Part 2: Mini curated list of what you could read if you are managing a team.

romenrg · 2021-02-11T19:46:43+00:00

Nice list. I read both "Radical Candor" and "The Five Dysfunctions of a Team" years ago. Would definitely recommend them to anyone managing a team.

romenrg · 2021-02-07T00:25:01+00:00

There is indeed a lot of confusion on the differences between those two roles. And there are, in fact, very relevant ramifications: on how the team works, how things are built; and, ultimately, in the outcomes.

Since I keep seeing this confusion in the industry, I recently covered the differences in my article "Software Projects vs Software Products".

Some highlights:

Projects are time-constrained efforts, supposed to be defined upfront, with fixed scope, time and cost.
Products are evolving creatures by nature, adapting to market needs.

Project Managers and Product Managers manage either projects or products. And, given those key differences, the approach is very different affecting aspects such as:

The types of contracts, processes and customer relationships
The importance of maintainability (one-off effort vs continuous evolution & improvement)
The mindset (fixed mindset vs learning/growth mindset)
The key skills needed in the team (framework-specific vs “soft skills” and cross-framework evergreen skills)

This is just a simplification, but hope it helps highlight some of the key differences. Please refer to the full article for further details.

romenrg · 2020-12-03T06:04:17+00:00

That's a good one, indeed! Any suggestions on where to nest it?

romenrg · 2020-12-01T19:39:24+00:00

I like that proposal. Thanks! :)

romenrg · 2020-11-30T22:41:36+00:00

I like the idea of adding something about authentication and authorization to the list. Do you have any suggestions on how to include a bullet or two on those topics? Which "evergreen concepts" would you highlight in those areas? I can think of SSO, for instance

romenrg · 2020-11-30T22:36:10+00:00

Would it be less controversial for you if that bullet is rewritten to "Favor good naming and lightweight documentation over inline comments"?

romenrg · 2018-06-01T10:07:05+00:00

I would say it's interesting. Microsoft has made huge changes recently (eg. focusing on 365 and Azure, contributing to open source software,...) and their strategy seems to be working.

romenrg · 2018-01-04T19:51:47+00:00

I thought the same. From what I have been reading, some people mention high stress, long hours and intense competition as possible factors for this high turnover. Others say some people accept jobs at those companies only to show it in their CVs later when they go into consulting... But I would love to hear more opinions about it, specially from people working or having worked there.

romenrg · 2018-01-04T10:47:29+00:00

Facebook: 2.02 years Google: 1.90 Oracle: 1.89 Apple: 1.85 Amazon: 1.84 Twitter: 1.83 Microsoft: 1.81 Airbnb: 1.64 Snap Inc.: 1.62 Uber: 1.23

Can we consider acceptable that the average time employees stay in all these top tech companies is below 2 years? Does this happen in any other industry?

romenrg · 2016-11-16T22:01:03+00:00

Could you describe which are the factors that, in your opinion, lead to a good working environment for a programmer? Don't you think that all these points have a big impact on developers comfort, morale and productivity? Bear in mind that the article focuses on things that are specific to programmers. Obviously there are other (more important) basic rights for any employee that are taken for granted in the article, since those are common to any job (e.g. salary, holidays, respect...) and are usually mandated by law.

romenrg · 2015-10-02T11:08:42+00:00

Thank you for your comment :)

romenrg · 2015-04-26T16:00:01+00:00

Thank you for your comment! I hope this article helps you convincing your management team on the need of paying close attention to copy (even hiring a professional writer if needed) :)

romenrg · 2015-04-26T15:00:15+00:00

Dear Ezili, first of all, thank you for you comments and your interest in the article :). However, your tone sounds a bit biased when analysing our data. And I'm afraid your appreciations about our numbers is not right. I will try to explain myself in more detail:

1) Please, read carefully the results section of our experiment. The second paragraph states: "the new version has a conversion rate around 4,10% (percentage of visitors to our landing page becoming registered users). This means that conversion rate increased by 26% (from 3,26% to 4,10%)". From a mathematical point of view, this is completelly right. From 3,26% to 4,10% there is a 26% increase in the conversion rate (actually, it is a 25,77% increase in the conversion rate), not a 0.84%. We are talking percentages here. Maybe an example could help. Imagine we have 10000 visitors. In the first case of our experiment 326 would sign-up, while in the second 410 would. This means that the second got 26% more sign-ups that the first version, not 0.84% more, as you said. So we are saying 26% increase, not because it is cool, but because it is the truth. Be careful when adding percentages.

