PT Toronto #12: Latif Nanji (Co-founder and CEO of Roadmunk) shares his talk “Design Communication in Product Management."
Design is a specialized skill, and as a PM, it can be intimidating—especially if it’s not your natural inclination. (Plus, there’s usually a design team to deal with that stuff, right?) But that mentality is a missed opportunity; it’s equally important for PMs to keep design top-of-mind when making decisions. Having spent most of his career as a product manager, Latif strongly believes that design should always be a priority for product managers. In this TKTK talk, Latif shares essential and actionable design principles that can be implemented in any product setting, and breaks down how PMs can put design at the forefront of their product strategy.
Latif Nanji is the co-founder and CEO of Roadmunk, a product roadmapping platform that enables organizations such as The Coca-Cola Company, Citibank, MasterCard and Adobe to visualize and collaborate on strategic plans.
Latif’s entrepreneurial chops extend beyond Roadmunk. He co-founded Pragmatic CEO, a Toronto meetup for tech entrepreneurs, and Pokerspace.com, an online social network for poker players. As an entrepreneur, he has raised over $3 million in venture and angel funding.
Latif’s background spans all things startup: from leadership and sales to product management and design. In his off-time, Latif is an avid reader, rock climber and skier.
28. roadmunk.com | @roadmunkapp
50% of firms focused on designed acquired since 2004,
happened in the last 2 years.“
Data on Design
29. roadmunk.com | @roadmunkapp
89% 6X
42 36%
of companies believes that
customer experience will be
their primary basis for
competition by 2016, versus
36% four years ago.
more likely to buy with a
positive emotional experience.
12x more likely to recommend
the company, and 5x more
likely to forgive a mistake.”
-Terskin Group
design firms have been
acquired since 2004, ~50% of
which have been acquired in
the last year alone
of the top funded startups are
co-founded by designers, up
20% from 2015
30. roadmunk.com | @roadmunkapp
Silicon Valley didn’t think a designer could build and run a company.
They were straight up about it. We weren’t MBA’s, we weren’t two PhD
students from Stanford. Being designers they thought we were people
that worked for people that ran companies.
- Brian Chesky Co-founder of AirBNB
Graduate from Rhode Island School of Design (RISD)
“
36. roadmunk.com | @roadmunkapp
Summary
Tell the user what to think
Minimize cognitive load
3 click mentality
Reversible design
Use verbs with context
White space is your friend
38. roadmunk.com | @roadmunkapp
Discussion
What principles have worked for you?
Where is design broken in your team?
How have you overcome friction about design?
How do I make myself an expert?
How can I avoid design slowing product dev down?
What tools should becoming familiar with?
What can I be doing today to invest in design as a PM
64. roadmunk.com | @roadmunkapp
50% of firms focused on designed acquired since 2004,
happened in the last 2 years.“
Data on Design
65. roadmunk.com | @roadmunkapp
89% 6X
42 36%
of companies believes that
customer experience will be
their primary basis for
competition by 2016, versus
36% four years ago.
more likely to buy with a
positive emotional experience.
12x more likely to recommend
the company, and 5x more
likely to forgive a mistake.”
-Terskin Group
design firms have been
acquired since 2004, ~50% of
which have been acquired in
the last year alone
of the top funded startups are
co-founded by designers, up
20% from 2015
66. roadmunk.com | @roadmunkapp
Silicon Valley didn’t think a designer could build and run a company.
They were straight up about it. We weren’t MBA’s, we weren’t two PhD
students from Stanford. Being designers they thought we were people
that worked for people that ran companies.
- Brian Chesky Co-founder of AirBNB
Graduate from Rhode Island School of Design (RISD)
“
72. roadmunk.com | @roadmunkapp
Summary
Tell the user what to think
Minimize cognitive load
3 click mentality
Reversible design
Use verbs with context
White space is your friend
74. roadmunk.com | @roadmunkapp
Discussion
What principles have worked for you?
Where is design broken in your team?
How have you overcome friction about design?
How do I make myself an expert?
How can I avoid design slowing product dev down?
What tools should becoming familiar with?
What can I be doing today to invest in design as a PM
Notas do Editor
Chat about design and how it can more engrained in our days as product managers.
I suspect people have had varying degrees of success with design in their organizations, my goal today is give you some tactile principles and examples you can leverage for yourself and organizaiton
Quick about me
Majority software startup, product roles (both internal tools, hardware, software)
Product Designer
50%, empathy, language of design (get into gritty examples, I’m more self-taught, so I’ve learned bottoms up, observed then applied), data around design (they say its non-tangible, I’m hoping to disprove that), how you use the first two and some other tips to get executive buy-in.
And how design can be introduced in the early stages of minimum saleable products.
Core foundation for driving product & design.
Therefore we need to instill in our team’s more ambitiously across our culture
If you want to feel their pain, have them yell at you.
1: Support cases – 75 cases over 2 weeks. Half days. Even if this wasn’t man-dated organizationally, anyone on my PM team would have to do this STAT. This also means revisiting them constantly.
