In my view, Product Management and Experience Design are techniques as critical to successful software projects as DevOps, Continuous Delivery, Testing, Agile and Lean.

• Product Management role tells what needs to done and in what order.
• Experience Design role tells how what needs to done should be done, from the user experience perspective.

It is quite difficult to develop good software without those two roles and their techniques. Both should be in the “adopt” sector of the technique area of the radar.

Product Management is not only for systems that will become a product, but for any system, since any system will have users. The Product Management role is the link between system users and the team who will build the system. It is different from the Business Analyst role which is more focused in the business and the owners of the system. And its different from Experience Design role which is more focused on how a user interacts with a system.

The Product Management role is responsible for talking with real users of the system, understanding the pain that the system is supposed to solve for these real users and help define what needs to be developed. Note that a system may be owned by a company, like a ticketing system or an ecommerce system, and this company who owns the system will ask for a certain set of features so they can reach a certain business goal, but the requirement gathering is incomplete if we don’t listen to the real users of the system who normally are customers of the company who owns the system.

If you have a great group of developers, QAs and BAs, all veterans in using Agile, Lean, Testing, DevOps and Continuous Delivery, all of that is useless if you are not able define what is the minimal set of features that can create value for the customer in the first release. And subsequently define the minimal features to be developed and deployed that brings greatest value to real users. The Lean Startup movement calls it MVP (Minimal Viable Product). Mark Denne and Jane Cleland-Huang, authors of Software by Numbers, first published in 2003, coined another term for this minimal set of features. They call it MMF (Minimal Marketable Feature).

The Agile Manifesto says that we should value “Customer collaboration over contract negotiation” and set as it’s first principle that “Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software”. The issue with these two statements is that it assumes that the customer who is the owner of the system knows what is “valuable software”. However, the customer normally knows what is “valuable software” for him, i.e., they know what are their business goals that they want to achieve with the system. The problem is that the customer doesn’t know their own customers enough in order to define the requirements upon what a system should be developed, i.e., the customer doesn’t know what is “valuable software” for their own customers.

It is the Product Manager’s role to understand the users, the problem the users have, and should bring this information back to the developers and experience designers so these three roles can jointly come up with a system that solves the users problem and, at the same time, meet the system owner’s business goals.

What do you think? Do you agree? Disagree? Share your comments below!

In this post I’ll reproduce some of my highlights from the book. These highlights provide advice on how to create a good checklist:

Pilots nonetheless turn to their checklists for two reasons. First, they are trained to do so. They learn from the beginning of flight school that their memory and judgment are unreliable and that lives depend on their recognizing that fact. Second, the checklists have proved their worth—they work.

There are good checklists and bad, Boorman explained. Bad checklists are vague and imprecise. They are too long; they are hard to use; they are impractical. They are made by desk jockeys with no awareness of the situations in which they are to be deployed. They treat the people using the tools as dumb and try to spell out every single step. They turn people’s brains off rather than turn them on. Good checklists, on the other hand, are precise. They are efficient, to the point, and easy to use even in the most difficult situations. They do not try to spell out everything—a checklist cannot fly a plane. Instead, they provide reminders of only the most critical and important steps—the ones that even the highly skilled professionals using them could miss. Good checklists are, above all, practical.

No matter how much thought we might put in, a checklist has to be tested in the real world, which is inevitably more complicated than expected. First drafts always fall apart, he said, and one needs to study how, make changes, and keep testing until the checklist works consistently.

The checklist cannot be lengthy. A rule of thumb some use is to keep it to between five and nine items, which is the limit of working memory.

You must decide whether you want a DO-CONFIRM checklist or a READ-DO checklist. With a DO-CONFIRM checklist, he said, team members perform their jobs from memory and experience, often separately. But then they stop. They pause to run the checklist and confirm that everything that was supposed to be done was done. With a READ-DO checklist, on the other hand, people carry out the tasks as they check them off—it’s more like a recipe.

As soon as I have some time available, I’ll be back here translating that material to English.

In phase 1 I had 5 product ideas and wanted to know in which should I invest.

In phase 2 I pick the idea with more interest from phase 1 and invested in creating the MVP (Minimal Viable Product), ContaCal, a calorie counter system.

In phase 3 I launched the website, the online campaign, got real users feedback and improved the system based on this feedback.

My phase 4 main objective was the search for revenue!

