READ it because, in this blog post, Daniel Zacarias shares a new process for estimation which is based around two basic goals: Aiming for “same-sized’ backlog items and Estimating as late (and as little) as possible. The best part is that he reveals both sides of the story so you can decide for yourself if you wish to implement it.

READ it because, in this post, Josh Elman looks back to what products came out since 2003 to 2014 and what happened in 2015. He also shares what he’s excited about in 2016 which include live conversations, interest groups and better self expression. 

READ it because, in this post, Simon Cross a Product Manager at Facebook shares a list of recommended books from other PMs at Facebook. The interesting part is that these books (similar to the PM tasks) are from various topics such as fiction and war stories, design, and marketing. 

WATCH it because, in this video, Sian Townsend, Director of Research at Intercom shares details of how they conduct classic user research, such as mobile usability testing and eye-gaze tracking. It also highlights how they’ve expanded the role of research to improve the entire customer journey, from marketing material to acting on feature requests. 

READ it because, in this Medium post, Fabricio Teixeira of uxdesign.cc shares his team’s take on what the future holds for UX in 2016. They believe our fascination with pixels is almost over. He also shares their team’s highlights of 2015, including some great discoveries. 

READ it because, in this TechCrunch post, Josh Constine reveals the details of the new Facebook’s Chat SDK which enables interactive experiences and bots in Messenger for shopping, booking and much more. With this move, Facebook aims to be the the WeChat of the west as these similar services became popular first in China and Japan with products like WeChat and Line.

READ it because, in this post, you can see a list of APIs with capabilities that include image tagging, face recognition, document classification, speech recognition, predictive modeling, sentiment analysis, and pattern recognition. These APIs also scored well against a diverse set of criteria such as popularity, potential, documentation, ease of use and functionality.

READ it because, in this blog post, David Marcus, VP of Messaging Products at Facebook looks at what the Messenger platform has achieved in 2015 and what will be the focus of 2016. He believes phone numbers will disappear, threads are the new apps and his team’s goal to make delightful experiences for users. 

READ it because, in this blog post, Kevan Lee from Buffer shares what he’s found from studying Facebook posts to see what boosts engagement. Findings include the best post types, the best day and time to post, and what type of questions to ask on Facebook. It’s interesting to note that still 75% of people post directly on Facebook instead of using 3rd party apps like Hootsuite or Buffer.

READ it because, in this post from Founder Institute you can see a list of various ways Gogan Biyani found early customers and how he went about them. It includes going door to door from homes to coffee shops and bars, interviewing friends, and more.

READ it because, in this blog post, Andrew Chen, Head of Supply Growth at Uber looks into the world of growth for startups. He presents what a bad forecast looks like and shares his tips on how to fix it. The number one thing is focusing on leading indicators that are specific to your product and business, not MAU.

WATCH it because, in this video, Brian Balfour, VP of Growth at HubSpot highlights the importance of retention on all other growth metrics including top line growth and lifetime value of users. He examines how to best analyze retention and ways to improve it, including: getting your core value in front of the users as often as possible, refining features, adding retention hooks, focusing on product quality and resurrection campaigns.

TRY it because, ColorFavs will allow you to create a palette from an Image.

TRY it because, jQuery Cards is a jQuery plugin repository for the latest and coolest plugins on the web. 

TRY it because, Talkus will allow you to chat with your website users right from lovely Slack.