Very often, product thinkers have hunches. Hunches about how something can be made better. Hunches about problems worth solving for, worth going after. But hunches are very different from their big brother, ideas.
Tag Archives: Product
The abbreviation disease
Before you start reading, I want to mention that this isn’t an attack against anyone specifically. This is a behaviour I’ve noticed in teams I’ve worked with over the years. I couldn’t find a better analogy to express this idea. The abbreviation disease leads people to use unclear short forms to convey something that canContinue reading “The abbreviation disease”
Content eats icons for breakfast
This is a tiny lesson in design I learned at Freshworks. The lesson seems obvious in hindsight, but it wasn’t so obvious when we were making the mistake.
Business software is so good now, that it’s competing with consumer software
For a long time, business software was clunky. Consumer software continued to radically innovate on user experience, staying ahead of the curve. Palm to iPhone. Styluses to capacitive touch. Taxis to Ubers. Torrents to Netflix. MP3s to Spotify, etc. We’ve lived through this story of how innovation in consumer software radically improved our lives inContinue reading “Business software is so good now, that it’s competing with consumer software”
Fighting outdated tribal knowledge in sales and support teams
When businesses start out, support and sales teams (like any other team) are closely knit. The teams are small and most folks know the ins and outs of the product being sold. Everyone stays on top of new product updates by playing with the latest features, reading documentation or just being quizzed in the hallwayContinue reading “Fighting outdated tribal knowledge in sales and support teams”
Lessons learned doing UX writing
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.
Three ideas to help you get started with user research
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.Continue reading “Three ideas to help you get started with user research”
Making your team discover the joy and value in writing things down
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. the backend engineers thought they knew – down toContinue reading “Making your team discover the joy and value in writing things down”
Convincing your team that words matter
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, unclearContinue reading “Convincing your team that words matter”
You cannot scale without documentation
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, andContinue reading “You cannot scale without documentation”
Shankar is thinking 