Business: Product Management

If you’ve built an innovative product with a beautiful user interface and high-tech features, but it still isn’t selling well, the reviews aren’t satisfactory, and you keep losing customers, it’s time to reevaluate whether UX design and product-management operations are keeping users at the center of your product-development efforts.

A user-centered product-management culture ensures that your services align with customers’ needs and add value to their lives. Customers should feel that you’ve designed every interaction with your product to address their needs and challenges. Plus, a user-centered culture builds loyalty, improves customer retention and conversion, and enhances brand value.

Wondering how to create user-centered culture at your company? In this article, I’ll consider some proven strategies for building a user-centered product-management culture. Read More

In recent years, the perception of UX design has changed dramatically. In the profession’s early days, less mature organizations frequently treated UX professionals as another type of graphic designer, as though UX designers were synonymous with Web designers. But, in today’s leading organizations, UX design is a strategic capability that drives innovation and enhances competitiveness. Similarly, the role of UX professionals has shifted beyond creating functional—if not delightful—user experiences by applying usability, information architecture, and design principles. Now, UX professionals are applying more of their understanding of psychology and human behavior to devising design principles in the service of persuasion. Read More

As software products have expanded over the decades, companies have had to apply a fair amount of effort to managing their customers’ experience. Since companies have added more and more features and functions to their software products, customer engagement has begun to fluctuate. Managing customers’ expectations had become complicated. These products have continued to grow because customers desired more features and the software companies wanted to offer more value—for a nominal fee, of course. Now, these companies confront the challenge not only of how to design and build the new features but also how to manage and release them.

Several companies—for example, Google—have managed these changes fairly well, but many have a lot of room for improvement. The days are over when we can honestly say, “If we build it, they will come.” We must do the work necessary to truly understand our customers’ needs. If we understood our customers, we would understand that we can’t just jam new features or functions into our software and expect customers joyfully to accept them. Read More