Book picks similar to
Validating Product Ideas by Tomer Sharon
design
ux
product-management
business
Strategic Writing for UX: Drive Engagement, Conversion, and Retention with Every Word
Torrey Podmajersky - 2019
But how do you choose the right words? And how do you know if they work? With this practical book, you'll learn how to write strategically for UX, using tools to build foundational pieces for UI text and UX voice strategy.UX content strategist Torrey Podmajersky provides strategies for converting, engaging, supporting, and re-attracting users. You'll use frameworks and patterns for content, methods to measure the content's effectiveness, and processes to create the collaboration necessary for success. You'll also structure your voice throughout so that the brand is easily recognizable to its audience.Learn how UX content works with the software development lifecycleUse a framework to align the UX content with product principlesExplore content-first design to root UX text in conversationLearn how UX text patterns work with different voicesProduce text that's purposeful, concise, conversational, and clear
Communicating the User Experience: A Practical Guide for Creating Useful UX Documentation
Richard Caddick - 2011
This indispensible and full-color book provides practical guidance on this growing field and shares valuable UX advice that you can put into practice immediately on your own projects. The authors examine why UX is gaining so much interest from web designers, graduates, and career changers and looks at the new UX tools and ideas that can help you do your job better. In addition, you'll benefit from the unique insight the authors provide from their experiences of working with some of the world's best-known companies, learning how to take ideas from business requirements, user research, and documentation to create and develop your UX vision.Explains how to create documentation that clearly communicates the vision for the UX design and the blueprint for how it's going to be developed Provides practical guidance that you can put to work right away on their own projects Looks at the new UX tools and ideas that are born every day, aimed at helping you do your job better and more efficiently Covers a variety of topics including user journeys, task models, funnel diagrams, content audits, sitemaps, wireframes, interactive prototypes, and more Communicating the User Experience is an ideal resource for getting started with creating UX documentation.
Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon
Colin Bryar - 2021
In Working Backwards, these two long-serving Amazon executives reveal and codify the principles and practices that drive the success of one of the most extraordinary companies the world has ever known. With twenty-seven years of Amazon experience between them, much of it in the early aughts—a period of unmatched innovation that brought products and services including Kindle, Amazon Prime, Amazon Studios, and Amazon Web Services to life—Bryar and Carr offer unprecedented access to the Amazon way as it was refined, articulated, and proven to be repeatable, scalable, and adaptable.With keen analysis and practical steps for applying it at your own company—no matter the size—the authors illuminate how Amazon’s fourteen leadership principles inform decision-making at all levels and reveal how the company’s culture has been defined by four characteristics: customer obsession, long-term thinking, eagerness to invent, and operational excellence. Bryar and Carr explain the set of ground-level practices that ensure these are translated into action and flow through all aspects of the business.Working Backwards is a practical guidebook and a corporate narrative, filled with the authors’ in-the-room recollections of what “Being Amazonian” is like and how it has affected their personal and professional lives. They demonstrate that success on Amazon’s scale is not achieved by the genius of any single leader, but rather through commitment to and execution of a set of well-defined, rigorously-executed principles and practices—shared here for the very first time. A Macmillan Audio production from St. Martin's Press
Service Design for Business: A Practical Guide to Optimizing the Customer Experience
Ben Reason - 2015
Written by the experts at Livework, this practical guide offers a tangible, effective approach for better responding to customers' needs and demands, and provides concrete strategy that can be implemented immediately. You'll learn how taking a design approach to problem solving helps foster creativity, and how to apply it to the real issues that move businesses forward. Highly visual and organized for easy navigation, this quick read is a handbook for connecting market factors to the organizational challenge of customer experience by seeing your company through the customers' eyes.Livework pioneered the service design industry, and guides organizations including Sony, the British Government, Volkswagen Procter & Gamble, the BBC, and more toward a more carefully curated customer experience. In this book, the Livework experts show you how to put service design to work in your company to solve the ongoing challenge of winning with customers. Approach customer experience from a design perspective See your organization through the lens of the customer Make customer experience an organization-wide responsibility Analyze the market factors that dovetail with customer experience designThe Internet and other digital technology has brought the world to your customers' fingertips. With unprecedented choice, consumers are demanding more than just a great product--the organizations coming out on top are designing and delivering experiences tailored to their customers' wants. "Service Design for Business" gives you the practical insight and service design perspective you need to shape the way your customers view your organization.
