Hallway Studio

10 books to help you make your company and product better

The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses Eric Ries It’s a must read at my company and we’re not alone. Lean Customer Development: Building Products Your Customers Will Buy Cindy Alvarez Cindy’s approach is simple and powerful. I’m such a fangirl that I have a signed copy. Inspired: […]

Why domain expertise is dangerous in a product manager

Recently I was talking with a worried head of product management whose team is afraid to ask customers how they used the product because they didn’t want to be seen as not knowing the answers. Product people need to seek answers in data, conversations, feedback and testing. We need to make decisions based on the best […]

If you want to run a good customer test, ask these quesitons

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When I’m planning a test with my teams these are the questions that we ask ourselves. It really helps us to focus our efforts in planning, recruiting and creating a a prototype or other artifact to test. What do we want to learn? This is the best place to start and should drive the answers […]

The many types of product managers

Product manager is one of those titles that can mean different things. There are many kinds of PMs that play different roles in different organizations and that’s a good thing.  You want a PM that fits your needs. The Wrangler If the CEO has grand visions of the product’s future and seems to come up with […]

How sculpture class made me better at making products

In college I needed one more elective to graduate so I took a sculpture class. I didn’t realize some simple techniques I learned in class would serve me for years. Every 15 minutes a timer would sound and we had to turn our piece by 20 or so degrees. This helped us to create a […]

Most popular posts of 2014

I started at 3Pillar Global January 2, 2014 created this site as a way for me to capture what I’ve learned and I’ve learned a lot. How teaching skiing makes me better at UX and product management  Using tests to make prioritization easier  Rules of prototyping engagement  To crash, burn and rise again stronger  My […]