Books

Rosenfeld Media · 2022 · print and ebook

Product Management for UX People

From Designing to Thriving in a Product World

More and more, designers are grappling with product management: as a peer discipline, as the job title of a boss or teammate, and as a future career destination. But there is surprisingly little help for designers who want to understand what it takes to manage products and services.

This book plumbs the intersections and gaps between design and product management, for designers who want to work well with product managers and for designers who want to become one.

First draft · nine chapters · free to read

Growing Product People

Where do great product people come from?

Can you hire them? Are they hiding inside your organization? Can you grow them from engineers, designers, project managers? It turns out you can. Product managers, designers and developers can all deepen their grasp of the full product mindset, and when they do, you start building a product culture one person at a time.

The book describes the expertise, skills and frameworks that come together in every great product person, and how to put those ideas to work inside your organization. I wrote it under contract with Sense & Respond Press, which stopped publishing books before this one could come out. The draft is here, chapter by chapter, while I work out what the finished book should be.

O’Reilly · 2nd edition, 2015 · first edition 2009

Designing Social Interfaces

Principles, Patterns, and Practices for Improving the User Experience

By Erin Malone and Christian Crumlish

Building interfaces that foster interaction and community is much harder than it looks. This practical guide gathers more than 100 patterns, principles and best practices for growing healthy online communities by co-creating the experience with the people who use it.

• The principles to understand before reaching for tactical patterns
• Cultivating healthy participation, and handling people who misbehave
• Adding social features to an existing site, and getting people talking to each other
• Ratings as a way to build a social experience around a product or service
• Many examples for each pattern, with an emphasis on mobile apps, and how the patterns apply inside the enterprise

Sybex · 2004

The Power of Many

How the Living Web Is Transforming Politics, Business, and Everyday Life

Social networks on the web touch countless parts of everyday life. With instant access to people of similar mind, we can form partnerships with more people, in more ways, than ever before.

Through case studies and interviews with leading thinkers and doers, the book draws out the lessons of peer-to-peer tools (web services, blogs, text messaging) used to reach shared goals: how Howard Dean’s campaign took a little-known candidate a long way, how activists organize meetings and letter-writing drives, how people find help for personal problems, and how artists find their audience.