product (think Kickstarter videos) or explains a product tutorial-style. Dropbox started this way as the founder wanted to test if there was sufficient demand for cloud storage. Video generally converts users better than all-text pages and can go in-depth on features. These videos can be a lot of work to make unless you have the existing team/infrastructure to produce video content. However, if you’re a scrappy startup who hasn’t set a quality bar you can get away with a lower-quality video.

5. Concierge MVP: Involves 1:1 support as you walk a customer through a task. Rent the Runway started this way. Major pro: there is no buildout required for this (compare to Wizard of Oz MVP.) The key is to be upfront that the feature is not yet built - you can frame the MVP as a beta program being offered to a small subset of users. This MVP form is commonly used by large companies as it can be run discreetly, involves no fake buttons (which can potentially reflect poorly on the brand) and serves as a hybrid between Customer Development and MVP testing. Note that this form is management-intensive + time-absorbing; you burn a lot of resources per customer so it’s expensive to get large data sets.

6. Piecemeal MVP: Uses various out-of-the-box softwares to match the functionality you need to test the basic version of what you want to build; aka a Frankenstein prototype. Groupon used this method when they created their original WordPress site and harnessed Apple Mail to manage order & generate coupons. This MVP format is not ideal for implementing multiple functionalities; it can be challenging to get off-the-shelf software to cooperate with each other. Pro tip: use automations (like Zapier or Integromat) to chain softwares together. Look for softwares that allow white labeling so you can add in company branding for improved believability.

7. Wizard of Oz MVP: This form has the illusion of being a completely made product but the tasks are actually carried out manually by an individual. This method avoids the engineering resource-heavy task of building out server-side logic. Zappos actually started this way; anytime an order was placed employees would buy the shoes from a brick-and-mortar store and mail them personally to the customer.

Keep in mind! Larger organizations have the resources to weather failed products. There is a different risk/reward calculus for start-ups. The biggest risk for startups is using all resources on a futile or failed endeavour. Meanwhile, risk to brand perception is often the biggest concern for established companies. The Wizard of Oz MVP is the most labour-intensive of all the above, but also the most protective of the brand (opposite true for Email MVP). As a product manager, you need to gauge your company’s tolerance for risk: do they care more about resources or more about the brand?

8. 100% Important Info About Metrics

What is a metric? A metric is a # measurement of something, synonymous with a KPI (key performance indicator). In Agile development, feedback loops are driven through metrics. As a product manager, it’s important to understand that all metrics are interconnected. You’ll need to keep a close eye on a select few that you associate with product success.

What makes a good metric? A good metric should be understandable and relatively simple; should generally take the form of a rate or ratio. Avoid looking at two metrics that are correlated and assuming a false connection. Correlation DOES NOT = causation (this was hammered into my head during middle school science).

What gets measured, get managed. — Peter Drucker

There are various categories of metrics, including:

• Growth & Activation: Measure how a product is growing, can be used to assess the effectiveness of marketing funnels and SEO. For example: total new users (by week, month, etc), new users by source, activated users.*

• Engagement: Very specific to each company, for example, YouTube considers 30 seconds of watching content = 1 view whereas Facebook counts just 3 seconds.

• Retention: Who’s coming back? This is closely tied to Growth & Activation metrics. For example, retained users & resurrected users.

• User Happiness: Examples includes MDS Scores, # of customers who have submitted complaints, App Store rating, NPS (net promotor score), etc.

• Revenue: Potential metrics such as LTV = lifetime value (how much revenue does a customer generate over a selected time period, ex. 1 year), CCA = cost of customer acquisition. B2Bs often track MRR = monthly recurring revenue and ARRR = annual reporting revenue (crucial for subscription services such as Dropbox or Netflix).

The goal is to pick at least one metric for each of the above stages. It’s a funnel-like journey for the user and you want to optimize your metrics at every step.

*An activated user has signed up for the product and performed a desired action; just downloading the app isn’t sufficient.

Keep in mind the difference between exploratory vs. reporting metics. The latter are metrics that are consistently tracked over long periods of time to measure product health. An exploratory metric is exactly what is sounds like, a data point to hunt down clues about user behaviour.

9. Building an (Epic) Product

Epic. A fun adjective and a key term for product management. An epic is the building block of product management; also known as a grouping of one or more features or functionalities that we want to build. Also also defined as a piece of work that takes longer than one sprint to build.

There are often 3-5 epics per quarter (depending on company size), an example epic could be translating an app into Spanish or implementing photo sharing in direct messaging. It’s important to note that not all epics are external, they can be internal tasks such as migrating to a new database (in comparison, features are generally always consumer-facing).

An epic is accompanied by an “epic spec sheet",” a form of documentation also known as a requirements documentation. The purpose is to allow anyone in the company to see what you’re building and also serves as a guideline for your product team. An epic spec sheet includes the following sections:

1. An Introduction: A summary of what the features are, what metrics you are trying to improve, links to supporting documentation, legal requirements, marketing plans, a place for early wireframes - anything that supports your case, written by the PM.

2. Product Requirements: This section includes details about functionality, also written by the PM.

3. Design Requirements: To be filled out by the PM and the (UX) Designers, may include early wireframes/sketches/prototypes.

4. Engineering Requirements: Mostly completed by engineers after discussing the above sections, this is the place for database/technology requirements, ex. a certain API endpoints.

PMs are responsible for creating/maintaining these requirement sheets, specifically the first two sections.

10. A Few More Key Concepts (and 10 is a nice #)

Product Managers are responsible for the what and the why. Designers and engineers supply the how. PMs harness user stories to help clarify what needs to be achieved with a new feature. The format of a user story is the following: As an X, I want to do Y so that I can Z. For example, as a user, I want to send pictures in a direct message with my friends so I can share my memories with them. User stories are often stored in the project management tool used by your team for easy reference.

Acceptance criteria is a set of requirements a software must fit to be considered complete. The acceptance criteria should be double (triple!) checked before releasing a feature. The acceptance criteria for the user story above ^ could be: “Given I am a user who has successfully uploaded a photo from my computer, when I click ‘send’ the image is sent to my friend through the direct message and then appears in the chat.”

How can a PM determine how long it will take to build a feature? Software estimation is quite complex (let alone for those without engineering backgrounds), however, a PM can accurately estimate software using velocity. Velocity is the number of story points accomplished in a period of time. Confusing? Let’s take it back.

Story points are values meant to represent the amount of work required to complete a given task or feature. Different companies use different scales for story points. The PM should assign story points to every task in a sprint to generate a total score for the sprint. For example, consider a theoretical sprint where there were 5 items but only 3 were finished. Perhaps each task in said sprint was allotted 5 story points: 5 + 5 + 5 = 15. That sprint has a velocity of 15. PMs can use the velocity data of past sprints to calculate the average velocity and determine how much work can reasonably be accomplished in a single sprint. Still confused, no worries! Read more about velocity here.

Other Useful Nuggets of Wisdom

There is no way I can squash everything included in this course into one article, but I’m going try my best. Some more key takeaways:

• How to structure a hypothesis like a PM: We believe [subject] has a [problem] because [reason] . If we [action], this [metric] metric will improve. Note: All products (should) stem from problems.

• PMs are responsible for feature triage and identifying what to build next. There are a lot of sources of feedback to filter through: internal feedback, user test data, online feedback, analytics/stats, news, market trends, watching competitors, customer interviews, WHEW! Make sure you understand the differences between qualitative vs. quantitative data. Note that customer interviews don’t directly scale (dozens of interviews don’t magically extrapolate to thousands of users.). Bottom line: decide which feedback is relevant and which is junk, then synthesize info. to make decisions.

