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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.

Engaged

Behavior change design creates entrancing—and effective—products and experiences. Whether you’ve studied psychology or are new to the field, you can incorporate behavior change principles into your designs to help people achieve meaningful goals, learn and grow, and connect with one another. Engaged offers practical tips for design professionals to apply the psychology of engagement to their work.

If these describe you, you may be the audience for this book:

  • You love attending conferences like UXPA, CHI, the Habit Summit, or HxRefactored
  • Your commute finds you listening to podcasts like Freakonomics Radio, 99% Invisible, HumanTech, or Radiolab
  • You have a job title like product manager, designer, or experience strategist (or you do the type of work associated with those titles)
  • You’ve worked in design agencies, on in-house strategy or design teams at big companies, or for yourself with clients
  • Your shower time is spent thinking about how to make the world a better place by making new products and experiences or fixing the ones already there
  • You’re always wondering why people do what they do and how to design for them

Validating Product Ideas

Want to know what your users are thinking? If you’re a product manager or developer, this book will help you learn the techniques for finding the answers to your most burning questions about your customers. With step-by-step guidance, Validating Product Ideas shows you how to tackle the research to build the best possible product.

Practical Empathy

Conventional product development focuses on the solution. Empathy is a mindset that focuses on people, helping you to understand their thinking patterns and perspectives. Practical Empathy will show you how to gather and compare these patterns to make better decisions, improve your strategy, and collaborate successfully.

Changemakers

Today’s radically complex problems require people to lead with design. Changemakers is an essential playbook for designers and nondesigners who want to drive change at work, at home, and in their communities. Groundbreaking designers Maria Giudice and Christopher Ireland—armed with insights from some of today’s top minds in business, tech, and social justice—offer a pragmatic, people-centered approach to change.

Who Should Read This Book?

Changemakers can be designers, leaders, CEOs, tech people, project managers, product people—virtually anyone who wants to embrace and address change. This book will show them how to do it by clearly defining, studying, and addressing change as a design problem to be solved.

Takeaways

  • A new approach to change is emerging, and design is at the forefront of responding and provoking change.
  • Purpose and passion are essential changemaker qualities.
  • Change involves choosing the right problem and finding an entity open to change.
  • This book will be your guide for creating and maintaining change in your organization—for you, your team, and your stakeholders.
  • Leaders can design change and affect the world—this book will show them how to become that kind of leader.
  • Each chapter has critical takeaways at the end of the chapter, summarizing important points.
  • Each chapter gives the reader a list of extra sources to gain further knowledge.

Writing Is Designing

Without words, apps would be an unusable jumble of shapes and icons, while voice interfaces and chatbots wouldn’t even exist. Words make software human-centered, and require just as much thought as the branding and code. This book will show you how to give your users clarity, test your words, and collaborate with your team. You’ll see that writing is designing.

Who this book is for

  • People who make their living writing and leading content strategy for software interfaces, or those who want to transition into this type of role from another writing background.
  • Designers and design leaders.
  • Product managers, engineers, and executives.

The Mobile Frontier

Mobile user experience is a new frontier. Untethered from a keyboard and mouse, this rich design space is ripe with opportunities to invent new and more human ways for people to interact with information. The Mobile Frontier will help you navigate this unfamiliar and fast-changing landscape, and inspire you to explore the possibilities that mobile technology presents.

Design for Impact

Many people make design decisions based on personal opinion, which is often ineffective. But proven visual, content, and interaction tweaks can boost sales by millions.

Why? Because customer-centered design combined with the scientific method makes products quantifiably better. As products improve, both businesses and their customers thrive. And making things better—not just different—is the heart of conversion design.

This book guides digital Designers, UXers, Marketers, and Conversion Rate Optimizers to leverage design and testing to drive business impact with…

  • A proven process to maximize customer and business value,
  • Testing principles and experiment examples,
  • A cultural framework to scale the approach, and
  • A toolkit to get you started.
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Project Management for Humans

Project management—it’s not just about following a template or using a tool, but rather developing personal skills and intuition to find a method that works for everyone. Whether you’re a designer or a manager, Project Management for Humans will help you estimate and plan tasks, scout and address issues before they become problems, and communicate with and hold people accountable.

Service Design

Service Design is an eminently practical guide to designing services that work for people. It offers powerful insights, methods, and case studies to help you design, implement, and measure multichannel service experiences with greater impact for customers, businesses, and society.