Articles on product

Wil Wade

Wil Wade

What Are These $%^&* Chores Doing in My Backlog!

Beyond Just Features and Bugs Projects tend to have three types of “tasks” for developers to do: features, bugs, and chores. Features and bugs are mostly self-explanatory. Features deliver direct customer value. Bugs are features that are not working as intended. These two tasks focus on direct connections to the users. Chores provide indirect customer

Brandy Davis-Balsamo

Brandy Davis-Balsamo

Don’t Drop the Ball on the Demo

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

Lo Wheelwright

Lo Wheelwright

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.

Nancy Samahito

Nancy Samahito

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.

Allie O'Connell

Allie O'Connell

The 2×2 Method

In a discussion about prioritization among product managers at Carbon Five, we were in consensus that a 2×2 is a powerful tool in many prioritization scenarios from assessing risks to the product or business to working out the path forward when faced with competing priorities for a product. As a visualization tool, a 2×2 gets

Alexa Roman

Alexa Roman

Delivering value, Making money

When I begin working on a new product, I’m always looking for ways to optimize the interactions for business and user value. I believe the best way to accomplish that is to get to market as early as possible with the proposed value. By getting to market, I mean everything from talking with customers about

Jeremy Morony

Jeremy Morony

Product Management For Agile Teams: Why Oh Why

At Carbon Five, we build software. We build it using Agile methods. This has worked out well for us and our clients for a long time. We recently added product management as a discipline to our team. There are some common challenges we see at C5 and we’ve been deliberately experimenting with different activities and practices around product development,

Bobby Matson

Bobby Matson

Building a LeapMotion DrumSet in Ruby

I love playing around with the LeapMotion. It is a wonderful little piece of technology, has great documentation, and is way ahead of its time. More specifically, I’m interested in its potential to communicate with MIDI, the protocol which allows software to translate musical data. A quick aside: My background is in music, having played

Lane Halley

Lane Halley

Seven Tips for Effective Customer Conversations

On July 18 I was the guest speaker at Startup UCLA, a summer accelerator program for UCLA entrepreneurs. I presented a new talk “Seven Tips for Effective Customer Conversations” and led the group in some exercises to practice core interview skills. Seven Tips for Effective Customer Conversations from Lane Halley Here’s a summary of the