• A helpful framework for above ^ PMs are not tasked with coming up with the ideas, the ideas come from everywhere including (EMUC): E = employees, M = metrics, U = users, C = clients (applies primarily to B2B PMs). Note that a user is not always the same thing as a client.

• User personas! These aggregates of observed user behaviour are often made by UX designers to build empathy for the user:

  1. Interview a large # of users

  2. Identify a user behaviour

  3. Write a description

  4. Give the user background info. (add a photo or sketch!)

• Hot Tip: Stay on top of industry news as a PM (a few minutes each day with a cup of coffee in the morning). GOOB (Get out of the building!)

• Learn as much about technology as you can (particularly if you’re a SaaS PM) such as familiarity with programming languages and relational databases. The benefits of this extracurricular learning are HUGE:

  • You’ll know what can be realistically built (learn to estimate difficulty and timelines for building features on your own)

  • It builds strong relationships with engineers (and boosts your credibility)

  • You will better understand the impact of your decisions and the long-term technical implications (*shivers* tech debt)

• MVP experiments generally accrue quantitative data (compare to qualitative data from customer interview). You must collect BOTH types of data. The quantitative data provides the what, the qualitative data adds the why.

• Every company does roadmapping differently, but it’s important to note that they are inherently incompatible with an agile development process. After all, how can you be agile if you’re handcuffed to a roadmap? While they can still provide value, roadmaps are generally inaccurate. Why have them at all? Executives and investors like to see quarter-based maps of expected progress.

• Failed products or features can still benefit departments of a company. For example, the Google Glass product probably lost lots of money but earned valuable press coverage and attention that positioned Google as a cutting-edge innovator.

• When communicating with engineers be super super super detailed. If something goes wrong, it is your fault as the PM. When you’re pitching an idea, have a good idea of where the feature will go in the future. Watch out for tech debt which inevitably falls on the engineering team’s shoulders. Most importantly, do NOT treat like the engineers like an agency.

• Remember this. Recite it every morning. Print it out and pin it to your desk. Get a damn tattoo. Find a solution for a problem rather than trying to fit a problem to a solution.

Final Verdict

Course rating 5/5

That said, I advise waiting until the course is on sale to purchase. A lot of the information above can be found free online from disparate sources. In my opinion, the single, biggest benefit of the course is that all the teachings are condensed into one place.

Why 5/5? This course helped me understand the entire process of launching and iterating a product; the whole product lifecycle. It gave me a holistic view of being a PM and introduced me to countless new terms and resources. I would confidently recommend this course to anyone who is starting in a new product role or is curious about exploring the career. (Be sure to check out the bonus 17th section that includes interviews with working product managers.)

Side Note: One of my favourite aspects of this Udemy course was the articles linked to different lessons for extra reading. I bookmarked all the links for later reading.

**Note: Article originally posted on May 30th, 2021 on brandcereals.com, migrated to Mirror in Jan 2022

Famously, Steve Jobs once called the Segway the next big thing after the PC. So, what happened to the imagined future of flying cars and people riding Segways to work? Let’s see … do you own a Segway? Does your family own a Segway? Does anyone you know (even tangentially) own a Segway? The answer is most likely no. More importantly, the answer to the next question is probably also no.

Do you want a Segway?

Perhaps Segway was too ahead of its time and suffered the costs of being first to market. Possibly the marketing was all over the place. We could take the easy way out and blame it on the high sticker price. Maybe, just maybe, it was singlehandedly sabotaged by Paul Blart’s character in “Mall Cop.”

Personally, I think it was a couple different reasons compounded together, but most of all, it was the product’s positioning. Or lack thereof. When writing this article, I asked my family and friends to send me the first thing that came to mind when they thought of Segways. I think these responses beautifully reveal the cause of Segway’s downfall:

Injury. Operator error can still overcome the power of engineering. — Charles Sutherland

Segways are technically bicycles ... they have two wheels. — Ozan Coskun

Reason #1: Who is the User? Literally, WHO. IS. THE. USER?!

In my opinion, the confusion over Segway’s intended user is the #1 reason it failed. The problem stems all the way from development as the Segway invention was patented and allegedly kept top secret during production. Consequently, user feedback was avoided until it was too late. If the product had been tested with users prior to launch, the Segway may never have seen the light of day or could have been released as a radically different product.

Takeaway: Discovery sessions with potential users could have revealed what Segway learned the hard way over the next 20 years: the Segway is a novelty product that fails to solve anyone’s problem.

Different groups tried to adopt the technology to no avail. We’re talking groups as disparate as the U.S. Postal Service, police in Chicago/Philly/D.C., gas companies (for reading meters), and even paramedics in Chicago (the Windy City was pretty gung-ho at first). The Segway wasn’t the perfect solution for anything or anyone - except maybe city sight-seeing Segway tours (that’s a mouthful!), which probably isn’t a large enough market to keep the lights on (more on city tours later).

I think Adam Hartung puts it best in this Forbes Article:

Segway tried to be a general purpose product. But no disruptive product ever succeeds with that sort of marketing ... Nobody inherently needed a Segway. Everyone was getting around by foot, bicycle, motorcycle and car just fine. — Adam Hartung

Had Segway set out to design a product for a specific user with an even more specific problem, they may still be in production. Instead, they were guilty of doing too much at once without doing anything really useful for anyone. It’s sort of like spraying air freshener throughout your apartment when what you really need to do is clean out the fridge.

Reason #2: Who is the User? Pt II - Because It’s Just That Important

The sticker price of a Segway is about $6,000-$8,000 USD. For that money you can go and buy a used car, 80 pairs of Lululemons, or over 2,400 Happy Meals. Segways are too expensive for most teenagers and young adults (especially with the rising cost of secondary education and the burden of student loans…I digress). Who does that leave? Families and seniors.

Well, minivans are popular for a reason. Good luck shuttling half the soccer team to practice on a Segway. As for older people with money? I don’t really see them lining up as early adopters.

Even in the best case scenario for Segway: an urban dwelling professional with spending money, there are still obstacles. Space is a premium in large cities; so where do you store your Segway at night in your condo or god-forbid … walkup apartment (sends shivers down my spine just thinking about trying to haul a Segway up multiple flights of stairs on a regular basis, they’re 109 lbs!)

I know I’ve talked a lot about how vague the intended Segway user is (or was). Here are a few examples of how Segway could have narrowed their positioning and adapted their product to better suit a niche market. Segway in alternative universes:

1. Segway as a healthcare company, developing cutting-edge mobility vehicles for the physically challenged

2. A pay-per-use model (similar to e-scooter systems set up in many cities) that allows people to rent Segways as needed; more affordable than buying a Segway outright

Reason #3: Rules of the Road

When the Segway launched in 2001, it was the first of its kind and the world was slow to catch up. Over the ensuing years, cities either banned Segways outright or struggled to establish rules of the road. After all, where does the Segway belong?

The sidewalk? Hmm I hope not. Let’s reserve that space for pedestrians; for seniors with walking canes, families with strollers and Chihuahuas in coats. The road? Eh, more than a little dangerous. I’m not sure who would hate that more - the Segway users or the drivers? Throw in public transit buses, student drivers and 18-wheelers into the mix … yikes.

The bike lane you might say. Well, good luck getting the avid cyclist community on board with that.

It’s an obvious problem and a serious one. Where does the Segway go?

