Brandon Satrom

Brandon Satrom is the Director of Product Management for Telerik, the world’s greatest developer tools company. An unabashed lover of the open web, Brandon loves to talk about HTML, JavaScript, CSS, open source and whatever new shiny tool or technology has distracted him from that other thing he was working on. Brandon has spoken at national, international and online events, and he loves hanging out with and learning from passionate designers and developers. He is the author of two books, the latest being “Building Polyfills” from O’Reilly. Brandon lives in Austin, TX with his wife, Sarah, and three sons, Benjamin, Jack and Matthew.

For more, keep up with Brandon on Twitter as @BrandonSatrom.

Presentations

UX Camp 2014: Prototype Camp

Goodbye Specs, Hello Prototypes

As a developer, architect and now Product Manager, I’ve spent most of my career trying to turn software ideas into reality. For many years, I worked on teams that adhered to the Way of the Functional Spec, an ancient practice whereby a product leader spends countless hours producing a document that uses text to describe the future state of software, only to see that document become useless by the time the first line of code is written.

Over the years, I’ve experimented with all of the agile and Product Management techniques designed to help drive down uncertainty in software and foster clear, high-fidelity collaboration between product leaders, designers and engineers. Some have been useful, others not.

About two years ago, a few product teams at my current company began toying with the idea of replacing our existing spec work with prototyping. Instead of working with text-based docs, a PM would work with an Interaction Design to create an interactive piece of software that conveys the vision for a product or feature.

This was one of the best decisions we ever made. High-fidelity prototyping is now a critical component of our product workflow, and we’ve become addicted to using these assets for collaborating with customers and internal teams alike.

In this session, I’ll will share how one software company abandoned functional specs and PRDs for the green pastures of prototyping. Using a case study format, I’ll share challenges we overcame, victories we experienced and tips for embedding a full-on Prototyping workflow in any software organization.