Part of the Process

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 "...