Ellery Yang

As a documentation PM, I recently took some spare time to inspect the Talk Pages feature in the MediaWiki software. As an enterprise documentation PM, I concluded that Talk Pages has its limits when MediaWiki software is used in enterprise settings (instead of public settings, for example, Wikipedia). So, I came up with a feature…

I must admit that the idea of embracing ambiguity didn’t come naturally for me at first: after all, as a computer science graduate I was trained to think binary — zero or one, yes or no, right or wrong. But when evaluating products as a PM, there is usually a spectrum of shades of gray…

It’s been exactly one year since I became a full-time PM with Microsoft. Among the plethora of things I’ve learned about products, one of the most resonating piece is about storytelling: A good story must make sense to the audience. This is harder than it sounds. The first corollary of this is that you must take…

This past week, I unlocked an important PM achievement: interviewing customers face-to-face. In fact, after 12 customer interviews in 4 days, I found it both exciting and challenging, especially for someone who hasn’t done it before. (I had had customer interviews before, but only over Skype.) Thanks to the unexpected challenges posed by these in-person…

I would like to share a new technique useful for PM’s I learned in the past week: how to use a whiteboard to validate a customer problem statement. Part 1: The whiteboarding technique The whiteboarding technique I learned is quite simple to describe: you write your problem statement on a whiteboard, and really put each…

Storytelling is everywhere! If you saw the title and opened this article, chances are you’ve been trained to accept the importance of storytelling like Newton’s Laws to physics. 100% onboard with this acknowledgement, I want to spotlight the presence of the storytelling technique in a few very different areas that I’ve been exploring. 0. A…