Life is moving faster for many of us, more demands are being placed on our time and attention, both personally (being a father, husband, friend, family) and professionally, (work, networking, learning) I’ve found myself paying more attention to ways to be more productive and to work on the right things at the right times.

Working as part of remote teams (does anyone work exclusively with people that are right next to them anymore?) these coordination and communication sessions are invaluable. We rely on each other more and more to handle complex tasks before, after or simultaneously with our efforts… how do we keep things moving slowly with a minimum of delays and inefficiencies?

A simple timer can kickstart tough work

I wanted to share a few resources I’ve found valuable.

Here’s a great article called “Doing the board” which is really close to the quick “daily scrums” I’ve been doing with some of the teams I work with. For those of you who know about Agile development, our scrums are a less technical version but still answer the basic 3 questions: “What did you do yesterday? What are you doing today? and What roadblocks do you have?” Here are some resources to explore these concepts: Mountain Goat Software, Scrum Basics website, a blog post on some additional best practices in holding the meeting.

A good article on Lifehacker, (one of my favorite daily reads) “I procrastinate because I care“, which explains a lot about perfectionists and their productivity… the concept is pretty clear in the title. The article also talks about the “Pomodoro Technique“, a timer-based way to kickstart large, complex or intimidating efforts. The concept is “I can do anything for 15 min or so” and you set a simple timer to start, knowing that an end is coming… you won’t be swamped forever in the complexity. A little more info here.

How do you and your team track personal and team tasks?

Via a quick post on the SuperWebAnalyist Blog from Ed Wu of the Web Analytics Association and Dell’s Consumer Online team come a great post on “numbers that lie” or at least don’t really offer any insights about online behavior.

In one of my new favorite blogs to read, analytics pro Avinash Kaushik shows how Averages, Percentages, Ratios and Compound Metrics (aka Calculated Metrics) don’t show much real insight, and can often be misleading.

As an example to combat the “fluff” of averages, you should identify your most important / interesting segments for your business and report those along with the overall averages. Distributions of tiers of activity also help wade through the numbers and get to real actionable insights.

See the rest of his very good recommendations here, including how to make use of the “Better Google Analytics” Firefox plugin that offers several advantages and updates Google Analytics.

Another great post is on his recommendations on establishing strong KPI’s or Key Performance Indicators for your website. (Not sure why there are 6 recommendations but 8 rules, but hey, who’s counting? What’s a KPI?

Measures that help you understand how you are doing against your objectives.

Although to some it’s obvious, unlike several of my past clients (sorry), you do need to set objectives for your web marketing efforts (some thing a little more specific and measurable than “have a cool website” and “make more money”) and then set measures to track your efforts in attaining them. How else do you prioritize your efforts?

Some of his recommendations are pretty standard, but his explanation of WHY they are good is worth a read. I’ve overviewed them here:

1. Conversion Rate, (pretty obvious) measures towards objectives
2. Average Order Value cross and up-sell measures (Yes, with segmentation and distributions!)
3. Days & Visits To “Purchase”, especially with relationship customers and products that are considered purchases
4. Visitor Loyalty & Visitor Recency, aiding in segmenting & targeting most valuable customers
5. Task Completion Rate, goes hand in making sites usable and fine tuning good content
6. Share of Search to better measure against competitors. Compete.com seems like an interesting tool to help

Follow Avinash on Twitter.

Are you actively managing your site’s analytics? What are you missing in your optimization of your sites efficacy and customer experience? Are you really capturing your share of market?

Just finished reading an interesting post from Douglas Bowman of StopDesign, he’s just left his role as Visual Design Lead of Google. He talks about his experiences of pure quantitative research overtaking visual design principles and creativity at Google. He confirms that:

“Yes, it’s true that a team at Google couldn’t decide between two blues, so they’re testing 41 shades between each blue to see which one performs better. “

He goes on to say that he understands why Google needs to approach decisions this way, but he also feels like they don’t balance the quantitative with other research or best practices in design. (There is an interesting related article on Marissa Mayer’s role in this on the New York Times site.)

I have three quick thoughts on this:
1. Although as a designer, Douglas has trouble with this extreme strategy, knowing who Google is and who their products target, i.e. everyone, I think it’s a pretty good idea to approach their user experience this way for them. BUT, testing 41 shades of a color doesn’t seem like the best use of anyone’s time.
2. Any idealistic, enthusiastic professional in their field has specialty backgrounds and expertise that make them good at their job… but it also can bring them further away from the perspective of their users. This is part of the ongoing conflict between “usability” professionals and “visual design” professionals. One wants “pure” usability with nothing extraneous to get in the way, the other wants style, panache, and a “wow” factor for the work. Who’s right? Both of them… that’s the fun part, the negotiation, part of the constraints and collaboration on teams that drive successful products.

3. More companies could learn from Google’s approach. Quantitative analysis doesn’t have to be 100% of the decision, but it should approach half of the input for many decisions. In my experience, most companies suffer from the opposite problem. Too few companies do any testing of designs for their website, their messaging or even their products. The only testing many have done is some vaporous “focus groups” recruited and paid for poorly thought out opinions. Too often the designs are based on what executives or the production team “think,” or “like” as the priority input over real users and actual data.