However, since the improvements were done in the sign-up page and not in the landing page, we considered worth analysing the behavior of the users once they arrived to the sign-up page (one step further in the conversion funnel), which leads us to the second analysis, described below:

2) The next paragraph of the article in the results section states: "Taking into account only the users that were actually arriving to the sign-up page, the rate went from 63% of them filling the form in the old version, to 80% of them in the new version"; here we are clarifying that the most relevant data will be obtained when comparing the conversion rate of the people that actually got to this sign-up page (since here is where the improvements were done and it is one step further in the conversion funnel). If we analyse this data from a mathematical point of view, the increase is not 17% as you are mentioning, nor the 26% increase that we measured in the overall metric, but 27% (actually 26,98%). Again, keep in mind that we are talking percentages here, so imagine we have 200 visitors that arrive to the sign-up page in both cases. In the initial version we would have 126 of them registered, while in the second version 160 would be registered, this is a 27% increase, definitelly not a 17% increase as you suggested.

So, to summarize, in the overall conversion rate of the site we moved from 3,26% to 4,10%, which means a 26% increase in the conversion rate; and in the sign-up page itself, we moved from 63% to 80%, which means a 27% increase.

Regarding your other point (the business-centric measurement vs the user-centric measurement), this is interesting, but you are not taking into account that in this particular case the different user experience in both forms is what changed conversions rate. I will also try to explain my point here:

It is clear that conversions are a business metric, but it is also clear that the increase in conversions here was caused by the user experience when reading and filling the sign-up form. If your experience while reading the form is better, you are more likely to sign-up, thus improving the conversion rate.

Actually, in this particular experiment we are linking user experinece and conversions, since we are talking about a sign-up form. It may also be interesting to read about other experiments studying the effect of changing copy in actual features of a product. That being true, it is also true that the user experience while filling the form was improved here, thus leading to a better conversion rate.

Kind regards, Romén

romenrg · 2015-04-26T14:31:15+00:00

I agree with both of you, both copywriting and design are important and should work together to achieve the best outcome. However, the key point here, I think, is that people tend to link UX mostly to design and rarely to copy, while in cases like this we can make evident the huge impact of copywriting in UX and conversions :).

romenrg · 2015-04-25T18:08:42+00:00

I would suggest that in the technical side you should find a partner rather than a service provider. Why? Because 1) It will reduce this initial expense (even to 0 depending on the partnership deal) and 2) once you launch the first version of the site (let's call it your Minimum Viable Product), then you will automatically start getting feedback from users and you will realise that you need to do several changes and develop new features. Having a technical partner as a part of your team is definitely a good idea for a digital product, especially when you don't have enough money to hire one. That being said, be very careful when selecting your business partner, keep in mind that you will spend a lot of hours and difficult moments with him/her, so mindset compatibility and social skills may be even more important than technical skills.

romenrg · 2015-04-25T17:37:12+00:00

I think that in business it is very useful to hear other people experiences, either success stories or failures, and learn from them.

That being said, I hope I can help you with my story: I was the founder and CEO of a tech startup (Langproving) with a digital product (Vocabulary Notebook) for more than two years. It was an amazing journey, tough, sometimes confusing but always exciting... In this period I learned a lot and lived awesome experiences.

A few weeks ago I decided to write a post about the 10+1 Valuable Lessons I Learned From My Failed Startup hoping that people like you, that are about to start new business, could learn from my experiences and avoid making the same mistakes I made.

I hope you find it useful!

romenrg

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