Have you heard of Facebook 360 photos? Wondering how your business can use them? Facebook 360 photos let you create an immersive 360-degree experience for fans on your Facebook page. In this article, you’ll discover six ways to use Facebook 360 photos for business. What Are Facebook 360 Photos? Unlike normal photos, Facebook 360 photos let [...]
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- Your Guide to the Social Media Jungle
As a product manager by trade, I’ve had countless conversations with UX designers about what product management is really about. Online, there’s plenty of chatter that seeks to justify the existence of product managers to curious UX-kinfolk.
Today, I want to shift the conversation to something more interesting – celebrating shared objectives and considering product management as a viable career path for UX professionals.
As is typical of product managers, I fell into the role by accident. I had to look up what a product manager even did before my first interview for the role back in 2001.
‘Product manager’ is one of those roles that draws in people from a myriad of trades and industries. Regardless of qualifications and experience, excellent product managers share common traits like customer empathy, curiosity, great communication, good listening and a philosophy of continuous improvement.
Even though you can’t pursue a degree in product management at university, you’ll find us in the thick of the action in many product-centric companies today – leading from the front.
You know what UX is, so I won’t preach to the choir a first principles definition of user experience or user experience design. But, for the sake of alignment, in my mind, the fundamental mission of UX is to present to your user the fastest path to satisfaction.
If I boil down the essence of why a business needs product management, it’s to answer these two questions:
It sounds basic, but around half of all new product development efforts fail because these two questions are not adequately answered.
On a broader level, organisations invest in product management as a business strategy to achieve sustained competitive advantage. These organisations typically have growth objectives – to grow profit or market share, for example.
Sustained growth requires sustained competitive advantage. To achieve this, a business needs to invest in differentiated, hard to copy, value creation – that plays to the strengths of the business – over a sustained period. Product management is the practice of delivering this sustained competitive advantage.
For product-led companies, great product managers are a business necessity. They’re the people who ensure scarce company resources are allocated to making the right products and helping the business grow.
There’s a decent overlap between the role of a product manager and a UX designer – both roles seek to understand customer problems and empathise with the user. So it’s no surprise that on occasion UX designers and product managers clash.
Product managers and UX designers both play a role owning the customer problem.
Power struggles arise over who makes the call on delivering value to the customer – especially in recently expanded teams with the introduction of one of the roles (UX or product management). The roles are not the same, though, nor should they be trying to do the same thing. When this happens, someone isn’t playing to their position on the field.
You could say a product manager is a Jack of all trades and a master of none. Interestingly, the number one challenge of any product manager is competing priorities. There’s always more to do than available hours in a day. Product managers can’t try to be experts at everything. Whether that’s trying to optimise a remarketing program in Adwords, or spending too much time computing price elasticity for their high volume product. Trying to out-design a UX specialist on the interface for a new cloud offering means they miss the big picture.
Any product manager who doesn’t embrace UX expertise needs their head read. UX shares the customer research load, guides best practice in product design and shepherds that through development. UX designers are critical to a product manager’s success.
Recent research shows that product management is now the highest paid role in Silicon Valley. A product manager in Sydney can earn, on average, $100,000 p.a. and a Senior Product Manager $145,000 according to job website Glassdoor.
The most rewarding aspect of product management is having a diverse and profound impact on the success of a business and its customers. You get to direct the energy of a talented group of people towards helping customers. It’s quite a buzz when done well.
In many organisations, product management is a high profile role. You get great exposure to senior leadership and it opens up more diverse career advancements in senior management. Of course, it’s not without its challenges. Occasionally it can feel like an overwhelming, thankless, 24-7 arse-kicking. But, if your organisation has strong leadership, and you can balance your attention between the finer details and the big picture, it’s a rewarding way to develop your career.
If you want to learn more about product management and hear from an inspirational speaker lineup, Leading the Product could be the conference for you. This 1-day event brings together more than 500 product professionals on 20 October in Melbourne, and 25 October in Sydney. UX Mastery is a proud sponsor of this year’s event.
