Fun to do this Track Changes podcast with the Postlight team. In this episode, Paul Ford and Rich Ziade mock a bunch of CxO titles, and then dig in on the hard slog of marketing knowledge and learning. In the end, I make the case for closer collaboration between marketing and product teams.
Tag: product
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How to build a cross-team content engine
Bringing teams together to work on enterprise content products requires intentional and consistent effort. It’s hard to get people sitting in different silos to collaborate, and it’s crucial to gain executive buy-in for an investment in content strategy.
Confab 2018 invited me to share some of the approaches I’ve used to break down barriers and garner support for content strategy. These include tactics like governance checklists, ongoing education programs, and even brokering an exchange of hostages.
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Friday 5 — 2.17.2017
- To this erstwhile language geek, the application of technology beyond a language lab (look it up, kids) is intriguing. Mondly aims to marry language learning with virtual reality to advance immersion learning.
- In order to build a successful product, identify friction-killing tactics to engage and delight your users. These lessons from Amazon points to different kinds of friction, and actions you can take to listen, identify, and mitigate.
- How much content do you give away on social media before asking users to pay for content? Learn from how The Economist turns social media users into subscribers.
- Do you wonder — or worry — about your political posts on social networks like Facebook or Twitter? There are implications for you, and for your expanded social network. Here’s what you should know before you post. And there’s a strong case to be made for leaving your phone at home when you travel abroad.
- If your company is working on its LinkedIn strategy for recruitment, it might want to double down on Facebook instead. Quartz suggests that Facebook’s new job postings don’t mean it’s chasing Linkedin — it’s headed for something far bigger.
Weekend fun: Creative juices flowing? Try A.I. Duet, which lets you play a duet with the computer. Machine learning-driven, it allows you to play some notes and then the computer responds to your melody. Also: this tweet made my Friday morning.
Consumed: Some unbelievable tuna tartare at Toro, a place I was nowhere near cool enough to be.
Every Friday, find five, highly subjective pointers to compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally. Sign up for a weekly email.
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Friday 5 — 2.3.2017
- It’s hard to tease out what makes for a great use of color in interface design but like Potter Stewart, we know it when we see it. Explore these practical tips and tools for using color in UI design.
- Andrew Chen identifies the smart questions to ask to make sure you aren’t falling for the Bad Product Fallacy: just because you don’t like it, that doesn’t mean it will fail. Ask these questions to challenge your assumptions — we’re in a world of nonlinear trajectories in product innovation.
- LEGO built a social network for kids, and WIRED says it’s not creepy. In its first iteration, creators consider it a continuous work in progress, “as adaptable as its young user base.” Read for interesting observations about their approach to engagement, including how children use emoji to construct a sentence.
- Time-saving design and metrics beyond the interface are two of the five UX trends to watch in 2017.
- What should talented humans defer to algorithmic judgment? HBR explores four models for using AI to make decisions and the role leadership must play in paving the way for our algorithmic future.
Weekend fun: What’s cooler than a Vespa? Maybe Piaggio’s recent creation, Gita: a rolling, cargo-carrying robot. Sure beats this scary, rolling robot — try to stay calm and relaxed.
Consumed: Some ridiculously good tuna tartar at Pacific Rim in Ann Arbor. There’s some good eating in this town.
Every Friday, find five, highly subjective pointers to compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally. Sign up for a weekly email.
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Friday 5 — 12.2.2016
Thanks to the 200+ readers who filled in the survey. Great feedback on areas of digital to cover, and I am equally impressed that the most common write-in entry was for NYC food and drink recommendations — see below.
- Your experience of email is starting to look a lot like your experience of the web. Animation and interactivity are providing rich new email functionality for communications ranging from standard retail to product education. Read more about the email client changes and tools behind this gain.
- What does work look like in a digital age? McKinsey outlines seven characteristics of the new world of work. The shift from from salaried jobs to independent work (aka, the gig economy) is a well-known trend, but the observation of ecosystems more than companies as the new driver of employment is food for thought.