Reason #4: Triple Threat of Expensive, Dorky & Dangerous

Personal anecdote: I’ve actually ridden a Segway before. My family and I booked a Segway tour of Dallas when my boyfriend came home for Christmas a few years ago. My dad actually fell off his and was stuck spending the rest of Christmas break recovering on the couch. While the tour was fun (aside from the accident), there were a few drawbacks to the Segway apparent to me on the very first use:

1. Self-esteem: If I’m being totally honest, I felt self-conscious and dorky riding a Segway (something a bike has never made me feel). Our Segway squad was like something out of a C+ comedy movie as we cruised around downtown Dallas.

2. Usability: If I remember correctly, the Segways had to be propped against a wall when not in use, or they would slowly wander off into the horizon. Poetic maybe, but not practical.

3. Terrain: The Segway was only comfortable on well-maintained city roads & sidewalks. Grass, gravel, potholes - think again. Don’t for a second confuse a Segway with an ATV vehicle.

4. Personal Injury: My dad is far from the only person to be injured while riding a Segway. In 2003, George W. Bush famously took a tumble from one. And in a twist of fate that once again proved truth is stranger than fiction: In 2010, Segway owner, James Heseldon died after driving his Segway off a cliff near his home in Yorkshire, England.

Doing Things the Right (Seg)Way

The Segway brand is so tied up in its iconic PT product that I’ve been referring to the PT as a Segway throughout this article. It bears worth mentioning that the company is still alive with a large line of e-scooters and adjacent products.

I didn’t realize Segway offered other products until doing research for this article. They even offer new OG Segway-ish models such as the Segway x2 SE or Segway x2 SE Patroller which was designed specifically for police officers.

While this article has focused on what went wrong, I could easily write another entire article about what Segway has done right. Maybe we are witnessing the resurrection of Segway with their new product lines? Only time will tell.

Check out Segway’s Non-Segway products!

Sources, Sources, & Sources:

Better Marketing: “Why the Segway Failed” by Leo Saini

Fast Company: “Exclusive: Segway, the most hyped invention since the Macintosh, ends production” by Mark Wilson

Forbes: “The Reason Why Google Glass, Amazon Fire Phone and Segway All Failed” by Adam Hartung

Innovation Management: “A Lesson in Innovation – Why did the Segway Fail?” by Paul Sloane

Prophet: “Why Did Segway Fail to Meet Expectations?” by David Aaker

**Note: Article originally posted on April 16th, 2021 on brandcereals.com, migrated to Mirror in Jan 2022

I remember coming to the realization as a child that it was impossible to ever know everything. When you’re young enough that your parents still always have the answers, it seems an achievable goal to know everything. Then it hit me. I will die knowing a fraction, a tiny tiny infinitesimal percentage of the world’s knowledge. (I also remember the first time I fully realized we all die one day in preschool but that’s a more macabre story for another day...) The idea that I will die before reading all the books I want to read, traveling all the places I want to go (so on and so forth) haunts me to this day. There is absolutely nothing scarier to me than wasted potential.

So, I make lists.

I make lists of books I want to read, places I want to go, and films I want to see. I refer to these lists constantly in the hopes of shrinking them. It’s a one step forward two steps back situation however, and every time I finish a book I add four more. My newest curiosity extends to Product Management, UX design, entrepreneurship and all their cousins. So, this “What I Read This Week?” series is 1) designed to share gems of knowledge I’ve mined from the stimulus and information overload that is the internet; and 2) a way for me to check off some of the hundreds of articles I bookmark as “to-reads.”

So! Check out these links and my takeaways. Maybe you’ll even bookmark these finds for your own list.

1. Article: “E.l.f Cosmetics, Chipotle embrace buzzy digital channels for makeup collab” by Robert Williams

Focus: Marketing, Social Media & Business Development

So, what’s going on in the world of marketing right now?

Chipotle and E.l.f Cosmetics are collaborating on a makeup set and limited edition menu item known as the “Eyes. Chip. Face” bowl. I actually first learned about this collaboration through a random influencer on my Tik Tok FYP even though it’s not at all similar to the content I watch. Both companies are promoting the collab on various SM channels including Clubhouse. I recently joined Clubhouse and I am very excited to explore the platform. In fact, I got so excited following different groups/platforms when I initially joined that the platform temporarily suspended my activity in case I was a bot. Opps! I do feel the app should recognize the activity pattern of new users going on following sprees but I digress…

The rise of restaurant & cosmetic brand collaborations is a curious phenomenon. According to the article, they are much more commonplace in China. This Marketing Dive article also introduced me to NTWRK, a mobile-first video shopping which has seen a massive increase of sales with people staying at home due to the pandemic.

Although I won’t be digitally running out to buy the palette I am intrigued to see how Clubhouse and NTWRK affect digital marketing strategies going forward.

Have an appetite for food or food-inspired makeup?

2. Article: “How to Present Design Work to a Billionaire and Not Look Like an Idiot,” by Mike Curtis

Focus: Design, Presentation Skills

How do you present design work to a billionaire and not look like an idiot?

Turns out the answer is intuitive: preparation and practice. This article is chock full of strategies to elevate your presentation game. Below are are a few of my favourites that I will carry with me:

• Avoid design jargon, big words are often used to dress up bullsh*t

• Stay focused on the big picture, avoid stakeholders derailing the conversation by talking in circles about the UI of a button

• Speak to the motivations of the stakeholders: Does you design aspire to onboard more customers? Increase revenue? Now’s the time to show data (if you have it) to back up your claims

• Always print your slide deck, bring a backup Bluetooth speaker, etc. A great presentation can be sabotaged by technical difficulties

• The author emphasizes that you should present your work in person whenever possible (vs. attached in an email)

Improving my presentation skills is a major career focus this year for me as I find myself giving more presentations than ever in my role as a Product Manager. This article gets bonus points for including one of my favourite quotes, see below:

If you think that good design is expensive, you should look at the cost of bad design. — Dr. Ralf Speth, CEO Jaguar

Are you ready to bring the power in PowerPoint?

3. Article: “Know When to Kill Your Brand,” by Denise Lee Yohn

Focus: Product Management, Business Strategy

How do you know when it’s time to say goodbye? Pro tip: If you’re offering cheap licensing or aggressive discounting, it may be time to shut the product line down.

In this article, Denise Lee Yohn looks at two deceased brands: Blockbuster & Radio Shack and analyzes their respective demises. Yohn argues Blockbuster was too slow to pull the plug: “its managers should have euthanized that brand long before it drained shareholder value and became the butt of jokes.” On the other hand, Yohn claims Radio Shack may have jumped the gun:

Radio Shack’s biggest misstep was its failure to stay true to its original purpose - equipping electronics DIY-ers and tinkerers. Today, fulfilling that purpose could look different, but it would still be important. The maker movement continues to expand, and demand for lower-cost electronic parts, products, and accessories remains strong. — "Know When to Kill Your Brand" by Denise Lee Yohn

Still not sure if a brand has met its time? Yohn advises you should look at a brand’s purpose (not profit) when deciding if the time has come to say goodbye. Try asking yourself the following questions:

1. Is the brand’s purpose relevant?

2. Can the brand fulfill its purpose harnessing a competitive advantage?

3. If you answered NO to the above, can the brand pivot to a new purpose using its existing assets?

Learn more about killing brands here! (Exclamation point seems a bit too joyous here…)

4. Article: “Grant Sanderson Channels His Passion for Math Into Marvelously Intuitive Explainer Videos” by Anthony Wing Kosner

Focus: Social Media, Product Sense

What does it mean to be a great math educator?

