Kintan's : Program Management

How would you design a kitchen? - cuatro (final)

kintan — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 13:30:00 GMT

Continued from tres...

After spending the first 12 minutes of a design interview for a program/product manager role in learning more about the user, requirements, constraints and scenarios, as per the design template, you could spend the next 30 mintues in actually designing the prodcut/feature/object.

What design you come up with will be directly proportional to your imagination, your readings and your curiosity; but it is important to do the following at the very least:

Approach the design in logical steps
Ask for feedback and design iteratively
Recognize key decision-points during the design and decide

More at the original post on kintya.com: http://www.kintya.com/blog/2008/08/how-would-you-3.html

-Kintan

How would you design a kitchen? - tres

kintan — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 10:33:00 GMT

continued from dos..

Once the requirements are gathered, constraints are taken into account and the mental model of the user is understood, you would have laid a solid foundation to start talking about key user-types and the scenarios in which the product/object is likely to be used the most.

It is important to identify key user-types, commonly known as "personas". Jonathan Grudin and John Pruit has written a detailed explanation of participatory design and personas here. My friend from User Research at Microsoft - Lada gave me a quick primer on various types of personas. In her words:

more at original post on kintya: http://www.kintya.com/blog/2008/08/how-would-you-2.html

-Kintan

How would you design a kitchen? - dos

kintan — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 08:56:00 GMT

Continued from uno..

I'll attempt to describe the notions of "mental model" and "affordances" in this quick post. Our mind constantly picks up pre-conceived notions and expectations about certain things. Mind assumes certain object to have a particular set of characteristics and if it finds out otherwise, it has a tendancy to judge the object as poorly designed.

More at the original post: http://www.kintya.com/blog/2008/08/how-would-you-1.html

-Kintan

How would you design a kitchen? - uno

kintan — Mon, 25 Aug 2008 04:05:00 GMT

I've received a few notes from friends to explain the my template for answering a design question in further detail, so let's use one of the cliche interview questions to walk through my approach of answering design questions in Product/Program manager interviews.

"How would you design a kitchen?" is tantamount to "How would you move Mt. Fuji?". Several PM interviewers are known to have asked this (in fact I was asked this twice - once in my campus interviews long time ago and then during a full-day interview - again several years ago.) As an interviewee, the key is to know that the "question" really does not matter. The approach does and the same approach can be successfully applied to ansewering a technical question like - "How would you design an object model for an instant messaging client?"

Before we start answering the question, let me share as to why I believe this template and more importantly "writing/scribbling/drawing your answer on the whiteboard" works. There are three strategic advantages of using the whiteboard in answering any design questions. The whiteboard helps in:

1. Taking notes and not having to worry about remembering them: As you'll see, the key in answering such questions to the interviewer's satisfaction is to ensure that you ask about every requirement and constraint before starting to answer the question - more the merrier. Writing down all requirements on the whiteboard and having them available during later stage in the interview can be really helpful...

More at original post: http://www.kintya.com/blog/2008/08/how-would-you-d.html

-Kintan

How to become a Program Manager (interview tips, resources, etc.)

kintan — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 08:21:00 GMT

Three years ago, I asked myself and several of my mentors within and outside of Microsoft - "What's the closest thing to entrepreneurship at Microsoft?" The unanimous answer was - "Become a Program Manager on a product that's about to grow/explode!!" I took the leap of faith and it worked. I've enjoyed every bit of it and would recommend it to anyone, who's passionate about technology, entrepreneurship and design.

Several folks have asked me a gamut of questions aboutthe role of a program manager, but the most common threads of conversations have been around "becoming a program manager at Microsoft."

While the role is called Program Manager, it is similar to the role of a product manager at most other companies including Google, Facebook, startups, etc. At Microsoft, Product Manager is a marketing role. Much has been written about the role by my mentors and people who are much more experienced, so I won't delve into it. I recently wrote two posts on the topic on my official/personal blog:

Part 1: http://www.kintya.com/blog/2008/08/how-to-become-a.html

Part 2: http://www.kintya.com/blog/2008/08/how-to-become-1.html

Let's create great things!

-Kintan

Why do you go to a conference?

kintan — Tue, 05 Jun 2007 20:55:00 GMT

In spirit of the ongoing TechEd conference, I thought this would be an interesting post..

