I am honored to have been asked to instruct a course on UXD and GUI Prototyping for BostonCHI.  This course will be part of BostonCHI’s Professional Development Seminars for 2011, which will take place on Friday, March 25th at the MathWorks in Natick, MA.

UXD (User eXperience Design) encompasses many topics, from use case and wireframe development to GUI prototyping and detailed specifications.   This course will focus heavily on the GUI prototyping aspects of UXD, but will also serve to put those concepts in context with the holistic UXD process.  I’ve long had tremendous passion for UX design, and will cover many foundational concepts as well as some advanced techniques using several software tools available on the market today (you will soon see additional blog posts covering some of these tools, such as CaseComplete and Axure).  Following this course, students will understand how wireframes differ from GUI prototypes, as well as how creation of GUI prototypes for mobile apps, web applications, local applications, and hardware devices differ from one another.  Students will have the opportunity to learn and work hands-on with some of the very tools I and thousands of other professionals use in the real world.

Needless to say, I am very excited about this opportunity!  Stay tuned to hear more about some of the specific software tools I’ve come to love that I’ll be discussing in depth during this course and in future blog posts!

More about BostonCHI:

SIGCHI is a forum for the study of human-computer interaction (HCI) and includes research and development efforts leading to the design and evaluation of user interfaces. The focus of SIGCHI is on how people communicate and interact with computer systems. SIGCHI serves as a forum for the exchange of ideas among computer scientists, human factor scientists, psychologists, social scientists, systems designers and end users. (from ACM SIGCHI)

BostonCHI is the Boston area chapter of ACM’s Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction. Our members, from throughout New England, share ideas and experiences on the rapidly growing and changing area of how computers and people interact.

It’s been a while since I’ve added anything to my blog – there have been a quite lot of changes in my life over the past year!  Most notably, about 10 months ago I assumed the role of President for ProductCamp Boston after years of involvement with prior events, including being a frequent presenter and serving on the organizing crew.  This is a fantastic organization, and I very much look forward to working with the extremely dedicated team of volunteers, helping to bring this professional group to the next level of success!

To that end, I wanted to quickly announce our next major event, which will take place on April 2, 2011, at the Microsoft NERD (New England R&D) center in Cambridge, MA.  More details will follow, including registration links and other necessary information, but for now please mark your calendars now if you’re interested – the core organizing crew has already been hard at work, and this event is shaping up to be a huge success!!

More to come…  enjoy!

www.ProductCampBoston.org

I presented “Mock-ups Made Easy, Using FlairBuilder”, based on my blog post below, at the last event in 2009.  This year I will likely be presenting again, but this time I will also be acting as part of the core organizing crew.  Planning meetings begin later this week, and already there’s a ton of excitement and engagement by over a dozen dedicated individuals.  I’m very much looking forward to working closely with the BPMA (Boston Product Management Association), as they will be heavily involved with this event as well.  This year’s event will once again take place at the Microsoft New England Research & Development Center in Boston, on Saturday, May 22nd.

Feel free to drop a line if you’re interested in hearing more about events like this one!

Cheers!!

I was at a local university interviewing for a Product Management / Market Analyst internship position this afternoon.  When we reached the end of the interview I asked if she had any questions for me.  She said, “No, but I would like to say how happy I am to meet you in person.”  At first I was confused because I had never spoken to her before, not even over the phone or via email, since this interview was set up through the career development office at her university.  I figured I’d just go with it and said, “Well it was great meeting you too!”  She then went on to explain how much she’s read about me – I could only imagine my company put out some marketing piece and mentioned me in it, but then she talked about specific experiences and “words of wisdom” I’ve offered.  I was completely lost until finally she mentioned this site, productninja.net, and then quoted things I’ve said and posted both here and on Twitter about Product Management!  I couldn’t hold in my laughter – I was simply floored that I walked into a room with a complete stranger who already “heard of me”, had read things I’ve written for the community, and then selectively applied specific aspects to the position she was interviewing for.  She finished by saying how honored she was to have had the opportunity to speak with me!  Now I’m sure she only started following my various tweets and blogs after hearing that I was the person coming to interview her, but still this represented tremendous initiative on her part considering she went well beyond researching the company itself.  I’m still shaking my head in awe at this event!

…I guess that’s social media at work folks!

