Product vision – have you forgotten about yours?

Jan 12

The product vision represents the goal of a product and the project that drives it. It explains why the project is being undertaken and what the desired end state is. It is meant to evolve, with the inspect and adapt focus of Agile driving this. It isn’t a wish list of product features, instead it gives a collective vision but with enough flexibility to support creativity within a team whilst combating individual visions.

The vision should touch upon the following areas:

The specific questions depends on the type of product you are building, however the questions listed should give you enough to know where to look. Inputs such as market and user research should feed into the product visioning process, especially for big projects.


Reverse engineering requirements to start your impact map

Jan 10

This is a useful tool that is perfect for product owners and business analysts within agile teams in prioritisation and working on a roadmap. Here is a pretty concise summary taken from the authors website:

An impact map is a visualisation of scope and underlying assumptions, created collaboratively by senior technical and business people. It is a mind-map grown during a discussion facilitated by answering the following four questions:

Why?
The centre of an impact map answers the most important question: Why are we doing this? This is the goal we are trying to achieve.

Who?
The first branch of an impact map provides answers to the following questions: Who can produce the desired effect? Who can obstruct it? Who are the consumers or users of our product? Who will be impacted by it? These are the actors who can influence the outcome.

How?
The second branch level of an impact map sets the actors in the perspective of our business goal. It answers the following questions: How should our actors’ behaviour change? How can they help us to achieve the goal? How can they obstruct or prevent us from succeeding? These are the impacts that we’re trying to create.

What?
Once we have the first three questions answered, we can talk about scope. The third branch level of an impact map answers the following question: What can we do, as an organisation or a delivery team, to support the required impacts? These are the deliverables, software features and organisational activities.
Impact Map

For a business analyst or product owner new to a project sometimes stakeholders start communicating with the what e.g. I want Facebook for our organisation. This is common and nothing new, nor is reverse engineering these requests, however it  can be a good starting point for your impact map.


How to measure return on investment with Scrum

Oct 6

Although somewhat painful, this video focuses on the business value field within Scrum. One obvious benefit is the combining of estimation with business value, however applying planning poker for to discuss business value is a useful exercise in its own right.


What is the best URL structure for SEO?

Aug 31

It is surprising how many places avoid these simple rules. On big website projects it is considered so easy that it is often left to the last minute and then people end up inheriting the default settings of a CMS. E-commerce sites are a slightly different beast altogether, yet all places that are still in business are now offering descriptive URL’s.

Rule 1 – use words rather than numbers.

Rule 2 – keep it lower case, you will be saving yourself a lot of grief down the road.

Rule 3 – use hyphens to separate-out-words for readability reasons. Do not go down the route of the _.

Rule 4 – avoid repetition, although on a big 15,000 pages content led CMS this can be tricky.

Rule 5 – keep it short and sweet, see point above to realise sometimes this just isn’t possible.

Rule 6 – keep the important stuff at the start

Rule 7 – avoid the extra parameters spewed out from dynamic pages

Rule 8 – subdomains eat up your link juice. Even though every stakeholder wants a subdomain, unless it’s for a UAT environment try to avoid it.

Rule 9 – avoid duplicates. You can go down the canonical route, however where possible keep it simple!

It’s best to master the basics yourself to avoid you paying an agency to highlight that you haven’t mastered the basics.


The Web Developer’s SEO Cheat Sheet 2.0 has been release by the Moz

Aug 29

Moz (formerly SEO Moz) are the industry leaders in SEO and making it accessible. Through out the lands organisations spend vast amounts of money on agencies who produce reports on touching the basics, often those covered in Moz’ beginner guide to SEO.

The latest version of the Web Developer’s Cheat Sheet focuses on… you guessed it, developers.


How to master Google Analytics

Apr 5

It’s very simple… watch these videos.


Persuasive Psychology for Interactive Design

Mar 16

Persuasive Psychology for Interactive Design, Brian Cugleman, PhD, PodCamp Toronto 2013, Rogers Communication Centre, Ryerson from Peter Mykusz on Vimeo.


How to turn off scheduled email reports in Google Analytics

May 20

Sadly turning off scheduled email reports in Google Analytics is not where you might think.

If you are considering ending it all now due to  your inbox full of graphs that look like the tail end of an unhappy face, you may want to give it another couple of minutes. As conveniently, it lives in:

Admin > Assets > Scheduled Emails

Google Analytics scheduled emails


Recent changes to Google and why they are bad

Jan 15

Recent Panda related changes to Google have left web managers upset and searchers lost. I have owned www.clearthedancefloor.com for about 4 years. Up until recently it had several years worth of blog content on it – until I decided to do a spring clean and accidentally deleted the lot. It always ranked top, in part because it’s my alias, I own the domain and it has lots of sites pointing to it with the text Clear the Dance Floor. Now this is all starting to change in favour of hits on Google’s own services.

So what are these changes to Google?

Google Panda!

Youtube and Google+ are the worst offenders here. For my “keyword” (although it’s not technically even a keyword) I am loosing out to Youtube videos. To be precise, Cascade – Evacuate the Dance Floor. This song is over two years old but due to the changes to Google it is now deemed to have a higher value than my little old website.

Google+ has created two major changes to Google search. The first being that “brand” pages are ranking highly in a short amount of time for general search. More disturbingly, if anyone in your circles refer to  a subject, they then become the authority on it in Google’s eyes. This level of personalised filtering creates further changes to Google as it now replicates the experience of asking your mate down the pub.

Amazon is an authority in terms of consumer goods. If you search for a book or album, it’s likely to be on Amazon. What would happen if Amazon were to offer hosting where I could get something like awooga.amazon.co.uk? My search rankings would go through the roof as I would get at least some of the prestige from being on that domain. This is what’s happening with all the blogging services and anyone that offers a form of user generated content hosting on their domain. I have particular problems with Podomatic giving me unneccessary competition in terms of search. Yet they are small fry in comparison to popular blogging services, leading many organisations to host their blog on these services for this very reason. Also I should mention, the recent changes to Google add greater emphasis to its own blogging service.