I've been to six conferences in the past year and have organized a few mini-conferences here and there in the past. I've been always fascinated to learn about people's motivations for doing any particular activity or making a specific decision.

"Attending a conference" may turn out to be an expensive ordeal, especially if you have to travel to a different city (or a country), take out the time from your daily planned work, pay for transportation, accomodation and other compulsive costs associated to going to a new place, in addition to paying the conference fees. But people still go to conferences.

When I was in school, I got lucky to be part of the school's engineering magazine's staff (which entitled me to a free pass to all major conferences in the country), and I selectively attended many. Currently I go to a conference either to present, to demo my product to learn more about a new industry/technology. But, the common and the highest order bit for me to attend any conference has always been and will always be "to meet new people", with similar or different interests.

Despite being the single-most motivating factor, I haven't been able to optimally meet all the right people I can potentially meet at any such conference, and I'm often frustrated. After every conference, I do a tally of business cards that I have collected (obviously in return of sharing my business card), and I always feel that I could have met more people with specific interests.

Few sites like Confabb (supported by Dave Winer, started by Salim Ismail) and Pubshub are attempting to create some kind of social community around conferences, but it hasn't worked out for me yet (although I've always yearned for something like this for years)..Confabb recently acquired assets of a Seattle startup from Ben Curtis - Conferencemeetup, which claims to have some social features. It will be interesting to see them integrated into confabb.

I did a quick Facebook poll to learn about people's motivations for attending conferences and here are the results:

Question: Why do you go to a conference?

1. To view demos from exhibitors (7%)
2. To meet new people with similar interests. (24%)
3. To listen to speakers/presentations.(34%)
4. To get away from work.(36%)

Today, with prolific blogging about all events worth attending and the generous conference organizers, who share content (even videos, see examples at www.ted.com and www.allthingsd.com) of the conference for free (in return of advertising), it becomes hard to justify paying the fees for listening to speakers/presentations. There is an interesting debate on value of such services on Techcrunch.

Why do/would you go to a conference?

-Kintan

originally posted at www.kintya.com

Technorati tags: confabb , conference , Ben Curtis , conferencemeetup , entrepreneur , Dave Winer

facebook polls: speed vs statistical significance

kintan — Tue, 05 Jun 2007 05:40:00 GMT

As a bootstrapping entrepreneur, if you have $100, you would first give them to your lawyer, then to your accountant, and then lastly to your market researcher. Facebook launched polls recently, which enables the users to quickly and cheaply($5 basic insertion fee plus $0.10 per answer) set up a poll (a question with multiple possible answers) and target it to the Facebook community (based on some very high level criteria - age, sex, profile keyword, etc.)

I am impressed by the simple design of workflow of poll-creation, implementation and analysis. But, the most exciting part was the speed. Facebook claims that they can get answers as quick as within 30 minutes (if you pay $1 per answer), but even when I chose the cheapest option ($0.10), I got the answers fairly quickly (I set up the poll, went to sleep and the answers were ready by the time I woke up -- and I didn't oversleep!!)

I set up a sample poll with a simple question?

Why do you go to a conference?

I was happy with the answers that I received, but I am not confident about the statistical significance of the data. If I were to make a critical product design decision, could I rely blindly on results of Facebook polls? I don't know. Probably not, at least now.

Overall, I do believe that Facebook will become a major cultural and economic force, leading up to a huge value creation for its founders and investors. If you've tried their polls, please share your experience. My friend Robert Scoble had doubts about facebook's appeal earlier in December 2006, but he's expressed positive notes about Facebook recently. Facebook is rapidly creating a tightly bound network/community and it is intelligently leveraging its vibrant community for lucrative applications, besides advertising.

Michael Arrington from Techcrunch describes Facebook polls as a marketer's paradise and I agree. I wonder if Microsoft Program Managers would start leveraging such quick polls to get additional datapoints.

get on Facebook.

-Kintan

originally posted at: http://www.kintya.com/blog/2007/06/facebook_polls_.html

Technorati tags: facebook , facebook polls , market research , entrepreneur , marketing

design of everyday things

kintan — Sun, 03 Jun 2007 17:21:00 GMT

If you are going to read only one book on design during your lifetime, my recommendation will be to read - The Design of Everyday Things by Donald Norman. This book has been instrumental in shaping some of my own approaches to design and I'm sure it has influenced several thousands of designers across the world. I would highly recommend this book for anyone applying for a Program Manager position at Microsoft.