Leading the Product has an impressive lineup of UX speakers, including:
UX Mastery has a free pass to Leading the Product to giveaway! To enter, you just need to tell us: “What’s one thing you wish you could get Product Managers to understand?” Entries close on Friday 7 October so be quick! Enter here.
The post What UX designers need to know about product management appeared first on UX Mastery.
Mike Riethmuller has done it again. His ability to dive deep into a current technology and find new creative ways to achive things is astounding. Make time for this. (madebymike.com.au)
Early bird discount ends today 
Jeff Fowler writes an in-depth account of his experience learning React. It’s written with a lot curiosity, which is super refreshing. Great read. (blog.jfo.click)
Have you ever just dumped your polyfills in with your main scripts? I know I’m guilty. In this post Philip Walton shares his approach to help us ship better code. (philipwalton.com)
Through this case study on redesigning the Building Social website, Marko Dugonjić shares some simple yet often overlooked front-end techniques that defer the use of JavaScript as much as possible, while providing some neat JavaScript enhancements too. (smashingmagazine.com)
Matt Seccafien explains how his team embraced the constraints of CSS Modules and shares a few things he wished he had known before refactoring a large codebase to use CSS Modules. (medium.com)
Aravind Ramanathan shares the technical details about the process of updating the core widgets.js file that millions of people rely on. Great insight into the inner workings of their deployment process. (blog.twitter.com)
This awesome looking tool was opened up to the public this week. Figma is the first interface design tool with real-time collaboration keeping everyone on the same page. Oh and it is built with React, which is pretty cool. (figma.com)
Ire Aderinokun looks at some of the major sites (WordPress, Medium, Ghost and Github) that have adopted the new system fonts stack and how they differ. She also shares some nice pointers for those that are keen to go down the system font path. (bitsofco.de)
A new book from A Book Apart written by Mat Marquis that offers a detailed and approachable tour around JavaScript. (abookapart.com)
The well known WordPress plugin developer Pippin Williamson went on a little tweet rant last week, which fuelled this epic post that looks at the major page builders currently in market. (pippinsplugins.com)
Are you passionate about design and web technologies? Are you constantly striving to stay current with the latest industry best practices? Are you able to switch easily between visual design and front-end development? Do you think deeply about your CSS class names? If so, please reach out. (wildbit.com)
Slack is hiring a Senior Communication Designer to help design the future of Slack’s digital brand presence. Designers serve a vital role here: from the craft and finish of every detail on our high-traffic public-facing websites, to creating the experience vision for landing pages for national ad campaigns. (slack.com)
The post Web Design Weekly #254 appeared first on Web Design Weekly.
This tutorial explains the benefits of using an automated schema migration tool such as FlywayDB, as well as the limitations of the Hibernate schema generation utility (hbm2ddl). The article assumes almost no knowledge of Hibernate, and it can be read by both junior and senior developers alike.
In a relational database, data is stored in table rows, and relations are expressed through a foreign key. While the database is responsible for storing and retrieving data, the business logic is usually embedded in the application layer. When using an object-oriented programming language, the object graph becomes the most natural representation of data. The discrepancy between graph-like structures and database tuples is typically known as the object-relational impedance mismatch.
The object-relational mapping (ORM) pattern aims to address this problem, and Hibernate ORM is undoubtedly one of the most successful implementations of this pattern. However, Hibernate is more than an ORM framework that conforms to the Java Persistence API specification.
Hibernate is a data access framework implementing many patterns that have been popularized by Martin Fowler in his book Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture. For instance, aside from the typical object-relational mapping feature, Hibernate also implements the following data access patterns:
While the ORM tool allows us to translate the object graph state changes into SQL statements, we are still managing two distinct data models. On one side, the database schema defines the rules for how data is ought to be stored, whereas on the application side, the domain model is an object-graph mirror of the underlying database schema.
So, who is in charge of driving the model representation? Is it the database or the domain model?
Continue reading %Schema Migration with Hibernate and FlywayDB%
