August 2014 Summaries

As a company, building a brand to attract top engineers is crucial for hiring amazing people and iterating towards a scalable business. The traditional "outbound" approach of directly reaching out to candidates can be replaced with an "inbound" strategy that focuses on building relationships through content, talks, and projects. This involves investing time in online communities, creating engaging content, celebrating employees' birthdays, hosting hackathons around topics you're passionate about, giving 30-minute talks, using side-projects, releasing internal tools as open-source projects, and creating public challenges. By consistently investing time and effort into these tactics, companies can increase their visibility, credibility, and appeal to top engineering talent.

Online news consumption has increased significantly, but traditional business models supporting it have struggled. Online advertising rates are low compared to print, and no one has cracked online subscriptions yet. The same issue affects major players like the Huffington Post, Vox Media, and BuzzFeed. Despite their growth, they still face challenges in generating revenue. The focus is often on getting readers to pay for content, but another aspect of the struggles facing the news business is the ugliness of online advertising. Ugly ads can be distracting, poorly designed re-targeting campaigns make the experience worse, and deceptive advertising is a major concern. To address this, publishers need to take a stand and choose high-quality ads that complement their editorial content, rather than detracting from it. This requires innovation in the advertising side of the business model, which has been lacking. Insisting on quality adverts would be a significant step forward in creating a better online reading experience.

A product roadmap is a set of questions that must be answered before adding a new feature to a product. The questions are designed to ensure that the feature aligns with the company's vision, will still matter in 5 years, will benefit everyone, improves or innovates on existing workflows, grows the business, generates meaningful engagement, can be supported and afforded, is designed well, and has a clear scope. These questions help product managers make informed decisions about which features to prioritize and avoid making "slippery slope" mistakes that lead to bloated products. By answering these questions, product teams can ensure that their roadmap is focused on delivering value to customers and driving business growth.

It's essential for developers to listen to user feedback and watch their behavior in the app to spot problems and solve them quickly. This can be achieved by using Intercom, a tool that helps simplify the development process for web projects. TrackDuck, a feedback gathering tool, uses Intercom to connect with its customers and has learned valuable lessons from user research on interface design issues such as overly complicated registration forms, onboarding for new users, and supporting mobile devices. By making changes based on this research, TrackDuck was able to increase customer engagement, improve the user experience, and reduce bounce rates. The key takeaways are to try to conceal rarely used but still necessary features, get rid of unused elements, and use conventional control elements instead of non-standard ones.

Growth hacking is often viewed as a flawed approach to achieving rapid growth, with its emphasis on quick fixes and silver bullets being seen as misleading. Real growth, on the other hand, stems from understanding and solving fundamental problems with one's product. A holistic approach to growth involves pairing metrics with their counter-metrics to avoid isolating individual metrics, and instead focusing on the system as a whole. This approach encourages teams to prioritize solving core problems related to growth, such as creating a user-friendly experience and addressing pain points in the customer journey. Ultimately, growth comes from winning small battles through iterative improvements, rather than relying on quick fixes or silver bullets.

The article highlights the importance of direct communication with users in product management, as few managers engage in such conversations. Many rely solely on analytics, which provides limited insight into user behavior and motivations. In contrast, Intercom's approach involves frequent, informal conversations with users, allowing for richer understanding of their needs and preferences. This enables more informed design and prioritization decisions, ultimately leading to better product outcomes. By leveraging Intercom or similar tools, product managers can break free from relying solely on analytics and gain a deeper understanding of their users' experiences.

I've joined Intercom as Director of Research after a 7.5-year international adventure with Google, where user research is deeply ingrained into the company's DNA, and everyone's a researcher. This approach focuses on designing for jobs that users want to do, rather than features we're not sure if people need or want, which I found appealing. Enterprise apps are an exciting frontier for UX designers and researchers, offering opportunities to transform lives with little attention paid to user experience historically. As a researcher, I'm excited to be in uncharted territory evolving rapidly, researching the future, and figuring out what users really want and need from products. However, leaving a design job at a tech company can lead to an existential crisis, as all work is left behind on servers that can no longer be accessed, making it difficult to pinpoint insights about human behavior with longevity.

Researchers have found that companies with happy employees are more successful on a range of metrics, including productivity, sales, and accuracy. However, providing perks such as free food or massages in the office may not be enough to improve company performance. Instead, it's about creating an environment where staff feel they are contributing to something significant, which leads to fulfillment. This can be achieved through practices such as recognizing employees' work, allowing them to grow professionally and personally, ensuring customer service is everyone's responsibility, and building strong relationships with the team. Companies like Zappos, Moo.com, Valve, Buffer, and Mailchimp have implemented policies that prioritize happiness, such as offering a $2,000 signing bonus if an employee quits after the first week. The key to fostering happiness at work is to focus on meaningful work, rather than expensive benefits.

The author recently joined Intercom, a company that offers a product as well as a great place to work. The author highlights the benefits of working at Intercom, including being treated well with great office amenities, open access to leadership, and opportunities to ship products quickly. They also enjoy the company culture, toolchain, and weekly cadence, which they find engaging and exciting. However, the author notes that there is not much "low hanging fruit" for improvement, as everything is effective and meets high standards. Overall, the author finds Intercom to be a great place to work with talented colleagues and opportunities to learn and grow.