Below is a list of my notes (both interpretations and highlighted from the book). I may have taken some sentences directly from the book, to ensure that the message is communicated optimally. The copyright remains with the author - Donald Norman.

Here's what I found important and interesting from the book:

The appearance of the device must provide the critical clues required for its proper operation - knowledge has to be both in the head and in the world.
What makes design a highly challenging and rewarding discipline is that it grapples with the need to accommodate apparently conflicting requirements. All great designs have an appropriate balance and harmony of aesthetic beauty, reliability and safety, usability, cost and functionality.
Art and beauty play essential roles in our lives. Technology changes rapidly, people change slowly.
Humans do not always err, but they do when the things they use are badly conceived and designed.
The psychology of everyday things demonstrate the importance of visibility, appropriate clues and feedback of one's actions.
Affordance refers to the perceived and actual properties of the thing, primarily those fundamental properties that determine just how the thing could possibly be used. For instance, a round object is assumed to have an affordance of a ball.

Something that happens right after an action appears to be caused by that action.

Two fundamental principles of designing for people are : 1. provide a good conceptual model and 2. make things visible.
Good designs have good mappings between the controls and the things controlled by them. For instance, the "next" button on a screen/wizard should be either on the right or bottom of the screen and not on the top left.
Errors should be easy to detect, they should have minimal consequences, and, if possible, their effects should be reversible. Errors can sometimes be prevented by using forcing functions.
Designers can use three methods to prevent users get into an erroneous state:

1. Intelocks - by forcing operations to occur in a particular order
2. Lockin - by keeping an operation active, preventing someone from prematurely stopping it
3. Lockout - by preventing someone from entering an erroneous state
Ask the following seven design questions while designing - How easily can one:
1. Determine the function of the device?
2. Tell what actions are possible?
3. Determine mapping from intention to physical movement?
4. Perform the action?
5. Tell if system is in desired state?
6. Determine mapping from system state to interpretation?
7. Tell what state the system is in?

These principles have worked for me and I'm certain that they'll work for you.

Let's design something extraordinary.

Kintan

PS: I'm blogging regularly at www.kintya.com This was originally blogged at http://www.kintya.com/blog/2007/06/design_of_every.html

Technorati tags: design of everyday things , Donald Norman , program manager , design

design as a competitive advantage

kintan — Wed, 15 Feb 2006 11:18:00 GMT

Design has essentially become one of the key competitive advantages of the killer apps of Web 2.0. Why has design become so important - all of a sudden? Or was it always important? Scott Berkun once said that the best user interface is "no" user interface. The thinking here is that the user should not realize that he/she is working in accordance with some user interface. The user interface should not make its presence felt. This was resonated in an interesting observation made by my architect friend Gianpaolo, while watching the movie - The Usual Suspects. In the movie, Kevin Spacey says, "the greatest trick the devil achieved was to make people believe he didn't exist." I believe that great UI and application designers make people believe that the user interface is not there.

A majority of people including me, read most blogs through some flavor of a RSS aggregator - reader. But there is one blog that I prefer to read on a web site on the browser. EmilyChang's blog (see OneNote screen clipping on the side)on strategic design is designed in a unbelievably appealing and surprisingly simple style. The choice of colors, the size of fonts, and the placement of items on the blog are visually attractive. The are subtle differences in the structure of the contents of the blog (For example, to expand a post, rather than clicking on the title of the post, you have to click on the actual text of the post, which is not intuitive, but very easily discoverable!!) She conducts interviews with innovative founders of various successful Web 2.0 companies. In a recent post, she has compiled the list of "design philosophies" of each of those companies.

It is apparent from these interviews that the creators of killer Web 2.0 applications consider design as their competitive advantage. While some companies had a quantifiable design philosophy (all functions should be accessible with one click.), several focused on the importance of iterative feedback from the users(release early, release often, listen, learn, incorporate). Interestingly, few designers stressed on "instant gratification." Emily's list is pretty comprehensive and helps derive the main design trends of Web 2.0, which she depicts as

simple
fast
intuitive
social
minimal
choice
useful
fun

Can these design trends be applied to enterprise software? Can we make ERP systems, simple, social, minimal(you wish!), and fun?

Let's create the extra-ordinary!

