The Productologist

I went to visit a customer a few weeks ago as part of a commitment to myself (and my products) to get out into the field more often. My goal with them and with all of my planned visits to the field was to talk about how they use my product, what business challenges they face and what they see for the future in terms of their own growth and what they would want and need from my product. I got what I was looking for…and a whole lot more.

This is my first off-topic post (NOTE: there’s still some Product Management stuff at the end…I just couldn’t help myself), but I just had to rave about this: SoBotanical Shave Gel. I was reluctant to try it at first, but I decided that I was being ridiculously stubborn about not trying it so I ordered it. Plus it was recommended by a friend who said, “It’s the bomb! You won’t be disappointed, man.” And he was right, although he may be slightly biased, since SoBotanical is run by his wife.

It’s been a little over a month since I started using this new note-taking method and I wanted to provide some details on how it’s going for me. To be honest, it hasn’t been as easy to switch to this note-taking style as I thought it would be. I have struggled on a few fronts–

Paper

The Inmates are Running the Asylum by Alan Cooper

I have been meaning to read this seminal text on application development and usability for some time (read: years), but somehow it always ended up on my reading list just below something else. After seeing some others reference the book and discuss conference talks where the author expanded on his theorems, I decided to bump The Inmates are Running the Asylum to the top of the list. After finishing it up, I was surprised, to say the least.

I was at a SVPMA meeting last month where the presenter, Barbara Nelson from Pragmatic Marketing, was giving a talk about the “Politics of Agile” and during the course of the discussion, she brought up examples of products that she had managed in the past. What I noticed was that when Barbara talked about the products, she always referred to them as “her” products. That’s what I like–making the product personal.