Field Notes from Carbon Five
A blog to help you navigate the world of product management, engineering, and design.
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 | …
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. …
QCon Talk: Thinking Methods
Wil Wade, senior developer at Carbon Five, will be speaking at QCon New York on June 25. His talk on thinking in systems focuses on understanding the context of this complexity through the patterns and structures around us; a perfect complement to Agile’s small iterable steps. This interview was originally published on QCon New York.
Adjusting to TypeScript 101
Super Simple Hacks While You’re Figuring Out Your Workflow There are a lot of really great reasons to use TypeScript, but we’ve occasionally encountered some hesitancy from programmers not sure how much of an adjustment it will be. Learning Typescript is not as complicated as say learning Elm and I’d argue it’s more enjoyable to …
Build Trust and Confidence with Frequent Demos
Part of our approach to software development at Carbon Five is to ensure everyone is playing with the same dictionary. The start-of-project questions we all ask are common: What are the success metrics for our stakeholders? Will our customers dislike our product? But words like “success” and “dislike,” “good” and “bad” are all personal words. …
How to Be Data Driven with Product – SF Talk Night Recap
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.