Rob Grady

[DISCLAIMER: I didn't hear the presentation but I read through the slides and am commenting on what I interpreted to be the salient points with a few of my own]

Peter Merholz recently gave a presentation where he advocated looking beyond designing products and design the entire experience strategy. I absolutely applaud the concept of taking a systemic approach in designing the customer experience but would first advocate teaching the concept of ‘product’ first. Too many people have yet made the leap from project to product. Too often I find that folks don’t recognize that their site is a product nor do they have the tools and processes in place to manage it.

The first step to recovery is recognizing your website is a product, not just a project. And, this is a good thing.

A colleague asked me “What’s the difference between a project and a product and why does it matter?” In short, projects have a fixed beginning and end where products have a lifecycle that can be comprised of many projects. Managing a website as a ‘product’ allows you to view it strategically, not just for the short period of time. When you are living from project to project everything is a priority and often an emergency where you implement partial requests and the result can be half-ass implementations with everybody angry.
As Joel Spoelsky points out, “A schedule is like wood blocks. If you have a bunch of wood blocks, and you can’t fit them into a box, you have two choices: get a bigger box, or remove some blocks.”
Systemic thinking certainly helps in defining strategy as well as a more complete user experience but good process and tools help to execute tactically. A simple process of capturing feature requests, evaluating the requests, prioritizing and assigning them to releases is key to successful execution. Combining that with a published (and visible) roadmap helps the folks manage the day-to-day.

While I certainly agree with Peter that understanding the systemic experience is key to ensuring the complementary implementation of products and services, there is still some fundamentals that many folks haven’t picked up yet.