Turbo wireframes for Lean Product Management

You are working with your team to define how your product will work or looking for mockups from the designers and you need to show them what you are looking for. Until a few years ago there were few choices and a lot of people ended up picking one of their favorite wireframe tools or used more basic tools to design the product. Tools like Visio or perhaps Omnigraffle were preferred for those with a more technical background and tools like Photoshop, Illustrator were favorites of those with a more design aesthetic. Others preferred using PowerPoint or other presentation tools to get their point across.

However, none of these are especially good at building a prototype that will help explain the product in detail and even help test/sell it with potential clients/customers. Now, with the advent of Lean practices and Agile development being applied to the software world it is the product manager that has to stay on top of what the customer wants and what engineering needs to deliver. This is a difficult task, no doubt but it is one that can be made much more efficient by using some of the latest tools for wireframing and prototyping.

This discussion is mainly for the product managers out there that are looking for a tool that they can use to quickly demonstrate the existing or new features of their product. Designers might want to use these products too but I’ve found designers much prefer the Adobe suite (or similar) in order to build out a prototype. So for those of you stuck in the middle between Sales, Designers, Engineering and other stakeholders that want to communicate quickly to all parties here are some choices:

• Pencil Free
• Balsamiq $79
• Axure $599
• iRise $6995

They are listed in order of least complicated to most complicated or less functionality to most functionality. My personal favorite is Axure - a tool that provides me a means of writing a detailed product specification and a fully functional prototyping tool in one. For the purposes of this article I’ve investigated iRise as well - it looks like a great tool but I believe it to be out of reach for most people due to its price.

Pencil is amazing in what it offers in a Firefox plug-in and I love the interface for Balsamiq, both of which are free or very cheap wire framing tools. So, I’m biased as I see Axure as being the winner by far - yes the $599 price tag is a little steep for some folks and a MAC version is still not available but the pros outweigh the cons IMHO.

Abstracting this a little, let me explain what this tool and perhaps others that I haven’t seen need to do in order to add real value to a product manager. In no particular order:

- Produce functional prototypes easily and without additional software
- Produce specification documents that if followed should define how that product/feature or service is to be delivered (a requirement in some organizations)
- Enable Customer Development professionals (product managers or sales perhaps) to have hands-on conversations with clients/customers without engineering involvement (probably the biggest win of all)
- Allow rapid testing with end users of A/B scenarios without engineering involvement
- Provide the means whereby learnings can be documented, reviewed and approved quickly
- Facilitate engaged conversation on a feature/set of features or roadmap within your teams

It may seem from the list above that I’m trying to avoid the use of engineering resources. That is not the case, but engineering resources (like everything else) should be used efficiently. So, I just want to make sure that when you employ engineering resources you have learned as much as possible before you need a full working version to learn more. Building something that isn’t what the customer wants is one of the biggest wastes in software projects and one that in lots of cases can be avoided.

So, find a tool that you are comfortable with that helps you solve these problems and your life will be so much better