Part of the Process

I've had this book on preview as each chapter came out and I've finally had a chance to read the full release version. So before it gets officially launch at MTPCon on June 13th here is my round-up... Formats : Paperback, DAISY, ePub, Mobi, PDF Where can I get it?  From  O'Reilly , Amazon or .... any good bookshop, although I think there are currently only 500 physical copies left world wide!     Who is it for?  Anyone involved in a software product development team or a startup founder thinking about which roles to hire next.  What's it about?  Product management, product leadership, not just the overlap but also the differences. How to grow your career as you grow into product leadership and how to hire the role for senior management. What's the book like?  The book is divided into three sections: The Product Leader The Right Leader for the Right Time Working with Customers, Agencies, Partners, and External Stakeholders The ...

Photo of Bellagio by me Bit of a parable about chasing silver bullets ... I have been a keen photographer since mid-2008 when I got my first SLR. Since then I have taken tens of thousands of photos, practising my technique and getting used to the tools available - for example natural light, flashes or particular lenses. Most of these photos never see the light of day and get written off as I don't like them for some reason or other, but I can't bring myself to delete them and every now and again go back and look to see what I can salvage. Each time I then fall into the trap of Gear Acquisition Syndrome ! I have been doing that recently and looking at what themes I can find in my photos and how they can be edited to fit in a series - at the same time as pricing up the latest Fuji X-T10. This time there are a couple of photos that have not only gone from the "nah" pile, but are now being shared on the Internet with other people! So, what has changed? ... The...

Waiter - B1 by Hartwig HKD If the previous episode that I shared was like a case study for my working life, the this one was like living this blog post on Gross Incompetence Implies Bad Intentions . We began the trip after an early start and arrived after 10hour flight (+5 hour time difference to add to the tiredness!) to find the room "not available" (later find due to problem rather than late checkout of previous guest). A meal was offered at this point on the hotel, but frankly with a body clock all over the place and constant grazing on an long haul flight really not needed. Betsy, the Lady from customer service then made it her mission to make up for various things going wrong, starting with catching us at the bar and converting our free meal into the mojitos and chips (fries) that we had after the complimentary "Welcome Cocktail". I'm not sure which room we should have had, but we ended up in a senior suite that although tired looking had a grea...

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...

I am currently lucky enough to be working on a project where the developers are looking into what they can learn from academic computer science and spiking various options to explore the solution space. This got me thinking to how relatively rarely you see this, in my experience programmers tend not to read industrial journals in the same way that say civil or electrical engineers might.  One thing that I would expect to see more in agile literature are Grice's conversational maxims (Grice 1975) Maxim of Quantity: Make your contribution as informative as is required for the current purposes of the exchange. Do not make your contribution more informative than is required. Maxim of Quality: Do not say what you believe to be false. Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence. Maxim of Relation: Be relevant. Maxim of Manner: Avoid obscurity of expression. Avoid ambiguity. Be brief (avoid unnecessary prolixity). Be orderly. For me the...

Woah, the past six or so months since I last posted to this blog have been a bit hectic in my personal and professional life! I still have about seven draft posts to write up. So hopefully I'm back on track for about one every week or two :-) mild warning for tenuous link and conclusions jumped to ;) Last week I had two conversations on very different subjects that boiled down to the same thing - constraining options (or ways of working) to ensure quality without change the quality of any other part of the system. The first one was entirely work related. One of our project teams is extending a feature that had been sent for design review for input, in my role as an internal technical consultant and as probably the last person to do extensive work in this area (about six years ago!) I followed up and had a chat with the team's senior dev and his team mate. We talked through the possible options and the technical debt that could be repaid. The option with greater opportunit...