Articles on Process
Working with Guests: Seven Tips for Getting your Company Ready to Leverage External Firepower
Companies have been successfully partnering with consultants since the dawn of time. Think IDEO’s work with Apple to create the mouse or Microsoft’s work with IBM to create MS-DOS. Our nation’s competitive strength comes, in large part, from this openness to collaborate, to learn from each other, to move quicker, and to leverage outside strengths, …
Changes Requested
Each team has their own tolerance for what is and is not a reason to request changes on a PR and block it from being merged. This may be rooted in process, fairness, and expediency, and may be a company or team decision. Whatever your personal philosophy may be, the team as a whole and …
How to Make Your Daily Stand-up Outstanding
Where else can you learn what your coworkers are doing, get your work unblocked, and get energized, all in 10 action-packed minutes?
Map vs Path
It’s a simple idea that can help your digital product take shape; when a user enters your system, do you hand them a map or a path? What’s the difference? Great question, and in this case, the metaphor is pretty literal.
Experiment-Driven Design Process
So you want to grow your product? That’s super awesome. Growth is often a goal that startups rush towards. “We need 100,000 monthly active users yesterday.” – random startup person Growth can mean a lot of things. Maybe you’re trying to grow the number of users, or increase time spent using your product. Whatever it …
How to Facilitate an Effective Retro
Does your product development team do a weekly retrospective? At Carbon Five, we think it’s the most important meeting of the week. Here are some tactical suggestions for facilitating a retro, so your team understands their challenges, celebrates their successes, and comes away with an actionable to-do list.
Pairing Retro
Back at my first job in tech, we paired 95% of the time. Many people were new to pairing. As it was my first job, I was relatively one of the more junior people on the team, which is an especially difficult position to be in for pairing. It was an incredibly intense experience for …
Happy Teams Build Great Products. Here’s How.
Ever feel like your product team is not working to its full potential? Here at Carbon Five, we’ve worked with hundreds of product teams, and we wondered what differentiated strong teams from struggling teams. Our curiosity drove us to create the Product Dartboard, a digital tool that helps teams identify their strengths, challenges, and blind …
Channeled Procrastination
I procrastinate. In high school it was a huge issue for me, because as a high schooler I was still inexperienced at it. I frequently found myself in last-minute mode, moving swiftly from one self-induced crisis to another. College wasn’t any better. The assignments were more spread out, but the due dates tended to be …
Carbon Five Wins Amplitude Emerging Product Leaders Award
We were honored to receive the award for Outstanding Product Agency in Amplitude’s Emerging Product Leaders Awards. This award is for the agency that provides clients the best product development, growth, or strategy support. At Carbon Five, product managers help clients to transform their vision into reality. We also build high-performing teams, mentoring client PMs …