Work Rules!: Insights from Inside Google That Will Transform How You Live and Lead
Laszlo Bock - 2015
"We spend more time working than doing anything else in life. It's not right that the experience of work should be so demotivating and dehumanizing." So says Laszlo Bock, head of People Operations at the company that transformed how the world interacts with knowledge. This insight is the heart of WORK RULES!, a compelling and surprisingly playful manifesto that offers lessons including:Take away managers' power over employeesLearn from your best employees-and your worstHire only people who are smarter than you are, no matter how long it takes to find themPay unfairly (it's more fair!)Don't trust your gut: Use data to predict and shape the futureDefault to open-be transparent and welcome feedbackIf you're comfortable with the amount of freedom you've given your employees, you haven't gone far enough. Drawing on the latest research in behavioral economics and a profound grasp of human psychology, WORK RULES! also provides teaching examples from a range of industries-including lauded companies that happen to be hideous places to work and little-known companies that achieve spectacular results by valuing and listening to their employees. Bock takes us inside one of history's most explosively successful businesses to reveal why Google is consistently rated one of the best places to work in the world, distilling 15 years of intensive worker R&D into principles that are easy to put into action, whether you're a team of one or a team of thousands. WORK RULES! shows how to strike a balance between creativity and structure, leading to success you can measure in quality of life as well as market share. Read it to build a better company from within rather than from above; read it to reawaken your joy in what you do.
Nicely Said: Writing for the Web with Style and Purpose
Nicole Fenton - 2014
You’ll learn how to write web copy that addresses your readers’ needs and supports your business goals.Learn from real-world examples and interviews with people who put these ideas into action every day: Kristina Halvorson of Brain Traffic, Tiffani Jones Brown of Pinterest, Gabrielle Blair of Design Mom, Mandy Brown of Editorially, Randy J. Hunt of Etsy, Sarah Richards of GOV.UK, and more.Topics:* Write marketing copy, interface flows, blog posts, legal policies, and emails* Develop behind-the-scenes documents like mission statements, survey questions, and project briefs* Find your voice and adapt your tone for different situations* Build trust and foster relationships with readers* Make a simple style guide and collaborate with your team
Interaction Design: Beyond Human-Computer Interaction
Yvonne Rogers - 2001
It should be labelled 'start here'." --Pieter Jan Stappers, ID-StudioLab, Delft University of Technology
Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time
Jeff Sutherland - 2014
It already drives most of the world’s top technology companies. And now it’s starting to spread to every domain where leaders wrestle with complex projects. If you’ve ever been startled by how fast the world is changing, Scrum is one of the reasons why. Productivity gains of as much as 1200% have been recorded, and there’s no more lucid – or compelling – explainer of Scrum and its bright promise than Jeff Sutherland, the man who put together the first Scrum team more than twenty years ago. The thorny problem Jeff began tackling back then boils down to this: people are spectacularly bad at doing things with agility and efficiency. Best laid plans go up in smoke. Teams often work at cross purposes to each other. And when the pressure rises, unhappiness soars. Drawing on his experience as a West Point-educated fighter pilot, biometrics expert, early innovator of ATM technology, and V.P. of engineering or CTO at eleven different technology companies, Jeff began challenging those dysfunctional realities, looking for solutions that would have global impact. In this book you’ll journey to Scrum’s front lines where Jeff’s system of deep accountability, team interaction, and constant iterative improvement is, among other feats, bringing the FBI into the 21st century, perfecting the design of an affordable 140 mile per hour/100 mile per gallon car, helping NPR report fast-moving action in the Middle East, changing the way pharmacists interact with patients, reducing poverty in the Third World, and even helping people plan their weddings and accomplish weekend chores. Woven with insights from martial arts, judicial decision making, advanced aerial combat, robotics, and many other disciplines, Scrum is consistently riveting. But the most important reason to read this book is that it may just help you achieve what others consider unachievable – whether it be inventing a trailblazing technology, devising a new system of education, pioneering a way to feed the hungry, or, closer to home, a building a foundation for your family to thrive and prosper.
Design Systems: A practical guide to creating design languages for digital products
Alla Kholmatova - 2017
Some can generate coherent user experiences, others produce confusing patchwork designs. Some inspire teams to contribute to them, while others are neglected. Some get better with time, more cohesive and better functioning; others get worse, becoming bloated and cumbersome.Throughout this book, Alla Kholmatova, previously a lead designer at FutureLearn, will share an approach and the key qualities of effective, enduring design systems. It’s based on Alla’s experiences, case-studies from AirBnB, Atlassian, Eurostar, TED, and Sipgate, plus 18 months of research and interviews — all attempting to figure out what works and what doesn’t work in real-life products. It may not answer every question, but it will help you figure out just the right strategy for establishing and evolving a design system in your organization.
High Output Management
Andrew S. Grove - 1983
In High Output Management, Andrew S. Grove, former chairman and CEO (and employee number three) of Intel, shares his perspective on how to build and run a company. Born of Grove’s experiences at one of America’s leading technology companies, this legendary management book is a Silicon Valley staple, equally appropriate for sales managers, accountants, consultants, and teachers, as well as CEOs and startup founders. Grove covers techniques for creating highly productive teams, demonstrating methods of motivation that lead to peak performance—throughout, High Output Management is a practical handbook for navigating real-life business scenarios and a powerful management manifesto with the ability to revolutionize the way we work.