Ms. Interviewee – if you’re reading this, thanks so much for the self-esteem boost!

“What is the source of inspiration for a product manager?”

There were many great answers from various PMs!  My answer was:

For me it’s my love for the “art of creation”. I think at the core of any successful Product Manager there needs to be a strong sense of passion for creating something from ground up and of course equal passion for the thing itself. Further, Product Management offers a multitude of complex concepts and processes that must be meticulously executed and managed, not to mention the depth of leadership a PM must provide to every group within a company – my innate desire to immerse myself within roles that are very dynamic in nature with ever changing rules and boundaries make this multifaceted, intricate, and engaging world of Product Management something I find highly exciting and enjoyable!

Q: I find it interesting that you slid into the product management role through the back door of project management. How did you learn WHAT to do – there’s a lot of marketing skills that come along with the gig and normally a project manager wouldn’t have them. Did you just do a very good job of on-the-job training?  -Dr. Jim Anderson, The Accidental Product Manager

A: In short I would answer that a strong inclination for self-taught skills and concepts coupled with good instincts, in that a lot of things seemed obvious and just made sense to me, account for most of my success in the role.  Your question was directed at my latest role, Product Management, but you could have easily asked the same question about my previous role, Project Management – there too I had no formal training or experience, just my own self education and raw gut feelings on how any given situation should be executed or managed and then tracked and reported on.

Perhaps this response sounds like a rather unorthodox approach, but it is what it is!  I will say that when I talk about self-taught skills that concept represents a huge amount of career engagement, both on and off business hours, in ways such as:

• Taking personal risks every chance I get
• Constantly evaluating my own successes, failures, strengths, and weaknesses
• Building strong relationships with managers, peers, direct reports, and just about everyone else in the company
• Interacting with all levels of the company, as well as with all levels of partner and customer companies
• Endless reading, researching, taking classes, going to conferences, being interviewed, twittering, and many other types of personal engagement that continually result in further opening my eyes, learning new concepts and skills, and ultimately exposing myself to piles of insightful and valuable information that have been instrumental in bringing my career to the next level!

Note that I am working on an article, “6 Great Ways to ENGAGE Your Career!” that will go into deeper detail on much of this – I’ll be sure to let you know when it’s completed.

Hope this helps answer your question – happy to go into further depth as desired!  Thanks,

Jason Miceli, Product Ninja

For years I’d been searching for good mock-up tools.  I went through just about every iteration of the mainstream apps – PowerPoint, Keynote, Publisher, Pages, etc.  I also tried dozens of smaller tools – open-source, freeware, shareware, and/or commercial.  Quite honestly, for a while I favored Microsoft Publisher above all others, though Apple Keynote was a close second.  However, when you start to use any of those apps for mock-up work on a regular basis you quickly realize that’s just not what they’re meant for.  The biggest problem with any of them is that they don’t allow for rapid alterations to designs as new ideas pop up or requirements change – considering the Agile world we live in these tools have proved to be…  not so Agile.

Then one day I saw someone Twitter about a tool called Balsamiq, wondering if anyone had tried and liked using it for mock-up creation.  I had never heard of it so I was very eager to check it out – 20 minutes later I was hooked on this little known tool!   I couldn’t believe I had never heard of it before, since it was 95% of what I *thought* (at that time) I needed.

Balsamiq is indeed a great tool.  It take a very stylistic approach to mock-up creation – every widget that you place on the canvas appears in a pencil-sketch type look and feel, which for a mock-up interface is great!  This way when you build and then demonstrate an interface to a group of folks there is no mistaking that it’s just a sample.  It also gets the point across very well that pretty much any part of the mock-up is still subject to change.  You can add just about any type of “widget” you’d expect any current-day interface to have – everything from standard buttons and drop-downs to newer widgets like ribbons and cover-flow.  There are also some basic customization capabilities for many of the widgets, such as selecting which entry in a list should be highlighted or how far a scroll bar should appear to have been scrolled.  I thought I was in heaven!

But then…  soon after, I discovered another independent developer’s product and suddenly heaven didn’t seem quite as high up as I thought it was.  Flairbuilder is by far the best tool I’ve found for interface mock-ups and more importantly “GUI prototyping”!  I could not recommend it higher for anyone who needs to design, then FEEL, and then re-design as necessary a new web or application interface!