2: Prototyping, its easy to get feedback internally, but there is nothing better than having your customer do the work. They will tell you what’s really necessary.
3: Quarterly visits. Get on a plane mandidate
4; My latest fav, is getting them to demo the product to a prospect with sales. You’ll start realize while sales so much.
Result:
Confidence for more senior and experienced people – saying: “GM, Oracle, Coke” – and this is what they all said.
Frequency > priority (frequency inside that feature is what designer’s care about – that next level)
Product management has it’s on jargon like agile, kanban, prioritization on theme.
You’ve probably heard -- don’t make the user think (they’re talking about something else)—
but something that is critical is that if those use cases are important enough you’ll know how to prioritize the design in a single feature.
WHY during beta, we ask ‘what were you thinking” (and does it match what you WANT them to think)
Kayak, a simple and well used interface. Very successful company.
Great UI. UX is actually pretty good,
But here is an opportunity where not UI design can win but UX.
What I’m personally thinking: important to select my preferences, telling me to buy now (top right), drill down
Now look at Google Flights!
Not at well designed, but it says ‘here are the best flights’ (its the priority by hiding: Costs, arline, time and wifi and type.)
They didn’t add the supplementary information (and the filters are tucked away at the top)
Show: if its not primary, its secondary
Secondary, reduce the clutter
UX can sometimes trump UI
Don’t make the user the think! (What we make is given them less to think about, and tell give them an obvious choice).
No focal point on the page
Priority has to be given!
Lastpass (Priority, focal, consistency just became our enemy in this context)
A lot of icons and different colors (many things fighting for attention!)
It doesn’t really explicit give you a place of focus because everything is the same size (so while this may be consistent -- an engineers argument)
Focus on the light area
Determined that cognitive people search for websites not by URL’s by brands, and they need to stand up.
Primary action is to usually dig into an account which when you hover you get icons (this is a perfect example of where use case is FIND, then EDIT/grab password or SHARE.
I wanted to mention them, because everyone in our office got excited because of a new navigation
I had sales/CS coming over saying “did you say with they did, that was unbelievable” - it looks so slick.
NPS
What to think (familiarity, as we see the black as a trend) -- diff than last pass is they used a hover here, because they knew that you’re not switching often enough to see the whole name (more real esate!)
They removed all that secondary information (# of cases, conversation, # of customers etc)
Show: if its not primary, its secondary
Secondary, reduce the clutter
UX can sometimes trump UI
Counter (ERP)
Contstraints / creativity
every option should be less than 3 clicks away (does include sub-workflows)
Hovers / drags count as halves.
This is a great one for scale, bigger the app, more complexity, use cases that are secondary but still important should not be barried
A hover is a half click,
This calms people don’t so they don’t get scared!
People can easily be afraid
A lot of the times its an undo button or clicking back (for simple websites)
What happens when you apply a filter / sort? Move a file to a new location with different permissions? Delete something?
Determine what needs to be reversible is again (recall: Empathy / Use Cases)
Emotional ease
Yes, No, Save, Okay in your app – easy opportunity to reduce cog load.
No ambiguity
This has to do with emotional ease
Clarity in action
Let me get the right content up, tags/social widgets (emotional ease); cognitively, less interference
This is a PURE case of DESIGN disruption, tangibly and economically
Now you’ve hopefully got a few principles you can toute
But now you need to convince executives
First column is 8 years.
What is uniteresting is google / shopify buying, what gets me is that McKinsey, Captial One, Ernest & Young.
That is a strong signal corporate enterprise who create presentations for a living are finally making moves.
6x more likely to buy with a positive experience (this was our early success at Roadmunk)
More forgiving (pretty iphone doesn’t work, you’ll wait)
VC POV, design is critical
10% of fortune companies have put it as an executive priority
Sums it nicely, when designers funded their company selling Obama O’s as cereal to start this, make sure design was part of their culture.
Now you’ve hopefully got a few principles you can toute
Lets make this a priority, get me the resources I need.
Education gap between people who’ve embraced these principles and those who have not
Love, reliability – powerful.
Executive 10% (fortune, design an executive)
Prototype – bring in a higher fidelity
Stay away from MVP
Start with how they enter, they often think about the feature from top to bottom in their mind
Going to go in thie order invest in those two areas, because they will be more forgiving (especially if they’re on the early part of the chasm)
Again, starts with empathy -> turning into use cases
They speed up your time over the chasm?
Why: Early majority need something reliable, better designed products are more referenceable (because people seem to be more forgiving towards them)
This is a great one for scale, bigger the app, more complexity, use cases that are secondary but still important should not be buried
A hover is a half click,
This is a great one for scale, bigger the app, more complexity, use cases that are secondary but still important should not be buried
A hover is a half click,
Quick about me
Majority software startup, product roles (both internal tools, hardware, software)
Product Designer
50%, empathy, language of design (get into gritty examples, I’m more self-taught, so I’ve learned bottoms up, observed then applied), data around design (they say its non-tangible, I’m hoping to disprove that), how you use the first two and some other tips to get executive buy-in.
And how design can be introduced in the early stages of minimum saleable products.