As a student I never hated math, but I never loved it either. I was generally apathetic with the exception of Trigonometry which I found incredibly fun for as yet unknown reasons. This article introduced me to Grant Sanderson, a Youtuber, who runs the channel 3Blue1Brown which is dedicated to explaining math using layman’s terms and graphics.

You have to be pretty engaging for your math videos to compete with the millions of prank videos on the platform. Sanderson argues that his videos don’t bother to answer the perennial question “when will I use this?” [e.g. when will I need to use the quadratic formula?], but rather appeal to emotions - a sense of mystery and wonder. Sanderson structures his videos as a story arc with the viewers as detectives trying to solve a problem.

I strongly recommend watching his Ted Talk. After watching, I immediately fell down the rabbit hole and learned all about the Fourier Transform. Will I ever use it? Probably not, but I’m sure glad I learned what it is. Needless to say, 3Blue1Brown has earned a new subscriber.

Lots of links! Link to the article! Link to the TED Talk! Link to the YouTube channel!

5. Article: “Designing for Crisis: 5 Learnings From Developing Trauma-Informed Products” by Annie Wu

Focus: UX Design, Customer Segmentation

This timely article immediately caught my attention as I was scrolling through the Airbnb Design Blog. I learned a little bit about designing for crisis in my architecture undergrad while learning about temporary shelters and refugee camps but I’d never thought about its application to digital design.

According to the article, Airbnb has launched a service for frontline workers to find places to safely self-isolate. Author Annie Wu describes the 5 principles of trauma-informed design that Airbnb considered while building the Frontline Stays Program:

1. safety

2. transparency

3. choice

4. mutuality

5. equity

For example, users always have the option to decline/exit user flows. This is designed to avoid the burdening feeling of being pressured into an experience and thus exacerbating trauma for the users. Interestingly, Wu notes making feedback prompts optional has led to an increase in the quality of the resultant user feedback.

Whenever possible the userface has been simplified to reduce the mental load of a medical worker using the tool after a long, grueling shift. Airbnb has shifted the language for its support ambassadors from “I can...,” to “Let’s,” to promote a sense of partnership.

Let’s learn more about trauma-informed design

6. Article: “Behind Every Great Product” by Marty Cagan

Focus: Product Management, Product Sense, Product Lifecycle, Launch Strategy

Disclaimer: This article is from 2016 and the information may be less relevant today.

In this article, Silicon Valley-based product expert Marty Cagan brings to light the true stories behind several iconic products and their product managers. Cagan cites case stories from major powerhouses such as Netflix, Google‘s Adwords, Apple’s Itunes, etc. (also all the product managers mentioned are women so yay for representation!).

Key takeaways from the article on how to build a great product:

• It’s important that a product manager takes true ownership of a product instead of relaying decisions to the CEO or through stakeholder committees

• Cagan notes, ”There’s little as powerful as a marketing person that’s also strong at product. The combination is amazing.”

• Long but worthwhile quote, paraphrasing here would be akin to butchering:

Like a successful CEO, the successful product manager must be the very best versions of smart, creative and persistent. By smart, I mean using new technologies to reach new audiences or enable new business models. By creative, I mean thinking outside the normal product box of features to solve business problems. And persistent - as in pushing companies way beyond their comfort zone with compelling evidence, constant communication and building bridges across functions in the face of stubborn resistance. Being a great product manager means having extraordinary grit. — Marty Cagan

For further reading, check out the article - “Good Product Manager/Bad Product Manager” by Ben Horowitz - which Cagan cites as inspiration for writing his own.

Interested in building a great (not good, not okay) product?

7. Article: “Please Make Yourself Uncomfortable: What Product Managers Can Learn From Jazz Musicians” by Ken Norton

Focus: Product Management + jazz

In his Mind the Product conference talk (and respective article), Ken Norton makes the case that jazz music is an apt comparison to the field of product management. The ability to improvise is crucial in both fields. Three lessons that product managers can ‘steal’ from jazz:

1. patterns

2. empathy

3. uncertainty

Norton notes that even improvised jazz starts somewhere, generally with loose patterns. For digital product sprints, it’s helpful to start with loose constraints, however, if you decide too much up front you risk trapping yourself in a box from the start.

Norton also speaks to the importance of active listening and empathy. As a product manager, this is an important skill to cultivate for conversations with users and among your product team. As for uncertainty, reprioritization and pivoting are nothing new to product managers. Don’t fight the uncomfortability of innovation Norton advises, if you’re uncomfortable you’re probably on the right track.

To learn more about how PMs can learn from jazz, check out Norton’s book “Yes to the Mess: Surprising Leadership Lessons from Jazz.” This book is included on my long-term reading list which you can check out here.

Get comfortable and watch the talk, or read the article

8. Article: “What is Tik Tok? Why Is It So Popular?” by Daniel —

Focus: Social Media, Product Sense

I am one of the countless Gen Zers who adopted Tik Tok with the onset of the pandemic and stifling cabin fever at hone. I even have a friend who’s grown an impressive following on the platform, Jackie Todd, check out her content here!

What is Tik Tok?

Tik Tok is the latest social media platform to capture the zeitgeist of an age. I remember when its predecessor, Musical.ly, was promoted by Youtubers but it seemed stunted for the pre-teen demographic. Tik Tok offers something for everyone from Taylor Swift super-fans (#kaylor?) to people looking for career advice, from cat grooming tutorials to real estate tours of luxury condos.

Why is it so popular?

Tik Tok satisfies the customer demand for micro-entertainment. It offers something to watch while you wait for an uber or in the airport lounge before boarding a plane. Like many, I find Tik Tok highly addictive and frequently uninstall it for a tech detox before redownloading it during a particularly dry pandemic lockdown weekend (Netflix? Again?!). The key ingredient to Tik Tok’s astronomical success: it’s FYP (the “For You Page”) algorithm. It’s almost disconcertingly intimate how well Tik Tok knows what I want to watch.

Make your day and learn about Tik Tok

Bonus readings I read this past week if you just can’t get enough from the above suggestions

• Article: “Why a Great Individual is Better Than a Good Team” by Jeff Stibel

• Article: “The 5 Superpowers of Outstanding Product Managers” by Ken Sandy

• Article: “10 Brands That Brilliantly Differentiated Themselves From the Competition” by Bethany Shepard

**Note: Article originally posted on March 23rd, 2021 on brandcereals.com, migrated to Mirror in Jan 2022

A synopsis for those who will inevitably eschew watching the video. Basically, Matthew Encina from The Futur challenges the viewer to improve their writing by copying the work of their favourite writer. This practice, known as ‘copywork,’ has been used for centuries by writers and artists to improve their craft. Encina choose to copy 365 entries in Seth Godin’s blog and see how much he could complete within a week.

I watched this video over the summer (I’m a massive fan of The Futur’s channel, I even talk about it in my first blog post) and was immediately inspired to try the challenge myself. I’d become a reader of Seth Godin’s work since picking up “This is Marketing” a few months prior. Full transparency: I’ve been caught binge-watching Godin’s interviews and presentations on Youtube way too late on a Monday, multiple times (especially this one!) .For my own take on this exercise, I choose to copy Seth Godins’ Top 100 posts. Godin writes about everything from marketing, business development, entrepreneurship, self-improvement to education, management and general life observations.

While I took longer than 7 days to complete the exercise, I certainly took less than a year. My process was simple: whenever I had a few minutes to spare I’d open my Google Docs, split the screen with Seth Godin’s blog and start typing.

