“This isn’t just a single role – the entire marketing team is being disrupted. Rather than a VP of Marketing with a bunch of non-technical marketers reporting to them, instead growth hackers are engineers leading teams of engineers. The process of integrating and optimizing your product to a big platform requires a blurring of lines between marketing, product, and engineering, so that they work together to make the product market itself. Projects like email deliverability, page-load times, and Facebook sign-in are no longer technical or design decisions – instead they are offensive weapons to win in the market.”

From Andrew Chen’s Growth Hacker is the new VP Marketing

Advocacy is a repeat theme in UX writing, but is borderline irrelevant when working for a product- and design-centric organization. Similarly, when you have internal stakeholders who understand the design process, you don’t need to worry about constantly building consensus. Deliverables like lengthy specs, comprehensive wireframes, and pixel-perfect PSDs are all artifacts from a time when risk-averse clients needed to enforce progress and limit variability. Inside of a product company, these efforts waste time, create politics, and mask responsibility.

This quote from The Rise of Product Design by David Cole nicely sums up why I love working on product teams. As someone who loves building & shipping, spending time trying to convince clients why design is in their own their best interest before even getting to the actual work feels like a colossal waste of time & energy.

It’s a lot easier to build momentum when the whole team has already bought into the importance of design and you can simply charge ahead with solving problems.

(Kudos to all the designers out there fighting the good fight of educating clients about the value of design!)

Part of my job at Granify involves product management and ensuring we ship an awesome product that customers love. I’ve been building products for a while, but the whole management aspect is still quite new to me. I’ve learned a ton by working alongside our CEO Jeff Lawrence, a seasoned product manager, but there are still many aspects of the job I find challenging — in particular, multitasking.

Serial vs. Parallel Work

My background is in production work: writing code and designing interfaces. In these roles you generally have a steady stream of serial tasks for which you’re responsible. You’re subject to interruptions (like any job) but it’s often possible to put your headphones on for a couple hours to focus on a single problem until it’s solved. And following that you move onto the next task on your list.

As a product manager, however, it’s virtually impossible to single-task. I’m bombarded with incoming information, and every bit is important & time-sensitive. Some examples:

• Listening to feedback from the sales team
• Hearing feature requests from the team or customers
• Reports from Q/A and customers about bugs
• Dealing with technical fires
• Reviewing &  accepting new work submitted by developers/designers
• Assigning new work to team members who finish tasks sooner than expected (always a nice problem to have!)
• Answering questions new employees might have about process, PM software, etc.

At any given moment I’m likely dealing with at least two of the above scenarios simultaneously. The nature of this role requires multiple tasks to be tackled in parallel — to do otherwise would slow down the rest of the team.

Product managers are the hub of the company

In essence, the Product Manager’s function is to synthesize the endless stream of information coming from different sources (customers, engineers, analytics, marketing, sales, executives) and turn it into something tangible that can be shipped to customers. Accepting & organizing these disparate data points as they arrive is critical. If you ignore (or defer for too long) any one aspect it begins to lag behind and slows down the whole company.

You can try to structure how you triage incoming information — for example, we’ve started having short Friday meetings to review customer feedback from that week — but often you need to listen when a co-worker is in the zone, excitedly telling you about their new idea. Those important nuances get lost when you ask them to distill their idea into a Google Doc to be read later when more convenient.

There may be downsides to multitasking, but with Product Management it’s an unavoidable part of the job. And it’s a skill I’m constantly working to improve.

I’d love to hear about your experiences – what advice do you have for someone trying to get better at multitasking?

Now that Google Reader is shutting down, I’m looking for alternative ways to read my RSS feeds. And if you’re one of those people who must have their RSS feeds pried from their cold-dead hands, I imagine you’re looking for alternatives too. Here’s a short list of some of the services that could fit the bill.

Pre-emptive disclaimer: No, I don’t consider flipping through links on Twitter/Facebook a replacement to RSS subscriptions. I know that works for lots of people, but not me. I like a more curated reading experience, and ensuring I don’t miss articles from specific blogs & authors. To me, reading whatever is on Twitter is like mindlessly watching whatever happens to be on TV or listening to whatever the radio is playing.

And with that rant out of the way, let’s find a new home for our RSS feeds!

Fever

Fever is a self-hosted PHP app you install on your own server (like WordPress). The awesome thing about Fever is that it scans all the links in your feed and makes the “hottest” rise to the top. The more feeds you subscribe to, the better Fever works. It’s got an iPhone-friendly layout too. And since it’s built by Shaun Inman you know it’ll be beautifully designed. Likely worth the reasonable $30 price tag.

NetNewsWire

NetNewsWire (NNW) is an RSS reader with versions for Mac, iPad and iPhone. Although most people use it to sync with Google Reader, it does also support standalone mode. The downside to this, of course, is that your subscriptions won’t be synced across devices. I used NNW years ago, before Reeder came out, and was overall pretty happy with it.

NewsBlur

NewsBlur is a hosted service for managing your RSS feeds. It’s got a web-based reader and clients for iPhone, iPad and Android. They have a free version of the service with some limitations (like number of feeds, stories, and “Feeding poor Shiloh”) and a premium version for $1/month (seriously). Looks like a pretty good service, though their servers are currently slammed with traffic.

The Old Reader

I haven’t tried The Old Reader but they claim to offer an experience “just like the old google reader, only better.” They’re currently in beta, but you can import your feeds and give it a try. It’s a hosted service and appears to be free, though there is no explicit mention of this.

FeedHQ

FeedHQ is a feed reader “built with readability and mobility in mind.” They offer some unique features, including syntax highlighting (for readers of programming blogs) and keyboard shortcuts. FeedHQ will be a paid service, but appears to be free during the beta testing period.

…Reeder?

I absolutely love Reeder. To me, it’s the perfect reading experience. I use it on my Mac, iPad and iPhone. The downside is that it currently requires a Google Reader account — it does no subscription management of it’s own. But it hides this fact ever so elegantly. In fact one friend claimed he used Reeder instead of Google Reader, and replied “well I’ll be damned” when I pointed out it only works when hooked into Google Reader.

This is a huge opportunity, in my opinion, for the Reeder team to transparently ditch syncing through Google Reader and instead switch their suite of apps to sync through iCloud. Or perhaps they could build their own sync service (and sprinkle a web UI on top). I would certainly pay for that, and I’m willing to bet others would, too.

They’ve nailed the most important part: the reading experience. And for this reason they have a head start on anyone else.

I’m not totally sure what I’ll end up using, but like Marco suggests I think we’ll see a lot of innovation and new players in RSS over the coming months. I know many people say RSS is “dead,” but I think there will always be a large enough group of RSS users to support a healthy ecosystem of products in this geeky niche.

What will you be using to read your RSS subscriptions?

(Even Hitler is upset to learn Google Reader is shutting down).

To say 2012 was an exciting year for me would be an understatement. Despite feeling perpetually busy, I hadn’t felt like I’d accomplished much until I sat down and started making a list. Posting a Yearly Review seems to be the trend among those in the web/tech industry, so I figured I’d post mine as well. Even though we’re already a few days into 2013, here are some of my highlights for 2012!

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