Philea Adhanti

The more chunks of information you add to an ‘interface’, the more difficult it becomes to ‘work’, using the information at hand. This is especially critical for first time users, because they haven’t had the ‘practice’ needed to encode the interface into long term memory, or, for the behaviour to become habitual. I constantly see this rule being broken by giants like Facebook, Google, and Wordpress. Don’t even get me started on automobile interface design. The ~5 bit chunk rule also compliments minimalism as a rigorous design philosophy. To expound, due to the limitations of working memory, as a product becomes more feature-full it inevitably becomes more difficult to use, because the user has to manage more information while operating the product. This makes good information design so critical.

On top of that, Product Managers need to carry the battle standard of measurement as an indicator of success. The metrics you use need to be those that tell the story of what your users are feeling, whether the…

Consider what I believe to be an underrated and undersold role of product management — optimizing for excitement. It’s our job to make sure that we’re pitching projects that are enticing to our engineering team.