September, 2015

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Deadlines are evil. Deadlines are our friends

Folding Burritos

Deadline. Even if you didn’t know what it meant, the word surely sounds ominous. And then, when you look up the origin of the term , it gets even nastier. The word comes from US Civil War prison camps, where guards would shoot any prisoner that crossed a line about 19 feet from the wall. That is the kind of inspiration for one of the most common concepts that we have to deal with on our products and projects.

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10 Things To Do To Appear ‘Innovative’

Street Smart Product Manager

Being “innovative” is all the rage nowadays. Companies big and small, tech and non-tech, are striving to seem innovative to employees and customers. I’ve worked at such companies, and I’ve helped many product managers working at such companies through my product help calls. As such, I’ve seen companies that are actually trying to be innovative, and those that seem more interested […].

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The Alternative to Roadmaps

svpg

I have always loved the General George Patton quote: “Don’t tell people what to do; tell them what you need accomplished, and you’ll be amazed at the results.” Unfortunately, typical roadmaps do just what the General warned against – they tell the team what to do. Usually that’s in the form of a prioritized list of features or projects that someone believes will actually solve some problem (even if that problem is often not explicitly stated or understood).

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How to be an Infinite Learner

Sachin Rekhi

One of the characteristics Reid Hoffman often mentions he values in great entrepreneurs is that they are infinite learners. Those who possess this quality are constantly expanding their expertise to new domains, regularly overcoming their own shortcomings, and their capacity for taking on new challenges seems limitless. Mark Zuckerberg is frequently cited as an infinite learner who has grown immensely in his ability to lead Facebook’s now 10,000 person organization and shape a product experience

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Platform Product Management Beyond Features: Introducing B-MAP for Platform Ecosystem Success

Traditional PM struggles with the complexities of platform ecosystems. B-MAP framework tackles this challenge. B-MAP goes beyond features, focusing on building, managing, adapting, and partnering to foster a thriving platform ecosystem.

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What Distinguishes the Top 1% Product Managers from the Top 10%?

Rahul Abhyankar

I came across this question on Quora and it got me thinking. It’s useful to understand what distinguishes the top 1% from the top 10% in any field. The top 10% in any field are likely some of the top notch performers in that field. The margin of difference is very small. Yet there must be that … Continue reading What Distinguishes the Top 1% Product Managers from the Top 10%?

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Learn something new with 6 useful Shared Collections

Roy Madden

We built our new feature, Shared Collections , with the idea that content becomes even more powerful when you are able to share it with others. The popular saying about teaching a man to fish is true: When you show your work newsfeed to others, you empower others to grow as well. We’ve seen so many inspiring Shared Collections over the past few weeks, and we wanted to highlight some of our favorites.

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A Preview of the Future for Customer Success

TSIA

The technology industry is not only transforming itself, but in a great many ways is the catalyst for transformations taking place across many other industries. From manufacturing to retail, traditional media to social media, community medical clinics to hospital surgeries, construction to home management, there seems to be no sector of our economy exempt from technology-driven disruption and transformation.

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Don’t Fall in Love

Product Management 2.0

“One’s first love is always perfect until one meets one’s second love.” Elizabeth Aston. I was honored to participate in a podcast hosted by my friend Michael Hopkin. Michael has a blog site dedicated to Product Management ( [link] ) and also runs a podcast called The Product Management Pulse. It was great fun and Michael is a great host.

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Dreamforce Challenge: Answer Questions 1,2,3,4

TIBCO - Thought Leadership

With the Dreamforce kick-off today, everyone is excited to be inspired, to imagine, to innovate. During this week of idea sharing with thought leaders, industry pioneers, and your peers, I challenge you to find the answers to questions 1, 2, 3, 4: How will you connect your Salesforce solution to your current and future systems? What’s the biggest challenge of all?

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Entity Resolution Checklist: What to Consider When Evaluating Options

Are you trying to decide which entity resolution capabilities you need? It can be confusing to determine which features are most important for your project. And sometimes key features are overlooked. Get the Entity Resolution Evaluation Checklist to make sure you’ve thought of everything to make your project a success! The list was created by Senzing’s team of leading entity resolution experts, based on their real-world experience.