- Every feature a product manager builds is a prediction, according to this Intercom article, and it’s easy to be fearful of making a mistake. Read on to find out how to use targets as a tool for learning, and how to set a short-term target that the product manger can directly impact.
- As data-driven marketers, we use analytics to identify areas for website improvement. Nielsen Norman advises not to read too much into your bounce rate, but to focus on return visits instead.
- Scott Brinker is launching a five-part series on disruption to marketing, and the first is on digital transformation. Marketing’s role in digital transformation has led to a growth in scope, particularly at the intersection of product and marketing — now marketers can choose their focus going forward.
Weekend fun: Thanks to the Verge for point out this never-ending hallway of Jake Gyllenhaal photos. Caveat clicker: You’ll either exit out immediately or be lost for hours.
Consumed: A fabulous Cubano and hot dog at the Brooklyn Nets game Barclay Center. Apparently, I’m not the first to discover these.
Every Friday, find five, highly subjective pointers to compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally. Sign up for a weekly email.
Photo credit: Free for Commercial Use
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Friday 5 — 11.4.2016
- LinkedIn is putting user data to work with a new Salary tool, now included with Premium membership. LinkedIn Salary provides filters like industry, location, and title, as well additional compensation elements like signing bonus. If you’re convinced you’re underpaid, use this newfound information symmetry to make the case.
- Harvard Business School profs figured out why you dropped your iPhone 6 in the toilet the week the iPhone 7 was announced. Apparently the constant stream of new products is making us all careless.
- Recent email hacks have been a case study in worst practices: passwords emailed freely, shared with assistants. Password manager services can improve your odds of staying secure. Now there’s no excuse not to make the switch: LastPass has moved to free model.
- Microsoft Teams launches to go head-to-head with Slack in messaging and collaboration, clearly hoping to build network effects through all those Office 365 users. Does a full-page ad in the New York Times tweak Microsoft, or just reek of fear?
- Benedict Evans points out that it might be time to evolve from mobile-first to mobile-native. With the increased functionality and global prevalence of the smartphone, can companies now build businesses that omit the PC and low-end featurephone entirely? Facebook’s announcement of one billion mobile-only users seem to bolster his hypothesis.
Weekend fun: New emoji are coming, likely later this month, to bring ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ to our pictogram lexicon. And you can feel less shy about communicating via emoji, now that MOMA has acquired the very first set for its collection.
Every Friday, find five, highly subjective pointers to compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally. Sign up for a weekly email.
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Friday 5 — 9.16.2016
- Rather than say, “I think users want this feature,” a product manager should ask, “What outcome do you predict this feature will have?” Read more insights from co-VPs of Product (!) at Reddit. There’s a lot of information elegantly packed into the mobile screenshot above: this approach provides an outcome-focused frame for feature decisions.
- Instagram will soon allow users to reduce abusive comments by offering the ability to disable comments and block particular keywords. Celebs will get the feature first, and then the rest of us.
- How does news creep into your day? 55% of people consume news while they are doing something else online, while only 44% actively seek it out. Pew reported on 10 facts about the changing digital news landscape.
- Junk. Trash. Crap. These are a few of the labels I’ve seen people call the folder where they stash all the apps iOS won’t let them delete. Here’s how you can ditch those apps, and do a lot more with iOS 10.
- Kristina Halvorson explains how to sell your content strategy project in your organization. She suggests starting with a story and describing specific pain points you intend to solve, instead of a lecture on what amounts to content excavation.
Weekend fun: There are few things I love more than seltzer water and creative internet for marketing purposes, so this is pure magic. And take note: in this case it wasn’t even LaCroix who came up with this.
Every Friday, find five, highly subjective pointers to compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally. Try out the Friday 5 archive, or sign up for a weekly email.
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Friday 5 — 6.24.2016
- Slack has launched Buttons to ensure you never leave, advancing the platform from a discrete messaging app to a productive work hub. Now you can pay back a colleague, resolve a tech alert, update a project management task all from within Slack, thanks to some new APIs.
- Is podcasting today following the same, inevitable trajectory as blogging back in 2004? Ben Thompson dives into the podcasting monetization challenge.