So, What Did I Learn?

I strongly believe if you want to become a better writer, you have to become a better reader. One of my favourite quotes is:

If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that. — Stephen King

As someone with a blog, I am always looking for ways to improve my writing. If I could capture even 10% of the essence of Godin’s writing style I would be thrilled. The benefits of this exercise are twofold: One, I can study Godin’s writing style in the hopes of emulating it. Two, in the process of transcribing his posts I absorb the actual content and Godin’s wisdom. While I copied the blog posts, I wrote notes about Godin’s writing style and highlighted my favourite passages. Here are a few writing qualities I feel are worth emulating:

1. Call and Response: Godin often responds to his blog post titles in the first sentence. These bold assertions draw the reader in. For example: Title: “The world’s worst boss” First sentence: That would be you.

2. Professional Examples: Godin has a prolific list of professional projects and readily volunteers his past wins or misses as examples. This technique backs up his assertions and boosts his credibility.

3. Directly Challenges the Reader: Godin is not afraid to be controversial or make polarizing claims. Even if you don’t agree with him, he’ll have you reevaluating your position.

4. Motivational Call-to-Actions: Godin’s posts are motivational. Even if he is dissecting the issues with our current educational systems (more than mildly depressing), he offers the reader a glimpse of a better future. The posts are optimistic, it’s never too late to change our ways.

5. Better Not More: There’s no consistent word count to his blog entries. If the concept takes 4 lines or 4000 words, so be it. Although, Godin generally tends towards the less is more maxim or rather ‘better not more.’

6. Intentional Line Breaks: This observation was made by Matthew Encina in the original video. Godin is very intentional in his line breaks; if there’s a high-impact sentence, it sits alone in a large plane of white space. Layout design is often under-utilized by writers. See example below

Favourite Passages & Words of Wisdom

When writing this post I considered attaching the PDF of my work as proof but determined I’d rather direct the traffic to Godin’s own site. So, you’ll have to take my word when I say I typed out all 110+ blog posts. And, if you want to read the full blog posts you’ll need to give Godin’s site a visit (best decision you’ll make all week!)

After reviewing all 110+ blog entries, my all-time three favourite posts are:

1. “Plenty of room on the island”: This post encourages creators to share the love for other creators, not everything is a zero-sum game. As someone who includes dozens of links in their posts, I would put #sharethelove as the second major theme of this blog after #continuousimprovement.

2. “The candy diet”: If you are what you eat, you’re also what you read. This entry reminds the reader to practice mindful consumption in the age of information overload. If enough of us demand better content we can avoid the race to the bottom.

3. “Like riding a bike”: This entry is all about the ‘learn by doing’ maxim. Failing is part of the learning process. Take this blog for example: I don’t claim to be the next Seth Godin or the world’s foremost expert on product; this blog is about #continuousimprovement and putting my work out into the world even if it’s not perfect. If I waited to post until my entries were 100%, there would be no posts at all.

(If you can only make time to read a few posts, do yourself a favour and check these out.)

As well as sharing my favourite posts, I thought I’d share a few of the passages that made me pause and think:

1. From “The candy diet”: ”*The media has always bounced between pandering to make a buck and upping the intellectual ante of what they present. Now that this balance has been ceded to an algorithm, we’re on the edge of a breakneck race to the bottom, with no brakes and no break in sight… Even if only a few people use precise words, employ thoughtful reasoning and ask difficult questions, it still forces those around them to catch up. It’s easy to imagine a slippery slope down, but there’s also the cultural ratchet, a positive function in which people race to learn more and understand more so they can keep up with those around them.”*

2. From “The email checklist”: ”*#17. Is any portion of the email in all caps? (If so, consider changing it). #18. Is it in black type at a normal size? #19. Do I have my contact info at the bottom? (If not, consider adding it)… #21 Could this email be shorter?… #30. Am I quoted back the original text in a helpful way? (Sending an email that says, in its entirety, “yes,” is not helpful.)… #36. If I had to pay 42 cents to send this email, would I?”*

3. From “Thinking about money”: ”Money spent on one thing is still the same as money spent on something else. A $500 needless fee on a million-dollar mortgage closing is just as much as money as a $500 trip to McDonalds… If money is an emotional issue for you, you’ve just put your finger on a big part of the problem. No one who is good at building houses has an emotional problem with hammers. Place your emotional problems where they belong, and focus on seeing money as a tool.”

4. From “Advice for authors”:* *”Don’t try to sell your book to everyone. First consider this: “58% of the US population never reads another book after high school.” Then, consider the fact that among people even willing to buy a book, yours is just a tiny little needle in a very big haystack. Far better to obsess about a little subset of the market - the subset that you have permission to talk with, that subset where you have credibility, and most important, that subset where people just can’t live without your book.”

5. From “The confusion about enough”:* *”To watch people at work, it seems like we never have enough: We need more social media likes, we want more market share, we demand more quick wins. And to see them at rest, it seems as though we never have enough: Things to entertain us, shallow friendships, conspicuous displays of success… Lots of us walk around thinking we do have enough: Education, exposure to difficult topics, situations where we need to change our mind, silence, deep relationships based on trust and commitment. I’m wondering what happens if we flip them around?”

There are so many nuggets of wisdom in Godin’s blog I couldn’t possibly highlight in this single post. I strongly encourage you to explore his oeuvre yourself. I would give this challenge two thumbs up but honestly my thumbs are a little sore from all the typing.

(Want more of Godin’s work, subscribe to his newsletter! All the cool kids do it.)

**Note: Article originally posted on January 31st, 2021 on brandcereals.com, migrated to Mirror in Jan 2022

With the second full lockdown in Toronto underway, I have what feels like more free time than ever. And as someone living in a cold climate, there’s only so much aimless wandering outside you can do before indoor heating calls your name. For this week’s blog post I’ve decided to compile a list of what I’ve been reading this week. #continuous-improvement

Don’t be afraid to agitate. — Brian Chesky, Airbnb

1. Article: “Airbnb: The Growth Story You Didn’t Know” by Morgan Brown

Growth hacking is a controversial subject. Even if you’re vehemently against the practice, this article serves as a useful crash course on the history of Airbnb and its astronomical success. The founders of Airbnb were trained designers who initially sold cereal boxes to raise money for their business. Their creative problem-solving abilities served them well as the company scaled up and overcame various obstacles.

An example of creative growth hacking: when the company realized their wish list function was under-utilized, they switched the star to a heart. This simple design change positioned Airbnb as a social discovery model and significantly boosted user engagement. The design sensibility that birthed the company is evident in their 2014 rebrand - Airbnb moved away from a cold, corporate blue (used by far too many tech companies) to a warmer colour palette that conveys hospitality.

Want to learn more about Airbnb’s astronomical success?

2. Article: “Great Product Managers are “Outcome Thinkers” by Max Bennett

Over the past few months I have transitioned from a Marketing to Product role (woohoo!). In order to do my job the best I can, I have taken it upon myself to read about the Product function outside work on a regular basis (#continuousimprovement, also quite literally the whole point of this blog). This article is a great place to start to understand what makes a GREAT product manager, not average, not okay, not mediocre (why do anything halfway?!)

The key to being a GREAT Product Manager is being an outcome thinker - as opposed to a technology or problem thinker. Outcome thinkers make sure that what they are building will achieve the desired outcome. Don’t just build something cool for the sake of it, not if you want to be GREAT.

Interested in being a GREAT Product Manager?

3. Video: "Airbnb's Brian Chesky @ Disrupt SF 2014"

(I know it’s a video, but if you turn on captions it’s kinda like reading?)

