Good to Great: Achieving Product Excellence in Web 2.0

Sitting in the session, Good to Great: Achieving Product Excellence in Web 2.0 by Dan Olsen at Web 2.0 Expo.

How to Elicit User Needs and Problems:
You need to understand your customers, talk to them and ask them what they like and don't like. Also important is observing their behavior.

How can you do this with million of customers?
Use quantitative research (.i.e. surveys) and site analytics and usage metrics.

Product Management:
A Product Manager by any other name would smell as sweet. Product managers sometimes have different titles even though they are responsible for their product. It's product manager's job to understand the market and customers. Your job is to make sure that product objectives meet business objectives. At the end of the day, a product manager's job is to have a successful product. You should know market and customer better than anyone else. Also you need to be the clearinghouse for all product ideas.

What does ROI mean in a product development context?
ROI:

• Investment = cost or resources required
• Return = "profit" gained from investment
  

Say you have two feature ideas. The idea that takes minimal time and provides the most return should be the one chosen. You need to find those high leverage ideas. How can we trim off requirements to keep the investment lower? You should prioritize order of ideas by ROI.

Process has 4 components:

• Strategy (Business Strategy, Product Strategy and Product Roadmap),
  
• Planning (Business objectives, Product Objectives ad Prioritized Feature list),
  
• Design
• Development

UI Design:

Web 2.0 PMs need UI design skills otherwise the design gap exists. Many startups don't have UI designers/ Product managers often asked to fill the void.

Faster pace = less documentation:
- long-winded MRDs and PRDs are dead
- Now: short specs with wireframes, wikis and whiteboard.

UI changes can cause dramatic changes in user experience.

In the UI design Iceberg, the tip above the water is visual design. This is what most people see. Visual design is followed by interaction design and information architecture.

Elements of UI Design:
UI Design

• Conceptual design
• interaction design
• information architecture
• visual design

Documents used:

• flow charts
• wireframes
• mock-ups or comps
• prototypes

Usability testing

• The goal is to evaluate how easy your product is to use. You can show mock-ups and gain feedback
  
• can solicit feedback on product or design documents

Making UI Design Decisions

• UI questions are never binary. It's about what percentage of users would take action A or action B?

A key UI concept is the fold. Have the key actionable items above the fold. The fold: "chrome takes away pixels." A lot of space is taken by toolbars, status bars and OS bars. Your 768 resolutions may be reduced to 600.

Why are metrics important?
You have a lot of decisions to make and having metrics makes it easier. Identify what are the key metrics for your business so you can optimize the equation of your business. Where is teh current value for each metric? How many resources does it take to "move" each metric a certain amount? What metrics have the highest ROI opportunities?

Track metrics as time series:
Time series much better than ad hoc bulk analysis. You should track metrics daily. One row for each day's metrics and each metric should be expressed as a column.

To make raw data more useful, you can do various things.
To facilitate comparisons over time:

• Create normalized ratios of primary metrics: A/B
• often still need to look at A and B independently.
• - use analysis over time such as weekly averages and monthly averages.
  

Viral loop steps and metrics:
Active users invite prospective users who may or may not click. Some things you should be tracking include

• % of users who are active
• % of users who are sending invites
• invites per sender
• invite clickthrough rate
• delivery success rate
• open rate
• clickthrough rate
• registration yield
  

Optimization through iteration

• measure the metric
• analyze
• hypothesize opportunities to improve
• synthesize (design enhancement)
• implement enhancement
• loop back

Abandonment rate can be calculated as 1 - conversion rate.

They are just launching yourversion.com in closed beta. He can be reached at dan (at) yourversion (dot) com.