71–80 of 93 posts
I launched a crowdfunded product back in 2017 that has kept going for the past 5 years, and I've never had this problem at all. Random people email me all the time (at least 3-5 times per week, even now) with information about bugs/feature requests, or just to say hi/thanks and show off their projects made with it. Comparing my site ( https://espotek.com ) to yours, yours is much more "corporate" looking and doesn't…
From my experience working as a PM with a medical/educational/hardware/software product, I think everyone finds this process is extremely challenging. First surprising thing I learned is that users don't usually actually have the will to spend any amount of time giving feedback. But they will avoid admitting it. The second discouraging thing is that when you do get them to sit down and talk, you will find that they'r…
This sounds remarkably like my job as a high school teacher. Depending on what else it entails, I bet I would enjoy a similar role. Thanks for the thoughts.
From my experience working as a PM with a medical/educational/hardware/software product, I think everyone finds this process is extremely challenging. First surprising thing I learned is that users don't usually actually have the will to spend any amount of time giving feedback. But they will avoid admitting it. The second discouraging thing is that when you do get them to sit down and talk, you will find that they'r…
People really don't have any passion for talking about your solution because they don't really care about you and you should take any discussion of solutions with a large grain of salt because customers are not PMs. But people are passionate about talking about their problems and that's where you should orient your discussions on. Don't ask about your product at all during PM interviews, simply try to understand the…
Yeah you need to understand the whole process that the user is part of, and then design a better overall process.
You can't ask the customer to design the product for you, they don't have the overview it requires and they also don't have any incentives to help you with your job, unless you give them something for their time.
Product managers make their job way too easy for themselves by expecting the users to provide complete requirements for them.
You could never have done any user research that would show you that people wanted to have a phone without buttons, before the iphone came out.
The programmers/engineers may have assembled a "perfect" tool (in the sense that it actually solves the problem that it should solve) but often practical usage needs to go through a number of steps that feel "unnatural" to the final user.
In some cases I managed to actually talk to the programmers but what I found most time is a sort of elastic wall, they often concur that this (or that) thing would be better/easier/simpler, then (for this or that reason) they never change it.
Maybe it is just me and my suggestions may well be either "impossible" to implement or plainly stupid, but after having been told a few times "You are right, if we do this it would be better, I am taking this note for next release." and then 1, 2, 3, 4 updates/releases after nothing has changed, it becomes tiring/frustrating to provide feedback/suggestions that will never be implemented.
Only as an example (which is a pet peeve of mine) is input forms, talking of desktop apps nowadays a (say) 1024x768 resolution on a monitor is a "bare minimum".
A single form (entirely viewable without scrolling) can well contain 30/40 input fields, yet (for some reasons) a number of softwares use multi-tabbed (tiny) forms, i.e. for the 30 fields you have three tabs, each one with 10 fields, if you forget an input on a field on tab #1 and go on, you cannot see which field is is missing (as you are on tab #2 or tab #3), then when you confirm you get a missing field error and you have to check all three tabs.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
People really don't have any passion for talking about your solution because they don't really care about you and you should take any discussion of solutions with a large grain of salt because customers are not PMs. But people are passionate about talking about their problems and that's where you should orient your discussions on. Don't ask about your product at all during PM interviews, simply try to understand the…
> The biggest mistake I see PMs make is coming in with an over optimism bias and assuming that your product must be top of mind for all users when the reality is that the most often scenario you discover from user interviews is that the problem you're trying to solve is of relatively minor importance to most people. You see this come through in products all. The. Damn. Time. Some PM, and probably one or more designer…
I launched a crowdfunded product back in 2017 that has kept going for the past 5 years, and I've never had this problem at all. Random people email me all the time (at least 3-5 times per week, even now) with information about bugs/feature requests, or just to say hi/thanks and show off their projects made with it. Comparing my site ( https://espotek.com ) to yours, yours is much more "corporate" looking and doesn't…
From my experience working as a PM with a medical/educational/hardware/software product, I think everyone finds this process is extremely challenging. First surprising thing I learned is that users don't usually actually have the will to spend any amount of time giving feedback. But they will avoid admitting it. The second discouraging thing is that when you do get them to sit down and talk, you will find that they'r…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This sounds remarkably like my job as a high school teacher. Depending on what else it entails, I bet I would enjoy a similar role. Thanks for the thoughts.
I suggest you look into “UX Research”. That’s precisely the role described by the parent comment. They work on a product team with designers, engineers, and PMs to help everyone else understand the needs of the user. They also help define who the user should be based on the needs of different kinds of users. It’s a pretty important role in most user-facing tech companies.