Tag: Product

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Disqus Reactions

Disqus – the commenting system I am using on this blog – recently added reactions, a quick way to react to posts without having to write a comment. If you scroll to the end of the post you will find the reactions buttons. They look like this.

What I like about this feature is the ability to use it effortlessly. Unlike commenting, you don’t have to login to Disqus to give a reaction on a post. You hit a button and it is done.

What is missing is dopaminification. As the blog owner I don’t get any notifications when someone react to one of my posts. I don’t even get a digest with the total number of reactions I am getting. It is also not clear which reaction is getting more clicked, which feels unnatural to what users are used to on FB. Sometimes familiarity trumps novelty.

This makes the reward cycle of this feature broken. People react to posts and I don’t get the dopamine rush of such acts, which should trigger me to post more, to get more reactions, and maybe on the longer run upgrade my Disqus account. 

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Product Posts

When I started this blog and decided to try to blog daily I wanted to have some professional benefit along the way. This is supposed to be driven by sharing the lessons I am learning through work or talking with others. And by voicing my opinions on different product topics.

This is one area where I am not succeeding. I have many content ideas but they are mostly lengthy posts that require half a day to finish each. They are more like essays than short posts.

Here are some titles and topics I am thinking

  • Product Domain Knowledge: How to deal as a product manager with products where you domain knowledge without creating unnecessary tension with the team.
  • Professional Readme: There is the relatively known idea of “Manager Readme”. I wanted to write a professional readme about myself and my style of working to make it easier for others who work with me, or want to hire me to have a good introduction about my strengths and weaknesses.
  • Writing a newsletter: Few months ago I started sending our department newsletter. I did some interesting experiments and wanted to share the lessons from this experience.
  • Demystifying Stakeholder Management
  • Mentoring new product managers: What I think constitutes a good mentor-mentee relationship.
  • Writing Product/Feature Announcements

And I am sure there will be more. But I need to commit.

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Request for Product: Cheap Wheelchair Weight Scale

Today I got this reminder to update my current weight. Sadly I don’t know how much I weigh. Last time I weighed myself was last year at my wheelchair maintenance place. They had those weight scales that one can hop on with the wheelchair. I weighed my chair then I sat on it and weighed us both to be able to find out my weight. Since then I was not able to do it again.

I tried searching online and the cheapest price I found was 600 Euro for an unknown brand. The middle range of those wheelchair weight scales cost between 1000-2000 Euro. This high price point is mainly driven by them being for commercial and not home use. They are mostly big, bulky, and heavy (One model I checked was 45 kilograms!).

I am sure with current technology there can be good enough wheelchair weight scales for home use that cost no more than 100 Euro. I hope someone builds such product.

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Email reactions

Today I replied to an email with a thumbs up emoji. I just wanted to tell the sender that I got his message.

I am sure this use case happens multiple times a day. I want to tell someone that I noted their message (or love it, hate it…etc).

It would be cool if Gmail supports reacting to emails. Almost 100% of my daily emails come from coworkers who are also on Google suite.

The biggest challenge for this feature is 3rd party mail clients. Google can’t support this feature on there.

But they can at least add one click reaction icons. When the user clicks one of them like a thumbs up, it replies to the sender with an email with a thumbs up inside. Single click, works everywhere.

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Product Management Modes

In the Arabic podcast I appeared on with Mohamed Sherif, he asked me an interesting question about the difference between doing conversion optimization features at Booking.com and building infrastructure products at Zalando.

I think there are different modes of operation when one is doing product management.

One dimension is the nature of the product. A consumer facing product involves lots of data analysis, user research, testing, release and iterations. An internal product requires lots of stakeholder management, understanding of business constraints, and lots of communication. It also has a personal feedback cycle, as whenever you screw up in an internal product the users come straight to your desk.

Another dimension that’s more generic regardless of the nature of the product is planning and execution modes. Think of a lion that’s picking a cattle from a herd. It keeps observing the herd to pick which one is the best opportunity. Then comes execution where the lion starts running until it achieves its goal (sorry vegans, c’est la vie).

The same applies in product. There is a mode where you observe, collect, brainstorm, think, and talk. Then there is the mode where the team executes and you work with them to eliminate any barriers to success.

