Posts filed under “Judy’s Book”
Functional Specs Matter
As part of the feature definition process, I’ve been focused on writing quick functional specs with wireframes and data requirements to facilitate discussions with developers and our tester on what we’re trying to accomplish from a product perspective. This process is proving to be extremely valuable, even in a quasi-Agile, get something up quickly and [...]
Great Post on What's Next (via Brad Burnham, Union Square Ventures)
Brad Burnham has a great post (which I found via Fred Wilson’s blog) about what’s coming next in the inevitable progression of the computer industry. He argues that we’re in a world where we no longer care about hardware or software but rather we care about data (Think Facebook, Craigslist). After data, he suggests that [...]
Grocery Coupons
We just released grocery coupons on Judy’s Book. It’s a click-to-print model via a partner which isn’t the best user experience, but it’s something. I’m not a couponer myself, but these are a great way to save on regular purchases. They are product, not store-specific so can be used wherever you shop regularly. You can [...]
Effective Daily Development Meetings
Jason Yip has a great post at Martin Fowler.com about making sure the ‘daily scrum’ is productive. One of the key concepts in his post centers around focusing on three things: What did I accomplish yesterday? What are my obstacles? What do I intend on accomplishing today? Another key concept focuses on the need to [...]
I need to spend more time on LinkedIn
I came across a cool thread on LinkedIn Answers via Powerset’s Blog. In it, the COO of LinkedIn asked the following question: “If you could build the perfect search engine, what would it do?” little fockers move The answers are pretty interesting and the themes that crop up are around context, intent and some interesting [...]
New Features at Judy's Book
Last Friday, we had an important release at Judy’s Book which included several new features. Some visible to consumers, others more in the back end, but all of which should lead to higher quality deals on site. The primary elements of this release were: Deal Approval Queue User Posted Local Deals (supported by¬†Local Editors in¬†select [...]
Time is the Enemy (via A Sack of Seattle)
Andy has a post up on his blog about the decision to scale back operations at Judy’s Book. Today was a tough day. For the second time in my life I had to tell a great team of people that the idea they’d worked so hard on was going away. After 3+ years, our management [...]
Awesome Local Deals Content in Seattle & Atlanta
We’ve been working hard to find creative ways to get hard to find local content into the hands of users – basically, doing work so users don’t have to. As most people in and around the local online sector know, it’s hard to get great local content. I think we’re starting to figure it out [...]
To make something great, you have to be a little obsessive
If you’re trying to put something great together, at some point, you have to get a little obsessive. This means you have to pay attention to little details that matter to users that aren’t quite right and highlight them again and again until they get taken care of. In the ideal scenario, you do all [...]
New Features on Judy's Book
We just released a couple of cool enhancements to Judy’s Book this week. The first is an enhancement to the user tags feature I wrote about last week. Based on deals users save or post, we infer their favorite stores and categories. This provides another lens on what people are interested in. I’m a big [...]