After reading the first article on this list I decided to learn more about Airbnb. This Q&A with Brian Chesky of Airbnb is full of insightful nuggets. Chesky explains that Airbnb seeks to revolutionize the hospitality industry (not just the hotel industry). Airbnb storyboarded the entire experience of going on a trip and realized that they were only a small slice of the pie; this discovery has led to a lot of their recent product innovation including Airbnb Experiences.

When discussing the controversial 2014 rebrand, Chesky says he told his team not to be afraid to agitate - the worst is being irrelevant and not talked about at all. Personally, I enjoy the new Airbnb logo which aspires to become a universal symbol of “sharing.” What do you think of it?

4. Article: “The World Needs a Tech Diet; Here is How Designers Can Help” by Fabricio Teixeira & Caio Braga

There is an increasingly large spotlight being shone on the ethics of the tech world. Netflix’s “The Social Dilemma” anyone? Everywhere you look people are absorbed in their phones - addicted - in part because of so-called dark patterns. So what are dark patterns? Ding! Endless scrolling on feeds, constant notifications, spam, etc. The consequences of unhealthy tech behaviours include depression, addiction, oversharing, etc. This article serves as a call to action for designers (with gorgeous graphics and UX to boot). How can designers make the digital world a more ethical place?

Learn more about dark patterns.

**Note: Article originally posted on December 6th, 2020 on brandcereals.com, migrated to Mirror in Jan 2022

Jargon and terminology can be intimidating

Lately I’ve been delving into researching the product management function. As part of my learning I’ve been collecting a list of product management terms, slang, and jargon. Sharing is caring so I’ve made my list (and the source for each definition) publicly available in a digital flashcard set on Cram.

Get studying now! Heads up that there’s 213 terms and counting! (Pro tip: Create an account on the platform to view.)

Here are some of my favourite terms I encountered, some of which I knew and some were new.

These are a few of my favourite terms…

You’ll notice a recurring theme of acronyms ROFL!

AARRR or “Pirate Metrics”

Try this look for Halloween

“A “startup” metrics model made by Dave McClure: acquisition, activation, retention, revenue, and referral. These are theoretically all the behaviours you are looking for in your customers.”

(Source)

BHAG (Big Hairy Audacious Goal)

Think of Big Foot or a Yeti

“The BHAG is a strategic business statement meant to focus the team on a medium-term goal which is deliberately audacious and bold; sort of like a vision statement.”

(Source)

Cannibalization

Nearly as scary as it sounds

“If one product in a company competes directly with another of the company’s products, it is sometimes described as cannibalizing the other product’s sales. This is why product managers responsible for a line or suite of products must work diligently to create distinct value propositions for each product or segment their products by persona, pricing, or other differentiators.”

(Source)

CX (Customer Experience)

UX meet CX

“CX, or customer experience, is the interaction between a product and a customer over the duration of the relationship. This includes a customer’s attraction, awareness, discovery, experience, advocacy and purchase and use.”

(Source)

Feature Creep

Look behind you!

“The tendency to add more and more features to a product as time goes by; more features seem to add more value, but feature creep refers to the generally negative effect on the consumer that comes from overloading a product with too many features.”

(Source)

GOOB (Get Out of the Building)

Go for a walk, at least to the nearest Starbucks

“Coined by Steve Blank to refer to the process of going out and talking to users instead of staying inside speculating about what they want.”

(Source)

Hedgehog and the Fox

Turtle and the hare 2.0

“Hedgehogs are really good at one thing and foxes are pretty good at a lot of things; a concept popularized in the book “Good to Great,” defined here because people use it describe companies that focus on doing one thing really well versus trying to be too many things to too many customers.”

(Source)

Inventor’s Dilemma

Would double as a cool album name

“Describes the recurring phenomenon where an older/existing business struggles to innovate as effectively as newer companies who are not as burdened by the need for high margins.”

(Source)

Kaizen

Sums up the purpose of this blog

“Continual improvement; the ongoing search for and elimination of waste in a process or system.”

(Source)

MVP (Minimum Viable Product)

Most valuable term

“An MVP, or minimum viable product, represents the earliest stage in the product development cycle at which the company believes it has enough features to satisfy early-adopter customers. In industries such as software, or for companies with limited funding, the MVP can help the product teams receive use feedback as quickly as possible, which they can use to iterate and improve the product.”

(Source)

NPS (Net Promoter Score)

Create a product you’d refer to your best friend

“How likely the user is to recommend the product to a friend. This is considered to be a good indication of how valuable they find the product.”

(Source)

Tiger Team

Eye of the tiger

“A completely separate team that’s given almost complete autonomy to execute a project.”

(Source)

Unicorn

So they do exist!

“A startup whose valuation has exceeded (the somewhat arbitrary) $1 billion. Given that most startups fail, this term is used to refer to the most successful of the most successful startups.”

(Source)

USP (Unique Selling Proposition)

Not be to confused with UPS

“A product’s USP, or unique selling proposition, is its unique competitive advantage, or the reason a customer would select the product over any other. Generally, the USPs are written as benefits to the customer or user.”

(Source)

VOC (Voice of the Customer)

Ask Siri to read findings in an Australian accent

“VOC, or voice of the customer, is a market research technique that produces a detailed set of customer wants and needs, organized into a hierarchical structure, and then prioritized in terms of relative importance and satisfaction with current alternatives".”

(Source)

Stay tuned for future product posts!

**Note: Article originally posted on November 15th, 2020 on brandcereals.com, migrated to Mirror in Jan 2022

The key to any successful product is a strong positioning foundation. “Obviously Awesome” by April Dunford is a short, snappy crash course on product positioning: What is it? Why does it matter? And how to do it? My manager recommended this book as I transition into a product role and I want to share the love for this great resource.

Have I convinced you already? In the wise words of Staples, that was easy! Buy the book here.

1. Find & Focus on Your Best-Fit Customers

Much of the wisdom in this book reminds of Seth Godin’s blog post 1,000 True Fans, inspired by Kevin Kelly’s thoughts here. The idea is simple, you should focus on capturing your true best fit-customers first. You aren’t the solution for everyone, so don’t try to be. Harness all your energy and resources on being the best product for your best customers; this is especially crucial for startups and growing businesses. As Dunford writes:

Otherwise, poor-fit prospects consume your sales team’s valuable time, energy and attention - only to choose a competitor that was a better fit for them all along. — Obviously Awesome (pg 12)

Respect there’s no one-size-fits all and find your niche. Disclaimer: Your pool of best-fit customers should be large enough to meet your sales objectives or consider expanding.

2. Choose Your Market Category Carefully, Very Carefully

One of my favourite passages in the book is when Dunford explains via cake analogy the importance of correctly choosing your market category:

Imagine you’re a baker and you decide you’re going to make the greatest chocolate cake the world has ever known. You probably weren’t aware of it, but the minute you decided your product was ‘cake,’ you made a set of critical business decisions before the flour hit the bowl.
— Obviously Awesome (pg 24)

A chocolate treat positioned as a cake is completely different to a chocolate treat positioned as a muffin or a snack. The same physical product triggers different assumptions and expectations depending on its positioning. Don’t accept the default category, position your product intentionally to your advantage - perhaps your chocolate cake is better as a bread?

It’s important to note that your category can shift over time, so don’t be afraid to transition into a better fit. Avoid the sunk cost fallacy.

