Is Carol good for Yahoo?

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For a long time I used to criticize Carol's performance as a CEO at Yahoo! (and Yahoo! overall), but after sometime I got bored of it. It felt like I was beating a dead horse and in fact I kind of felt good for them and even cheered a little bit when there was something positive. I guess I like underdog stories :).

I saw an article today in Business Insider on how Carol managed to increase display ad revenues by double digit for 4 quarters in a row and I kind of felt good for them. I in fact wrote an email to my Yahoo friends congratulating them.. Weird :).

I still think Carol is not the right person to lead Yahoo or atleast they need to hire a community evangelist to build relationship with bloggers. Yep, I am offering myself :).

How to be a good product manager

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Product Manager is one of the most versatile roles in any organization. Product Managers have to deal with developers, marketing, legal, finance and designers. Its a role which touches every aspect of the product evolution. The most challenging part of this job is the fact that there are no direct reportees to any product manager. They need to carve a niche for themselves through influence rather than authority. What they need to do is to understand and bring together different lines of thoughts from different teams together to create a single successful product.

This becomes quiet challenging in technology companies. Most of the successful product managers in my experience come from strong technical background. This is important because the most difficult part of their job is to deal with developers. While raising a feature request they need to understand a developers point of view. Its also important for them to be able to relate their technical expertise to gain respect and influence among developers and still be able to appreciate and evaluate the creative and the artistic side of the product.

Any company would want their product managers to have the right product instincts and creative sense. Its not simple to develop product instincts over a day. Although a few people have natural instincts in analyzing products and knowing what would work and what will not, for most of them this is developed over a period of time. You need to analyze the market, understand their needs, and see how products should be developed to meet these needs while generating profit for the company.

While preparing for product managers role, take several good technology products and see what makes a product fail or succeed. Read case studies because that helps you in understanding the market. Try to take failed product for the company you are interviewing for and see why it failed, how it can be improved and what changes you would recommend.

So what attributes make a good product manager.. Below are some of my thoughts

• Needs to have a deep business understanding. 
• Should be able to communicate across multiple departments and multiple levels in a company.
• Very analytical and scrupulous while analyzing product features.
• Deep technical understanding.
• Strong customer focus and marketing acumen.

User Interface Design vs. Visual Design

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As a product manager, I have been reading a lot about design issues lately.It took me a long time to comprehend just how important(even more than engineering) design is for success of the product. No matter how great your engineering team is, it needs to be told on what to build.

I often debate what is more important, User Interface Design or Visual Design? Truth be told, both are equally important, but if I had to choose one, I would lean towards usability design. In essence the interaction of the user with your product and how easily he gets to do what he intends to do with the product is supremely important.

You could have an OK visual design, but a great user interface design and have a hit product on your hand. Good example is Google itself. But no matter how great your visual UI design is, if the product is not well designed for user interaction, it will not have a long shelf life.

I am trying to use many of these principles at Faqden Labs and I will continue writing about my experiences and thoughts.

If you are at MIT, 6.831 is an amazing course on User Interface Design( http://courses.csail.mit.edu/6.831/2011/handouts/gr1-analysis/gr1.shtml)