Every once in a while an embarrassing product demo gets captured in the media and we all hold our collective breath as the latest source of escalated hype plummets back down to the ground. A version of this happened a few weeks ago when Tesla attempted to show off the “armor glass” on its new Cybertruck model by slinging a metal ball at the window, leaving CEO Elon Musk blinking in the limelight as CRACK,  glass shattered to the floor.

Well, that was not supposed to happen…

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What’s the most important meeting of your day? For everyone involved in building your product — product managers, developers, designers — it should be the daily stand-up. Where else can you learn what your coworkers are doing, get your work unblocked, and get energized, all in 10 action-packed minutes? 

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“Data is ubiquitous technology. We’re constantly collecting it, manipulating it, and trying to monetize it.” – Jess Starr, Product Manager, Okta

Carbon Five San Francisco hosted Product Talk Night to discuss the different ways data and business intelligence can impact product development and business growth. Our guest speakers included: 

• Jess Starr, Product Manager, Okta | @okta
• Mira Cho, Product Manager, LaunchDarkly | @miracho

Carbon Five San Francisco hosted Product Talk Night to discuss the importance of being data-driven in software development and product management.

Allie O’Connell, Senior Product Manager from Carbon Five Chattanooga, discussed her personal experiences with product analytics and shared insights on how to effectively align product success metrics with overall business goals.

Carbon Five began as a development shop almost nineteen years ago and added the Product Management discipline fourteen years into our journey. We have realized the importance of involving a Product Manager, who is dedicated to gathering requirements and can easily handle the business and technical aspects required to build successful products. There are many reasons why our clients see greater business success and adopt more efficient software development process when they have a dedicated Carbon Five Product Manager on their team. Here are a few of them:

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 spots, and provides teams with actionable steps to continuously improve.

Speaking of continuous improvement — we just released a few updates to the Dartboard. Now you can see a more detailed Dartboard report, facilitate a productive team discussion with our downloadable guide, and create your own follow-up assessments — which is critical to team success! Continue reading …

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 and leaders so that they can continue to build amazing things once we roll off the project. Continue reading …

Product Managers are awesome! They keep goals in mind and priorities at the forefront –
and when designers get to work with them, it’s a real treat. Clearly, there is a lot of overlap in skill sets, but sometimes you’ll find yourself on a team without a dedicated PM. So if you’re a designer in a position where you need to do a little PM’ing – you’ll want to have these skills.

For a primer on what a Product Manager is and does on an Agile team, check out this great resource. The role is a bit tricky – and as a designer, the work can feel uncomfortable at first because PM deliverables can seem much less concrete than design’s. But, if you can master the secret art of Product Management, you will be a much better designer for it. Continue reading …

If I mention the word “agile” to you, a couple of rituals common to agile methodologies probably come to mind. Daily stand-ups and iteration planning probably top the list, and you probably think of other agile concepts like user stories and estimating their complexity with an arbitrary number of points. Continue reading …

We <3 Prioritizing

In modern software processes, prioritization is at the core of what we do.

We prioritize because we don’t like waste. Waste:

• Of human effort, which is disrespectful.
• Of money.
• Of time.

If you’re wasting one of them, you’re probably wasting all of them.

Prioritizing is variously simple, complicated, demanding, exhausting, and strangely emotional.

In this series, we introduce some tools and strategies that can help you successfully navigate prioritization on your product, at every level and every phase of product definition and development. Continue reading …