Costs for changing the system was getting too expensive

I was getting at a point were I needed minor changes to the system and every change to the system was going to cost me too much, not only in money but in time, since freelance developers are not available whenever you need them. I’m an old programmer… My last production code was in Perl. At that time, Microsoft ASP was new stuff and no one ever heard of PHP. This was 1998.

As soon as I got the database access, I wrote a simple Perl application to generate statistics so I could check how the app was going, how many users signed up and so on.

Due to my familiarity with Perl I was tempted to write more code using this language but since this is an experiment, I decided to get the source code from the source code repository (GitHub), try to run the application locally on my machine, make some changes, test it, send it back to GitHub and then deploy in production. It worked!

Now the doors were really open to full experimentation. The site was based on WordPress, so I could change it to certain degree anytime I wanted. And now the application I could also change – to a certain degree – anytime I wanted, so it’s time for some experiments.

Prior to revenue, a survey

Prior to charging users for using the system I decided to run a survey so I could have a better understanding of how the users view the product. The first question was about the NPS (Net Promoter Score), a customer loyalty metric:

The Net Promoter Score is obtained by asking customers a single question on a 0 to 10 rating scale, where 10 is “extremely likely” and 0 is “not at all likely”: “How likely is it that you would recommend our company to a friend or colleague?” Based on their responses, customers are categorized into one of three groups: Promoters (9–10 rating), Passives (7–8 rating), and Detractors (0–6 rating). The percentage of Detractors is then subtracted from the percentage of Promoters to obtain a Net Promoter score (NPS). NPS can be as low as -100 (everybody is a detractor) or as high as +100 (everybody is a promoter). An NPS that is positive (i.e., higher than zero) is felt to be good, and an NPS of +50 is excellent. Companies are encouraged to follow this question with an open-ended request for elaboration, soliciting the reasons for a customer’s rating of that company or product.

Source: Wikipedia

ContaCal’s NPS was 65%, a very good index.

ContaCal NPS

The second question was about how much the user was willing to pay for the service.

How much would you pay?

39% of the users were willing to pay for the service and the average price they were willing to pay was around 5 BRL per month.

We also asked about nutritionist counseling as part of the service and in this scenario, 42% of the respondents were willing to pay an average price of 20 BRL.

Nutritionist counseling

The last question was about ad supported business model. I was not surprised that 94% of the users preferred the free ad supported option.

Ad supported

The search for revenue

My first experiment was with ads. The option at hand was Google AdSense, so I implemented it in the website as well as inside the application. The results were not very compelling.

I experimented with AdSense during one month. I had close to 85K pageviews and 20.5K unique visitors. This generated U$ 32.19 in revenue.

Next step was billing. Here in Brazil we have boleto bancário, an alternative to credit card for receiving payments.

Boleto Bancário is a financial document, a kind of proforma invoice issued by a bank that enables your client to pay the exact specified amount to the receiving party (merchant). As long as within the due date period, your client may use a lotto house, supermarkets, post offices, home banking in addition to any bank agency in the Brazilian territory.

Source: The Brazil Business

I implemented initially boleto bancário using Cobre Grátis service. I had some issues that made me change to credit card. For credit card processing I used PayPal. Quite useful since they provide recurring payments as well as international payments, which was quite handy since ContaCal was also attracting some users from other Portuguese speaking countries and I do have a few subscribers from abroad!

After using credit card only lots of user were asking for boleto, so now I offer both options.

Some time ago I showed my initial user statistics:

ContaCal users 08/2011 through 10/2011

Below you can find the follow on statistics up to February 2012, not only for users but also subscribers:

ContaCal users from 11/2011 through 02/2012

ContaCal subscribers from 11/2011 through 02/2012

One thing that is really important is to have a log of all the tests made so you can relate each of the experiments to the numbers you see in your charts.

The results

Below are the results of 6 months of my lean startup validation experiment.

ContaCal numbers

Under Mkt costs is AdWords and Facebook Ads. Under Infra costs are all infrastructure costs including hosting, email marketing tool, domain registration, unbounce and any other SaaS tool required to run ContaCal. Under Dev are all the development costs including not only the Startup DEV but also the WordPress theme acquired at themeforest as well as the designer who worked on implementing the theme in the WordPress.

Now I need to work on reducing those costs as well as keeping the revenue growth.

