Field Notes from Carbon Five
A blog to help you navigate the world of product management, engineering, and design.
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.
Optimizing Performance in React 16.8
React Dev Tools comes with a profiler that can help pin down performance problems, and React 16.8 came with some features to make it easier to improve performance of functional components. But to use these tools effectively you need to know what the problem is and how to find the culprit.
Creating a Data-Informed Culture – SF Product Talk Night Recap
“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 | …
Organizing Open Source Projects With Project Boards
If you’ve spent any amount of time in the open source community, you’re probably familiar with GitHub issues. Issues are a fantastic way to organize the discussion around bugs and feature development in a codebase, and it’s common for open source projects to rely on issues to communicate actionable chunks of work to contributors. This …
Shallow Testing Hooks with Enzyme
Hooks significantly simplify your code, and you can use them within an existing React codebase that otherwise uses classes. And it’s easy to dive right into using hooks – until you try to test your fancy new components.
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 …
Carbon Five Partners with Techstars NYC to Mentor Next Generation Entrepreneurs
We’re excited to announce our 2019 partnership with Techstars NYC today. Since 2017, Carbon Five has run workshops and directly mentored dozens of startups and first time entrepreneurs at the Techstars programs in Atlanta, Seattle and NYC.
SFDW Recap: Universal Inclusive and Accessible Product Design
The primary function of design is to make something useful. Unfortunately, many digital products out on the market have been developed without universal accessibility in mind. As designers, we have the unique opportunity — and responsibility — to help shape the next generation of inclusive and accessible technology.
Approaching Gender in Software Products
It is a delight to use software that seems to really ‘get’ you as a person! To achieve this, it requires that the software has been built by people who sought out to understand their users. When software isn’t built with its users in mind, it has the potential to leave its users feeling alienated. …