- Scott Belsky explains why you should focus on the first mile of product experience: elements like the welcome/tour, the onboarding, the explanatory copy, and the defaults. Over time, product teams tend to optimize for existing users, when they should be continuously improving the 15 seconds of the user experience for new users.
- The latest Pew report on social media in the workplace finds that 34% of Americans use social media to take a mental break while at work, while only 20% use it for information to help solve work-related problems. Surprising to me: a full 25% of Americans don’t use the internet at work in any capacity.
- Should your brand be on Snapchat? Trackmaven’s useful Snapchat marketing guide [registration required] offers a step-by-step how-to for marketers.
Weekend fun: If your definition of “fun” extends to “mildly terrifying,” don’t miss Boston Dynamics’ latest video featuring Spot, a new mini robot that can toss a soda can in the trash even if it struggles with hardwood flooring. On a lighter note, take a cool, geeky break with some liquid nitrogen tossed on a lock, a rose, a watermelon, and even bare skin.
Every Friday, find five, highly subjective pointers to compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally. Try out the Friday 5 archive, or sign up for a weekly email.
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Friday 5 — 5.20.2016
- Bots won’t replace apps, better apps will. Read the entire post for insights on the limitations of the conversational user interface, including too many taps and lingering skeuomorphism in chat interaction design.
- 85% of Facebook video is watched without sound, which is why you’ll find savvy organizations posting videos like this, this, or this — all tell a compelling story with the audio off.
- Can you learn UX in a one-week course? Unlikely, according to this post summarizing the missteps in education for user experience designers. Don’t miss the embedded link to useful books, blogs, and podcasts geared toward aspiring and learning UX designers.
- Part of the challenge faced by IDEO designers is helping their client companies accept change. This HBR post describes transformative empathy, co-design, and shared vision as three core tools in their arsenal.
- Product managers juggle a wide range of tasks — from plotting the course to managing tactical features and functions. Product Hunt picked 9 useful apps for a product manager’s toolkit.
Weekend fun: There’s definitive proof that low-tech can be fun in this week’s agency post-it wars. Set phasers to stun: Nerd alert. News you can use: universities seeking new titles with just a soupçon of bureaucratic bloat should try this handy title generator.
Every Friday, find five, highly subjective pointers to compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally. Try out the Friday 5 archive, or sign up for a weekly email.
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Friday 5 — 4.15.2016
- We’ve all been hearing a lot about bots — but what are they? Facebook Messenger’s new release paves the way for more bot interaction, and Engadget has compiled a list of Facebook Messenger bots in the works. The lag time between interactions is odd — my early interactions showed early bots are rough, if not outright frustrating and useless.
- What does it mean to be a minimum viable product manager? Brandon Chu provides a useful overview of where a product manager should focus his or her attention for optimal results, as well as competencies and tasks to leave by the wayside.
- Litmus interviews marketing leader Ann Handley for advice on how to write great email copy. I like her use of “pathological empathy” with the recipient — too often email copy is so goal driven that the recipient’s needs, frame of mind, and even preferred device are overlooked.
- Email is notorious for miscommunication: recipients often read too much or too little into tone. But smiley faces won’t save us — new research shows that emojis, rendered differently on different platforms, also have potential for miscommunication. Another takeaway: the Apple “grinning” emoji is definitely terrifying.
- What is our responsibility to curb bad behavior on social media? This article makes the case for better stewardship of what happens on our own profiles. Last week at Harvard I took part in a Berkman Center panel on cyberbullying, which explored mitigation approaches including the role of the bystander.
Weekend fun: Drone racing is coming to ESPN, and it looks amazing. But sometimes it’s best to turn off all this tech and go to bed.
Next week: Friday 5 will take a break next week for a quick trip to Berlin and a big move to NYC. Whether you’re an actual human or a chatbot, please send me your favorite curry wurst joints or stellar moving hacks. I’ll need them all.
Every Friday, find five, highly subjective pointers to compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas that affect how we live and work digitally. Try out the Friday 5 archive, or sign up for a weekly email.