Next phase: the search for profit

Since I was able to find some revenue, now it is time to search for profit. Some of the areas I’ll work on during next phase:

• reduce advertising costs by improving AdWords usage
• reduce infrastructure costs by optimizing its usage
• price increase
• usability review

See you there!

Old TV remote control

Checkout the number of buttons in the remote control. The maximum is 4. There are some remotes with only one button. When I was a kid I remember the first TV bought in my house with a remote control that had only 2 buttons, one for volume and other for changing channel. That simple! That was around 1975. At the time, the technology for making a remote control was too expansive, so it could not be too complicated and have too many buttons, otherwise it would be too expansive to be sold in the market. That was the restriction that drove the simplicity of those 1st generation remote control. Now we don’t have that restriction and we get remotes that can accomplish much more tasks but are way more complex. Take a look at the picture below (and I even picked a not-so-complex one!):

Digital TV Remote Control

So maybe next time we want to design something more simple, we can think of imposing some restrictions to the design process!

I was reviewing my Kindle highlights for this book and found this highlight:

Surgery has, essentially, four big killers wherever it is done in the world: infection, bleeding, unsafe anesthesia, and what can only be called the unexpected. For the first three, science and experience have given us some straightforward and valuable preventive measures we think we consistently follow but don’t. These misses are simple failures — perfect for a classic checklist. And as a result, all the researchers’ checklists included precisely specified steps to catch them.

But the fourth killer — the unexpected — is an entirely different kind of failure, one that stems from the fundamentally complex risks entailed by opening up a person’s body and trying to tinker with it. Independently, each of the researchers seemed to have realized that no one checklist could anticipate all the pitfalls a team must guard against. So they had determined that the most promising thing to do was just to have people stop and talk through the case together — to be ready as a team to identify and address each patient’s unique, potentially critical dangers.

Dr. Gawande found out that in order to address the unexpected, checklists should not only include task checks but also communication checks. Dr. Gawande got to that conclusion visiting a 700,000-square-foot office and apartment complex construction site with between two to five hundred workers on-site on any give day managed by a man called Finn O’Sullivan. The volume of knowledge and degree of complexity O’Sullivan manages is impressive and it was as monstrous as anything Dr. Gawande had encountered in medicine. Here’s the explanation:

It was also a checklist, but it didn’t specify construction tasks; it specified communication tasks. For the way the project managers dealt with the unexpected and the uncertain was by making sure the experts spoke to one another — on X date regarding Y process. The experts could make their individual judgments, but they had to do so as part of a team that took one another’s concerns into account, discussed unplanned developments, and agreed on the way forward. While no one could anticipate all the problems, they could foresee where and when they might occur. The checklist therefore detailed who had to talk to whom, by which date, and about what aspect of construction — who had to share (or “submit”) particular kinds of information before the next steps could proceed.

The submittal schedule specified, for instance, that by the end of the month the contractors, installers, and elevator engineers had to review the condition of the elevator cars traveling up to the tenth floor. The elevator cars were factory constructed and tested. They were installed by experts. But it was not assumed that they would work perfectly. Quite the opposite. The assumption was that anything could go wrong, anything could get missed. What? Who knows? That’s the nature of complexity. But it was also assumed that, if you got the right people together and had them take a moment to talk things over as a team rather than as individuals, serious problems could be identified and averted.

So next time you design a checklist, remember to include not only task checks but also communication checks.

Locaweb has almost 700 employees now. We ended 2010 with approximately $100M in revenue. We have around 130 people in our engineering group which include software developers, system administrators, user experience designers and product managers. We decided to use the SaaS team – around 25 people – as the group who will be part of the experiment.

In phase 1 we worked on figuring out what to do. The next phase is building the MVPs!

Organizing the team

From the 10 ideas we tested, 6 had enough traction to motivate us to build the MVPs, i.e., the minimal viable product. However, one of them was not simple enough to be developed as an MVP in 1 week so we decided to move on with 5 MVPs. The self-organized into 5 groups of 5 people each to work on developing the 5 MVPs. We wanted the groups to have focus during a whole week, so the groups were allowed to work in a different place so they ware not disturbed by daily work. Since we could not leave the company without anyone capable to deal with daily needs of our existing SaaS products, we decided to have 2 teams working during one week and the other 3 teams working during the next week.

