Product management, user experience, writing, and everything else close to my heart.
Businesses default to re-organizing their teams when they want to do things differently. While this does solve certain problems, it’s not always the silver bullet.
I’ve been part of several changes in teams, and I’ve seen people move teams. I’ve seen re-orgs happen so many times that I’ve gotten tired of them. The people doing the re-orgs see them as a panacea to everything, but they often miss the details.
We hired Akshaya to work on product copy for Freshdesk. We worked together for six months, writing and reviewing content for screens every day.
She wrote about how she got started and lessons we learned together, along the way. If you’re just getting started with UX writing, you should check out her post here.
I started out in PR at Freshworks. I rarely spoke to customers when I was in PR, except when I worked on doing some case studies of how people used Freshdesk. It’s something I regret now – I should have used the first two years of my career to get in front of more customers. The fact that I didn’t start out in support or presales was a big disadvantage for me when I moved to product management.
But when I did move, the first thing I wanted to do was talk to our users and get a mental model of a typical business that used Freshdesk. We didn’t have a user research team back then, and I’ve never liked waiting, so this is how I rolled up my sleeves and got some work done, to start talking to several customers.
I’m sharing these three ideas, because they will help you quash blockers to user research in your organization. Let’s go.
Continue reading “Three ideas to help you get started with user research”
Last week, my engineers and I met to discuss the specifics (or so we thought) about a feature we were going to be working on. Even after an hour of healthy debate and discussion, I felt that everyone in the room wasn’t on the same page.
If we had actually gone ahead and built what we wanted to build without getting to the details in writing, it’d have been nothing short of a disaster.
Continue reading “Making your team discover the joy and value in writing things down”
I think copy is an intricate part of product design. Getting everything else right, and product copy wrong would still be a disaster. But in most organizations, product copy falls through the cracks. It’s the last thing anyone worries about, and it isn’t seen as something that influences user experience. When not well thought-out, unclear copy doesn’t just make your product look unprofessional, but also frustrates and annoys users.
The hardest thing to do is convincing designers and engineers – the entire product team that words matter. The best way to go about it is to show, and not tell. When we got on calls talking to Freshdesk users, we realized many of them were confused by something we thought was very simple to understand.
If you’re building a business that grows like crazy, documentation should be a culture trait you should promote and look for in the people you hire. I realized this when we worked on a major revamp of Freshdesk’s product interface in 2017.
The team worked hard for close to a year on this project, and we thought we had a great launch in 2017, but soon discovered hundreds of features that we missed out. Our very own customer support team had to tell us about features that were part of the older interface, and we scrambled to build them later. A lot of times, we learned about product behaviour only after our customers told us about how much they missed them in the newer interface.
Shankar is thinking 