A nice review of Marketo. I really feel like Marketo is starting to gain momentum in a serious way. Articles like this make me feel all warm inside that I was able to have a positive impact on a company and on the people who use the product. This raises an important thought for me. …
Managing expectations is always hard. Lots of angles, lots of risk. Who is right? Should you track all of your hours? Should you pad your hours? In my experience, people want predictability in an unpredictable world. They want to hear, “This is exactly what we can do at maximum efficiency.” with the follow-up later of…
I’ve been pretty excited about the work I have been doing at Marketo. The marketing automation platform we built has alot of really unique models. The way segmentation works is just beautiful. I am really proud of it. Additionally, the stuff coming out in the next few months is making it even better, faster, stronger.…
I went to a conference today at Yahoo. Nice campus. It was P-CAMP Unconference for Product Managers. I took alot away from it. Some learnings: There is a huge chasm between what serious Agile practitioners proscribe and what most companies who say they are doing agile actually do. One guy said, “You just have to…
Project management is hard work. I feel for anyone who has to do it in the software industry. The problem is simple. To do any kind of prediction in project management, you need to be able to guess how long something will take. Let’s say you want to build a web page. How long will…
I can hardly remember the growing pains from Koko. We had 30 people at the peak. I remember agonizing over organizational charts. I remember thinking about communications lines. I remember how hard it was to get engineering leaders to communicate effectively (at all) to account managers. I remember isolated incidents, but I really don’t remember…
The last two years has been a major education for me in Marketing. First at Intuit, where I felt the entire organization is run by the Marketing Department. I felt that the main goal of marketing was to project (micro)manage incremental changes in high volume processes. In other words, there was a marketing person in…
Marketo is starting to launch into beta, bringing on a few customers at a time. It’s a stressful time for all as there is so much left to do and so many details. I really appreciate how good Katie was at this sort of thing. Keeping track of a million details. She kicks ass. Meanwhile,…
User Experience Architect: “So guys, I am going to go to the user and try the product. Does the basic use case work?” Engineer: “Yes, it works.” Quality Assurance: “Yes, it works.” User after trying it: “No, it doesn’t work.” Engineer: “Must be user error.” Which part of the joke is funny? It doesn’t really…
What are the worst management sins? Here is my short list. Micromanagment. I really hate it when a boss says, “I want you to be responsible for this, but I am going to dictate how you do it.” This is the thing that made me want to leave Intuit. If you delegate then, let the…
The first company I worked as an interaction designer, Remend has officially closed it doors. Here are some lessons learned for dot-coms building a product: A dollar spent in architecture is 10 dollars saved in maintenance. Never hard code anything if you can help it. The lesson is that things change. Details change. You have…
Marketo.com (The comapny I work for as UX Architect) is launching their flagship product and public site this week. Uses a bunch of jQuery, Tabs Plugin, Validation Plugin and Scrolling Promo Effect. Design was by (upon request). HTML Production was done by NetKitchen and myself. Overall, I think it’s a solid looking site. One thing I…
Exciting news: The book publisher has green lit my book. I am starting to write it now. It is about jQuery and how it empowers designers. I will give a better summary after I work on it for a little while. I get an advance and everything. The book will be made of physical paper…
David Foltz over at Turbotax pointed me at this video. I think it’s brilliant. Apparently they are having a content for the best Turbotax rap. Now that is some inspired marketing. They should put this on TV. Their regular commercials are boring and stale. The work I did with Turbotax last year has been tested this season. Although…