Building the MVP

Building the MVP

Building the MVP

Building the MVP

Building the MVP

Building the MVP

The MVPs

And with no further ado, here are the MVPs:

• SocialEagle: social network monitoring tool.
• Sob.re: virtual business card.
• SMTP Service: authenticated SMTP service with reporting.
• Seja Avisado: notification widget.
• Mezu: SMS marketing tool.

Lessons learned

• It was good to have the teams fully focused for a whole week.
• Since we put in the same team people who are not used to work together, it was a bit difficult to estimate the effort and many times we under estimated the effort.
• In some products we believe we didn’t get the M for minimal correctly. We may have built sub-minimal viable products that may require another week to get to the minimal level.
• Back to the daily activities of the non-startup environment it’s a bit difficult put some energy, even a small amount, to the MVPs.

Next steps

Now we are measuring the interest in each of the MVPs. We intend to have another Agile Product Discovery week in Feb/2012. During this week we intend not only to discover new products, but also work on the existing MVPs, specially those that we believe are sub-minimal.

In phase 1 I had 5 product ideas and wanted to know in which should I invest.

In phase 2 I pick the idea with more interest from phase 1 and invested in creating the MVP (Minimal Viable Product), ContaCal, a calorie counter system.

My phase 3 objectives were:

• website launch
• online campaign (Google, Facebook, Orkut, etc.)
• real users feedback!

Website launch

I officially launched ContaCal on Sep 4th sending an email to all existing users plus the people who showed some interested during phase 1.

Online campaign

I used Google and Facebook. Both generate leads, but Google generated 3 to 4 times more leads than Facebook for my specific web application. Today I’m running a $30/day campaign in AdWords ($1500/month) and I don’t increase it because ContaCal still doesn’t generate any revenue. As soon as I find a sustainable revenue source for ContaCal I’ll certainly increase this investment.

During a certain period my web site was out for maintenance and Google suspended my AdWords campaign. It took 8 days and many emails sent with one or two replies for Google to resume my campaign. This hurter my new user subscription rate.

Real users feedback

I received tons of feedback. Some asking for additional features, some with difficulties in using the system and some thank me for the system!

Based on the feedback, I used some additional development as well as adjustments to the site layout. That costed me around $1000.

Some statistics

Below you can find some statistics about new users and how this number relates to certain events.

ContaCal users

Total cost and time so far: $9,025 – 2 months and 3 weeks

• Phase 1 (idea funnel): $1,600 – 2 weeks
  • 5 product ideas pages in unbounce: $50
  • 5 Google AdWords campaign: $1,500
  • 5 Domain registration: $50
• Phase 2 (MVP): $3,425 – 1 week
  • crowd sourced logo: $310
  • wordpress template: $35
  • wordpress template adjustments: $80
  • startup dev MVP development: $3,000
• Phase 3 (Launch + campaign + feedback): $4,000 – 2 months
  • Campaign: $3,000 ($1,500/month)
  • Application and layout adjustments: $1,000

Stay tuned for the next steps

• the search for a revenue stream!!!

Again good speakers and interesting topics, but again nothing really new for those who follow product management, agile software development and startup related feeds.

I guess the good thing of attending BoS is not exactly the content, that you can get through the net. It’s the opportunity to meet in person lots of people from the software industry and exchange experiences and opinions.

Below are some tweets and references. And again from the number of tweets it’s easy to spot the talks that brought me more new stuff.

Paul Kenny

• Introverts think in order to speak. Extroverts speak to help them think. @PaulKennyOL at #BoS2011.
• Introversion and extroversion are preferences, not boxes we are stuck in. @PaulKennyOL at #BoS2011
• My close suggestion: is there anything we can do to help you make a decision? Inspired by @PaulKennyOL at #BoS2011
• A nice close RT @GaryAres: #bos2011 For everything you have heard so far is there any reason we cannot do business?
• Use the NOs in a sales closing as a learning experience and ask: do you mind telling me why? @PaulKennyOL at #BoS2011.
• When you ask, wait for the answer. @PaulKennyOL at #BoS2011.
• @paulkennyol A lot of businesses failed from not asking than from asking #BoS2011
• There’s much more to learn from qualified no than from unqualified yes. Ask questions to work on closing that deal! @PaulKennyOL #BoS2011
• Asking aids the decision making process. @PaulKennyOL at #BoS2011.
• #BoS2011 @PaulKennyOL Closing is the natural progression in the conversation… Feels weird if you do not ask for a decision…
• Closing is what you do for a customer and not to a customer. @PaulKennyOL at #BoS2011.
• @PaulKennyOL “Sales Constipation could happen because your don’t want to hear what they have to say about your product.” #BoS2011
• You can’t have delighted customers without customers in the 1st place. Techies- close your deals!! @paulkennyol #bos2011
• We need to stop “unteaching” our kids on how to be entrepreneurs. @PaulKennyOL at #BoS2011.
• Kids know how to close. @PaulKennyOL at #BoS2011.
• We don’t like closing. @PaulKennyOL at #BoS2011 Google “Alec Baldwin ABC” to see how not to do it.
• @paulkennyOL You are a founder therefore you are a salesperson #BoS2011