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3 Exercises to Sharpen Your UX Skills

UserTesting

Being a great UXer takes a lot of work. You need to be creative, empathetic, articulate, and patient ( among many, many, other qualities ). And those traits don’t just manifest overnight. Like an athlete, you need to train and … The post 3 Exercises to Sharpen Your UX Skills appeared first on UserTesting Blog.

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Understanding Buyer and User Needs: A Short Survey; Popular Product Management Tweets

Good Product Manager

Understanding Buyer and User Needs: A Short Survey. One of the key elements underpinning any successful product, service or solution is that it addresses buyer and user needs. That is not a guarantee of success, but it is difficult to create and sustain a successful offering in the market that does not satisfy customer needs. Unfortunately, this is one area where organizations struggle.

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Join feedly! We are growing our dev team.

Roy Madden

Hi. We are feedly. We are a small team located in San Francisco and Palo Alto. We are passionate about the web, personalization, and connecting people to the content they rely on to think, learn, and keep ahead. We serve million users and teams, connecting them to the subset of the web that matters to them. We love to listen to our users and iterate quickly – it helps us get details right.

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Welcome New TSIA Members! September Edition

TSIA

At TSIA, we are dedicated to helping services organizations both large and small grow and advance in the technology industry. We’d like to take the opportunity to welcome this month’s newest members, as well as acknowledge companies already a part of the TSIA community who have recently expanded their membership to include additional service disciplines TSIA has to offer.

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The Big Payoff of Application Analytics

Outdated or absent analytics won’t cut it in today’s data-driven applications – not for your end users, your development team, or your business. That’s what drove the five companies in this e-book to change their approach to analytics. Download this e-book to learn about the unique problems each company faced and how they achieved huge returns beyond expectation by embedding analytics into applications.

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Roadmap Alternative FAQ

svpg

In my prior article I discussed my favorite alternative to conventional product roadmaps. That article seemed to strike a chord in people, and I received quite a bit of very positive feedback. However, I also received more than a few questions. This didn’t really surprise me because as I said in the article, this is not a minor topic. But in my back and forth with people, I realized that there were several common and often significant confusions, and sometimes, the discussions would expose

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Why Competing on Price Always Win

The Product Coalition

Conventional wisdom says “competing on price is a race to the bottom”. As a result some businesses are not open to exposing the prices of their products and services and some would even create complex sale and pricing structures that would hog decision-making. A case in point to share?—?I am one of those city dwellers who would leverage on the lame excuse of “the inexorable hustle and bustle of life that prevents me from keeping a healthy lifestyle” to procrastinate my decision on an exercise re

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Is Your UX Team Missing This Important Expert?

UserTesting

I recently discovered that my car helpfully sounds its alarm to let me—and everyone else within a six block radius—know when its battery is about to die. It was around 7:00 AM on a Saturday morning, and I was desperate … The post Is Your UX Team Missing This Important Expert? appeared first on UserTesting Blog.

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How do you create an experiment-driven culture?

DISQO

We all grow up hearing the age-old saying, practice makes perfect. It’s instilled in us from childhood, and as we grow older, we feel compelled to pass this wisdom onto younger generations. There’s enough evidence – both empirical and anecdotal – to suggest that practice does indeed lead to perfection. It should therefore be evident that perfection cannot easily be achieved without practice.

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IDC Analyst Report: The Open Source Blind Spot Putting Businesses at Risk

In a recent study, IDC found that 64% of organizations said they were already using open source in software development with a further 25% planning to in the next year. Most organizations are unaware of just how much open-source code is used and underestimate their dependency on it. As enterprises grow the use of open-source software, they face a new challenge: understanding the scope of open-source software that's being used throughout the organization and the corresponding exposure.

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How to Connect Your Service Offers to Business Value: Part 3

TSIA

In this three-part blog series, we’ve gone over the capabilities you’ll need to develop before providing customer outcomes, as well as ways to determine how your customers measure success. To continue with the theme of answering the question “What’s most important to your customers?” the final installment in this blog series will cover how your organization can offer, and monetize, adoption services to ensure your customers are not only reaching their desired outcom

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Leveraging Your Field Service Engineers to Drive Revenue

TSIA

On the surface, smart, connected products threaten to make the need for on-site service obsolete. Embedded technologies will phone home and signal either a firmware upgrade or generate an automated service request for a customer-replaceable unit as part of an advanced exchange program. Although this is happening more and more and will undoubtedly continue in the future, hardware companies will always need a field service engineer to go on-site at a customer’s location.

