Part of the Process

I am a big Werner Herzog fan. I love his movies. I love his interviews. He seems like the kind of person you would want at a dinner party. So I was intrigued when he appeared twice in my Twitter timeline this week. The first was a quote from an interview giving advice to young film makers "Technical knowledge inevitably becomes dated; the ability to adapt to change will always be more important." - Werner Herzog — Erik August Johnson (@eaj) September 6, 2016 I think that this is also great advice for developers starting out in their careers. People's problems and the work they do doesn't change as much as the underlying technology. This is a pretty simplistic example but I started running in 2009 and my experience is pretty much the same: I listen to upbeat music of my choosing I get statistics recorded of my performance I can share those statistics on Facebook or Twitter To support that I am on the the fourth device with about 6 different operat...

This week I spent half a day at the Simpli F lying Airline Marketing Innovation Lab . This kicked off the of the build-up to the Aviation Festival. There were a range of people from different airlines attending. Covering social media and marketing roles. I was part of the "disruption communications" rotation, so got to hear a range of approaches to the different scenarios.  One thing that is striking about airlines is how open they are about most operational matters - just don't ask them to share commercial details like ancillary deals! But that's probably as how airlines deal with communications or customer service is closely aligned to their brand. Even if they use the same tool or know the techniques of another airline it may not make sense in their context. EasyJet is different from BA who are different again from Emirates.  I wish I could share more from the day, but I'll leave with this. The customer service professionals at airlines aren't uncar...

Industry verticals can be big beasts. I work in "travel" or "travel tech", depending on how granular the segmentation gets. But this covers a range of people who have many different needs. It also covers many different levels of accessibility to the problem.  This week I'll take a look at a variety of blog posts in "Travel tech". Written by those involved in solving different problems in the same vertical. The experience and accessibility to the problem area isn't evenly distributed. On the one hand, many people have experienced booking a holiday or catching a taxi. By comparison not as many have communicated to passengers following an airline schedule change. Consumers making a travel booking   I would like to contrast two different approaches here. The first is the the developer with access to the API calls . It is now possible for anyone to create booking apps with relative ease. I love the fact Arun's use case was "her...

Hobbies are a great way to relax and unwind from work. They are also an excellent opportunity to practice some skills and learn about yourself.  Photography shows a clear visual representation of how practice with tools can improve output . Running I have found has taught me a couple of lessons about performance and motivation. Here are my top four Goals are important   An arbitrary goal, doesn't fit in any plan but I feel good Yes, even arbitrary goals . As long as they have a narrative that you can use as a guide. They provide a sense of progress and small achievements to celebrate.  For example as an individual runner, it makes no real difference to my life running 10km just under an hour. Or a bit faster at 51 minutes. But the difference in the sense of pride and achievement in my progress was real.  Your environment matters Periodically I pause from running then have to restart. Sometimes this also involved a house move and I need to find a new r...

The past week I have been getting through my backlog of books and reading Jolt by Justin Jackson. So without further ado, here is my first book review! Formats : ePub, Mobi, PDF Where can I get it? Directly from the author via  https://justinjackson.ca/jolt/ Who is it for? As the site says it is "A book for programmers, designers, freelancers, makers, and entrepreneurs." What's it about? How to sell and connect with your market. This isn't a guide, or even a replacement, for traditional marketing. But ways of getting people interested in your new side project or start up. This is much more about authentic community building and engagement, the selling almost seems to be a byproduct. What's the book like? Each chapter follows a similar style starting with an anecdote. Next is a description of the theory the anecdote displayed. Finally, the chapter finishes with some practical ideas. This takes the theory and presents it in ways that you can apply i...

Once you have the results from the spike you are ready to start the project. That will develop the excellent feature or product from your roadmap . How the actual project then starts can have a massive effect on the results. On that topic "Project startup. Is there an art to getting it right?" was subject in the BCS PROMS-G Spring School in 2015. One session I enjoyed was   Project Start-up - Acknowledging the Outside World . Here two members of the National Audit Office (NAO) shared observations from reviews of large projects.  Often problems in government projects are as a result of issues at the project start. They estimate that around 75% projects late/over budget. So, £300bn of tax payers money at risk (seems to be cycle where much better in election years before going up ;) The NAO approach has been to pay more attention to major projects. Looking at value for money and delivering, rather than just cutting costs. Alison and Grace then talked about the report "...

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...

In this post, I'd like to make a short plea for better product documentation. One of the entry points to the Cronofy API documentation has an explicit link "for Product Managers". This link takes you to their use cases page. Over the past few years, I have looked at plenty of API documentation. From PDFs to the current trend of a GitHub repository and wiki. This was striking in how unusual it was. But if your product is an API then why should it be? In the technology service industry should we go further? Should there also be a "for testers" link? This could be like the Cronofy Product Managers link. It could reuse existing information but highlight and target them for a specific audience. For example, take the developer sections about rate limits and validation. Then add testing tips about your API for integration testing. Stripe has good developer documentation . Yet you have to scroll down a couple of pages of information before reaching the words "...

