“Creative thinking requires a relaxed state, the ability to think through options at a slow pace and the openness to explore different alternatives without fear.” - Fixing our Unhealthy Obsession with Work Email

The Cult of Design Dictatorship is bad because it so easily appeals to every human’s ego, and it gives bad designers an excuse to always be right. Alex Cabal, The Cult of Design Dictatorship

When I was a wee pup working on My Yahoo, this was a crime I committed more than once. We’d argue about how a particular feature should work, narrow things down to two contradictory options, and end up implementing both as a “configurable setting.” Users would then never find or use the setting, and we’d end up looking like idiots when we had to remove it in a future release.

A great article from Wired explaining what feedback loops are and how they work. Harnessing the Power of Feedback Loops - Wired

Just finished with web 2.0 expo (SF). The conference was not well attended, probably the result of bad timing (right after SXSW) and a name that was AWESOME in 2007. That said, here are two of my favorite presentations. There were others, but the presenters haven’t posted the slides. 1. Cindy Alvarez, “But How Am I Doing Compared to Other Companies?” If you do any A/B testing, conversion optimization, or direct-response online advertising then you will find this useful.

Programmers write code, QA specialists (really just a specialized kind of programmer) make sure that it works, designers create flows, layouts, copy and graphics, and sales people sell. Sure, someone needs to keep an eye on costs and revenues, and manage the business - but that’s not what most product managers do. So do we really need product managers? Or do we just need someone to make sure that someone is leading the team and taking accountability for delivering something that consumers want and customers pay for?

From my perspective, United Airlines had two things going for it: membership in Star Alliance, and that lovely arrangement of Rhapsody in Blue that they play as you board. Things got better when they aligned themselves with US Airways (America West, re-branded). I had received consistently good service from America West, and that seems to have carried over through the various mergers and bankruptcies. Plus, it’s nice to be able to add a long connection in Vegas, so you can play a few hands on the way out of California.

The Economist launched a new version of their homepage a couple weeks ago. Their designers had an interesting challenge – taking a premium, text heavy weekly and making it work on a web obsessed with the visual, social, and real-time. They loosened the paywall, added more daily content updates, and moved the site away from being simply an online reflection of their print publication. You can read a description of the new design on their site.

It’s been a long week. Starbucks finally announced my main project. I’ve been juggling calls with both India and California, taking care of the dog-in-law, and not sleeping much. We’re building a new kind of web UI on top of a lot of complicated technology platforms (location detection, a content management system, etc.). It’s a fun change from my last two prducts (Yahoo! Toolbar and My Yahoo!), which both required engineering rebuilds of existing products with big audiences.

I’m a big fan of managing by objective. Wherever possible, I believe that PMs, engineers, testers and designers should begin their work by first agreeing to (or at least accepting) a list of user and business objectives that a feature or product should fulfill. This will be useful in framing the many discussions that will follow. This week in Why Microsoft Had to Destroy Word Peter Merholz discusses how Microsoft made some tough decisions in the design of Word 2007.

As a product manager it is tempting to blame failures on the action - or inaction - of others. This is dangerous because it allows one to avoid responsibility for the commtiments they make. To be a great product manager you have to be a good leader. That means holding yourself accountable. The best definition of accountability I’ve seen describes accountability as “a personal choice to rise above one’s circumstances and demonstrate the ownership necessary for achieving desired results (Connors, Smith and Hickman, ‘The Oz Principle’).

For all my time at Yahoo I’ve had the good fortune of working under Tapan Bhat. I worked for him directly for the first year as we tried to sort out My Yahoo!. “My” was and is a pretty geeky product, with a lot of power user features. Our job was to figure out how to turn it into a mass market product. Having it for several years before abandoning it I felt that I had a great sense of what users wanted in a “personalized home page,” and what we needed to do to make the product grow again.

Something to blog about After nearly four years at Yahoo! I finally feel like I have something to blog about. One of the best things about my job is that I get to learn from some of the best minds on the internet. Periodically, something that I learn resonates so deeply, or describes my situation so precisely that I can’t help but print it in 30 point font and hang it on the wall of my cube.