4. Have an Inclusive Positioning Team

Assemble representatives from across the company when designing your positioning. Your ‘Positioning Team’ will be strongest if it includes members of different branches. As Dunford notes:

Assembling a team often exposes how different groups in your company hold certain assumptions about your attributes, value and target markets. — Obviously Awesome (pg 77)

Don’t be alarmed if there’s major discrepancies in how your Positioning Team perceives the product, but acknowledge there’s lots of work to do.

Note: Including different disciplines in your Positioning Team will also make it easier to achieve company-wide buy-in later on.

3. It’s Not Always Good to Be Trendy

Embrace the trends, but only if they make sense or else risk confusing your customers. Voice-activated sounds cool but does it make sense for your water bottle design? Avoid spoiling thoughtful positioning with an irrelevant trend added for “cool points.” As Dunford warns:

Companies can get too focused on the trend to the exclusion of the market, which ultimately leads to confused customers. It’s like describing why you are interesting without first telling people who you are. — Obviously Awesome (pg 158)

Stick to the basics. The best positioning is clear and concise, cool is bonus points. We’re not in middle school anymore.

4. Effective Positioning Has Company-Wide Buy-In

Positioning has ripple effects across the company and can only be effectively executed with company-wide buy-in. Your customer service will thrive when sales representatives know what they’re selling. Your marketing campaigns will perform better when your designers know who the competition is. If you care about your positioning you should make sure your team does too.

To optimize your positioning, every facet of the company has to buy-in:

Positioning on its own isn’t useful to a company. Once you have worked through your positioning, you need to share it across the organization. Positioning needs to have company buy-in so it can be used to inform branding, marketing campaigns, sales strategy, product decisions and customer-success strategy. — Obviously Awesome (pg 165)

5. There’s (x3) Ways to Come-To-Market

There’s essentially three ways to position your product in relation to a market:

1. Create a new market

2. Attempt to become the leader in an existing market

3. Try to capture a segment of an existing market

Each strategy has pros and cons for companies at different stages of development. Creating a new market is the most challenging approach but can be highly lucrative if you’re positioning a radically innovative product. Alternatively, competing in an existing market allows you to reap the benefits of those who have come before. Dunford writes, “Many startups compete in established market categories and do so successfully by first breaking up the market into smaller pieces and focusing on one piece they can win” (135).

There’s a million more takeaways not mentioned above but to find out what they are you’ll have to check out the book yourself!

**Note: Article originally posted on October 5th, 2020 on brandcereals.com, migrated to Mirror in Jan 2022

First, a bit of background: I generally keep no more than 2 pages of apps on my phone (no folders!), so every app has truly earned its spot. “been” has been (pun intended) on my phone ever since I got it (and it’s an iPhone 6S for context!). Also, this post is not sponsored, I wish it was!

So what exactly is this app? been is a FREE app that allows you to keep track of what % of the world’s countries you’ve visited. The simple interface means all you have to do is check off your visited places from a list of countries and it automatically calculates the percentage of the world you’ve seen. At the bottom of the screen you can toggle between the world vs. the USA, where you can select states visited. So far, I’ve seen 7% of the world’s countries and 62% of the USA (I am missing most of the mid-west states).

This app has a remarkably simple interface, but there are a few key features I want to call attention to:

1. When you click on a country/state it links directly to country’s official Wikipedia page.

2. The app makes it easy to upload your custom map to Instagram or share your travels via text. If it’s not on social media, did the trip even happen? *sarcasm* Added bonus, your social-media-ready-map will automatically include the % of the world you’ve seen.

Download it now (or once you’ve finished reading this post…)

So, what do others think? What’s the consensus?

One of the best ways to learn more about a product and what could be improved upon, is by reading the app reviews. On Google Play, been has a rating of 3.3/5. On the App Store, it has 3.7/5. My rating would be 3.5/5, right smack in the middle.

Reading through the reviews I noticed the same few comments again and again:

1. The Android version lacks most of the iOS capabilities, for example, there is no USA map for Android users.

2. There is no log-in or way to backup data. Every time a user gets a new phone they have to enter all their data from scratch. Not a great function for an app that exists to serve as a memory log.

3. Missing countries and countries incorrectly categorized by continent.

It’s interesting to note that I’ve read several reviews where people wished the app was more in depth and allowed you to record the specific cities you’ve been to. While I appreciate the ambition, I actually prefer having a high level overview app that takes minimal space on my phone.

Read the reviews yourself

Possible Points of Improvement?

It’s worth repeating that been is a 100% free app with no in-app purchases, so any points of improvements are less qualms and more food for thought. Besides addressing the concerns of the previous section (all valid complaints), here are a few suggestions:

• An improved map interface. I agree with the myriad of comments I read asking for a pinch and pull map interface. This feature would be especially useful for Europe with all its geographically small countries (Luxembourg anybody?). Most of us, including myself, have to come expect an interactive map and find our fingers will automatically try to zoom in.

• Colours! Branding! I love the signature orange hue of been, but I wish there was a more comprehensive colour palette. Perhaps a blue, a teal or a whole spectrum of orange with black accents? The icon itself is most problematic, the pale grey is underwhelming and I often have trouble spotting the app on my phone.

• Option to bookmark countries for future travel? The most I use been is immediately when I’ve come back from a trip or am wishfully planning future travels. I definitely do not use this app daily; very rarely am I randomly struck by an urge to check my travel log. Allowing users to use the app to plan future trips would be a great way to boost retention.

• Spotlight country of the day. Ever fallen down a rabbit hole of dictionary.com’s word of the day? Same. Now imagine if been highlighted a country of the day … awesome right?

• Cloud nine scenario: been could partner with travel agencies or airlines to become the ultimate vacation app. It would ideal if been was built to help you track and boost the % of the world’s you’ve seen all within the same app.

• (Update): Since publishing this post, my talented sister has recommended a colour-coded system or separate tab to designate countries where you’ve only been to the airport. This system could placate globetrotters as airport hopping to count countries has been a longstanding controversy. Also, my sister’s amazing and you should check out her website, designed by moi.

Sidebar, I strongly recommend you to pick an app on your phone and brainstorm product improvements - it’s a thought-provoking and highly satisfying exercise. It’s a bit like, “If I were president, I would create a law…”

So what?

In short, I highly recommend you download this app! At the very least, you’ll have a fun hour brainstorming every place you’ve ever been; best case, you’ll have the app on your phone for years as a handy record of your wanderlust.

Side note, this app is ideal for a UX portfolio redesign. The structure of the app is simple and clean, but it’s just begging for a UI makeover. Stay tuned for a potential redesign courtesy of moi! If you attempt this design challenge, tag @brandcereals on Instagram so I can check it out!

Convinced? It’s free - try it! Seriously, try it!

**Note: Article originally posted on September 15th, 2020 on brandcereals.com, migrated to Mirror in Jan 2022

There are so so so many marketing tools, it’s overwhelming!

Over the last few months I’ve been compiling a list of helpful tools that I actually use on a regular basis. If these tools are unfamiliar to you, I advise you to check them out and see if you can implement them in your workflow.

Disclaimer: This is not a sponsored post, I am just a huge fan of these tools!

1. Airtable

This browser based platform is useful in so many capacities. I’ve personally used Airtable to set up a social media approval platform whereby my manager can review and approve drafted materials prior to publication. You can even connect Airtable to Wordpress and feature interactive tables on your website. Learning more about relational databases is high on my to-do list!**

** I have since learned a ton of relational databases, I highly recommend this Udemy course on Airtable to get started.

Hell yes, I want to learn more about Airtable!