Intercom on Product Management
Intercom Inc - 2015
This book by the team at Intercom, a rapidly growing San Francisco software startup, is designed to help those working in the ever evolving field of product management Since Intercom began in 2011, its team has been writing about how it approaches the product challenges it faces. How do you decide what to build? How do you decide what not to build? What questions should you ask beta users? How do you manage feedback? Intercom on Product Management takes the best product posts from Intercom’s award winning blog, Inside Intercom, and collects them together in actionable lessons for product managers. It’s not the definitive book on product management, but we think it’s a damn good place to start. What you’ll learn: CHAPTER 1 Evaluating your product CHAPTER 2 The thing about new features CHAPTER 3 Which new features to build CHAPTER 4 Getting the feature used Intercom on Product Management was written by Des Traynor, co-founder of Intercom and edited by John Collins, managing editor of Intercom's blog. Des has written extensively on product management and strategy and is a regular speaker on the topic at conferences like Business of Software, Launch and Mind the Product. John has over 20 years journalism experience covering technology and business issues, most recently for The Irish Times. Intercom helps web and mobile businesses to see, engage, learn from, and support their customers in incredibly personal ways. More than 4,000 web and mobile businesses use Intercom to communicate with their customers. Praise for Intercom on Product Management "A valuable resource for anyone who wants to build products that customers will want to use time and time again." - Nir Eyal, author of Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products. "Moves beyond the cliches and platitudes and provides astute, actionable advice on modern product management. I'd put it at the top of the reading list for anyone that has anything to do with building great products." - Dharmesh Shah, co-founder and CTO of HubSpot. "Really, really really good. Even better, easily accessible, so you can spend just a few minutes scanning through it and pick up something of value to use quickly." - John Koetsier, VP of Product at VentureBeat. "While books about design and programming abound, resources for the product manager are scant. Intercom has been filling that void with excellent blog posts and now a book of guidance, Intercom on Product Management." - Ryan Singer, Product Manager at Basecamp
Web Analytics 2.0: The Art of Online Accountability & Science of Customer Centricity [With CDROM]
Avinash Kaushik - 2009
"Web Analytics 2.0" presents a new framework that will permanently change how you think about analytics. It provides specific recommendations for creating an actionable strategy, applying analytical techniques correctly, solving challenges such as measuring social media and multichannel campaigns, achieving optimal success by leveraging experimentation, and employing tactics for truly listening to your customers. The book will help your organization become more data driven while you become a super analysis ninja Note: CD-ROM/DVD and other supplementary materials are not included as part of eBook file.
Good Strategy Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why It Matters
Richard P. Rumelt - 2011
Richard Rumelt shows that there has been a growing and unfortunate tendency to equate Mom-and-apple-pie values, fluffy packages of buzzwords, motivational slogans, and financial goals with “strategy.” He debunks these elements of “bad strategy” and awakens an understanding of the power of a “good strategy.” A good strategy is a specific and coherent response to—and approach for overcoming—the obstacles to progress. A good strategy works by harnessing and applying power where it will have the greatest effect in challenges as varied as putting a man on the moon, fighting a war, launching a new product, responding to changing market dynamics, starting a charter school, or setting up a government program. Rumelt’snine sources of power—ranging from using leverage to effectively focusing on growth—are eye-opening yet pragmatic tools that can be put to work on Monday morning.Surprisingly, a good strategy is often unexpected because most organizations don’t have one. Instead, they have “visions,” mistake financial goals for strategy,and pursue a “dog’s dinner” of conflicting policies and actions.Rumelt argues that the heart of a good strategy is insight—into the true nature of the situation, into the hidden power in a situation, and into an appropriate response. He shows you how insight can be cultivated with a wide variety of tools for guiding yourown thinking.Good Strategy/Bad Strategy uses fascinating examples from business, nonprofit, and military affairs to bring its original and pragmatic ideas to life. The detailed examples range from Apple to General Motors, from the two Iraq wars to Afghanistan, from a small local market to Wal-Mart, from Nvidia to Silicon Graphics, from the Getty Trust to the Los Angeles Unified School District, from Cisco Systems to Paccar, and from Global Crossing to the 2007–08 financial crisis.Reflecting an astonishing grasp and integration of economics, finance, technology, history, and the brilliance and foibles of the human character, Good Strategy/Bad Strategy stems from Rumelt’s decades of digging beyond the superficial to address hard questions with honesty and integrity.From the Hardcover edition.
Why We Fail: Learning From Experience Design Failures
Victor Lombardi - 2013
But this book offers more. It provides important insights into both what can go right and what can go wrong in a product offering. To make great products, we need to understand what makes some fail and others succeed. To all the aspiring, young entrepreneurs who are reading this: take heed. Embrace failure to learn from failure. Learn from failure to avoid failure." —Don Norman Co-founder, Nielsen Norman Group Author of The Design of Everyday Things (Revised and Expanded) Just as pilots and doctors improve by studying crash reports and postmortems, experience designers can improve by learning how customer experience failures cause products to fail in the marketplace. Rather than proselytizing a particular approach to design, Why We Fail holistically explores what teams actually built, why the products failed, and how we can learn from the past to avoid failure ourselves.Why We Fail will help you:1. Understand the key mistakes other teams have made so you don't repeat them2. Turn unavoidable failures into building blocks to be successful3. Create a team environment where failures are controlled and valuable
When Coffee & Kale Compete: Become Great at Making Products People Will Buy
Alan Klement - 2016