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Building know-how from the ITX team blog

ITX Product Momentum Podcast – A Pragmatic Approach to Product Management

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Imagine a colleague asks you to describe the software product manager role. Where would you begin? So few of us actually studied this stuff in college. How can we hope to explain it when we’re not even sure we’re doing it right? We deliver MVPs for MVAs. We set goals using OKRs and KPIs. And we apply a host of methodologies to build all this incredible software. But in the midst of all the jargon, it’s easy to lose sight of our greater purpose.
In this episode of the Product Momentum Podcast, Sean and Paul chat with Johanna Rothman. Also known as the “Pragmatic Manager,” Johanna helps product leaders identify problems, recognize opportunities, and remove obstacles in their development process. Though she has authored more than a dozen books on digital product management, Johanna sees software not as the end goal – but as the means by which we achieve that greater purpose – inspiring our teams to improve the world around us.

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ITX Product Momentum Podcast – Episode 19: The Significance of Contributive Design

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As organizations move inexorably to a team-based, agile methodology, how do individual contributors effectively demonstrate what they’re working on or what they’ve accomplished? If performance is measured based solely on the team’s deliverables, how do team leaders appropriately acknowledge each member’s contribution or target their professional development? Enter the concept of contributive design, in which involvement of the individual is made clear. Contributive design fosters an environment in which team members collaborate as one, but also where they’re not necessarily dependent on others for their own outcomes.
In this episode of ITX’s Product Momentum Podcast, hosts Sean and Paul welcome Miguel Cardona, professor of design, artist, and keynote speaker at ITX’s 2nd annual ITX UX 2019: Beyond the Pixels design conference. Miguel introduces us to contributive design and its far-reaching impact – not only in the classroom, where contributive tools help him evaluate the performance of project teams and isolate the contributions of each student. Contributive design applies with equal significance in the workplace as we consider the modular nature of teams, design systems, and the user experience.

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People Skills: The Foundation of Effective Software Development

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The culture of the software development world has sometimes valued technical know-how above all else. Developers may see cultivating the “soft” skills of social interaction, teamwork, and communication as a distraction from the work of writing beautiful code. In reality, we need these skills in order to do our jobs properly.

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IT Incident Response: Avoiding the New Normal

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Imagine being audited by the IRS. Every minute, every day, 365 days a year. Stress builds and anxiety deepens, relieved (but only momentarily) when daily reports come back free of incident. For now.

That’s what it is like to work in Production Support. Audits of one sort or another (formal and otherwise) and the incident reports that sprout from them have become the new normal in the age of “everything tech.” In our world, incidents mean smart phone apps that don’t work, super-slow websites, social media platforms that are down, and more. And our “auditors” number in the thousands, maybe even millions (if we’re “lucky”).

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Human-Centered Design

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Product people get excited about solving problems that make people’s lives better. On that we can all agree. It’s the approach we choose to achieve that goal where differences arise. Sometimes the differences are significant and obvious – Agile vs. Waterfall, for example. Sometimes, they seem much less so. Take user-centered design vs. human-centered design. Aren’t users of our products human? Of course they are, but there’s more to the difference than a mere distinction.

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3 Positive Steps That Address Tomorrow’s Design Challenges

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As product people, we pursue mastery in an evasive world that bobs and weaves all around us. As markets shift and our users react, we’re required to learn and adapt and to perceive our circumstances in different ways. Just as our clients and their customers do. And as we question whether yesterday’s answers will solve tomorrow’s problems, we realize the need to seek new learning.

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Introducing Gender Perspective Into Design

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Earlier this winter (summer in the northern hemisphere), I enjoyed facilitating the first-ever Gender Jam in Buenos Aires, Argentina. The event was organized by Buenos Aires Service Jams, the local chapter of the Global Service Jams – a non-profit and volunteer-based network of service design aficionados – and MásMujeresUXar, the local chapter of Mas Mujeres Ux, a community of women from Latin America who work in user experience and try to empower women in technology and enhance their visibility through workshops and access to educational courses.

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ITX Product Momentum Podcast – Episode 16: Developing Organizational Agility

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Imagine a world in which we drop the labels that segregate us as Lean. As Agile. As waterfall. As design thinkers. Imagine a world where instead we build the kinds of organizations and cultures that encourage and reward learning and customer centricity, that incentivize teams to deeply understand their customers and to ensure that we’re always delivering value on their behalf. Let that sink in.
In this episode, hosts Sean and Joe chat with Jeff Gothelf, author, coach, consultant, and a featured keynote speaker at ITX’s 2nd annual ITX UX 2019: Beyond the Pixels design conference. The world Jeff hopes for is not necessarily the one he predicts, but it is a world that allows us to freely pick and choose the components and methodologies that work best within our respective domains.

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