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
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
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
The recent flurry of excitement about OpenAI in particular and AI in general is certainly reminiscent of the early days of other technologies like web, web 2, and mobile. I suppose it is therefore predictable that we will see a hype-cycle being followed. Hard to know exactly how close we are to the top now… Continue reading A-Why
A topic which I used to find myself talking about a lot more is 'rinsing'. A few people have asked about it recently so I thought it was worth digging out some reference points and going over it again. The core idea of 'rinsing' is having a relatively rapid way to assess ideas for products… Continue reading Rinsing
I wanted to introduce a project I'm working on at the moment. A lot has been written about product, and the structures of organisation that are needed to make it work. But we tend to focus less on the interplay of the key roles which inevitably appear on the top team, the SLT, inside any… Continue reading Trio
Leading product 