Amazon Product Management

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Amazon has a very distinctive technique for bringing a new product to market. Instead of throwing stuff against the wall to see what sticks, they begin new product development with a notional press release followed by a first cut at the product's FAQ. Keep in mind that the press release will never be published in its original form – rather, it's a guide to keep the business, product, and engineering teams on the same sheet of music. I think of the press release as the high level, 30,000', strategic view of the product and the FAQ as the operational, 10,000', view.

Once the press release and FAQ are created the marketing team can layout their vision which is then passed to the product department to document the functional specifications, wire diagrams, and technical requirements for the engineering team to develop and the QA team to test against.

At the end of the day, though, it's a company's corporate culture that drives the success of their products. At Amazon, their corporate culture focuses on what the customer wants. This "the customer is always right" mentality may seem obvious, but it really does depend on each company's DNA. When I worked at Apple, our priority was to provide the best possible user experience (UX) and customer experience (CX).

Contextual Menus

When I worked at Apple, my boss's boss was discussing UI/UX design with Steve Jobs in meeting about the Apple Online Store. Steve commented that contextual menus had become the "dumping ground" for the lazy designer.

After upgrading to OS X 10.8.2, last night, I noticed two things. They weren't new things, but they jumped out at me.

First was that Mac OS X is no longer Mac OS X, it's now just OS X. I had heard something about this rebranding earlier this year, but this was the first time that I actually noticed it. In 2001, when I spoke at WWDC, it was beaten into us that we had to refer to it as Mac OS X.

The second thing - and this one's minor - is that the order of items on Mail's contextual menus could be better arranged - much better arranged.

Specifically, when right clicking on an e-mail account the Erase Deleted Items/Junk Mail should be near the very top. In other words, they should be one of the first choices since they're the most common options selected. Personally, I think the New/Rename/Delete/Export Mailbox options probably don't even belong in this contextual menu since they're so rarely needed.

But, that's just my 2¢. There may be a good reason that I'm overlooking.