Kintan

via Kintya

Technorati tags: design , emily chang , web 2.0

writing "WOW" emails

kintan — Mon, 06 Feb 2006 11:40:00 GMT

Emails have become the official means of recorded conversations in corporations. At Microsoft, a typical program manager writes an average of 30-40 emails every day and reads many more. It would certainly help improve productivity, if the emails are crafted in an optimally sound way. Guy Kawasaki has done a great job in delineating the craft of email writing in a recent post.

Let's change the world!
Kintan

via Kintya

ipod and the design of things to come

kintan — Tue, 03 Jan 2006 06:23:00 GMT

I religiously admire Apple for its proven ability to consistently come up with terrific designs. Desin is the sole reason as to why Apple has been able to enjoy the price premiums over competitors. Other companies that I admire for great designs include IDEO, Microsoft, Herman Miller, Oakley and Porsche. Ipod has been a phenomenon for the last couple of years and I have been intrigued by the factors that made it a phenomenon.

The MP3 technology had been invented in the mid-eighties and flash-memory based MP3 players had been around since the mid-nineties. But, MP3 players were regarded as geeks' fantasy toy until the IPOD was introduced.

What is so different about the Ipod and how was Apple able to do it?

I've discussed this question with several designers, entrepreneurs and entrepreneurs and I'll share my findings here. As always the designers at Apple and Steve Jobs studied the social, economic and technical factors that dominated the entertainment industry in the late nineties. Let's look at some of the social, economic and technical factors.

Social: The popularity and proliferation of the internet had made people accustomed with the limitless choices available for any activity. Suddenly, people had the ability to selectively read any newspaper in the world. Selection, choice and personalization were the key trends.

Economic: Peer-to-peer file sharing applications like Napster and later Kazaa were extremely popular (and they worked). Essentially these services allowed people to download media (songs, movies, etc.) for free. There were huge protests from the recording industry (both the recording companies and artists). Everyone from college students to investment bankers were getting arrested for downloading pirated media. Napster was eventually shut down (and is now re-opened with a legal subcription model). A legal way to download media was indispensable at that time.

Technical: While the MP3 compression technologies had enabled people to have thousands of songs, the flash memory-based MP3 players of that age restricted the users from leveraging the technology. The MP3 players were small enough to be carried in pockets, but the ability to have only a limited number of songs with them was a big restriction.

Apple identified these factors and iteratively designed one of the most effective music delivery system. With the contemporary white looks and an intuitive minimalistic design, ipod quickly became "the" thing. Apple had studied all the social, economic and technical factors and predicted "How they were going to change?" over the course of next two years. For some factors, Apple itself brought the change (iTunes). The ipod overcame the size restriction by empowering the users to store 1000 songs in their pocket for the first time in the history. With iTunes, Apple created a legal and seamless delivery system, where the users can easily download songs to their ipods. Most of the people I've talked with love the ability to seamlessly transfer music from itunes to ipod. Today Apple and ipod have more than 70% of market share and the ipod family has grown to include video ipods.

What can we designers learn from the ipod?

Study the social, economic and technical factors that govern your target market and predict how they are going to change in the next two to three years. Find the gaps between the predicted factors and the current factors and fill those gaps. The best designs have always simply filled those gaps.

Several books have been written on the topic. Some of the books that I've enjoyed reading include:

The Art of Innovation by Tom Kelley
Simply better by Patrick Barwise and Sean meehan
The Design of things to come by Vogel, Cagan and Boatwright
Ten faces of innovation by Tom Kelley
About Face 2.0 by Cooper and Reimann

Some of the upcoming trends and related products that I believe will make it big in the next year include smartphones, personalized clothing and collaborative filtering. Please share your comments on design, trends and ipod. (originally posted at Kintya.com)

Program Management interviews at Microsoft

kintan — Sun, 25 Dec 2005 14:21:00 GMT

A bunch of my friends and readers have asked me about "the" interviews for a program management position at Microsoft. Having being involved in several program management interviews, I'll try to write about the preparation that I would recommend for anyone applying for a PM position at Microsoft.

1. Do you really want to become a PM?
Before asking this question to yourself, find out the details about the role of a program manager. Then write down the reasons as to why do you want to become a program manager. If there is interest, I can write about this topic in detail in future posts.

