Companies that live and die by outputs often fall into the "build trap," cranking out features to meet their schedule rather than the customer’s needs. In this book, Melissa Perri explains how laying the foundation for great product management can help companies solve real customer problems while achieving business goals. By understanding how to communicate and collaborate within a company structure, you can create a product culture that benefits both the business and the customer. You’ll learn product management principles that can be applied to any organization, big or small. In five parts, this book explores: Why organizations ship features rather than cultivate the value those features represent How to set up a product organization that scales How product strategy connects a company’s vision and economic outcomes back to the product activities How to identify and pursue the right opportunities for producing value through an iterative product framework How to build a culture focused on successful outcomes over outputs

    The goal of the book is to share the techniques of the best companies. This book is aimed primarily at Product Managers working on technology-powered products. That includes the hundreds of "tech companies" like Google, Facebook, Amazon, Twitter and the like, as well as the thousands of companies moving to leverage technology (financial companies, media companies, retailers, manufacturers, nearly every industry). Inspired covers companies from early stage start-ups to large, established companies. The products might be consumer products or devices, business services for small businesses to enterprises, internal tools, and developer platforms.Inspired is secondarily aimed at the designers, engineers, user researchers and data scientists that work closely with the product managers on product teams at these same companies.

    This practical book takes experienced web developers through the new discipline of frontend architecture, including the latest tools, standards, and best practices that have elevated frontend web development to an entirely new level.Using real-world examples, case studies, and practical tips and tricks throughout, author Micah Godbolt introduces you to the four pillars of frontend architecture. He also provides compelling arguments for developers who want to embrace the mantle of frontend architect and fight to make it a first-class citizen in their next project.The four pillars include:Code: how to approach the HTML, CSS, and JavaScript of a design systemProcess: tools and processes for creating an efficient and error-proof workflowTesting: creating a stable foundation on which to build your siteDocumentation: tools for writing documentation while the work is in progress

    "This book is a guide to how we do product development at Basecamp. It’s also a toolbox full of techniques that you can apply in your own way to your own process.Whether you’re a founder, CTO, product manager, designer, or developer, you’re probably here because of some common challenges that all software companies have to face."

    Yet, managing human beings and navigating complex product roadmaps is no easy task, and it's rare to find a product leader who can steward a digital product from concept to launch without a couple of major hiccups. Why do some product leaders succeed while others don't?This insightful book presents interviews with nearly 100 leading product managers from all over the world. Authors Richard Banfield, Martin Eriksson, and Nate Walkingshaw draw on decades of experience in product design and development to capture the approaches, styles, insights, and techniques of successful product managers. If you want to understand what drives good product leaders, this book is an irreplaceable resource.In three parts, Product Leadership helps you explore:Themes and patterns of successful teams and their leaders, and ways to attain those characteristicsThe best approaches for guiding your product team through the startup, emerging, and enterprise stages of a company's evolutionStrategies and tactics for working with customers, agencies, partners, and external stakeholders

    The Lean Startup movement is very promising, but for many teams it ends up translating into an important question: ”Yeah, but what to build ?” “In ThoughtWorks, our response has been a process called an inception. We gather together a good sample of the people who will be affected by the product and have an intensive session to set an initial direction, using a series of exercises focusing on collaboration and the capture of broad goals. We don't attempt a detailed specification, as that is exactly the kind of thing that becomes out of date as soon as code hits production. But we do want to understand what kind of outcomes we are hoping for, the features that we think will drive these outcomes, and how to assess the effectiveness of our product. With The Lean Inception, Paulo has captured his experience in running these inceptions over the last decade. In particular it's focused on his work to boil the inception down to its essence, concentrating the activity on a single, if very intensive, week of work. Paulo shares how he makes this work, through writing a product vision, capturing personas, understanding the user journeys, and developing high-level features. The result isn't a detailed plan of work, which we find quickly rots into irrelevance. It is a guiding set of goals to set us off in the right direction. It doesn't plan out a final product, with all the features that our users will need, instead it focuses on an initial product that we can release and learn from - the Minimum Viable Product. “ – Martin Fowler, Chief Cientist at ThoughtWorks

