Jeff Cram started blog series called post launch paradigm with a great post called “Your website is not a project.” The article lists all the ways companies fail when they think of a website as a project to be completed.

If a website is not a project, what is it? Jeff calls it an “ongoing process.” I call it a “product.” Website product management is becoming an increasingly important service offering for Content Here and it is a natural extension of the selection work that I have been doing over the first three years of the company. During a selection engagement I create a road map of functionality to be implemented over time and set expectations for user adoption and incremental improvement. Recently selection clients have been engaging Content Here after implementation to help them progress along that road map. This feels great on a number of levels: these clients realize that their websites are not projects, they have bought in to the concept of continuous improvement, and I get to see the clients working with the products that they have selected. I even get to go through code once in a while!

I am currently providing web product management services for two clients. One client is a start-up launching a new web-based product. The other is a 100 year old newspaper. While at face value these two clients couldn’t appear to be more different, they are actually quite similar. Both are trying to [...]