Part of the Process

Super short post to tell you about today's MIT Sloan Review hosted webinar "Five Strategies for Getting the Most From AI " based on the blog post of the same name  by Jacques Bughin. This shared the results of various surveys and research by McKinsey & Co. From this research, the highlights on developing a successful AI strategy are: you need to be digital based and native already, no leapfrogging straight from an analogy business don't try and do it on your own - they are not mature technologies yet, so use an ecosystem with startup partners and academia be bold - take the chance to reinvent your products The other theme running throughout was that when developing strategy you should think about growth as this lead to bigger profit gains than cost cutting. The advice was also to do it soon, from the companies survey there was a bigger boost from early adopters who innovated. Finally, it's about humans as much as technology. The top three reasons f...

Great look here at Product Analytics . Think I use about 5 tools altogether, and even with Google Analytics, I layer other tools on top to help make the data usable  Life Beyond Google Analytics: Pick the Best Tools for the Job Thinking about product culture started with the start of a new series on Medium from FutureLearn -  Using agile principles to develop company culture Part 1: Introduction  and it promises to be a great look at how a successful organisation in delivery can live the values of the agile manifesto. It was then a short step to  Stop Blaming, Start Innovating  a great article that teaches us that Innovation , like charity, begins at home. Thoughtworks have a similar take and say that  "Innovation is the key to unlocking a best practice culture" Thoughtworks, 2017 Next up were two posts that cover more of the nuts and bolts of Product Management work . The first was a round of top tips on  How to become a great Product Man...

Photo by  Andy Kelly  on  Unsplash This week I attended a webinar on AI in the aviation industry. I don't envy anyone in doing a summary of AI in under an hour leaving enough time for the rest webinar! IT's a shame that one bit that gets missed is the role of supporting technology or ecosystem in innovation. Looking back one of the big factors allowing AI to become useful has been the supporting technology. Namely, speed of processing power and availability of memory. Taking a different industry, the Netflix business model was helped by increasing broadband speeds, encoding formats, and again processing power. The change in the shape of overheads was probably a key enabler. Switching to an internet streaming business allowed the delivery mechanism to scale on demand. Going to the root of both of these, Get off the grass by Hendy and Callaghan had the best history that I have read of Silicon Valley. The innovation didn't come from research into com...

Chatbots are an interesting example of how supporting technology can be the catalyst for innovation. In this case smartphones with messaging apps, constant fast network connections, and an API economy. All these enable comparatively low-tech chatbots to be viable (even I wrote a production text interface to an asset DB in 2000!). So, it's not new technology that's the innovation, it's combining existing technology in ways that change behaviour. This article in the Harvard Business Review is spot on. AI systems much more like employees than traditional IT. Because it "learns" you often can't just lift the data/business rules into a new system. So you need to start thinking about "handover periods" and " training " a lot more. (Also make the jobs-to-be-done framework about hiring tools to do a job much more apt!) There is much promise in Artificial Intelligence , this article on what to think about machines that think  contains some ...

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...

In the run up to a 15below customer conference I always seem to attend another event with some similarities elsewhere. This year was no different with the Travel Technology Initiative Spring Conference in London around the topic of the "UX revolution" that has been occurring in travel over the past couple of years. The first of the stand-out talks for me were Anna Chomse, Industry Head - Travel at Google who showed the process going from exploring holiday options to booking, with the different needs at each stage. She then showed a few examples of good design reflecting those needs, and how sea r ch terms used or platform (such as mobile) can make a difference to the experience of using the site. Thomson holidays was one example of how to do it right. (The Hoover website with its search terms not in the user's language and confusing mobile experience was an example of how not to do it) Next Sam Crowther, Head of Creative at Bauer Radio then took us on journey throug...

online - simplify decision making So you've got g reat new idea s but you need to decide on what to do next. In most c onsumer product development where there is a volume of (potential) users, e.g. a popular public service such as Facebook or Amazon, this is relatively easy as you can go through an MVP process, do some lean startup experiments or even run some A/B test and make changes.  B2B product management doesn't have quite the same volume of usage or "want" being a driver, for example a SaaS platform about coordinating snow ploughs won't be able to gain much more usage during the summer months. With this in mind I am going to take a look at five things I've read this month and pick a key idea from each to build up a toolbox that can be applied. Ask the right questions , onc e we know we are solving the right problem then we are off to a good start. Keeping the bias out of questions and using techniques such as conjoint analysis to find ...

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...

Recently I've been thinking about e mpathy in product development and how often in commercial software development that you are not the user. One area that I see a lot of people focus on is separating the problem from a potential solution in requirements.  Empathy Map by Oliver Quinlan User stories especially attempt to do this, unfortunately I don't think that the "As a ..." format as practiced is helpful, from my experience it's too easy to make it a justification exercise for a solution, it doesn't really help promote empathy or show that the user has really been taken into account. (Your mileage may vary and I'd be interested to hear from anyone who thinks that the "As A ..." user story format is the best available) In Innovation is not magic   Aly and Fernanda make the point "Innovators can get excited about things they can do and can become dazzled by the splendor of  their own creation. When someone has an idea,...

I've been meaning to write about "Big Data" for a while, especially when as an Artificial Intelligence graduate I saw the Venn diagram at the start of a recent Amadeus sponsored report included both machine learning and natural language processing. Also in Bain & Company's report their research showed that analytical capability had a strong correlation with top performing companies. So I thought I'd sum up some of the articles out there on the subject at the moment. Is it just hype? Gartner's analysis is that Big Data is currently at the peak of inflated expectations and heading towards the trough of disillusionment -  and Wired's article asking Is Big Data in the ‘Trough of Disillusionment’? showed areas that is already more advanced. Is the case that as the Japan Times OpEd Deflating the hype on big data claims "big data isn’t much more than a sexier version of statistics, with a few new tools that allow us to think more broadly ab...

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 ...

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...