Any company with a significant part of their business on the web should have these efforts as core to their website or application marketing strategy and internal or external staffing: (No, this is not a complete list.

• Web analytics that are set up correctly and constantly monitored
• A/B testing or even multivariate testing, especially for ecommerce and applications
• Social media monitoring, WOM, user comments, Twitter, Facebook, Blogs
• Use of paid search or media buys to test messaging, (yes, marketing/branding messages can be tested effectively via PPC!), ads and landing pages
• Frequent direct contact with customers and users (yes, this is qualitative too!)

What areas of input and research is your company missing in gathering for your marketing, website or application? What can you jump into *today* to move more in that direction?

The second ever ProductCamp started in Austin at 8am this morning. I had never been to any BarCamp-style “un-conference” before, but I must say I really enjoyed it. It was active, informative and agile, in the sense that we the participants, voted on the sessions at the beginning of the day, we were expected to actively discuss, interupt and add our own value to the proceedings. Open sessions were guided and moderated, some a bit more successfully than others, but all that I attended had value to me as a marketer and professional. They had a Twitter account open and many of us Twittered about it, and posted photos to Flickr in this group. My Twitter here at CharlieNB.

I enjoyed a session on general Agile/Scrum and roles, another on Agile best practices and horror stories with Ross Hobbie. I was interested in others managing content and/or marketing via Scrum processes, but no others were. After the session though, I spoke with several people that had great product marketing teams and development teams, but no user-centered design or UX resources. They were interested in how UX could help with their prototyping and products, several good discussions!

The Global Product Mgmt session was a little too open and unfocused, but to be fair, it’s a REALLY broad and complex topic, it could have been broken into 3-4 different sessions.

I jumped into UX 101 with Ben Phenix late, but it was well recieved by all, clear, simple concepts that were easy to apply. I’ve been through and given a lot of UX presos, and this one was good.

Pat Scherer gave more of a presentation rather than a discussion, but her detailed points on Priorities and Roadmaps was very complete and clearly well proven in the real world.

Next up was a Product Management Tools roundtable… very well moderated by (I think) Cindy Phillips. We covered a lot, from requirements gathering, to basic excel templates, into productivity tools. Here are the ones I captured: Blackblot, xcelsius, devonthink, xmind, “montecarlo analysis” excel plug-ins, Mindmap, MindMeister, Google Trends, search volume, surveys with Survey Monkey and QuestionPro, customer wiki’s and communities, Salesforce QA (? not sure of the name), Markettools, Passenger, PHPBB communities, BasecampHQ, fogbugs (tracks accuracy of estimates), Jira, JOTT, Rally, Webex, Breeze, Camtasia, Snagit, Yugma, Netmeeting, Lifehacker. Whew!!!

My last session was with Charlie Ray on navigating political minefields. Charlie was very entertaining, and also shared many good insights… management styles aside, there was a lot of good info to bring to daily life. My favorite quote is “Nip the G.M.O.O.T” meaning stop CEO’s from saying “Get Me One Of Those” when seeing features and adding them willy-nilly to products. Charlie also won the award for best session at the end of the day. Good job Charlie!!!

Throughout several of the sessions, the differences between startups with scarce time, personnel and financial resources versus larger, mature companies with sometimes too many resources and plenty of budget were apparent. Some of us discussed the idea of a StartupCamp, either a seperate BarCamp, or as a track at the next Product or BarCamp. We’ll be gathering thoughts and discuss further, so contact me if you are interested.

I really want to thank the organizers of the event, Paul Young and John Milburn, they did a great job.

Sponsors took care of the space, coffee/snacks, lunch, tshirts and mugs, thanks!

I certainly recommend the BarCamp concept and certainly will participate in the next Product or any other Camp. (Full world wide list here.)

Hope to see you at the next BarCamp event!

[tag]ProductCamp, BarCamp, UX, product management, product marketing, Austin, agile, global products, StartupCamp[/tag]

I’m looking forward to attending/participating in the upcoming ProductCamp Austin on 14 June, organized by Paul Young.

ProductCamp is a collaborative unconference about Product Marketing and Management

In the spirit of BarCamp, ProductCamp is a collaborative, user organized unconference, focused on Product Marketing and Management topics. At ProductCamp there are no “attendees,” since everyone participates in some manner: presenting, leading a roundtable discussion, helping with logistics, securing sponsorship, setting up wifi, or volunteering. ProductCamp is a great opportunity for you to learn from, teach to, and network with professionals involved in the Product Management, Marketing, and Development process from the Austin area!

In my new (contract) role, I’m responsible for both general marketing and our product as well… a social and video sharing community website. It’s very early stage, built on top of a purchased platform with basic/generic functionality. The big task we are facing is how to develop the product, the design and the content… preparing to attract the community.

I’ve had less than a year experience with Agile – Scrum processes, but I’m pretty excited about it’s potential, especially with user experience/ UX and site development/ management. I’ll go into an overview of how we are managing this site/product/community via our own version of Agile/ Scrum on this blog soon. But for now, I hope to learn a lot and fine tune our process/ priorities at ProductCamp Austin.

By the way, Paul also has a great blog I’ve just discovered, Product Beautiful. It’s focused on (what else?) product management and marketing.
I’ll be there, hope to see you!

[tag]ProductCampAustin, product management, agile, scrum UX, Barcamp [/tag]