Top Product Management and UX Articles of 2021
3 min readDec 21, 2021
In my opinion, these were the best product management and UX articles of 2021, which is the 6th year I’ve compiled this list. I read quite a few articles, and I’m very happy to include some new authors on the list this year. I hope you all enjoy the list as we look toward a brighter 2022.
Product Management
- Product Sprawl by Rich Mironov … Read it at https://www.mironov.com/sprawl
- The Hidden World of Pricing: Uber, Trulia, Etsy, Superhuman & More by Pete Flint … Read it at https://www.nfx.com/post/the-hidden-world-of-pricing
- How Product Can (and Can’t) Speed Up Development by Rich Mironov … Read it at https://www.mironov.com/productive
- What Are Survival Metrics? How Do They Work? by Adam Thomas … Read it at https://builtin.com/product/survival-metrics-product-management
- ICED Theory — Growing Infrequent Products by Vivek Kumar … Read it at https://www.reforge.com/blog/iced-theory-growing-infrequent-products
- A Framework for Understanding Market Problems by Saeed Khan … Read it on Medium
- A Framework for Understanding Value by Saeed Khan … Read it on Medium
- Don’t Let Ego-Driven Development Drive Your Product Creation by Adam Thomas … Read it at https://builtin.com/product/ego-driven-development
- Service design for product managers by Emily Patterson … Read it on Medium
- Lifting the Feature Factory Boulder by Katie Saindon … Read it on Medium
Honorable mentions:
- The Risks of Replatforming by Rich Mironov … Read it at https://www.mironov.com/replatforming
- Your guide to SaaS packaging by Kyle Poyar … Read it on Substack
- A New Way To Tell if a Company Is Truly Product-Led by Kyle Poyar … Read it at https://openviewpartners.com/blog/how-to-tell-product-led
- The Growing Specialization of Product Management by Adam Fishman and Keya Patel … Read it at https://www.reforge.com/blog/product-specializations
UX
- Design for Safety, An Excerpt by Eva PenzeyMoog … Read it at https://alistapart.com/article/design-for-safety-excerpt
- There’s no such thing as fully automated web accessibility by Anna E. Cook … Read it on Medium
- Legibility in User Interfaces by Nitish Khagwal … Read it at https://prototypr.io/post/legibility-in-user-interfaces
- Best Practices For Modal Window Design by Nick Babich … Read it on Medium
- A Comprehensive Guide to AI Assistant Design by Nick Babich … Read it on Medium
- Getting Started with Journey Mapping: 27 Tips from Practitioners by Alita Joyce … Read it at https://www.nngroup.com/articles/journey-mapping-tips
- Designing Human-Machine Interfaces For Vehicles Of The Future by Nick Babich and Gleb Kuznetsov … Read it at https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2021/12/designing-human-machine-interfaces-future-vehicles
- Recruiting and Screening Candidates for User Research Projects by Therese Fessenden … Read it at https://www.nngroup.com/articles/recruiting-screening-research-candidates
- Dangerous UX: Consequential Options Close to Benign Options by Page Laubheimer … Read it at https://www.nngroup.com/articles/proximity-consequential-options
- Overlay Overload: Competing Popups Are an Increasing Menace by Kate Moran … Read it at https://www.nngroup.com/articles/overlay-overload
Honorable mentions:
- Why You Cannot Trust Numbers from Qualitative Usability Studies by Raluca Budiu … Read it at https://www.nngroup.com/articles/true-score
- How Many Participants for Quantitative Usability Studies: A Summary of Sample-Size Recommendations by Raluca Budiu and Kate Moran … Read it at https://www.nngroup.com/articles/summary-quant-sample-sizes
- How To Create An Engaging And Useful Chatbot by Marli Mesibov … Read it at https://www.smashingmagazine.com/2021/01/create-engaging-useful-chatbot
- Scenario Mapping: Design Ideation Using Personas by Kim Salazar … Read it at https://www.nngroup.com/articles/scenario-mapping-personas
What did I forget to list? Please leave a comment and let me know. Note: I left out a lot of great podcasts and videos, but I hope someone else can compile a list of those.
