Rian van der Merwe Rian is passionate about designing and building software that people love to use. After spending several years working in Silicon Valley and Cape Town, he is currently Product Manager at Postmark, working from Portland, OR. He also blogs and tweets regularly about user experience and product management.
“Get out of the deliverables business” has become quite a mantra in the lean startup and UX movements. There’s much to love in that sentiment — after all, for every wireframe you make, you’re not shipping code to customers.
But I’m worried that, just like with the concept of a minimum viable product, we’ve taken this sound advice to an extreme that’s actually hurtful to the creation of... Read More
What is a product manager? What do product managers do all day? Most importantly, why do companies need to hire them? Good questions. Well, the first confusion we have to clear up is what we mean by "product."
In the context of software development, a product is the website, application or online service that users interact with. Depending on the size of the company and its products, a... Read More
How do you convince clients to trust you with their valuable and much-loved product? In my experience, the best way to sell work to clients is to apply user-centered design not only to the work we produce, but also to the clients who commission that work.
We have to understand who our clients are, what is important to them and what their goals are. And then we have to deliver work that... Read More
