techintuitions-blog

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In an effort to scale an industry where video games sales have exceeded $10 billion in revenue, the average gamer spending 8 hours/per week and 67% of households playing video games, Microsoft will now allow game developers to host their own tournaments on Xbox Live. This move establishes a bold stance from Microsoft to further increase gamer engagement by allowing an open ecosystem for tournament gameplay.   

Statistical Reference: https://lnkd.in/e4dsn9m

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Checkout this post by the Wall Street Journal “Style In The Office” section featuring myself and colleagues as we share our thoughts on style in the office that fosters a great culture throughout the organization.

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Tidal’s rise to the top of the App Store after the drop of Kanye’s album indicates the company’s desire to “win” through exclusive distribution of content which is a huge play in the music streaming space. While most of this content will be available on other streaming products within another week and YouTube has over a billion users which dominates online video usage, Tidal’s exclusive video content play will be difficult to convert trial users to actual subscribers given the level of access to free content. Time will tell how much value consumers place on being “first in line” for content thus disrupting the music streaming ecosystem and forcing companies to rethink their approach to provide engaging user experiences.

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From undergrad to working for a digital payments giant. Checkout this article feature where I explain my journey and tips to being a successful product manager.

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As the world continues to be more integrated with digital and physical devices powered by technology, there we be a desperate need to have a society that analyzes a problem through the lens of a computer scientist.  Knowing this  fact, Computer Science For All pledges to bridge the literacy gap in computer science in underserved communities/demographics to tackle the technical challenges we face in the future.

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The Art of StoryTelling is an essential skill that once mastered you're able to influence others and use the boardroom as your canvas to illustrate an engaging message for your audience. Special thanks to the decodedco team for facilitating a great business storytelling workshop and providing tools to create more compelling presentations

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As the internet of things continue to mature, screens go away and our interaction patterns change across device mediums, there's a pressing need for strong Zero UI design for the next wave of tech innovations incorporating human gestures.

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The Game of Music Streams

Music Culture

With the ever evolving nature of music business, society is seeing a huge explosion of investments in the music streaming business.  Record stores in the traditional sense is just about extinct and artists are looking at innovative ways to get music out to fans while monetizing the whole experience from discovery to ultimate fandom. Which the launch of Tidal and Apple Music the Game of Music Streams is ever so relevant now. Couple that with existing players like Pandora, Rdio, Spotify, Songza and SoundCloud you now have a power struggle for music streaming supremacy.  In this post we’ll focus on the music discovery aspect of streaming and how it can be a key differentiator when consumers are evaluating which service to choose.

Impact of Music streaming

In a September 2014 Pando Daily article, we noticed trends of music app usage far exceeding their social media counterparts. This article inspired me to understand the adoption of music streaming apps by conducting a survey around music discovery to help derive common themes that can help uncover the areas of emphasis for consumers.

Problems with the Music Discovery Experience

What has become apparent amongst music consumers is the desire for features on the following:

1.) The ability to have deep insights into the  musicians that inspire the artists they know and love.

2.) The ability to search through sub genres of music.  

Simply searching for hip hop groups or artists doesn’t quite suffice for your everyday consumer who views hip hop in many shades of gray.  With respect to hip hop, there’s conscious all the way to southern trunk poppin’ tunes thats considered hip hop. Now let’s shift our focus to rock. Like hip hop, there are many layers to this genre.  Rock can be classified as indie, pop and hard metal to name a few which appeals to different consumers.  

Opportunities for Streaming Services

In order for music streaming services to truly flourish the services need to provide distinction of sub-genres and the ability to search by artist preferences they follow to enable a rich discovery experience for consumers.  Whichever service figures out the key to consumer’s heart and ears with regards to music discovery will truly emerge a leader in this race.  With all things considered the question still remains, who will win the Game of Music Streams?

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Me and my partner in crime hosting the 1st Global MasterCard Hackathon! #TakeMA #Hackathon #MasterCard #innovation #tech (at Mastercard NYC Tech Hub)

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The recent Microsoft acquisition of calendar app Sunrise conveys a strategic move to be more integrated with 3rd software and platforms to expand their ecosystem of users (ie. Android, iOS) that will extend current offerings of Outlook.  This could be one of many moves given their focus on cloud computing and expanding the Outlook franchise business.

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With the rise in mobile payments and the adoption of Apple Pay there are many considerations in the payments ecosystem.  What does this mean to the consumer? What does this mean for small business? What does this mean for big business? What does this mean for other payment players in market?

Its obvious Apple Pay provides validation that mobile payments is truly an emerging global push to connect merchants, consumers and card issuers. For the merchant, there's the benefit of better day-to-day operations and intuitive consumer insights.  The consumers will now be equipped with incentive laden experiences to prompt them to digitally pay for more goods and services than ever before.  For the card issuer, as the conversion of cash to digital payments increases, so does their profit margin for their business. 

The digital payments story is still being written and it will be interesting when we look back a few years from now and assess the likelihood  of a truly cashless society.

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It was an honor a privilege to mentor such a talented group of young men on their product business strategy, user experience and technology at the "Design Your Startup in Day" workshop at the Google offices on Saturday.  Special thanks to the All Star Code team for delivering such an impactful day of activities for the students, parents and mentors.

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Although still in its infancy, Bitcoin shows a lot of promise and could truly change the way we view payments globally.

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Check out my workshop deck I presented at NPower on Product Management!  Students learned how to derive business metrics from consumers to help drive product design decisions for the redesign of the Spotify music discovery feature.

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S/O to the entire #GroupMe product team for launching their newly designed mobile app. Job Well Done! #techintuitions #cleanux

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My Product Review on Zenly

During the UX Labs meetup we had an opportunity to learn and apply a Heuristic Evaluation on Zenly a startup in NYC aimed to simplify the painstaking process of looking for apartments in the city. 

What is Heuristic evaluation you say? By definition a heuristic evaluation is a usability inspection method for computer software that helps to identify usability problems in the user interface (UI) design.  To simplify this concept it's to identify workflows within the product and capture connections and/or disconnections of the user experience.  

Some of the key elements of a heuristic evaluation are the following:

- Explore: Think of a number of use cases for the product and walkthrough each one with as a potential user and attempt to derive some key observations.

- Record your observation: Document what struck you a good, bad or indifferent as these discoveries help build a case for recommendations and/or feedback for the product.

- Turn observations into actionable insights:  Once the observations have been gathered 

For my evaluation I approached the product as a new user searching for apartments.  For each workflow gap I highlighted  provided a recommendation:

1.) Home page request for email before apartment browsing? 

Recommendation: As a first time user, give users an opportunity to explore the product and request for an email when they elect to book an appointment with a realtor.

2.) Verified by Zenly vs. Avail Now?

Recommendation: As a first time user, Verified by Zenly and Avail Now isn't quite clear given the fact the main value proposition of the product is providing a venting process for all properties. Essentially you can consolidate both options and simplify the experience by showing only available properties.

3.) Avg. rent vs. listing ?

Recommendation: As a long time resident in NYC the first criteria apartment seekers inquire about is PRICE.  Providing the average rent as a filter isn't very helpful to seekers as more expensive properties can overshadow an affordable listing and force the user to look in other areas in the city.  Provide a sliding scale that will allow the user to view low to high cost properties to give a more holistic view of apartment listing.

Overall this product is attempting to solve a real problem in NYC and I'm very excited on the future as the Zenly team continue to iterate over the user experience.

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Powerful Video on Tristan Walker and the road he endured to become a prominent figure in the tech community though growing up through adverse conditions.