Part of the Process

Three varied viewpoints and interesting talks at tonight's ProductTank, around what Product Managers usually forget. First up was Mark Rodgers sharing how they overlooked things in the first iteration of the new image search functionality at Brandwatch. I can completely relate the situation in my own work. That thing where when you see the product with real data and a real usage situation you suddenly notice something and think "how did I miss that?!", since it now seems so obvious. This made me feel a bit better that if someone, as experienced with Mark and with his team at Brandwatch, can make that mistake it's not surprising I do. Next was Ben Sauer from ClearLeft. His talk was a more abstract look at companies culture. For example, how it is all around us but that we don't notice it. And consequently (or maybe because of?) we don't discuss it enough. He recommended a couple of books to read Creativity, inc  by Ed Catmull  and  Nonviolent Communi...

Looking at my notes I forgot to blog about November's meetup "From Startup to Corp: The differences, and how to adapt to the change ." sponsored by 15below . There were three very good talks on the difference between very small companies and massive ones . Some highlights from the three talks: Don't feel like you have to aim for moonshots if you aren't Google Ventures - you only get a limited number of bets compared to GV, so a 10% incremental improvement every year is nothing to be ashamed of ! Don't feel too embarrassed by your peers - if you start of at the same time as JustEat but have a much more niche market it's OK to have more modest growth . Just because you can see everyone doesn't mean that they know what you are doing - large organisations have the privilege of knowing communication is poor so actively do things to encourage it, in a small startup you have to make ensure people are informed . Large organisations ca...

Last week was an interesting edition of the ProductTank Brighton meetup hosted by Pure360 . The topic was " Product Management in Unusual Places ". Reading blogs and books it is easy to think that Product Management falls into two distinct groups of "B2C" and "B2B". Yet there are some more interesting cases lurking in there. Faye Wakefield from Comic Relief started with a talk on "When everything MUST be alright on the night, how do you test, collect feedback and iterate?" . Her situation is unusual as the focus for the year is pretty much on supporting seven hours of television once a year. Most of the donations come during this time. The key goal is to collect donations so the culture is risk averse in experimentation. S o this is an extreme environment for risk appetite. What was similar here was small user base interacting over time a large period of time. This is not suitable for doing A/B tests, or other experiments, to discover how to i...

fishbowl jump by Kay Kim A few days ago Timehop popped up a link to Brighton: The UK's Silicon Valley or Just a Feeder City for London? that was written a year ago and the situation has changed that much (although 15below could be another name to go with Brandwatch! ;-)) The story laid out was quite familiar, very few of my friends at university stayed in the area though and I moved out for 4 years getting experience in ... you guessed it in London! It also chimes in with the effects of innovation systems talked about in the book Get off the Grass: Kickstarting New Zealand’s Innovation Economy by Shaun Hendy and Paul Callaghan. In Chapter 3 of Get off the Grass the authors tell the story of the origin of Silicon Valley and how agglomeration had made it successful, this area previously had an industry manufacturing valves that had powered electrical circuits before transistors. The story of Silicon Valley nicely illustrates the three key aspects of the a...