producteering.org » Great Products http://producteering.org Software & technology trends Thu, 22 Apr 2010 06:34:20 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.6 en hourly 1 © selina.dsouza@aspiresys.com () selina.dsouza@aspiresys.com() Just another Localhost.localdomain weblog selina.dsouza@aspiresys.com No no http://producteering.org/wp-content/plugins/podpress/images/powered_by_podpress.jpg producteering.org http://producteering.org 144 144 The Making of Great Products: The People and Roles involved http://producteering.org/2008/06/27/the-making-of-great-products-the-people-and-roles-involved/ http://producteering.org/2008/06/27/the-making-of-great-products-the-people-and-roles-involved/#comments Fri, 27 Jun 2008 09:07:32 +0000 Producteering Digest http://producteering.org/?p=111 While it takes a lot of good people and resources to build a great product, there are three key roles that need to be a part of the core team. These three key people have to represent the needs of different stakeholders, for a product’s overall success. They are:

* The product manager
* The user experience lead
* The product engineering lead

The role of the product manager is to make sure that the product has value – he does his research, knows his target audience and defines the product functionality. As the overall product owner, he also represents the business owner, company executives, sales, marketing, product marketing, legal, finance and customer support.

The user experience lead represents the user’s behavior and literally puts himself in the users’ shoes. If his job is done well, the end-result is something that users can figure out. The UX lead must represent interaction design, visual design, user research, usability engineering and often content/editorial.

The product engineering lead is often an architect or senior engineer and is responsible for ensuring that the product that is defined is something that can actually be delivered. He must know what is possible and what is not and must represent architecture, engineering, test automation, site operations, and site security.

While the product manager role is sometimes neglected and not staffed optimally or at all, many a time interaction design is also side-lined when doing user interface design. Similarly, engineering is sometimes left out of the loop in the initial product definition stages.

It is therefore of utmost important to understand that each of these roles bring unique value to the development and ultimate success of a product and it is imperative that they all work cohesively to deliver a great product.

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]]> http://producteering.org/2008/06/27/the-making-of-great-products-the-people-and-roles-involved/feed/ 0 The Making of Great Products – The importance of persona profiling http://producteering.org/2008/06/20/the-making-of-great-products-%e2%80%93-the-importance-of-persona-profiling/ http://producteering.org/2008/06/20/the-making-of-great-products-%e2%80%93-the-importance-of-persona-profiling/#comments Fri, 20 Jun 2008 08:59:26 +0000 Producteering Digest http://producteering.org/?p=110 Now and then, we come across a product or service that comes into an already-crowded marketplace and yet manages to establish itself as the new standard in its market. Some examples of these innovators are Google (which managed to penetrate through the crowded search engine space with its search technology that beat the rest of the competition) and MySpace (which picked up the lessons learnt from earlier social network sites and corrected the mistakes/effectively addressed the pain-points).

There are two key methods that smart companies use to create winning products in mature markets. First, they understand their target market and where the current products fall short. This is done by bringing in personas in your design decisions.

Some of the things that you certainly need to look at are:

• Persona is about real people that you would meet, talk with and observe
• Don’t start with a method or methodology and keep it intuitive
• Persona is all about role-play and getting in to their skins
• Base it on first-hand user knowledge and primary experience

In effect, persona profiling is not about market segmentation, customer profiling or workflow analysis. Neither do they fit preconceptions, use-cases or demographic models, because reality is often times more difficult that what we think. Personas aren’t supposed to make us feel comfortable about our design decisions; in fact, they should do just the opposite and can keep us honest.

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