Core foundation for driving product & design.
Therefore we need to instill in our team’s more ambitiously across our culture
If you want to feel their pain, have them yell at you.
1: Support cases – 75 cases over 2 weeks. Half days. Even if this wasn’t man-dated organizationally, anyone on my PM team would have to do this STAT. This also means revisiting them constantly.
2: Prototyping, its easy to get feedback internally, but there is nothing better than having your customer do the work. They will tell you what’s really necessary.
3: Quarterly visits. Get on a plane mandidate
4; My latest fav, is getting them to demo the product to a prospect with sales. You’ll start realize while sales so much.
Result:
Confidence for more senior and experienced people – saying: “GM, Oracle, Coke” – and this is what they all said.
Frequency > priority (frequency inside that feature is what designer’s care about – that next level)
Product management has it’s on jargon like agile, kanban, prioritization on theme.
You’ve probably heard -- don’t make the user think (they’re talking about something else)—
but something that is critical is that if those use cases are important enough you’ll know how to prioritize the design in a single feature.
WHY during beta, we ask ‘what were you thinking” (and does it match what you WANT them to think)
Kayak, a simple and well used interface. Very successful company.
Great UI. UX is actually pretty good,
But here is an opportunity where not UI design can win but UX.
What I’m personally thinking: important to select my preferences, telling me to buy now (top right), drill down
Now look at Google Flights!
Not at well designed, but it says ‘here are the best flights’ (its the priority by hiding: Costs, arline, time and wifi and type.)
They didn’t add the supplementary information (and the filters are tucked away at the top)
Show: if its not primary, its secondary
Secondary, reduce the clutter
UX can sometimes trump UI
Don’t make the user the think! (What we make is given them less to think about, and tell give them an obvious choice).
No focal point on the page
Priority has to be given!
Lastpass (Priority, focal, consistency just became our enemy in this context)
A lot of icons and different colors (many things fighting for attention!)
It doesn’t really explicit give you a place of focus because everything is the same size (so while this may be consistent -- an engineers argument)
Focus on the light area
Determined that cognitive people search for websites not by URL’s by brands, and they need to stand up.
Primary action is to usually dig into an account which when you hover you get icons (this is a perfect example of where use case is FIND, then EDIT/grab password or SHARE.
I wanted to mention them, because everyone in our office got excited because of a new navigation
I had sales/CS coming over saying “did you say with they did, that was unbelievable” - it looks so slick.
NPS
What to think (familiarity, as we see the black as a trend) -- diff than last pass is they used a hover here, because they knew that you’re not switching often enough to see the whole name (more real esate!)
They removed all that secondary information (# of cases, conversation, # of customers etc)
Show: if its not primary, its secondary
Secondary, reduce the clutter
UX can sometimes trump UI
Counter (ERP)
Contstraints / creativity
every option should be less than 3 clicks away (does include sub-workflows)
Hovers / drags count as halves.
This is a great one for scale, bigger the app, more complexity, use cases that are secondary but still important should not be barried
A hover is a half click,
This calms people don’t so they don’t get scared!
People can easily be afraid
A lot of the times its an undo button or clicking back (for simple websites)
What happens when you apply a filter / sort? Move a file to a new location with different permissions? Delete something?
Determine what needs to be reversible is again (recall: Empathy / Use Cases)
Emotional ease
Yes, No, Save, Okay in your app – easy opportunity to reduce cog load.
No ambiguity
This has to do with emotional ease
Clarity in action
Let me get the right content up, tags/social widgets (emotional ease); cognitively, less interference
This is a PURE case of DESIGN disruption, tangibly and economically
Now you’ve hopefully got a few principles you can toute
But now you need to convince executives
First column is 8 years.
What is uniteresting is google / shopify buying, what gets me is that McKinsey, Captial One, Ernest & Young.
That is a strong signal corporate enterprise who create presentations for a living are finally making moves.
6x more likely to buy with a positive experience (this was our early success at Roadmunk)
More forgiving (pretty iphone doesn’t work, you’ll wait)
VC POV, design is critical
10% of fortune companies have put it as an executive priority
Sums it nicely, when designers funded their company selling Obama O’s as cereal to start this, make sure design was part of their culture.
Now you’ve hopefully got a few principles you can toute
Lets make this a priority, get me the resources I need.
Education gap between people who’ve embraced these principles and those who have not
Love, reliability – powerful.
Executive 10% (fortune, design an executive)
Prototype – bring in a higher fidelity
Stay away from MVP
Start with how they enter, they often think about the feature from top to bottom in their mind
Going to go in thie order invest in those two areas, because they will be more forgiving (especially if they’re on the early part of the chasm)
Again, starts with empathy -> turning into use cases
They speed up your time over the chasm?
Why: Early majority need something reliable, better designed products are more referenceable (because people seem to be more forgiving towards them)
This is a great one for scale, bigger the app, more complexity, use cases that are secondary but still important should not be buried
A hover is a half click,
This is a great one for scale, bigger the app, more complexity, use cases that are secondary but still important should not be buried
A hover is a half click,