Blog Blog Blog

I haven't posted here for a while, but that doesn't mean I haven't been writing!  Here are a couple of blog posts I've written (and co-written) for the Yammer Product Blog:

Don't Listen to the HiPPO (Highest Paid Person's Opinion)

My colleague Neil and I write about how we did user testing during the dogfooding process for a feature that got a lot of attention from the higher ups. 

From the post: 

"It can be scary to hear upper management strongly disagreeing with your product decisions. Take the feedback into consideration, take a deep breath, make a hypothesis, and test it. Don’t waste time trying to design a solution to each problem you hear about as you hear about it—you’ll quickly drown in unsolved problems."

To Cheese or Not to Cheese: Using Inhibiting & Promoting Pressures to Design Features

In this post, I take a page from Social Psychology. I talk about brainstorming what the inhibiting and promoting pressures are of people using a product, focusing more on what is keeping people from doing the action you want them to do.

From the post:

"In product, we often focus on promoting instead of inhibiting. We phrase problems around actions we want the user to do (or do more of), and build features around that. Matt Wallaert encouraged us to instead focus on the inhibiting factors that are blocking our users. What are the real barriers keeping people from using our product?"