Part of the Process

In the past month I've been reading a lot and two particular articles caught my eye. The first article I found interesting was a case study by Suleimanagich  (2013) of how even successful implementations of new technology, e.g at the project level, doesn't guarantee success if the company strategy isn't correct.This is the story of how Kodak had invented a digital sensor before any digital cameras were available on the market. This seems to be a common assessment of Kodak's fortunes - they slipped up by not pursuing the innovation - for example "Kodak's Missed Opportunities" by Bergstein (2012) or The Economist's (2012) "The last Kodak moment?". So at this point in my journey I was thinking, why did Kodak fail? Which brings me onto the second article I found interesting this month. Avlesson and Spicer (2012) puts forward a stupidity-based theory of organisations, could this offer an explanation on why Kodak failed? Did Kodak suffer ...

The Amadeus blog recently posted an interesting take on the fad "less is more" in a post entitled  Why the ‘less is more’ concept in software design often falls short of its intentions . At first I agreed wholeheartedly as the title and intro had lead me into some nice confirmation bias ("grrr! gosh darn those gurus selling us different flavours of snake oil every year!"). Then I thought about it a bit more and the new feature being discussed was meeting a need; people wanted it and were pleased it was now present. That made me think that there was possibly some effective product management going on .. lo and behold the post was written by a product manager! This sentence was the most telling : "how we define the worth of adding more features. For me, it is worth it if you are doing something for the human being who will be using the feature." So a focus on user need is important, as if by magic later that day I read the brilliant post   How to Work...