RAFFIAPALM

Resources for product teams from industry experts.

Functionality, design, and technology are inherently intertwined. In the old waterfall model, the market drove the functionality (aka the requirements), which drove the design, which drove the implementation. Today, we know that the technology drives (and enables) the functionality as much as the other way around. We know that technology drives (and enables) design. We know that design drives (and enables) functionality.

You don’t have to look further than your own phone to see numerous examples of both. The point is that all three of these are completely intertwined. This is the single biggest reason we push so hard for the product manager, product designer, and tech lead to sit physically adjacent to each other.

— INSPIRED: How to Create Tech Products Customers Love (Silicon Valley Product Group) by Marty Cagan

Source: Amazon Kindle

Related Stories and Excerpts:

  1. Mental Model #1: Address “Important”; Ignore “Urgent.” These are entirely separate things that we often fuse together. Important is what truly matters, even if the payoff or deadline is not so immediate. Urgent only refers to the speed of response that is desired. You can easily use an Eisenhower Matrix to clarify your priorities and ignore urgent tasks, unless they so happen to also be important. Mental Model #2: Visualize All the Dominoes. We are a shortsighted species. We think only one step ahead in terms of consequences, and then we typically only limit it to our own consequences. […]
  2. Good teams have product, design, and engineering sit side by side, and they embrace the give and take between the functionality, the user experience, and the enabling technology. Good teams get their inspiration and product ideas from their vision and objectives, from observing customers’ struggle, from analyzing the data customers generate from using their product, and from constantly seeking to apply new technology to solve real problems. Good teams understand who each of their key stakeholders are, they understand the constraints that these stakeholders operate in, and they are committed to inventing solutions that work not just for users […]
  3. One of the keys to breaking into a new market is to establish a strong word-of-mouth reputation among buyers. Numerous studies have shown that in the high-tech buying process, word of mouth is the number-one source of information that buyers reference, both at the beginning of the sales cycle, to establish their “long lists,” and at the end, when they are paring down their short ones. Now, for word of mouth to develop in any particular marketplace, there must be a critical mass of informed individuals who meet from time to time and, in exchanging views, reinforce the product’s […]
  4. The “what” of service design may seem like the job of managers, not designers. But the “how” is different. And further, the approaches, methods, and skills required to do it (the “how”) in fact turn the “what” into something different. The work that managers see as analytical and abstracted becomes generative and materialized. The disconnected stuff of organizational life becomes connected and a shared matter of concern. Organizations are revealed as dynamically constituted in the multiple interactions between people and things and other people, in many places, over time. — Service Design: From Insight to Implementation by Andy Polaine, […]
  5. Visionaries take a greater interest in technology than in their industry. Visionaries are defining the future. You meet them at technology conferences and other futurist forums where people gather to forecast trends and seek out new market opportunities. They are easy to strike up a conversation with, and they understand and appreciate what high-tech companies and high-tech products are trying to do. They want to talk ideas with bright people. They are bored with the mundane details of their own industries. They like to talk and think high tech. — Crossing the Chasm, 3rd Edition: Marketing and Selling Disruptive […]

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