What is IBM Watson and how can product managers use it?

IBM Watson is IBM's artificial intelligence technology that can be taught to answers questions posed in simple English. IBM Watson learns from documents, the same way a human being learns by reading. The difference is Watson can learn from millions of documents in a short period of time and keep up with the growing body of written knowledge on a topic.

IBM Watson learns a topic very quickly.
Experts I spoke with said that when provided with access to adequate written material, IBM Watson can answers questions as accurately as an expert in the field 60% of the time. When an expert coaches IBM Watson for 8 weeks on a topic, IBM Watson can answers questions as accurately as an expert in the field 90% of the time.

You don't program Watson. You teach it
There is no programming language for IBM Watson. Product managers and domain experts can simple teach Watson by providing written material and training it.

I think there are interesting possibilities with Watson in the areas of education and healthcare.

Prototypes For Data Driven Products and A new Role Called Data Product Managers

For many years I prototyped my products very early in the design process and used it a tool for conversation and design participation. I have even tried it for home improvement projects. Recently I started building predictive analytics products that help enterprises identify a segment of people, take actions to influence the behavior of those people, track the engagement of such interventions and measure the eventual impact of such behavior change.

For such products I learned, by trial and error, that we will have to build multiple prototypes. These fall into two main categories; user experience prototypes and data prototypes.

1. User Experience Prototypes
You may have to build a user experience prototype for every persona that encounters the product. In our case, there is a professional user who looks at segments of people and takes action and an end user who receives such interventions.

We built one prototype to show the experience of the professional user and another prototype to show the experience of the end user.

There are good tools to build such prototypes. My team uses Axure RP. It is the best in the business. Product managers can develop skills to use this tool. User experience designers and visual designers also developed skills to build these prototypes within days.

Prototype could also be a sales demo tool
Our visual designer built a version of the prototype with the final visual design screens. We plan to use this prototype for early sales conversations with customers and prospects.

2. Data Prototypes
Data prototypes may fall into multiple categories. The first prototype might be to visualize insight from existing data. The second prototypes might be to visualize insights from engagement data. The third prototype might be to visualize the impact the action taken has had.

The purpose of building a data prototype is the following.

a. Ensure that the data you want to visualize exists.
b. Verify the quality of the data you want to derive insight from.
c. Check to ensure that the data is ready to tell the story you want the data to tell.

A team of experts built the data prototype and determined if the insight we want to visualize were meaningful, useful and reliable. I anticipate that this data prototype significantly improved the quality of our design, improved the communication of the design to our engineers and significantly reduced possible errors in the product. I called the experts who built the data prototype and arrived at the final design, data product managers.

Data Product Managers
Building data products might require skills that traditional software product managers may not have. So I created a role called data product managers who have technical skills such as querying a data base, manipulating it and visualizing the data in a spreadsheet.

If you would like to learn more, drop me a note and I will be glad to share what I can.

How To Build An Accordian Menu In @AxureRP Prototyping Tool

The accordian menu is a very useful component for web products. I recently build a prototype for a data driven product and used this component. Here is a very useful tutorial on how to build it. You can download the project file for this from the Axure website.

Execution, People, Design

When a senior leader joins a company they are sometimes asked to outline a 90 day plan. It is good to have one even if you are not asked.

At Castlight Health, I am focusing initially on execution, product goals, training and development for my colleagues and product design in that order.

Execution
I find that looking at simple foundational things that need to be done is an important first step. If there is a lack of ability to execute, that area needs to be attended to first. This usually boils down to everyone knowing their goals and knowing who does what when to accomplish those goals.

People
The next things I am focusing on is to find out if the right people are on the right job and if they needs any specific skills. Putting the right people on the right job and getting them the necessary training is the important next step. This includes hiring.

Product Design
The next area is the design of the products that I and my team are responsible for. Even though this is what I love to do, this cannot be done if the first two things are not taken care of.

You might be wondering why I did not mention the word strategy anywhere. I believe that it is hard to change the strategy of a product area until you have gained the trust of your colleagues. I plan to focus on that after the first 90 days. Also, I believe that it is harder to execute on a strategy than to come up with one.

Product Expert to General Manager

To progress in your career, you may have to play the role of a general manager rather than that of a product expert. Product managers who are expected to play the role of a general manager of their product may be wondering what that means.

It is generally easier to play the role of an expert in a product area where you have a lot of experience, education and exposure. However, as you progress in your career, you will have to influence, hire, manage and motivate experts who are more experienced that you in their functional areas. For example a CEO may have to hire and manage HR, sales, engineering, design, finance and marketing experts. No CEO can be an expert in all areas.

Learning how to gain the respect and trust of experts who know more than you and are more experienced than you in their functional areas is a key skill to have to progress in your career. This is when you realize the role of a manager is not to tell people how to do their job but to paint the big picture, articulate the goals, get them the necessary resources, remove hurdles and let them execute towards those goals. It goes without saying that you need to convince those experts that the goal you are setting is worth pursuing.

Good product managers learn to do this at an early stage in their career. Some of them go on to become CEOs.