Start with a Simple Model

For simplicity, let’s divide the web world into two buckets: marketing websites that want to sell something and application sites that are tools to get work done.

Marketing websites are necessarily graphics complex and require a deep psychological understanding of the prospective buyer. Activity centres around the call to action in order to complete a purchase transaction - turn a prospect into a customer. Visual cues and engagement are key components. You want to keep a prospect engaged as long as it takes to get a purchase done.

Application sites, however, are tools that a customer wants to use to improve their life. Simple clear work flows and quick outcomes are paramount. Once the customer has achieved their expected outcome, they want to move on to something else.

Goldilocks-CSS is designed to support application sites. There are better solutions for marketing sites. Goldilocks-CSS is opinionated and is built to create SaaS or enterprise sites cost-effectively. Key issues that a product manager has to address is consistency, accessibility, maintainability, performance and SEO:

Consistency

The user journey from first contact to outcome must be uniform. There are already many established conventions that your users have become accustomed to - don’t annoy them with experimental ways of doing things.

Accessibility

The WebAim estimates that 1 in 4 North Americans have some form of disability such as blindness, low vision, color blindness, inability to use a mouse, slow response time, learning disabilities, dyslexia, or inability to remember or focus on large amounts of information.

Furthermore, in North America, litigation against inaccessible websites has been steadily increasing to over 10,000 suits in 2020. Typical settlements range from US$5,000 to US$25,000 to the claimant plus legal fees plus development to repair the website. These are serious numbers that are increasing especially for repeat offenders.

Maintainability

Consider that a product manager is responsible for the life cycle of a product from inception, MVP, production, debugging, feature extension, maintenance during maturity and finally, product termination and wrap up.

Developers, however, enter and exit the product life cycle based on the developer’s area of expertise. Product creation requires more analytical skills. Maintenance requires more mainstream coding skills. Consequently, there will be different approaches / methods appearing in the product code producing technical debt.

This technical debt is the product manager’s problem to manage, not the developers (sadly). Minimizing this technical debt and ensuring effective maintenance requires that the product manager know what tools are available to the developer and shape the conversations to contain costs.

Performance

Developers don’t pay enough attention to the communications technology that create the TCP/IP network (Internet). Developers mostly assume that the Internet can handle everything that they throw at it. The reality is that the Internet is more rickety than people realize.

Consider that almost 20% of households in North America are in rural areas serviced by Wireless ISPs using some form of Wi-Fi technology. Average download rates are far less than what is available to their urban kin. Add Netflix style streaming video into the mix and bandwidth gets used up quickly.

But, you say, more than 50% of web traffic is now consumed by cell phones. Okay, how good is cell service in these rural areas? How much data can you move at the edge of a cell tower service area? One bar signal strength anybody? How about radio shadows in downtown urban areas where there might be no bars? Even if there is a strong signal between your phone and the cell tower, how much bandwidth is connected to that cell tower? How much data throughput do you get during busy parts of the day?

If your business is global and many of your customers are in countries less advanced, then how much data throughput can you count on and how reliable is that service? Service interruptions are more common than people realize. Video streaming also creates network bottlenecks that impact the performance of your application website.

So, as they say, size matters. Minimizing website payloads, using proper caching and incremental on-demand file loading can dramatically improve the customer experience.

SEO

A web page that follows HTML5 standards that use correct semantic layout makes it easier for search bots to read and rank the web page. Note that Search Engine Bots are fundamentally “blind” and need guides to help them understand the meaning of your web page. Better bot parsing of your web page gets higher rankings … without spending a lot on adwords to overcome loss of meaning. More bang for the buck … a product manager’s dream!

Summary

Web development today must look beyond the sizzle of the UI and the glamour of trendy code. Business drivers are intruding into the walled gardens that the technical people have erected. Customer considerations and business profitability are now driving the needs of the people that hold the "purse strings". Ignore these drivers at your own peril.