Turing Festival 2017 Notes

5 min readAug 4, 2017

Our ExD (Experience Design) team at MOO went along together.

Note: Some of these notes are quite short and I didn’t write notes for every talk I went to. A lot of notes I took were contextual to my own work, so the length of notes below is no reflection of the quality of any talk. For example, I was completely mesmerised with Jeff Gothelf’s talk but didn’t take many notes. He looked at the whole ecosystem of a product, it was wonderful. It had numbers, research, culture and was rich with insight.

All the Things You Need When You Want Great Design by Jane Austin

Jane is the Director of Design and User Experience at MOO, she lives the content from her talk everyday. Obviously I’m biased about this one!

Build shared understanding between a team
Good design is not being the expert designer who makes giant designs to prove their worth, it’s about being a design facilitator
Get the whole team involved in the research

Use the quad — 1 x Agile Delivery Coach, Product, Engineering and UX representatives to make some of your key decisions. Consent not consensus — not every single team member needs to be in every single meeting
Build the right thing, build the thing right
To come up with an MVP is not enough, you need to break it down into smaller shippable increments
Have strong opinions lightly held — disagree, commit, test and iterate
Bake in analytics from the start
You need design at every step of the process
You need to ensure consistency — use a design system

Prioritising Features and Talking to Users by Qasar Younis

A great product accomplishes a specific task elegantly
Have the humbleness to recognise your product is almost always failing
Do your customers feel like your product’s moving? Momentum is everything when you’re small. Shipping might be favoured over (user) testing
If you’re not talking to your users every week you’re failing
It’s not enough that people love your product
Everyone knows the basics — research, mixed teams, etc. already. [You need to do more]
Understand what execs expect a Product Manager to be e.g. a Project Manager?
You need one person to be ultimately and clearly responsible for the Product, not many (e.g. not one person fromMarketing, Design, Project Management and Engineering)
With data, be careful of rationalising what you want to see

How to prioritise:

Define the behaviour you want e.g. what do you want people to do when they open Google Maps?
Build and test one assumption at a time
Before release, predict behaviour — what do you expect to happen?
Improve organisation and people

Everyone thinks they’re a good PM. It takes years of building and shipping to become good. Stop reading shit on the internet (well this is awkward), go out and do and learn

Read:

Maintaining Product Values at Scale by Leo Nilsson

Would add analytics and other competencies to cross-functional teams
Quality of hypothesis vs quality of data scale: intuition, anecdotes, correlation, causation

The plural of anecdotes is data

Even hypotheses based on data still need validation, especially as time passes
Make sure to look at differing behaviours between new vs active customers

The Power of Product Culture by Janna Bastow

Halting continuous delivery because of shonky infrastructure is bad

Roadmap timelines don’t work — ditch them! They always marches you forward with some assumptions:

Nothing will disrupt your timeline
Planned features will work as soon as they’re launched
Planned features are the right thing to build
Nothing’s going to change

Product of Your Imagination: Adventures in Product Management, Storytelling and Pasta Monsters by Nick Marsh

Imagination products are the result of imaginative processes
Imagination as a product you can buy
Talked about a cool hypothesis experiment — you can input a child’s address and the book will feature a satellite map with that location. 7% of customers abandoned because they didn’t know the child’s address. So the team tried an option where if no address was provided, a generic illustration was used instead. Conversion didn’t go up immediately, these customers were still buying the book but later(?)

Hacking Your Tractor With Black Market Code: A Sense & Respond Case Study by Jeff Gothelf

When you enforce bad policy, people will work around that policy
Technology cannot get ahead of culture

Minor Bug Fixes by Rob Gill

Release notes are buried in app stores
Offer ability to email feedback in release notes
Use TL;DR at the top of release notes

Use bullets or manual separators like [+] to create a list / hierarchy
Use *TITLE* to create subsections / hierarchy
Ask the user for their rating and if the rating is low, then say something like “Sounds like we could improve” and give the opportunity to explain the low rating