This morning I was in a rush to get the train to work and I also wanted to grab breakfast on the way. So I stopped by a local cafe next to the train station. I ordered a bagel with cream cheese. I thought that it came with cream cheese already and they could put it in a bag and give it to me. Instead I had to wait a few mins for it to be heated and then I discovered I had to spread it myself. I kept checking the clock, but still made the train and ate my bagel too while waiting.
Today was an unusual day. Its a Wednesday, hump day so its half way through the week. At about 1030am, I decided to get a covfefe coffee from Dana Street Roasters, my local cafe in Mountain View. When I got home, I decided to do my laundry. Then made dinner, cleaned the stove and vacuumed my room. The reason I say its unusual is that I haven’t done these things in a long time.
Home made dinner – a combination of random stuff
I realised on Monday night (Day 88), I hadn’t been home in the evening in a while. When I spoke to my room mate, French, he mentioned that I hadn’t cooked in a while. I haven’t been home in the evening in about 3 weeks. Whilst tonight, I could have gone out to join the Aussies in Tech meetup or met up with a friend, I decided I was going to have a quiet evening on Day 90. Its been a combination of co-workers from Australia being in town, meeting new people, visitors from out of town, and doing stuff.
I want to write about a topic that I’ve mentioned in my podcast and in various discussions with other product folks.
I recently did a presentation on the Confluence Cloud mobile app to my fellow product manager’s in the Confluence team. I was giving a presentation about a decision we were making to get feedback. I got to the meeting early about 5 minutes before everyone else. So to give them some context, I drew a timeline. It was a straight line to represent the whole year, with horizontal marks for each month from January to December.
Then I did a review of the past year, writing on each month the release we had shipped in 1- 2 words. It looked like this:
* January – launch
* Feb – search
* March – notifications tab
And so on for each month.
In total, we have shipped 12 releases during the year from major feature releases to point releases with bug fixes.
I chat with Jordan Sim, Group Product Manager at BigCommerce. He focuses on enabling and implementing strategic business development partnerships with the BigCommerce product. Jordan oversees two areas – order fulfilment and shipping logistics.
He’s launched and managed product integrations with Intuit Quickbooks, Alibaba, and led the transition of MagentoGo & eBay Prostore clients to BigCommerce.
I chat to Anna Lee Anda, UX research at Zendesk for S2E8 of This Mobile Life. This podcast is about mobile user experience research. Anna is based in Singapore. She’s worked in UX & product. Anna shares some great insights into SaaS user research from Zendesk. Previously, she worked at Seek, one of Asia-Pacific’s largest recruitment marketplace. Anna has also worked on ANZ’s Go Money app which has millions of downloads.
I chat to my good friend Anthony Cole. Anthony is a product developer with a background in wordpress and frontend development. Originally hailing from Silicon Valley and via NZ, Anthony works in Melbourne for startup Lexer.io. He shares insights on why you should use a pattern library.
A pattern library is a set of components that you can reuse for common design problems. It also defines the interactions of components. By using a pattern library, it allows teams to focus on the bigger customer problems. Ultimately, it helps you ship products faster.
Here are the highlights of my discussion with Jenny Hsu, Business Analyst at GPY&R, about wireframes. A wireframe for apps is like the blueprint to building a house. In this interview, Jenny walks us through the process of starting a product, then creating its blueprint through wireframing.
This interview also showed a good comparison of working with the waterfall model versus working with the Agile method as mentioned in our last podcast, episode 9*.
Jenny and I worked at the same time for Asia Pacific Digital Group (formerly called Next Digital). She has been instrumental in the development of many products, including OfficeMax, Jenny Craig and White Lady Funerals.
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We have a new podcast episode for This Mobile Life! Season 1 Episode 10 (S1E10) is on “Create a blueprint with wireframes”. Its an in-depth chat on why we use wireframes and write requirements. We also discuss how we do it. I interview my good friend Jenny Hsu, business analyst from GPY&R.
