What Product Managers Can Learn: Zendesk vs. Help Scout

March 24, 2014 By

SlingshotAt Accompa, we strive to provide the best customer service we possibly can. It is one of our key differentiators.

A big part of being able to provide consistently excellent customer service is having the right tools & processes. To this end, our Support team had been using Zendesk for several years.

But they switched recently to Help Scout. When I talked with them about it, I realized this switch had a very interesting lesson for product managers. In this post, I’d like to highlight this lesson. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Product Management, Product Marketing, User Experience Design

Product Management Comic: Who Changed My UI

March 6, 2014 By

Our previous two posts (on why you shouldn’t drastically change your product’s UI) received a lot of responses. So, we thought we’d make a super-awesome comic about it!

Who-Changed-My-UI [Read more…]

Filed Under: Product Management, User Experience Design Tagged With: , ,

Making Drastic Changes to UI: Consumer vs. Business Apps

January 20, 2014 By

In last week’s post, I outlined why drastically changing the user interface (UI) is not a good idea.

We received some good feedback on Twitter about this (paraphrased):

Companies such as Facebook are doing drastic UI changes all the time. If it’s good enough for Facebook, isn’t it good enough for most companies?

This is a great question! In this week’s post, I’d like to share my thoughts on this… [Read more…]

Filed Under: Product Management, User Experience Design Tagged With: , ,

Product Managers: Why Making Drastic Changes to UI is User-Unfriendly

January 13, 2014 By

confused boyThis seems to be a hot trend nowadays at many software companies: Drastically changing the user interface (UI).

In fact, this happened recently to several of the cloud software applications we use internally at our company.

There are many reasons why companies do such major changes: Modernizing the UI, making it prettier, making it more social, making it look more like Facebook/Google+/etc.

While most of these goals are well-intentioned, I believe a lot of the companies are forgetting one important thing… [Read more…]

Filed Under: Product Management, User Experience Design Tagged With: , ,

Why Product Managers Should Avoid Product Complexity

July 13, 2011 By

I recently came across a blog post by The Cranky Product Manager about product-line complexity. It’s an entertaining post. More importantly, it makes good points regarding the pitfalls of complexity. In this post, I will share my thoughts on this.

Product and product line complexity happens when we add too many features or when we add overly complex features. Often this happens over time as a product “matures”. It can also happen because of lack of rigor when writing requirements. When it happens, both your customers and your company suffer.

Here is a short list of… [Read more…]

Filed Under: Product Management, Product Roadmap, User Experience Design Tagged With: , ,
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