Before I talk more about Flairbuilder let me say I’ve researched many other tools around the same time I found  Balsamiq and Flairbuilder – Pencil, iPlotz, Mockupscreens, Axure, Gliffy, and several others.  Of course each of these tools have their pros and cons, but when I consider what I was so quickly able to accomplish with Flairbuilder the winner was clear!

To be fair, Flairbuilder is not without its problems – since Cristian Pascu is essentially a one-man-show the product is not yet at the maturity level of something like Axure.  But Flairbuilder does come at a fraction of the cost and with key features and an overall work-flow that I find favorable.  Additionally many of the bugs I’ve discovered have been quickly verified by Cristian and then resolved in a new release shortly thereafter.  More impressive is that I’ve made no less than five individual feature requests of varying complexity – three of them were implemented SAME DAY.  The others were implemented in short order.  I’ve had many discussions with Cristian to date – his excitement and dedication towards his product are clear and respectable, and he has many great things on the horizon!

What’s different about Flairbuilder from Balsamiq and some of the other tools?  Most notably Flairbuilder is not just a mock-up or wireframe tool, but rather a full GUI prototyping tool.  Every widget that you add to the canvas can be customized not just in cosmetic appearance, but in behavior as well.  For example, if you have a button on the screen you can make it “clickable”, causing any number of possible events to occur – open a pop-up window, show a floating pane, display a simple informational or error message, switch to a new page, add an item to a list, ask a conditional question, change the layout of the screen entirely, or countless other possible actions.  The same is true of selecting an item from a drop-down or double-clicking an entry in a data table.  Just about any action you can think of is easily re-creatable within this tool, and it takes no programming experience to accomplish.

Once a project is complete there are several options on how you can present the prototype to an audience.  Of course you can open the program locally and show how everything works using the application’s built-in “preview” mode, but you can also use an online viewer which allows anyone, anywhere to see the prototype from within a standard web browser.  An HTML export feature is also coming soon which will make it even more accessible.

Flairbuilder comes at a price of just over $100, and if you’re a Product Manager or anyone else who has a need to design new interfaces for just about any type of project it’s worth every penny!  It has quickly become my favorite software tool, and I look forward to continuing to work with Cristian in an effort to manipulate his product’s strategic direction to serve my own devious plans!!

Initial concept ideas (none of these have been fleshed out in terms of grammar, elegance, professionalism, etc. – just concepts for now):

• Product Management: To ensure all products meet the highest levels of market success!
• Product Management: To foster 100% product success rate!
• Product Management: Building products that meet or exceed all market expectations!
• Product Management: If a product is not successful then we haven’t done our job!

Important note – I suspect some people may read the above ideas and consider asking the question, “what about cases where a product was successful at one point, but then sometime after the product has really reached its end of life in the marketplace?  Does that or should that reflect on the Product Management teams’ success status?”  To such a question I offer up that it’s Product Management’s responsibility first and foremost to identify this unfortunate fact as early as possible and then quickly work to take corrective action, even if that means decommissioning the product.  An unsuccessful product must not remain in that state unaddressed – *something* must be done with it, whether that’s a series of feature adds or enhancements, a software rewrite, implementation of a new strategic direction, and/or if necessary declaration that the product has truly reached end of life – we should just accept that it was a good ride and move on.  Think Kodak and Fuji – certainly no one would fault their product managers for the fact that the film industry all but blinked out of existence almost over-night, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t their responsibility to make the call that time has come to retire legacy film based products and move on to bigger and better things, thus ensuring that all marketed products remain a success!

First and foremost, I would say you know if a Product Manager is doing a good job if the product(s) they worked on are successful! Product Managers’ efforts can be gauged in several ways – looking at metrics such as project throughput, time to market, product completeness, internal understanding and adoption, etc. – but all of those elements ultimately roll up into the single, critical statistic of *market success*.

Does that mean it’s the Product Manager’s responsibility to ensure provisioning and support are adequately trained? – YES! Does that mean it’s their responsibility to ensure Sales and Marketing are adequately armed with collateral and proficient in all aspects of the service? – YES! And here’s the real kicker – does that mean it’s their responsibility to ensure the market truly wants and is ready to receive their product? – RESOUNDINGLY YES!!! That last point is the most important one to consider – all products must be driven by the customers, and therefore the Product Manager must work to ensure they know exactly what the customers want and what the market is willing to pay for.

