Field Notes from Carbon Five
A blog to help you navigate the world of product management, engineering, and design.
Greenfield Projects: Seven Ways to Set Yourself Up for Success
Greenfield projects have a hidden set of needs — and each one can be an opportunity for growth if handled well! But if handled poorly or if not handled at all, these pitfalls can perpetuate and multiply across the lifetime of the project, taking you further and further away from your treasure and further into the endless cave of despair.
The Future of Digital Healthcare: Interview with Nick Altebrando from AbleTo
The health and wellness industry is being forced to quickly adapt to new norms faster than ever before. Telemedicine and telehealth services are now on the rise. Contactless patient care and remote check-ups are becoming routine. Customer needs and behaviors are changing almost daily. So what does this mean for the future of health and …
New to Mobile App Design? Six Things to Know for Your Next Mobile Project
At the start of any project, one of the first things to consider is what technology solution the product should be built for. A website? A mobile app? Should it be for iPhone or Android…or both? As mobile apps lead the charge in user acquisition, the ability for a designer to solve problems for the …
Story Nanoslicing
It’s the start of a new project for our team, and we’re all excited to get development rolling. The Product Owner’s grand vision sounds great, but how do we get from that vision to the day-to-day detailed stories we’ll need to work on? We’re not about to go off into a cave to build in …
Creating Successful Online Banking Products – Agile Growth Workshop Recap
Banking and financial institutions are rapidly working on digitizing products to stay relevant and better serve customers, but, the truth is, modernizing banking experiences is incredibly difficult. A digital project in the banking world is nothing short of an order of magnitude. The requirements behind developing successful banking products are staggering compared to the average …
A Tale of Two GitHubs: A Practical Guide
Let’s say you have two GitHub accounts: one is a work account that you use for professional projects, and the other is for your top secret hacker projects. This can cause problems like trying to push to a repository with an account that doesn’t have access or having the wrong GitHub author in your commits. …
Designing Our Way Through Uncertain Times – San Francisco Design Week Recap
We’re in a moment of unprecedented change. The COVID-19 pandemic has forced many product designers to face a variety of new professional challenges. We’ve paused co-located work. We’re unable to see users and co-workers in person. We’re required to explore new ways of collaboration, all while navigating the ups and downs of today’s economy. Furthermore, …
Pivoting and User Research During a Pandemic
Creating a consistent feedback loop with users through quantitative and qualitative user research is the foundation of any lean, user-centric product team. Get your Free Guide to User Research Help your team understand your users’ behaviors, needs, and motivations. We often invest the most in user research when the product roadmap is new and unproven. …
It’s Never Been Better to Get Started with Cypress Web Tests
If your project could at all be described as a web application, your UX pipeline would likely benefit from adopting Cypress. Beating out Selenium on speed as well as breadth of testing tools, Cypress provides automated testing of your website’s critical features in a matter of minutes. A testing framework built on top of many …
How to Deploy Elixir Releases with Ansible
In my last post, I described how to generate a platform-specific Elixir release. Now, the only thing left to do is to put it on the world wide web. To follow along with this post, you’ll need a few things: An IP address for a remote machine (preferably running Linux) you want to deploy your …