Powerful structures for product-driven organisations
The old adage is that you learn something new everyday. Well I bumped into an old Conchango colleague the other day and learned about 500 new things in one hour. The one which has been rattling round my head ever since is the Winograd Schema Challenge. The challenge is to see if a computer can… Continue reading Trophy suitcases
Yes, I know, it's been a year since lesson 01. We have still been learning. Most of that time was spent working very hard on mkblv02, which unfortunately I can't yet talk about in detail here: we are working for a large company and they're still very much testing and tweaking before going live. That's… Continue reading Lesson 02
Of course innovation has been going on since there were people, sticks and fire. But, in terms of the literature, it really started for me in 1990 with Elko J. Kleinschmidt & Robert Cooper’s New Products, Key Factors in Success (with its quite marvellous cover, above. Can you imagine the brainstorm?: 'how ARE we going… Continue reading A tale of two tales
It's old news now but Ian Hickson's post on leaving Google after 18 years introduced a really a really fascinating idea. It's a great read throughout - and in places surprisingly direct and acerbic about senior Google managers - but the bit that particularly stood out to me was this: 'Google's culture eroded. Decisions went… Continue reading With benefits
Here's the first update from an experiment we're doing at Make. Believe. We started on our first project (mkblv01, in homage to Factory Records) towards the end of June. It's a start up called 'YumTuc'. And I know the founder George Thwaites because he's an old friend from Bristol University (and I mean old, that… Continue reading Lesson 01
Yesterday was 'Mind the Product' - a conference for product people at the Barbican and online. Of course, it was a hugely polished affair with a wide selection of extremely interesting speakers. It absolutely reminded me of what I like about attending conferences. A few highlights: Tim Hartford ('the undercover economist') picked out a few… Continue reading What shall we talk about?
So I'm starting something new. Or perhaps more accurately, several new things. Some of them are my things and some of them my clients'. I don't have a lot of business philosophy to dole out. I get a bit stuck after 'work hard' and 'try to be nice to people'. But there is a new… Continue reading Back to the start
With all this talk about the jobs that will be lost to AI, such as BT's perhaps-slightly-premature job hack, it might be easy to assume that the sort of roles at risk are unglamorous, middle management paper pushers or jobs in call centres. But anyone who's spent a bit of time playing with tools like… Continue reading Model behaviour
Yes, the customer wants it, but do they want it from you?
I saw today a post from Tom and Dean at Fluxx, 'You won't lose your job to AI. You will lose your job to someone who is using AI,' and read this excellent (quite long) post on NWSH which talks about what our attitude to AI should be. As David Mattin says, we have a… Continue reading Fear and AI
Leading product 