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[Video] The Three Levels of Customer Adoption

TSIA

After you’ve landed a customer, you want them to find enough value in your solution to expand their spending and renew their business, but how do you get them to that point? In this video clip from his keynote presentation at TSW 2015 Best Practices, “The Who, What, Why, and How of Driving Adoption and Outcomes,” TSIA’s executive director, Thomas Lah, explains how successful adoption of technology is your key to unlocking the door to expansion and renewal.

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B4B: How Technology and Big Data Are Reinventing the Customer-Supplier Relationship

TSIA

With the rise in popularity of cloud-based business models, many technology companies are feeling increasing pressure to transform their businesses to focus less on products and more on services. Fortunately, you don’t need to replace your traditional product-based business model entirely, but instead, find ways to add profitable “as-a-service” offers into the mix.

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LLMOps for Your Data: Best Practices to Ensure Safety, Quality, and Cost

Speaker: Shreya Rajpal, Co-Founder and CEO at Guardrails AI & Travis Addair, Co-Founder and CTO at Predibase

Large Language Models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT offer unprecedented potential for complex enterprise applications. However, productionizing LLMs comes with a unique set of challenges such as model brittleness, total cost of ownership, data governance and privacy, and the need for consistent, accurate outputs. Putting the right LLMOps process in place today will pay dividends tomorrow, enabling you to leverage the part of AI that constitutes your IP – your data – to build a defensible AI strategy fo

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Organizational Structure and Capabilities Along the Remote Services Continuum

TSIA

In our previous post , we stressed the importance of companies designing new service offers that are centered on driving business outcomes in order to avoid creating another complexity avalanche in the age of IoT. In this latest installment of our IoT blog series , we’ll be tackling the topics of organizational structure and smart service capabilities as industries move along the remote services continuum.

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How to Win Friends and Influence People with User-Centered Copywriting

UserTesting

Whether you’re writing marketing copy or UX copy, your goal is to get the user to take action. But in order to get users to act, you need to overcome the biggest challenge in copywriting: People don’t want to like … The post How to Win Friends and Influence People with User-Centered Copywriting appeared first on UserTesting Blog.

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What Happened? How to Write a Better Error Message

UserTesting

It was on my commute home from work when I was deep in the throes of an intense game of Two Dots. I’d been stuck on a level for basically forever and had two clear choices: break down and buy … The post What Happened? How to Write a Better Error Message appeared first on UserTesting Blog.

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To Design an Awesome Product, Let Go of Being Right

UserTesting

I recently had a conversation with a designer who was working on the early stages of a new product. Naturally, I recommended getting user feedback early and often throughout the design process. And he said…. “But what if your user … The post To Design an Awesome Product, Let Go of Being Right appeared first on UserTesting Blog.

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Use Cases for Apache Cassandra®

There’s a good reason why Apache Cassandra® is quickly becoming the NoSQL database of choice for organizations of all stripes. In this white paper, discover the key use cases that make Cassandra® such a compelling open source software – and learn the important pitfalls to avoid. From understanding its distributed architecture to unlocking its incredible power for industries like healthcare, finance, retail and more, experience how Cassandra® can transform your entire data operations.

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Building habit-forming products: an interview with Nir Eyal

UserTesting

This is a Q&A interview with Nir Eyal about his book Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products. Nir writes, consults, and teaches about the intersection of psychology, technology, and business. He’s also taught at the Stanford Graduate School of … The post Building habit-forming products: an interview with Nir Eyal appeared first on UserTesting Blog.

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4 Tips to Improve Your Credit Card Form UX

UserTesting

I have a confession to make. I use Amazon to buy just about everything I need, but not because of the two-day shipping. And it’s not because of competitive pricing, either. The real reason? I never have to input my … The post 4 Tips to Improve Your Credit Card Form UX appeared first on UserTesting Blog.

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Building habit-forming products: an interview with Nir Eyal

UserTesting

This is a Q&A interview with Nir Eyal about his book Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products. Nir writes, consults, and teaches about the intersection of psychology, technology, and business. He’s also taught at the Stanford Graduate School of … The post Building habit-forming products: an interview with Nir Eyal appeared first on UserTesting Blog.