Things to Learn About Managing & Developing Product

Wired’s Webmonkey recently caught-up with Google’s Todd Jackson.  He is the product manager for Google Mail, and more recently Google Buzz.  The interview is an interesting mix of talk about GMail, Buzz and how his team manages development and maintenance the products. Their are some great take home points to glean from it if you are developing products and services online.

So in summary, here they are:

• “Eat your own dog food” – There’s nothing quite like using the product you develop for your own resources, before forcing others to use it, and to this end the GMail team all use the product to run their operations.
• Learn from the hiccups – There is always something to be learned even from the most negative events, and the GMail team cover every last detail of issues to ensure that periods of downtime do not necessarily occur again.
• Learn quickly – The privacy issues surrounding the roll out of Buzz really kicked up a storm and Google got plenty of egg on its face.  The sweet and the short is that you need to learn and respond quickly to such concerns.
• Respond to the smallest outages – In Google’s case, even if only 0.1% of users are affect that still represents a massive number, made even more acute when the outage is to a mission critical service such as email.  When people rely on your products you shouldn’t wait around if there are issues.
• Communicate with users – When there are problems, or when users are making requests for new features, it is always good to provide channels of communication to ensure they are kept in the loop, this both eases concerns, but also makes them feel valued.
• Redundant sections – To increase the level of redundancy you need to ensure that sections of functionality are not inter-dependent.  Dependencies are bad.  To this end, make sure that sections of your product are resilient to outages.  In google’s case, contacts outages int he past had rendered GMail unnecessarily inoperable.
• Performance & speed are features - More speed = more usage.  When Google sped up Picasa 2 times, the usage levels double.  This is a pretty conclusive driver for improved speed on sites and faster loading times.  Speed is good and with the availability of broadband, ever more critical.  Don’t make users wait around.
• Avoid noise – People loved buzz, but they hated the noise it created in the box. Noise not just in people’s inboxes, but online as a whole is a real problem.  It hinders productivity and can kill the working day.  Helping users cut noise is a good thing.
• Keep public & private separate – When developing products and services, remember that people do like to keep public and private personas.  Keeping these separate is a good thing, and allowing people to keep them separate helps.  Invading them constantly as Facebook does only gives yourself a bad rep.

Many great points and things to be learned by product managers and development teams around the globe.  Some nice extras, but as well as a few things I have covered before in topics such as my review of the Whitney Museum website, as well as the aforementioned institution’s response to negative feedback.

Anyhow, a useful lesson for the forthcoming Easter weekend.  Enjoy!

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