Photo by Sebastiaan ter Burg So having a good roadmap with themes it is now important to get the work delivered somehow. Unless the developers have done something similar enough before. You need some way of discovering how to chunk up the work. What you call this doesn't really matter, but I have used the agile term "spike".  According to a comment in the Agile dictionary , this is a rock climbing term. A spike is driven into the rock face to help support the climbers. Although it does not get us closer to the top it allows us to go faster and have a safer climb. Likewise, a development spike doesn't produce the feature faster, but it provides a foundation to move forwards. In a project kick-off meeting, I remarked about how successful the spike had been. A developer there joked that I should write a blog about it, so here it is... "challenge accepted". I have been reflecting on what I feel made the spike successful. This particular...

The wrong kind of roadmap... This post was inspired by a chance conversation from a developer, from another Brighton based software product firm. This occurred during The Lean Event . The conversation started during an audience participation section of Jared Spool's talk . I told him about trying to organise around themes and in exchange He told me about a lack of connection without that. This pleased me as it meant I was on the right track, but also reminded me not everyone has it sorted ( even if you think they do from the outside ). Unknown to me at the time I was sat at the table with Roman Pilcher! (more on him later) In the past three years there have been three big influences on the way that I look at roadmaps. Well that and software development, they are (in chronological order): Gojko Adzic introduced me to Impact Mapping at one of the first Product Owner Survival Camps.  First we learned about the importance of goals. Then being able to measure the impac...

How to explain revenue mange ment to normal people... This year's TTI summer conference was around the idea of "money for nothing" - that is doing effective revenue management to get more profit without any extra product or inventory. Like most of the professions in and around travel, it should come as no surprise that data analytics and supporting business decisions effectively seemed to be the main theme of the morning.  There were three speakers covering various aspects. Deniz Dorbek from Wyndham Hotel Group started by talking about "Total revenue management" from a hotel point of view. This included exploiting spa, sports, food and beverage, meetings as well as room rates. A key point in her summary was around people in revenue management communicating and working closely with the marketing and online analytics teams to ensure success.  Dimitrios Hiotis from Simon-Kucher and Partners is from a tour operator background and introduced tools at TUI...

I have been struggling to write a summary of The Lean Event and Phocuswright Europe as they both packed in so much content, I have so many notes to read through! Taking the two together it's clear to me that they are natural complements. Indeed Umesh Pandya's talk on "Learing to build wayfindr: independant travel for blind people" would not have been out of place at Phocuswright, just as Gary Morrison's afternoon keynote on Expedia Worldwide could have been a Lean Event session on lean in the enterprise. So i'll pick a couple of sessions from each to talk about. From The Lean Event  There were so many good sessions over the two days, but I'll briefly talk about Jared Spool's keynote on "Building a winning UX strategy" for this insight on Innovation alone - innovation is the space between current experience and aspirational experience. The simplicity of looking at innovation as gap between frustration and aspiration/delight was qui...

Machine Learning Miller by Bastian Greshake When I wrote about AI and the Future last year I was reasonably excited, as an Artificial Intelligence (AI) graduate, of the possibilities and jealous of those beginning their careers in AI. Since now they have the luxury of extreme computer power and storage, 3D printing and the other abundant pieces of technology needed to create the future bounded only by our imaginations! The past couple of months though and I am noticing a bit of a trend in conference presentations (and tweets coming out of conferences) that seem to have moved a lot of the hope and hype around big data onto AI. Or more specifically machine learning. I am not going to single out any specific examples, but I feel this covers two basic areas: I don't need to know about my data or structure it to get useful information and  I won't need to configure things. because machine learning. (Lack of ) Data structure I am not sure what i...

Being into product development I am unsurprisingly fasinated by features and how other product people approach and solve problems. One particular feature that intrigues me is Twitter lists.  It is a simple feature with one configuration option - private or public - and one setting to either add people or remove them from the list. There are no big built in workflows or obvious big assumptions (at least to me) of how Twitter are forcing intending you to use their list. One of the things that I love about this is that it allows you to project your needs onto the feature and use it to solve your problem . So being interested in finding out more about this - and wanting to test out Twitter polls! - I did a quick survey to see who else uses lists I'm appearing on twitter lists and use them to segment my interests (hard when following >100 ppl!) How about you? — Neil Chalk (@_neilch) 21 February 2016 Now it's not very scientific and the results were hardly overhwelmin...