Product Managment

Yahoo!’s problem is that it never knew what it was

by justingibbs on August 17, 2010

In the post, What Happened to Yahoo, legendary programmer Paul Graham dives into how Yahoo! fell from grace. I was at Yahoo! around the same time as Paul, we even worked on a few projects together and I agree with much of his post. The availability of easy money allowed Yahoo! to truck along without [...]

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Is no spec process better than an overly detailed one?

by justingibbs on June 16, 2009

The other day I was meeting with a company and was a bit shocked when they openly admitted to not writing specs. And before you ask, yes the company is rather successful and been in business for years – all without formalized a spec process. As a product manager I find it difficult to image, [...]

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WordPress and Matt’s passion for design

by justingibbs on May 31, 2009

I’ve always been impressed with WordPress. It’s fast, clean, and open source. A lot of my enjoyment comes from it having just what I need and nothing I don’t. But a lot of that enjoyment also comes from the fact that it’s a beautiful tool. Everyone knows that Auttomatic and WordPress are focused on open [...]

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Design decisions using travel and arrival mode

by justingibbs on May 7, 2009

As product managers we’re always asking why people visit our company’s site. We can ascertain this in many ways – user feedback, analytics, surveys, etc. Avinash Kaushik explains that you can go a long way with just three questions. Of course all of this is goals based and not only can it return some insightful [...]

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Best books for lean product managers

by justingibbs on April 28, 2009

Being an avid reader of non-fiction I find that I tend to go through phases. Right now I’m racing through books that have anything to do with Disney Imagineering. Prior to that it was lean product development. Having just finished Four Steps to the Epiphany I thought I’d compile a list of what I found [...]

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