    Not to worry: This book is the one place you can turn to find quick, non-intimidating, excellent design help. In The Non-Designer's Design Book, 2nd Edition, best-selling author Robin Williams turns her attention to the basic principles of good design and typography. All you have to do is follow her clearly explained concepts, and you'll begin producing more sophisticated, professional, and interesting pages immediately. Humor-infused, jargon-free prose interspersed with design exercises, quizzes, illustrations, and dozens of examples make learning a snap—which is just what audiences have come to expect from this best-selling author.

    It has led nothing short of a revolution in the entertainment industries, generating billions of dollars in annual revenue while capturing the imaginations of hundreds of millions of people in over 190 countries. But to reach these great heights, Netflix, which launched in 1998 as an online DVD rental service, has had to reinvent itself over and over again. This type of unprecedented flexibility would have been impossible without the counterintuitive and radical management principles that cofounder Reed Hastings established from the very beginning. Hastings rejected the conventional wisdom under which other companies operate and defied tradition to instead build a culture focused on freedom and responsibility, one that has allowed Netflix to adapt and innovate as the needs of its members and the world have simultaneously transformed.Hastings set new standards, valuing people over process, emphasizing innovation over efficiency, and giving employees context, not controls. At Netflix, there are no vacation or expense policies. At Netflix, adequate performance gets a generous severance, and hard work is irrel-evant. At Netflix, you don't try to please your boss, you give candid feedback instead. At Netflix, employees don't need approval, and the company pays top of market. When Hastings and his team first devised these unorthodox principles, the implications were unknown and untested. But in just a short period, their methods led to unparalleled speed and boldness, as Netflix quickly became one of the most loved brands in the world.Here for the first time, Hastings and Erin Meyer, bestselling author of The Culture Map and one of the world's most influential business thinkers, dive deep into the controversial ideologies at the heart of the Netflix psyche, which have generated results that are the envy of the business world. Drawing on hundreds of interviews with current and past Netflix employees from around the globe and never-before-told stories of trial and error from Hastings's own career, No Rules Rules is the fascinating and untold account of the philosophy behind one of the world's most innovative, imaginative, and successful companies.

    Guns, which lead to so much death, work exactly as they’re designed to work. And every time we “improve” their design, they get better at killing. Facebook’s privacy settings, which have outed gay teens to their conservative parents, are working exactly as designed. Their “real names” iniative, which makes it easier for stalkers to re-find their victims, is working exactly as designed. Twitter’s toxicity and lack of civil discourse is working exactly as it’s designed to work.The world is working exactly as designed. And it’s not working very well. Which means we need to do a better job of designing it. Design is a craft with an amazing amount of power. The power to choose. The power to influence. As designers, we need to see ourselves as gatekeepers of what we are bringing into the world, and what we choose not to bring into the world. Design is a craft with responsibility. The responsibility to help create a better world for all.Design is also a craft with a lot of blood on its hands. Every cigarette ad is on us. Every gun is on us. Every ballot that a voter cannot understand is on us. Every time social network’s interface allows a stalker to find their victim, that’s on us. The monsters we unleash into the world will carry your name.This book will make you see that design is a political act. What we choose to design is a political act. Who we choose to work for is a political act. Who we choose to work with is a political act. And, most importantly, the people we’ve excluded from these decisions is the biggest (and stupidest) political act we’ve made as a society.If you’re a designer, this book might make you angry. It should make you angry. But it will also give you the tools you need to make better decisions. You will learn how to evaluate the potential benefits and harm of what you’re working on. You’ll learn how to present your concerns. You’ll learn the importance of building and working with diverse teams who can approach problems from multiple points-of-view. You’ll learn how to make a case using data and good storytelling. You’ll learn to say NO in a way that’ll make people listen. But mostly, this book will fill you with the confidence to do the job the way you always wanted to be able to do it. This book will help you understand your responsibilities.