Your influence in each mode depends on multiple factors. For example if you work with an inexperienced team, you will have to interfere a lot in the execution mode to make sure the team is working on the right things. If you are in a customer obsessed/centric culture, you will spend less effort having to convince the team why something is necessary during the planning mode.

Understanding the factors that influence your work and which of them you can influence by how much is crucial to become successful at what you do.

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Don’t forget your booking

We were discussing how the favicon should report the status of a deployment pipeline, and I showed my team the following example from Booking.com

Once you land on the Booking page of the website, the title says “Your Details”

If you leave the tab, it changes to “Don’t forget your booking”
And if you wait longer, it turns into yellow and adds (1) to signal something like a notification

This is master persuasion. Even the smallest thing like the favicon and tab title can have a big impact.

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N26

N26 recently launched “Spaces”. It is some sort of sub-accounts in your account that you can create and configure to save money in.

While n26 is a leap forward to the German market, for me it is quite disappointing compared to the bank I used in the Netherlands.

Yesterday I realized I can’t edit/delete a scheduled transfer once it is scheduled (unless it is a recurring one). This is scary.

This spaces product is half baked. I can’t automate transfers between spaces making it almost useless and hard to build savings habits.

And the most scary for me was when a friend’s card got hacked, someone withdrew money from India on a Sunday evening, we called the number on the back of the card and guess what? They are off on Sunday. And here is what they say on their support page

Freak out and destroy your card

Overall my experience with n26 so far is that they invest in those useless user interface changes (spaces, dark themes…etc) without improving the core experience of their banking services. I hope it gets better because right now it is far from my expectations.

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Google Flights

I was never a fan of Google flights. Yesterday a friend told me to give it another shot. I went there and I got hooked.

The new experience is much faster and more dynamic. The work done on the front end is great.

The most impressive for me is how fast the results load if you change something in the search. For example when you add another passenger, Google can’t just multiply the price * 2 as they have to ensure the flight still has a seat for the passenger you just added. This requires a new API request to the providers asking them for the new search results, which is typically slow. Same applies to any other change like dates or airports.

It seems this speed is driven by caching results on their end, however cache is not reliable as it may happen that the trip is no longer there, or the price went up by the time users click on the flight to book it. I don’t know what else they are doing to make it this fast while staying reliable.

Another reason for this speed is caused by only searching the airlines themselves and not other 3rd party websites. SkyScanner always gets stuck trying to retrieve the data from that one slow provider. This also reduces complexity on the front end as Google doesn’t have to show the same flight multiple times by multiple providers.

Overall it seems that you can provide a superior experience by building insanely faster horses, even if you don’t have the all the options, nor the most accurate prices.

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Twitter, Facebook, and asymmetry

Asymmetry of connections is a better representation of human relationships than symmetry. We are not as interested in everyone who is interested in us.

Twitter does this best by making the connection on the network unidirectional. I can follow someone without them having to follow me. If I am interested in you it doesn’t mean you are interested in me.

Facebook realized this and solved it by introducing the news feed algorithm. They later added the ability to follow someone without having to friend them. This was Facebook way of admitting asymmetry of relationships and trying to reflect that on the product.

Not all asymmetry is represented equally. Twitter uses a discrete binary model of representing asymmetry. I am either following you, you follow me, we both follow each other, or none of us follow the other.

Facebook’s representation is continuous, and it keeps oscillating between both ends of the spectrum. The algorithm keeps calculating how much I am interested in you and how much you are interested in me. Those separate scores determine how much the algorithm shows me from what you do and how much you see from me.

In hindsight this is what makes Facebook more successful, it is having this more accurate representation of asymmetry of relationships reflected in their product.

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Zapier

Yesterday I wrote about wanting a replacement to ifttt, some people on twitter told me to try Zapier. I tried it and it is exactly what I need.

It is basically an internet chewing gum, you use it to stick two things together which is what I did, making it automatically publish my newest blog posts to twitter and LinkedIn.

It checks every 5 minutes for new posts, much better than ifttt, which changed from every 20 minutes to every few hours which isn’t good. Thank you internet.