2. Design, design, design:
A majority of program management positions at Microsoft require you to design the "features" of the product. Please don't confuse the word "design" with graphic or visual design. Read it as product design or software design to be more specific.

I would recommend reading the following books to start with:

1. Design of everyday things by Donald Norman
2. About Face 2.0 by Alan Cooper and Robert Reimann
3. The inmates are running the asylum by Alan Cooper
4. Don't make me think! by Steve Krug
5. The Art of Innovation by Tom Kelly

I can write more on this topic, if there is interest.

3. Project Management:
The main goal of a program manager is to ship the right product at the right time. This involves all aspects of project management, including dealing with ambiguity, developers, testers, marketers, customers and managers. Be prepared to come up with specific real-life scenarios when you've demonstrated strong project management abilities. That is the only way to demonstrate your skills in this area.

Happy holidays!!
communicate...

Kintan

Conducting effective Threat Modeling meetings

kintan — Thu, 22 Dec 2005 23:55:00 GMT

How to conduct threat modeling meetings effectively?

Prepare:

Make sure that the participants have had enough context about the feature/component.
Have about 3 reviewers who are NOT part of the component/feature team, to get an outsider’s perspective.
Have an education session at least 3 days prior to the threat modeling meeting, to ensure that the reviewers who are not part of the feature team can be educated about the feature.

During the meeting:

The driver should act as a scribe to capture comments.
It is advisable to have a shorthand notation to take quick notes.

About the threat model itself:

Although there is a lot of background information, it is good to focus on the entrypoints and assets.
Ensure that every asset has at least one threat associated with it.
Ensure that every entry point is associated to a threat.
In the background information section, focus on external security notes and internal security notes.
Typically the Internal security notes section is notoriously empty in a lot of threat models. To fill it, probe the feature team with questions like: “Have you found yourself getting the same security questions repetitively?”

Asset (Definition): An asset is anything that an attacker can perceive to have some value and tries to attack it. For most of the features, consider Execution Context as an asset. Don’t sweat too much on Entry points.

Mitigation: During the threat modeling meeting or after?
It is good to spend a limited amount of time in discussing the mitigation, right after identifying the threat.

Do not confuse threats with vulnerabilities. All threats must be described as: The attacker does the following…Draw a clear distinction among the threats that are mitigated, not mitigated or partially mitigated.

Do not list imaginary threats in the threat models. An example of an imaginary threat would be: If there is a bug in the code, then following is our course of action.

Buffer overrun: It can never be completely mitigated.

Always describe the mitigations planned by the test and dev team, for buffer overruns.

These points are based on my conversations with Al Comeau, Michael Howard, Maithili Dandige, RobAnn Mateja and Subu Subramanian.

Creating products that people love

kintan — Thu, 22 Dec 2005 10:14:00 GMT

In the design section, I will share my design philosophy, learnings and tips. I recently saw a recording of a presentation with the title: Creating products that people love. I use some of these principles to design the products in Real-Time Collaboration. Here are my notes from the presentation:

Products we love should fit most of these criteria:

Products we love reflect us positively.
Products we love empower us.
Products we love contribute to meaningful memories.
Products we love create a visceral sense of pleasure by feeding our senses.
Products we love are a matter of choice (Never force the user).
Products we love create a sense of fun.

Tips:

Keep a track of the products that you love yourself.
Know your market inside out.
Send cameras to target market and ask them to take pictures (showing their use of the product).
Keep your own visual vocabulary (screen clippings, pictures, other images, etc.)

While designing and evangelizing, put a personality to your products

For example, Microsoft Office products had a unique personality, when they were initially launched.

Word was a single 30 year old lady, that drove a Taurus and loved to help others.
Excel was a brash and successful lawyer.
PowerPoint was a young graduate (a creative guy with a white shirt and an undone tie!!)

Products should communicate a clear message.

Marry products that people love with a very strong business model. There have been several startups with super cool products that people loved, that did not succeed due to lack of a profound business model.

KMorrill wrote on the same topic, some time ago.

One of the first blogs on Program Management

kintan — Mon, 19 Dec 2005 20:47:00 GMT

Chris Pratley (a Group Program Manager in Office) had described his personal experiences about the role of program management, almost two years ago on his blog. This post has helped a lot of new (and wannabe) program managers(including me!) at Microsoft, to decide about their career. Thought that it would go hand in hand with Steven Sinofsky's post...