    Creating high-quality software for the enterprise involves a much different set of challenges. In this practical book, two expert product managers provide straightforward guidance for people looking to join the thriving enterprise market.Authors Blair Reeves and Benjamin Gaines explain critical differences between enterprise and consumer products, and deliver strategies for overcoming challenges when building for the enterprise. You'll learn how to cultivate knowledge of your organization, the products you build, and the industry you serve.Explore why:Identifying customer vs user problems is an enterprise project manager's main challengeEffective collaboration requires in-depth knowledge of the organizationAnalyzing data is key to understanding why users buy and retain your productHaving experience in the industry you're building products for is valuableProduct longevity depends on knowing where the industry is headed

    It shows you how to use the Value Proposition Canvas, a practical business tool to design, test, create, and manage products and services customers want. It compliments and perfectly integrates with the Business Model Canvasfrom "Business Model Generation" so you can succeed with great value propositions embedded in scalable and profitable business models.Practical exercises, process illustrations, and workshop suggestions help you immediately apply the tools in the book to your daily work. The book includes an online access to Strategyzer.com to complete and assess exercises interactively, learn from peers, and download pdfs, checklists, and more.You'll love "Value Proposition Design" if you've been overwhelmed by the task of true customer value creation, frustrated by unproductive product meetings and misaligned teams, involved in bold shiny projects that blew up, or simply disappointed by the failure of a good idea."Value Proposition Design" will help you successfully understand the patterns of value creation, leverage the experience and skills of your team, avoid wasting time with ideas that won't work, and guide you through the design and test of products and services that customers want.

    Now, in a tour-de-force narrative twenty years in the making, Ashton leads us on a journey through humanity’s greatest creations to uncover the surprising truth behind who creates and how they do it. From the crystallographer’s laboratory where the secrets of DNA were first revealed by a long forgotten woman, to the electromagnetic chamber where the stealth bomber was born on a twenty-five-cent bet, to the Ohio bicycle shop where the Wright brothers set out to “fly a horse,” Ashton showcases the seemingly unremarkable individuals, gradual steps, multiple failures, and countless ordinary and usually uncredited acts that lead to our most astounding breakthroughs.Creators, he shows, apply in particular ways the everyday, ordinary thinking of which we are all capable, taking thousands of small steps and working in an endless loop of problem and solution. He examines why innovators meet resistance and how they overcome it, why most organizations stifle creative people, and how the most creative organizations work. Drawing on examples from art, science, business, and invention, from Mozart to the Muppets, Archimedes to Apple, Kandinsky to a can of Coke, How to Fly a Horse is a passionate and immensely rewarding exploration of how “new” comes to be.

    Even if you don't immediately recognize his name, you have almost certainly used one of the radios, clocks, lighters, juicers, shelves or hundreds of other products he designed. He is famous not only for this vast array of well-formed products, but for his remarkably prescient ideas about the correct function of design in the messy, out-of-control world we inhabit today. These ideas are summed up in his 'ten principles' of good design: good design is innovative, useful, and aesthetic. Good design should be make a product easily understood. Good design is unobtrusive, honest, durable, thorough, and concerned with the environment. Most of all, good design is as little design as possible.In that spirit, this monograph is as little book as possible. It is a clear, comprehensive and beautiful presentation of Dieter Rams' life and his work. It is a must-have book for anyone interested in Rams' work, his legacy, and his ideas about how to live.

    But have you ever wondered how Google makes billions of dollars while providing search, email, and maps for free? How do they figure out which ads perfectly capture your interests? And how do they search the entire internet so quickly, anyway?By answering real-world questions like this, Swipe to Unlock gives you a peek under the hood of the technology you use every day, decodes technologists' weirdest buzzwords, and shows you how technology is changing the society we live in for better or for worse. Unlock the answers you need to become a better-educated consumer, digital citizen, or technology professional.

    Treat it as the UX expert on your bookshelf that you can read from cover-to-cover, or to dip into as the need arises, regardless of whether you have 'UX' in your job title or not.