Author: Meredith

It can definitely feel like a multiple personalities situation. Going from an advertisement to the home page to a landing page to a sign-up page to the first use of the product to ongoing use and into the billing form for example, that might feel like six or seven different products. If you are going through one of those experiences and you come across a really high contrast transition – aesthetically, branding wise, interface wise – there’s a good chance there were very different personnel involved in creating those two high-contrast experiences.

A lot of times it’s like you’re actually working with two people as soon as you click the next button and are taken to something that’s completely different.

– Sam Hulick, “Samuel Hulick on building better onboarding“

I’ll speak with companies and they’ll be excited to say, “In Q2 we’re going to launch our onboarding.” It’s always a little something that I wince at, because it sounds like they’re treating it as the launch of a discrete feature you can walk away from. They’re not necessarily looking at it as an evolving element of product-market fit.

In the same way that you wouldn’t launch customer support and then be done with it, you want to have your user onboarding – especially if you’re not looking at it as the definition of some pixels that show up on a screen but rather the process of helping people become successful while adopting your product – to evolve as your market evolves and your product evolves and your customer base evolves. It’s something that ideally involves constant iteration and evolution.

– Sam Hulick, in “Sam Hulick on building better onboarding“

The following is a quick stab at how I work through product development that I drafted in response to some workplace questions. I always have plans to refine, clarify, and polish these types of things, but I never get to it. Publishing now with the hope that making it live incentivizes me to come back and edit. Continue reading “Finding problems” →

Don’t ever take a fence down until you know why it was put up. 

― Robert Frost

First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out—Because I was not a Socialist.

Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out—Because I was not a Trade Unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

– Martin Niemöller

I think I’m much more humble than you would understand.

– Donald Trump to Lesley Stahl in 60 Minutes interview, “The Republican Ticket“

Factions with strict ideological agendas love to pretend as if all policy issues, problems and solutions are simple and self-evident. But this is absurd. In truth, our world is now connected by an incredibly complex web of political, legal and economic relationships; a Gordian knot of competing agendas that can quickly take ‘simple’ solutions to very unhappy places.

– Michael Arnovitz, in Thinking About Hillary — A Follow-up.

– Scott Belsky in Crafting The First Mile Of Product. H/T @jeffgolenski

In an effort to either sound smart and attract investors, or to simply dress up an otherwise boring product, startups that rely too much on jargon end up alienating the users they want to attract.

– Josh Horwitz, in Startups can’t explain what they do because they’re addicted to meaningless jargon