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Product Management for UX People

User experience designers and researchers often struggle with the idea of product management—as a peer discipline, a job title, a future career, or even what the title entails. But surprisingly, there is no roadmap for designers who want to understand what it takes to manage products and services. At least, not until now.

Enter Christian Crumlish with his book, Product Management for UX People. An experienced product manager himself, Crumlish delves into the intersections and gaps between design and product management—for designers who work with product managers and designers who want to become product managers. You’ll find all the answers to your questions about this intriguing career.

Who Should Read This Book

UX professionals who are curious about product management and want to know which of their skills might apply to the products role if they are considering a career change. Any UX person who works on a product team and wants to figure out how best to work in that context. A UX practitioner or manager who is considering a transition to product management and needs guidance about the responsibilities and career possibilities.

Takeaways

  • Define what product management means for your business and what product managers actually do.
  • Apply your skills as a UX practitioner to the product manager role.
  • Learn how product managers work with engineers to keep teams aligned and take responsibility for business outcomes.
  • Figure out how product managers, UX practitioners, and teams can work together effectively.
  • Pinpoint how to say “no” to stakeholders and make difficult choices between competing priorities
  • Read compelling stories about the author’s experiences, as well as other people’s stories in “From the Trenches” sidebars.
  • Be sure to read the “44 Signs You Are Becoming a ‘Real’ Product Manager.”
  • Figure out how best to work with data analytics for growth, engagement, and retention in your business.
  • Learn how to test hypotheses with real-world experiments.
  • Discuss profit and loss models, revenue models, and how to break even.
  • Look for “Key Insights” at the end of each chapter, which highlight the important points to remember.

Design for Learning

Online learning can be so dull. Enter Design for Learning. Whether you’re a novice or experienced online instructional designer, you’ll learn how to apply industry best practices, how-to examples, powerful templates, and compelling activities to craft compelling instructional content for text, audio, and video. Read, enjoy, and create online learning experiences that will never be called “dull”!

Takeaways

  • Writing compelling content and instructional text
  • Designing interesting text and visuals
  • Planning and producing videos
  • Recording sound and voice-overs
  • Creating and facilitating live website presentations
  • Designing surveys for class feedback
  • Rating whether your presentation was successful

Who This Book Is For

  • Teachers, learning development professionals, and anyone tasked with designing an online course or a one-off workshop
  • Content creators, instructional designers, user experience designers, and others who care about the experience of online learning

Whether you’re a novice or experienced online instructional designer, this book will show you how to apply industry best practices, and provide how-to examples, powerful templates, and activities to craft compelling instructional content—whether text, audio, or video.

Best of all—your course will never be called dull again.

Storytelling for User Experience

We all use stories to communicate, explore, persuade, and inspire. In user experience, stories help us to understand our users, learn about their goals, explain our research, and demonstrate our design ideas. In this book, Quesenbery and Brooks teach you how to craft and tell your own unique stories to improve your designs.

Build Better Products

It’s easier than ever to build a new product. But developing a great product that people actually want to buy and use is another story. Build Better Products is a hands-on, step-by-step guide that helps teams incorporate strategy, empathy, design, and analytics into their development process. You’ll learn to develop products and features that improve your business’s bottom line while dramatically improving customer experience.

Prototyping

Prototyping is a great way to communicate the intent of a design both clearly and effectively. Prototypes help you to flesh out design ideas, test assumptions, and gather real-time feedback from users.

With this book, Todd Zaki Warfel shows how prototypes are more than just a design tool by demonstrating how they can help you market a product, gain internal buy-in, and test feasibility with your development team.

The Leader’s Journey

No one gives you a manual for how to be a great leader. Enter Donna Lichaw. Her step-by-step book draws on psychology, neuroscience, design thinking, and years of coaching experience to help you activate your superpowers and achieve your mission. You’ll transform yourself, your team, and your business into a league of superheroes poised for success. Follow her blueprint to:

  • Figure out your core story of who you are as a leader.
  • Identify your superpowers and use them for good.
  • Map your mission as a leader in order to achieve your goals and make an impact.
  • Develop your strategic roadmap by thinking like a storyteller.
  • Learn how to handle tough decisions and move forward with purpose.
  • Transform your fears from impediments to assets.
  • Engage your superfriends, allies, and even your supervillains so that you can all be super together.
  • Reflect back on your journey and build energy for your next mission.

Available from Audible and other major audiobook sellers.

Interaction Design Bundle

What this bundle includes:

  • Design That Scales: Creating a Sustainable Design System Practice: Learn how to create, manage, and sustain a successful design system.
  • The User Experience Team of One (2nd edition): Whether you want to cross over into user experience or you’re a seasoned practitioner trying to drag your organization forward, this book gives you tools and insight for doing more with less.
  • The User’s Journey: See how a “story first” approach can transform your product, feature, landing page, flow, campaign, content, or product strategy.
  • Designing Interface Animation: A crash course in motion design theory and practice for web designers, UX professionals, and front-end developers alike.
  • Design Beyond Devices: Learn the techniques you’ll need to build fluid, adaptive experiences for multiple inputs, multiple outputs, and multiple devices.
  • Engaged: Practical tips for design professionals to apply the psychology of engagement to their work.
  • A Web for Everyone: Practical advice and examples of how to create sites that everyone can use.
  • Make It So: Interaction Design Lessons from Science Fiction
  • The Mobile Frontier: Explore the possibilities that mobile technology presents.
  • Playful Design: User experience practitioners can realize enormous benefit by exploiting the solutions that games have found to the real problems of design.
  • Prototyping: Learn how prototypes are more than just a design tool by demonstrating how they can help you market a product, gain internal buy-in, and test feasibility with your development team.
  • Designing Agentive Technology: A conceptual grounding and practical advice to unlock agentive technology’s massive potential.
  • Figure It Out: Shows us how to transform information into better presentations, better meetings, better software, and better decisions.
  • Web Form Design: Leading designers show you everything you need to know about designing effective and engaging Web forms.
  • Writing Is Designing: Shows you how to give your users clarity, test your words, and collaborate with your team.
  • See What I Mean: Learn how to create comics about your products and processes without an illustrator—just like Google, eBay, and Adobe do.

Why We Fail

Just as pilots and doctors improve by studying crash reports and postmortems, experience designers can improve by learning how customer experience failures cause products to fail in the marketplace. Rather than proselytizing a particular approach to design, Why We Fail holistically explores what teams actually built, why the products failed, and how we can learn from the past to avoid failure ourselves.

Eye Tracking the User Experience

Eye tracking is a widely used research method, but there are many questions and misconceptions about how to effectively apply it. Eye Tracking the User Experience—the first how-to book about eye tracking for UX practitioners—offers step-by-step advice on how to plan, prepare, and conduct eye tracking studies; how to analyze and interpret eye movement data; and how to successfully communicate eye tracking findings.

A Web for Everyone

If you are in charge of the user experience, development, or strategy for a web site, A Web for Everyone will help you make your site accessible without sacrificing design or innovation. Rooted in universal design principles, this book provides solutions: practical advice and examples of how to create sites that everyone can use.