You can find more at Product Principles blog: The Art of Asking

Paul Kenny (@PaulKennyOL)

David Cancel

• A customer suggests you a feature. You reply “great suggestion, will cost X”. The customer says “oh, ok. I don’t need it”. @dcancel #BoS2011
• Average conversion rate in the us is 2% (for Elephants or iPods) via @google #bos2011 via @dcancel (via @johnprendergast)
• @ProductPrincipl you are amazingly fast! #BoS2011
• It’s not about the data. It’s about the learning so you can make your customers happier. @dcancel at #BoS2011.
• @dcancel presenting churn, NPS and cohort at #BoS2011.
• Shared metrics == clear feedback loops #bos2011 via @dcancel
• “Go do it” “Do it faster” “Do both” #jfdi @dcancel at #BoS2011
• Optimize your business for learning, not data. #bos2011 via @dcancel
• “Data alone is useless” – thank God someone said it. #BoS2011
• We have an strategic plan. It’s *doing* things. #JFDI. @dcancel at #BoS2011.
• In God we trust; for the rest bring data. @dcancel at #BoS2011.

You can find more at Product Principles blog: Creating a Data-driven Business

Dave Cancel (@dcancel)

Alexis Ohanian

• “Your UX tells me how much you respect me.” – @kn0thing #BoS2011
• How can you make the world suck less with software? @kn0thing at #BoS2011.

Alexis Ohanian (@kn0thing)

And to end the conference, chinese grab-and-go food. My chines fortune cookie says: “You income will increase.” with that typo! It’s not saying “your income…”. It says “you income…”. I wonder what that means.

I suggested @SGBlank, @Cagan, @JurgenAppelo and Roy Singham, ThoughtWorks founder and chairman, as speakers for next year.

Now flying back home.

See you in #BoS2012.

Beautiful day in Boston Seaport area

Full room at #BoS2011

Again good speakers and interesting topics, but again nothing really new for those who follow product management, agile software development and startup related feeds.

I guess the good thing of attending BoS is not exactly the content, that you can get through the net. It’s the opportunity to meet in person lots of people from the software industry and exchange experiences and opinions.

One thing I noticed is that there are many people attending BoS who are from the old software model industry, the one based on licenses and on-premise installation. Good to see they are at BoS looking to understand that software is moving into hosted based subscription model.

Below are some tweets and references. And again from the number of tweets it’s easy to spot the talks that brought me more new stuff.

Patrick McKenzie

• Advice from @patio11 at #BoS2011: don’t make desktop software.
• RT @PaulKennyOL: A culture of testing is better than a culture of ask the boss Patrick McKenzie #BoS2011
• Everyone ran your software for the first time. 30-40% second time users is common. First impressions are critical. #BoS2011
• The last 5 man-years of development isn’t visible in the first 3 seconds. (So A/B test the headline.)
• A/B testing often tells us things we don’t want to hear, like the design isn’t helping.
• Your 100-man-years of engineering isn’t as important as wordsmithing your site’s headline copy @patio11 #bos2011
• Systematic A/B testing prints money. @patio11 at #BoS2011.
• Most common outcome of A/B testing: no significant change. @patio11 at #BoS2011
• Did hiding extraneous settings behind “advanced” link improve conversions? Yes, by 16% #BoS2011
• Simplify to improve conversion rates. Make advanced config optional. @patio11 at #BoS2011
• Shorter is probably better in a web sales funnel. @patio11 at #BoS2011
• “There are 30 words of Japanese that have made it into English.. 15 of them are meteorological events that can kill you” ~ @patio11 #BoS2011
• @patio11 #BoS2011 Engineers see marketing as witchcraft… LOL
• Math and Science always work. @patio11 at #BoS2011