2. iPad (or any comparable tablet)

I must confess it took me a full decade to get onboard the tablet train. It wasn’t until I joined the workforce full-time that it became a part of my regular workflow. Investing in an Apple Pencil or tablet stylus will help you get the most out of your device. I’ve found a tablet and stylus to be the best way to markup drafts of marketing collateral and it’s an eco-friendly alternative to printing copies of rough drafts.

Interesting in buying an iPad? And maybe an Apple Pencil?

3. Tiny Scanner App

This handy PDF scanner app has been one of my favourites for years. You can use Tiny Scanner to take a picture of a document that is then formatted as a PDF for further use. I’ve used Tiny Scanner for everything from signing leases to tax returns. This tool is perfect for both personal and professional use. And the best part? It’s free!

I’ve got so many documents to scan!

4. A Notebook (yes, a good ole’ notebook)

If you don’t already carry a notebook, it might be time to invest in one. I go through about a notebook a quarter judging by the growing stack of filled notebooks in my apartment. Whether it’s to jot down feedback or take notes during a meeting, notebooks are the ultimate tool. Spruce up your notebook by investing in coloured pens or use sticky notes to highlight key sections. Personally, I’m a fan of moleskin notebooks. My architecture background might be bleeding through when I say that the paper quality justifies the price.

Note: a tablet can also double as a notebook depending on your preference!

I need a new notebook ASAP!

5. Unsplash Photos

This is an amazing database of free, royalty-free photography. Unsplash has thousands of high-resolution images - you may even find some on this site! If you don’t have a budget to purchase images, then Unsplash’s free images may be your new best friends. The key to finding the right images is to experiment with different search terms.

Of course I want free images!

6. The Noun Project

Adding icons is a quick way to spruce up a presentation but they can be challenging to make unless you’re an Adobe wizard. For $39.99 USD/year you can upgrade to NounPro for access to over 3 million free icons. For a personal touch, you can customize the icon colour and/or background online before downloading the file as a vector PNG or SVG. If you can’t afford a subscription don’t worry - you can still download select Public Domain icons with attribution!

Icons, icons, icons!

7. Upwork

At small companies or startups, often there arises a need to outsource an expertise. Upwork is a website that allows you to virtually hire experts in fields ranging from data analysis to brand design. I’ve personally used Upwork on multiple occasions including to hire a vector illustrator for marketing collateral. Upwork is set up with a secure payment system and milestones so you can hire with confidence. I recommend browsing portfolios and reaching out to candidates personally on top of posting a job opportunity.

I’m looking to outsource a project!

8. Marketing Dive Email Newsletter

Subscribing to Marketing Dive’s daily newsletter is one of the best changes I have made in my workflow. It only takes a few minutes each day to stay abreast of industry news. Reading marketing news insights helps gets me in the mindset of big-picture thinking before my first meeting of the day. If you belong to the school of thought that learning is a lifelong endeavour that doesn’t stop when you’re handed your degree, then check out Marketing Dive’s email newsletter. #continuous-improvement

Interested in signing up for the newsletter?

9. Monday.com

Even if you’re not yet subscribed you’ve probably seen their Youtube Ad campaigns - Monday.com is a project management tool that completely changes the game. I use Monday.com all day everyday to keep track of tasks and update my team on my progress. With Monday.com, you can use boards and widgets to organize your workflow. Tools like Monday are especially important for teams that work remotely!

P.S. Dear Monday.com, please hire me for a commercial - I love your product!

I could use help with project management!

10. Hootsuite

One of my responsibilities as a Marketing Manager was to run our corporate social media accounts. That involves coordinating the posting schedule of social media content across various platforms: Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, etc. Hootsuite combines all your social media platforms into one easy to use interface which makes scheduling a breeze.

Sign me up!

**Note: Article originally posted on August 30th, 2020 on brandcereals.com, migrated to Mirror in Jan 2022

YouTube is the place to learn how to dice onions without crying, how to style heatless curls overnight, and how to optimize your website’s SEO. There’s a wealth of marketing and design knowledge on YouTube, if only you know where to look.

In the spirit of #continuous-improvement and lifelong learning, I’ve compiled a list of some channels worth checking out. From graphic design tutorials to high-level marketing strategy, these Youtubers cover a wide range of topics. And let’s face it, who doesn’t love free knowledge?

1. The Futur

When I’m running on the treadmill, chances are I’m binge watching The Futur’s videos. Major highlights include their “Young Guns” competition (where young graphic designers compete in design challenges) and the “Building a Brand” series. The latter is an 11- part series documenting the process of rebranding a California craft brewery - warning, after watching you may want to quit your job and start brewing!

For context, The Futur is an online business and design education platform whose mission is to teach 1 billion creatives. It was founded by Chris Do, who serves as both judge and host for the “Young Guns” series. As you fall into the wonderful, educational rabbit hole of their content, you’ll become familiar with the whole Futur crew.

2. AJ&Smart

This is my go-to channel for all user experience design matters. When I first became interested in UX, I spent countless hours going through ALL of their videos (literally one-by-one chronologically). This channel is run by a Berlin-based UX and innovation studio, and their content is packed with practical knowledge. A major focus of this channel is “design sprints," and you’ll find they frequently reference this book as the holy grail of sprint knowledge.

I especially recommend this channel for anyone interested in learning UX vocabulary or adding design sprints to their workflow.

3. Awwwards.

Think TED Talks, but ONLY about design. Major highlights for me include the talks by Pablo Stanley, Aaron James Draplin & Chris Do (of course!) Learn about everything from brand ideology to user onboarding from the best of the best. With an average video length of 25 minutes, make sure to grab a snack and enjoy the beautiful presentations - seriously, these designers make some of the MOST aesthetically pleasing slides I’ve ever seen. #continuous-improvement

4. Kel Lauren

This channel is one of my recent quarantine finds and I’m so grateful I stumbled upon it! Kel Lauren (designer “stage name”) is a young graphic designer who often redesigns iconic logos. I love watching her design process in Adobe and seeing every decision she makes in real time. It’s refreshing and relatable to watch a fellow young professional at the start of her journey. I can’t recommend her enough!

5. Business Insider

At first glance, this channel may seem like a wild card choice - let me explain…

Business Insider’s videos are often master lessons in marketing and often marketing gone wrong. Videos such as “The Rise and Fall of J. Crew” track the trajectory of a brand, and it’s very educational to learn how marketing has helped and hindered household names over time.

Meanwhile, the “So Expensive” series explains why caviar, Disney World and Supreme clothing are (guess!) so expensive. This series is perfect if you’re looking to add a few fun facts to your dinner party conversation repertoire.

6. Jesse Showalter

I love Jesse’s channel because it’s a blend of easy-to-follow tutorials and career advice. Jesse is a positive, motivating force and he’s been doing a lot of exciting collaboration videos lately, for example The Power of Leadership with Jonathan Courtney (from #2 AJ&Smart). Jesse is another great resource for anyone interested in learning more about web development and user experience (UX) design.

7. Danksy

Danksy’s channel is the most technically educational on this list. If you’re overwhelmed by Adobe, just starting out, or looking to find shortcuts in your workflow - look no further! Danksy’s videos take the form of short, specific tutorials: “How to Create Custom Shadows in Adobe XD” (spot The Futur t-shirt?) or “Set Up Isometric Grids in Illustrator in Seconds.” Whenever I have a design concept I don’t know how to execute, I make a beeline straight for this channel.

**Note: Article originally posted on August 23rd, 2020 on brandcereals.com, migrated to Mirror in Jan 2022