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How Product + Design Work Together To Build ‘A Better Future’

3 Tips from Jared Spool (Strategic UX) and Roman Pichler (Product)

Compared with other software development disciplines, product management and user experience (UX) design are still pretty young professions. That said, they’re maturing rapidly and growing more specialized every day. As their evolution continues, it isn’t always clear who’s responsible for what on a product team and how best they can work together (we offered guidance on this topic in a post last year). Maybe it’s no surprise, then, that UX designers and product managers seem to get in each other’s way on the road to success.

This post canvasses the views that Roman Pichler (PM) and Jared Spool (UX) recently shared in consecutive podcast episodes of Product Momentum. What’s most intriguing about both conversations is how they each arrive at the same desired outcome – improving the lives of end users – despite taking parallel paths.

Jared calls that desired outcome a better future, while Roman describes it as the positive change a product should create. But both agree that whatever the solution, it’s less about building shiny new features or making things look pretty (i.e., outputs). Outcomes always trump the digital knickknacks we create along the way.

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Objective Prioritization is Impossible

The prioritization of anything complex must be a collaborative process.

According to Dictionary.com, the first two definitions of priority are listed as:

  1. The state or quality of being earlier in time, occurrence, etc.
  2. The right to precede others in order, rank, privilege, etc.; precedence.

We use the term a little differently in the software development industry.

In our world, prioritization is –

The art of combining everything we think we know about the past with the fixed resources we have right now to predict the order in which to do things to improve our collective future.

It is complicated, imperfect, and messy. The most powerful prioritization schemes are those which align our teams and empower them to make better decisions.

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Great Visions Unlock Human Potential

Getting the Vision Right is Hard Work – But It’s Vital to Team Success

A great vision is one that unlocks human potential and creativity by painting a clear picture of what is possible. Stewarding, adapting, and continuously refining the product vision is the top priority of successful leaders because it is a key driver of the organization’s strategy.

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Where Are The Innovations?

In this blog, ITX EVP of Innovation Sean Flaherty explores where innovation comes from, obstacles that stand in its way, and a simple technique you can share with your teams today for capturing ideas that lead to more innovations.

This blog is a refreshed version of the original, which was first published February 15, 2022, on Medium.

 

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Maximizing Developer Value: The Intersection of Tech and Business Domains

In his role as Principal Software Engineer at ITX, John Roets knows the value engineers bring to the table and describes it in the blog below. Leaning on content curated from thought leaders like Amazon’s Jesse Watson, SVPG’s Marty Cagan, and others, John offers words of caution and support to his fellow engineers and their teammates: “If you fail to see beyond technical skill as what makes developers valuable, you’ve got it wrong.”

My new favorite article is The Hard Thing About Software Development, from Jesse Watson, a software development manager at Amazon. I discovered it through James Coplien, an Agile influencer, who has labeled the article as ‘profound.’

The article itself isn’t new – it was written in 2017 – but its message is as relevant as ever.

In the article, Jesse is responding to an independent remote developer – a freelancer, gig worker – who is lamenting the fact that gigs don’t pay well.

On the surface, this seems contradictory. After all, developers are in high demand and are paid well. Right? What’s going on here?

 

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Bridging the Gap: Highlights from ITX’s 2nd Annual Product + Design Conference

ITX hosted its 2nd Annual Product + Design Conference on June 22-23 at the Grand Hyatt Hotel Ballroom in downtown Rochester. The 2023 event’s 225+ Keynote Day attendees included every fashion of product maker and leader.

They may have entered the conference as product managers, designers, engineers, QA specialists, and content strategists. But they exited as members of a product team – collectively responsible for solving one shared problem: how do we improve the lives of our users

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Harness the Power of Discovery: Matching Team Skills to Client Needs

Keys to Stewarding the Client Investment & Maximizing ROI

Getting to the heart of a client’s concern is the crucial first step to delivering an effective software solution. But deciphering complex requirements and balancing competencies between a client and a technology partner can be a daunting task. This is where discovery comes into play.

In our series’ first post, Discovery: Understanding the Problem Space, we learned that discovery begins before kickoff with a client-focused “needs analysis session.”

In this blog, we’ll explore how discovery activities help teams gain powerful insights, establish trust, and deliver impactful solutions as they work to steward the client investment.

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From Product Strategy to Roadmaps and Release Plans

In the Planning Stage, look for the ITX innovation lead to guide the product team from Vision to Strategy to Roadmap. In our recent post, we explained that Vision represents a desired future state. Strategy explains how you’ll get there, and Roadmap lists the mile markers along the journey. In this post, we examine the innovation lead’s role in navigating that path.

Building software isn’t about the features you add – the bells and whistles. It’s about helping your end users be more successful. Any notion that a product with more features is by definition better than a product with fewer features is a misguided one.

Innovation leads help their clients and teams discover the difference between adding features for features’ sake and adding features that solve problems for users and create business value for clients.

Our journey starts with Vision, which directs everyone’s effort and investment toward making users more successful. In addition to vision statement – a declaration of objective – innovation leads help teams strategically derive two additional artifacts: the product strategy and the product roadmap.

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Illustration showcasing how a Product managers starts out with a product strategy and ends up going through a product road map to end up in a product release.

When Teams Celebrate Constructive Feedback, They Win

I was recently given some amazing feedback on a talk that I gave to a group of CEOs in Oklahoma. I took too long and added too many details to my opening story before I explained the context and reason for the story. The CEO who provided the feedback was lost and found himself wondering where I was going. He found himself wandering off. I sometimes get lost in the story when I am speaking and often lose track of my audience. It is not good.

That feedback caused me to seriously revamp the opening of my speech, starting with some direct context early on in the speech. The last couple of talks I gave since the revamp were markedly better and gained more powerful, early engagement from the CEO groups. I was able to turn that feedback into gold immediately. In my early business career, that would not have been the case for me. This is the result of learning how to celebrate feedback when I get it. (p.s. I sent the CEO a small gift to thank him in this case.)

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Setting Objective Measurements Growth

One day, I had a good friend call my cell and say, “I need a team that can pick up the pieces from another vendor. I need help getting these small features out the door in three months or I’m going to lose my job. Can you help me?” For context, the teams I work with have been building software products for two and a half decades and this has happened on more than a few occasions. This time, my team had worked on this technology platform before, and, represented confidently that they would be able to knock the project “out of the park.” Everyone on my team expressed confidence that this was a no-brainer. You might guess where this is going next.

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