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7 sins inviting bad features to sneak into your product

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Entrepreneurs and product leaders are well-trained to relentlessly prioritize the important stuff, and say no to everything else.

And yet, despite using countless prioritization tools and decision-making frameworks, we are often caught off-guard, allowing our human weaknesses and cognitive biases to get in our way and make bad product decisions.

Often enough, those bad decisions mean bad features sneaking into the product making it cluttered, lacking a coherent experience, and practically making it worse.

Here are 7 deadly sins that invite bad features to sneak into your product:

1. Ego  There’s nothing like inflated ego to make good entrepreneurs behave like rock stars seeking personal glory.



When the “me” part comes before everything else (company, users, employees), bad features are invited into the product for the sake of creating a buzz, being trendy, trying to get noticed and becoming famous.

The thing about ego is that it usually comes with other destructive characteristics suc…
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Treat your CV like a product to increase your job search conversion rate

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Lately, I had a chance to help a few developers and product managers with their CVs.

After spending years going over resumes, I got to the conclusion that even the brightest people, who know how to design, develop, and promote their products, face some difficulties when it comes to promoting themselves.

So I came up with this notion that CVs are just like products, and product people of all, can exploit the similarities to make their CVs stand out and convert better.

Let’s dive into the details:

Know your user  Let’s start with the personas: HR managers, recruiters, ATS bots, and hiring managers.
There are many practical tips on how to get past the ATS bots into the human hands. These guides usually focus on including accurate keywords across the resume and/or in a dedicated summary section. Personally speaking, I hate buzzwords, so as a general guideline I would suggest to manage them like SEO: you must include them, but don’t overuse or repeat them too much.

In this post, I will foc…
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This simple hack helped me reduce my smartphone addiction and win some free time

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It seems like everyone is trying to wean themselves off their smartphones these days; turning it into black and white, hiding apps inside folders, canceling their notifications and badges, and whatnot.

I’ve been reading countless theories and methods about this and thinking:

“Who am I kidding?"
I don't want to break up with my iPhone!
I love my iPhone!
It’s part of me, the most important add-on to my body.
It’s the amplifier and the distortion all together!

I love checking my messages 1,000 times a day. I love checking our server loads, the number of open orders, exceptions, statistics, trends, emails, who retweeted my tweets, how many new subscribers joined my newsletter and how many likes my last blog post generated.
The iPhone is my all-in-one monitoring tool. It's interesting, it's fun, and it's even productive in many cases despite what many people think these days.

Only problem is - I became a bit too obsessive about it.

I find it hard to let it go and check…
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Visually distorted - when symmetrical UI looks all wrong

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I’ve been gifted with a questionable super-power to spot visual defects at first glance.
It’s like having a spider-sense for distortions, I get this tingling feeling in the back of my skull, every time I see something that’s not aligned, twisted or unaesthetic.

It happens to me when I meet people (look at those gigantic hands! her head is tiny! OMG those fingernails! they look like they belong to a mole!), and as much as I’m trying to make it stop - I just can’t fight my own super-powers.

It also happens when I look at user interfaces: whether I’m working on something new, advising others, or just using a product - I can’t help but spotting design issues the minute I look at things.

So, as an attempt to get rid of this overweight - I decided to create this collection of common UI distortions caused by optical illusions and other design reasons, along with my proposed fixes, hoping that it will help the world create better-looking interfaces (and help me get rid of this unwanted “gift…
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The quest for developing a reliable rating system

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Trust plays a critical role when purchasing products online, but trusting the brand is not enough when booking a vacation or even ordering a massage at home, as the supplier in these cases is not the brand itself.

93% of consumers use online reviews to support their purchasing decisions; they seek for reassurance, a social proof that the product or service they plan to order is indeed the quality they expect it to be.

Rating and review systems are expected to be accurate because they are based on high volumes, however, as we learned over the years of operating our marketplace for beauty and lifestyle services - this is not always the case.

The problem When we started Missbeez, we knew we were dealing with a sensitive business.
Haircuts, makeups, massages, even nail treatments - those are all personal treatments, and therefore our customers were concerned about who’s coming over, their work quality and their experience.

The more expensive or personal a product is - the more sensitive use…
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5 basic mistakes product managers still make

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Product management is all about dealing with decisions, priorities, trade-offs, and compromises.
And yet, I’ve seen product people who focus so much on their product, that they often forget how to work with people.

Call it soft skills, intercommunication skills, it doesn’t matter. It’s the kind of things you need be aware of and work on, in order to become a good manager.

Here are 5 basic behavioral mistakes product managers still make, followed by some practical tips:
Mistake #1: Talking instead of listening  As a product manager, a big part of your knowledge comes from listening to others, and yet - many product people feel obliged to do the talking (and miss the opportunity to shut the fu🤭ck up).

Whether you are talking to customers, partners, sales, support - let them share their knowledge, pains, challenges, goals, and use this invaluable information to shore up your market understanding and connect the dots required to build a successful product.
THE QUIETER YOU BECOME, THE MOR…
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