In the “city that never sleeps,” what better place is there to be – and community of product people to be there with – than in New York City for Product Collective’s 2024 New York Product Conference!
3 Tips from Jared Spool (Strategic UX) and Roman Pichler (Product)
Compared with other software development disciplines, product management and user experience (UX) design are still pretty young professions. That said, they’re maturing rapidly and growing more specialized every day. As their evolution continues, it isn’t always clear who’s responsible for what on a product team and how best they can work together (we offered guidance on this topic in a post last year). Maybe it’s no surprise, then, that UX designers and product managers seem to get in each other’s way on the road to success.
This post canvasses the views that Roman Pichler (PM) and Jared Spool (UX) recently shared in consecutive podcast episodes of Product Momentum. What’s most intriguing about both conversations is how they each arrive at the same desired outcome – improving the lives of end users – despite taking parallel paths.
Jared calls that desired outcome a better future, while Roman describes it as the positive change a product should create. But both agree that whatever the solution, it’s less about building shiny new features or making things look pretty (i.e., outputs). Outcomes always trump the digital knickknacks we create along the way.
ITX hosted its 2nd Annual Product + Design Conference on June 22-23 at the Grand Hyatt Hotel Ballroom in downtown Rochester. The 2023 event’s 225+ Keynote Day attendees included every fashion of product maker and leader.
They may have entered the conference as product managers, designers, engineers, QA specialists, and content strategists. But they exited as members of a product team – collectively responsible for solving one shared problem: how do we improve the lives of our users
Keys to Stewarding the Client Investment & Maximizing ROI
Getting to the heart of a client’s concern is the crucial first step to delivering an effective software solution. But deciphering complex requirements and balancing competencies between a client and a technology partner can be a daunting task. This is where discovery comes into play.
In our series’ first post, Discovery: Understanding the Problem Space, we learned that discovery begins before kickoff with a client-focused “needs analysis session.”
In this blog, we’ll explore how discovery activities help teams gain powerful insights, establish trust, and deliver impactful solutions as they work to steward the client investment.
Data-Driven Design and Futures Design Added to Conference Keynotes, Workshops
It’s true what they say: “Good things come to those who wait.”
I’m beyond excited to introduce Krissi Xenakis, Jocelyne Dittmer, and Phil Balagtas to the speaker roster for ITX’s Product + Design Conference 2023, June 22-23 in Rochester, NY.
Author of Radical Product Thinking to Offer Workshop, Keynote
Shortly before publishing our June 2020 podcast episode with Radhika Dutt, she posted an article entitled,What’s sucking momentum from your product development journey – and what you can do about it. As soon as I read that piece, I knew we needed to invite Radhika to guest on our Product Momentum pod. The fit was just too good.
Here we are, 3 years on, and the fit is just as strong.
We’re excited to welcome Radhika to conduct a workshop and deliver a keynote address during our 2-day Product + Design Conference, here in Rochester, NY on June 22-23!
Radhika – an entrepreneur, product leader, and author of Radical Product Thinking: A New Mindset for Innovating Smarter, joins UX and product management legends Jesse James Garrett and Rich Mironov on an increasingly impressive speaker line-up.
In the Planning Stage, look for the ITX innovation lead to guide the product team from Vision to Strategy to Roadmap. In our recent post, we explained that Vision represents a desired future state. Strategy explains how you’ll get there, and Roadmap lists the mile markers along the journey. In this post, we examine the innovation lead’s role in navigating that path.
Building software isn’t about the features you add – the bells and whistles. It’s about helping your end users be more successful. Any notion that a product with more features is by definition better than a product with fewer features is a misguided one.
Innovation leads help their clients and teams discover the difference between adding features for features’ sake and adding features that solve problems for users and create business value for clients.
Our journey starts with Vision, which directs everyone’s effort and investment toward making users more successful. In addition to vision statement – a declaration of objective – innovation leads help teams strategically derive two additional artifacts: the product strategy and the product roadmap.
Rich Mironov and Jesse James Garrett, Veterans in Product and UX, to Keynote ….
As producer of ITX’s Product Momentum Podcast, I was only too excited to learn that past guests Jesse James Garrett and Rich Mironov had accepted our invitation to speak at the 2nd annual Product + Design Conference 2023, on June 22-23, 2023.
In this second post in our series, Leading Product Innovation, we look at how ITX innovation leads help clients establish a clear Vision for their software product. In the series’ opening blog, we talked about how Discovery activities guide the product team to answer Why? What? For whom? Here, we explore their role in building stakeholder alignment around the product Vision and articulating that Vision in a way that rallies the team to confidently commit to its fulfillment.
Managing risk. It’s the unavoidable reality of software product leadership. Sometimes that risk comes from not knowing what to do first, or next. Other times it’s the risk of not staying current with technology. Ultimately, product leaders face the risk that any one of these will damage their company’s brand or bottom line.
ITX innovation leads help clients manage that risk – first by guiding the product team through Foundation Stage discovery activities, later transitioning into the Planning Stage of the product development process with a clear product vision.
Leading Product Innovation, the ITX Way is a new blog series offering an inside look at how Product + Design come together to deliver innovative product solutions.
The product manager role at ITX has evolved throughout our 25-year history. Here, product managers are called innovation leads – more than nuance, the title emphasizes our belief that our clients manage the products we help them build; we are partners in that development.
To best understand the innovation lead’s impact, it’s helpful to drill into their involvement during key stages of the process – Foundation, Planning, Development, and Deployment. In this article, we’ll look at how innovation lead guides discovery activities to help their product team understand the problem space.
