Build.

On November 18th, 2014, we publicly released Optimizely's iOS editor. Before we launched, there was one problem the whole team rallied behind to fix: we weren't proud of the product. To fix this issue, we went beyond a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) to an MVPP-the Minimum Viable Product we're Proud of.

This article is a guest post by Jeff Gothelf, Director of User Experience at TheLadders in New York City. Jeff has been promoting the use of Lean UX as an effective method to spur greater innovation, quality and productivity in startups as well as within teams in larger organizations.

Look at any successful company and you'll find a set of people that stand out and are the ones that really make the difference. It may be the difference between a great product or a terrible one.

Building the Minimum Bad Ass User. Part Two. Unfinished Business... Kathy Sierra at Business of Software Conference 2013, Boston, Ma. Kathy Sierra's talk last year, 'Building the minimum bad ass user', is one that has had a huge impact, not just on the people that were there in the room on the day, but on people who have watched it online subsequently.

Personas and User Stories made sense when customers and product teams were far from each other. That's no longer the case. This is a guest post from Alan Klement describing how one team used the design technique of Job Stories to design a profile page in a product.

Exclusive Interview with Ash Maurya, Author of Running Lean Q. Why is your book "Running Lean" especially important now? We live at a time where we have so much power at our fingertips, where we are building more products than ever before. But the odds of building successful products haven't gone up.

This is "Des Traynor - Product strategy in a growing company" by MindTheProduct on Vimeo, the home for high quality videos and the people who love them.

Intercom's Des Traynor at Business of Software Conference 2013, Boston, MA talking about why Product strategy is mostly about saying no. Funny, thought provoking and actionable.

Here's a simple set of Yes/No questions that you can quickly answer before you add another item to your product roadmap. Saying yes to a feature request - whether it's a to an existing customer, a product enquiry, a teammate, or a manager - is immediately rewarding.

The Lean UX approach to interaction design is tailor-made for today’s web-driven reality. In this insightful book, leading advocate Jeff Gothelf teaches you valuable Lean UX principles, tactics, and techniques from the ground up—how to rapidly experiment with design ideas, validate them with real users, and continually adjust your design based on what you learn.

A behind-the-scenes look at the firm behind WordPress.com and the unique work culture that contributes to its phenomenal success. 50 million websites, or twenty percent of the entire web, use WordPress software. The force behind WordPress.com is a convention-defying company called Automattic, Inc., whose 120 employees work from anywhere in the world they wish, barely use email, and launch improvements to their products dozens of times a day. With a fraction of the resources of Google, Amazon, or Facebook, they have a similar impact on the future of the Internet. How is this possible? What's different about how they work, and what can other companies learn from their methods?

This book gives you the tools to decide which features to improve, which features to ignore, and how to better address your customers. Drawing from some of the best posts on our blog, Intercom on Product Management offers guidance on the tough decisions you need to make as a PM.

Here's part 1 of short animated video describing our engineering culture (here's part 2). This is a journey in progress, not a journey completed, and there's a lot of variation from squad to squad.

Here's part 2 of the animated video describing our engineering culture. Check out part 1 first if you haven't already seen it! This is a journey in progress, not a journey completed, so the video is somewhere between "How Things Are Today" and "How We Want Things To Be".

I work with quite a few product teams, and after a while you start to see patterns. Many organizations are frustrated because they believe that it takes far too long to move from concept to delivery.

I'm always badgering teams about moving faster. Yet I continue to meet people and teams that not only move very slow, they don't understand the relationship between speed and innovation, or speed and quality.

I've worked in technology for twenty years, the past thirteen as a product manager. I've gained somewhat of a reputation for being effective at working with software engineers. This skill has earned me a place in history as one of the three greatest product managers of all time.1

When it was five of you sitting the same room, it was easy. When someone needed to know something, they stood up in the middle of the room and asked, "Who broke the build?" When a decision needed to be made, you looked up at Phil and said, "Phil, this needs to scale from day one, right?"

Any project manager worth their salary has a variety of tasks to complete every day, from budgeting to planning, training to presenting, and balancing all this out is all part and parcel of the job.

Episode: 505: LAUNCH incubator: Josh Elman, partner Greylock & product master (ex- Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook) shares secrets to successful growth cycle Find out why so many hot startups are using InVision to prototype, present & collaborate on design in real-time.

Last year, Stormpath made the big shift from Scrum to Kanban. While we love Agile principles, the Scrum process wasn't working for us. Kanban made our team more efficient, happier, and increased our focus on quality software. More importantly, it has become a core part of our company culture, and is now used by non-technical teams like Marketing and HR.

I like having customers. You like having customers. In fact, once we get a customer we sure would like to hang on to them. The problem is that our customers always want our products to do more, more, more for them. What this means is that we always need to be adding new features and capabilities to our products.

When I start working with product teams, one of the first things I try to do is to get them to stop thinking of their job as one of gathering and documenting requirements.

Google Ventures Startup Lab | This workshop focuses on what makes for a good meeting, what kinds to avoid, and how to run them effectively. Meetings can suck the life out of a startup, and can prevent teams from executing. When done correctly, meetings can keep everyone informed, help the company move more quickly, and identify and resolve obstacles.

"There are myriad great ideas, but great execution is a rarity." -Everyone If you've ever tried to start a company, you've heard a thousand variations on this admonition-because it's true. While you might secretly harbor the notion that your idea matters a lot more than the herd supposes, you also know that great ideas inevitably die without great execution.