If all of this is in line then the product should be a success, and that’s the real measure of whether or not a Product Manager is truly doing a “good job”.

IMHO.

Q: What would you consider the *best* possible organizational structure as it relates to Product Management, Product Marketing, Development, Corporate Marketing, and any other key department(s) you feel are part of this picture, starting from the CEO and working down?

A: The organizational structure of a company depends greatly on the size and maturity of the organization and the orientation of the leadership team. At most software startups, the Engineering team gets built first and then there is a realization that the founder(s) or Dev team are not in a position to actively manage the product, so they look to hire a PM to take over the reigns.

At more established companies, a new product is assigned to an existing PM, who likely has 3 or more products/services that they are already responsible for managing. If they are lucky, they are pulled off of the other products (or at least reduce their day-to-day responsibilities) to focus on the new product.

In either case, the PM has an uphill battle for time, attention, resources, and money.

In startups, PM usually falls under Engineering. In older organizations, they tend to fall under the broader Marketing umbrella or be a stand-alone team. Each structure has it’s strengths and challenges, which have been and continue to be debated in the PM community, but the one I think functions best for the role of Product Management is being a stand-alone team.

While this usually means giving up the stature, influence, and budget of being part of the Marketing or Engineering teams, the autonomy and ability to operate between these two powerful entities best suits Product Management’s true charter–to listen to and observe the market and provide guidance on how to maximize the value of that information into an executable product strategy.

Product Managers wear many functional hats and go by many monikers, but ultimately, their primary responsibility is to guide their product(s) to success, whatever shape that might take for their product or company. Success could be revenue or users or media attention or downloads (best to set that metric at the outset in order to make sure you are prioritizing correctly), but whatever it is, the Product Manager is the one whose head is on the platter if it doesn’t happen.

If Product Management sits within either Marketing or Engineering, I believe that they are too constrained by those teams’ other mandates to effectively perform their own duties. Don’t construe this to mean that I see PM teams that are structured within those teams to be doomed to failure. I have, in fact worked on teams in both of those scenarios, with much success. But at the time, my PM goals, as designed by the executive team, were aligned with one or the other of Marketing or Engineering, which is why those arrangements worked. I don’t see that as being ideal for the true function of Product Management.

Having a stand-alone Product Management team means that you have to have STRONG Product Management team. Ideally, it means have a VP of Product Management who is on the same level as Marketing and Engineering, reporting directly to the CEO (or COO or whomever Marketing and Engineering report to). That gives Product Management a voice at the executive table and enough influence to drive not just the product roadmap, but the product strategy.

If there isn’t a VP of Product Management, then you really have to have STRONG Product Managers. And by strong, I mean being able to go into the CEO’s office and say things like, “No” or “I need X to make this product successful” or “We can do that, but that will affect all of our current product plans for the next X months. Here’s why I wouldn’t recommend that.” With data to back you up, of course, but you have to be able to say those words. Otherwise, Product Management will always be a second-class citizen to some other organization that can say those things.

So in an ideal world, here is what the corporate structure looks like (I have not gone into detail about what happens within other teams, just the product team):

A word about UI design sitting within the Product team. I think this is a crucial element of the Product team that is missing 99% of the time. Design is an important market requirement, and too often it is relegated to the function of making already-built functions “prettier.” Design in software is more than look-and-feel. It is the workflow and ease-of-use and extensibility of the user experience. Design is fundamental in the success of software. Apple is the quintessential example of this. I am no Apple fanboy, but I recognize the obvious fact that their products START with design, rather than end with it.

My comments on Ivan’s answer:

Mr. Productologist,

I must say thank you for this opportunity to be interviewed – it was a great experience re-living and then documenting all these tales of old, and it was a pleasure to converse with you if only for a short while.

I find your very detailed answer to my question 100% spot on! It really helps to solidify and reinforce the many thoughts and ideas that have been swimming around in my head, and of course the general direction you outlined resonates with me extremely well. I too have found myself reporting to just about every permutation of CEO, CTO, CSO, Engineering, Strategy (the other CSO), etc., but in the end I couldn’t agree with your sentiments more – having that critical voice with executive management is what ultimately allows for Product to offer key strategic leadership to the team, while assuming and retaining appropriate accountability.

Thank you again Ivan, this was a very insightful and meaningful exercise! Take care.