You can find more at Product Principles blog: Engineering Your Marketing Outcomes

Patrick McKenzie (@patio11)

Laura Fitton

• To find time for social media, find a problem you’re already solving another way and figure out how to solve it via social media. #BoS2011
• “You don’t get a prize for getting the most followers or friends. You get a prize for growing the business.” ~@pistachio #BoS2011
• “If you’re not blogging about your product or service you’re throwing money away” @pistachio at #BoS2011
• Cool – the underwear gnomes cartoon. youtu.be/TBiSI6OdqvA #BoS2011
• Get found. Convert. Measure what matters. @pistachio at #BoS2011.
• And repeat! RT @JocaTorres: Listen. Learn. Care. Serve. @pistachio at #BoS2011.
• Listen. Learn. Care. Serve. @pistachio at #BoS2011.
• Don’t tweet the title. Extract useful info from the article and then tweet. @pistachio at #BoS2011.
• We are moving from “one to many” to “any to many”. Anyone can be the root of a big message. ~@pistachio #BoS2011
• Two word secret of social media – Be useful. @pistachio at #BoS2011

You can find more at Product Principles blog: Business of Social – What B2B and B2C Software Companies Need to Know About Social Media

Laura Fitton (@pistachio)

Josh Linkner

• RT @theospears: Brainstorming while pretending to be someone else frees you up to be creative ~@JoshLinker #BoS2011
• RoleStorming as an option to BrainStorming. @joshlinkner at #BoS2011.
• “Watch out for group-think. Group-think is that poisonous thinking that waters down your best ideas.” via @joshlinkner at #BoS2011
• Mistakes are the portals to discovery ~@joshlinkner #BoS2011
• Playing it safe is the riskier movement possible. From failure you learn. From success not so much. @joshlinkner at #BoS2011.
• The five whys – Louis CK – hilarious youtu.be/4u2ZsoYWwJA #BoS2011
• Because things that aren’t just can’t be. Ask “why?” to see where you can get. @joshlinkner at #BoS2011.
• Being creative? RT @FastFedora: Why stop at standing desks? Practicing standing conferences. Join me at the back of the room. #BoS2011
• Why? What if? Why not? – 3 qns to foster creativity #Bos2011
• Metaphor for business shifts Symphony orchestra with conductor => Jazz where NOT taking risks is frowned upon. #BoS2011
• Creativity is 85% learned behavior. @joshlinkner at #BoS2011.
• Great metaphor for decline in creativity in today’s society by @joshlinkner at #BoS2011 – Lego toys. From fun to following instructions
• I disagree that there’s a creativity crisis. Difficult times foster creativity, hence the huge startup and entrepeneurial movement. #BoS2011
• When your head is up you notice things. @JoshLinkner at #BoS2011.
• Josh Linkner livestreaming at #BoS2011 Encyclopedia Britannica was Google for 219 years before Google bit.ly/eQRD5g

You can find more at Product Principles blog: Unleashing Creativity

Josh Linkner (@JoshLinkner)

Checkout this funny video about asking why. I purposely set the video to start at 6m20s so you can jump directly to the why joke:

Rory Sutherland

• The “IBM at terminal 5″ video presented by Rory Sutherland at #BoS2011: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_F1NVxmsa9I
• “All models are wrong, but some of them are useful.” #bos2011
• R. Sutherland “In most cases we act and then just post-rationalize our decisions” #BoS2011
• Rory Sutherland (wonderful speaker): “If your restaurant has the slight smell of sewage around it–don’t try to improve the food.” #bos2011
• “Absorbing information contradicting our prejudices registers in the same part of the brain where we feel pain” via @rorysutherland #BoS2011
• RT @dharmesh @rorysutherland “people aren’t aware of their own heuristics. They will derive to rationalize they’re maximizers. ” #BoS2011
• Rory Sutherland explains the importance of communicating with the “lizard’s brain” at #BoS2011
• Videoconferencing shd have been positioned differently. instead of poor man’s airplane it she have been “rich man’s telephone call” #Bos2011
• Don’t end up as the cheap inferior substitute for something else. #BoS2011
• Our perception of everything (including value), is “relativistic” (sic) and contextual. #Bos2011 Rory Sutherland
• R. Sutherland “people aren’t aware of their own heuristics.” #BoS2011 they will derive to rationalize they’re maximizers
• Problem with market research: people don’t behave as usual in a market research. #BoS2011
• The default option is “do nothing”. Rory Sutherland at #BoS2011.
• People look for things that satisfices than maximizes. If not, why people go to McDonalds? Rory Sutherland at #BoS2011.
• The here and now really matters to our lizard brains. Rory Sutherland at #BoS2011.
• Praxeology – Austrian term for human behavior and decision-making. @RorySutherland at #BoS2011
• Break tasks into sub tasks to increase probability of completion. #chunking explained by Rory Sutherland at #BoS2011.
• “What’s bad about waiting for a train isn’t waiting. It’s uncertainty.” #BoS2011
• “Creativity is policed by rationality, but rationality goes unpoliced.” Rory Sutherland is a trip. #BoS2011
• If you think creativity is expensive, you should try logic. #BoS2011

You can find more at Product Principles blog: Praxeology – Lessons from a Lost Science

Rory Sutherland (@RorySutherland)

Checkout the IBM’s Wimbledon Lotus T5 campaign presented by Rory at the end of his talk:

Lightning Talks

• Lightning Talks really exceptional. Well done @coreyreid @kjtreier @justingoeres @patrickfoley @tylerrooney #BoS2011
• Congrats @JustinGoeres! “@JocaTorres: Justin Goeres won the Lightning Talk contest at #BoS2011.

Justin Goeres (@JustinGoeres)

Michael McDerment

• “I think you should be developing benefits, not features.” @mikemcderment at #BoS2011.
• Pristine code without customers is a pyrrhic victory. @MikeMcDerment #BoS2011 #prodmgmt
• Name tiers based on customer type? (funny/cute names vs descriptive) Lost a million dollars. Clever names won. @mikemcderment #BoS2011
• Video convert 20% LESS than screenshots as demo tools. @mikemcderment at #BoS2011.
• Slide after slid of exponential product growth curves. Lesson: launch early. #BoS2011
• I guess you meant 2004? RT @dharmesh: Freshbooks has grown to over 3.5 million users since starting in 2044. #BoS2011

You can find more at Product Principles blog: A Litany of Product Management Mistakes at FreshBooks

Michael McDerment (@MikeMcDerment)

Peldi interviews John Nese from Soda Pop Stop

First, you need to watch this video:

• If you quit, you defeat yourself! John Nese #BoS2011
• It’s very easy to make decisions when you are broke. John Nese at #BoS2011.
• John Neese – a man who loves what he does is inspiring at #bos2011 – please support sodapopstop.com
• John Nese is a fantastic example of gentle competition and democratization of decision on products (resisting statu quo) #BoS2011 #hatsoff
• I’m sitting at a software conference listening to John Nese talking about craft sodas sodapopstop.com @bosconference #BoS2011 #awesome
• RT @admarsenal #bos2011 @Balsmiq to John Nese at sodapopstop.com. Question: What kind of metrics do you collect? Answer: What kind of what?
• Peldi: “You’re the CEO”, John Nese: “So, that’s just three letters!” #BoS2011
• We should not be creating jobs. We should be creating wealth. John Nese at #BoS2011.
• +1 RT @AriH: Conversation with the guy from the Soda Pop Shop is putting a smile on my face. #BoS2011
• John Nees thinks people need to pay their dues – no starting at the top, you need to understand it through experience at all levels #BoS2011
• Don’t be afraid to fail cos you are going to do well – John Nese @ SodaPopStop #bos2011
• John Nese summarizes Cincinnatus bit.ly/vXbUSY “You have to do what you have to do” #BoS2011
• I never work. I go there everyday and play! John Nese at #BoS2011
• RT @mitmads Thanks John Nese for your advice “You own your shelf space” #BoS2011
• I love the contagious enthusiasm of this guy when he talks about artisanal soda pops. Great to see people who love life. #bos2011
• RT @MichaelNozbe Fantastic testimonial by John Nese of SodaPopStop. Amazing story #BoS2011 instagr.am/p/RchP8/
• The biz world needs more people like John Nees. #BoS2011

You can find more at Product Principles blog: An Interview with John Nese

Peldi and John Nese