Part of the Process

Last night was the latest installment of ProductTank in Brighton . We were lucky to have an overview of continuous discovery from Teresa Torres. She started off by discussing how discovery and delivery should be more intertwined and not separate phases - this can be a problem with “dual track” as it can be impression it gives. She then asked " Continuous discovery ... are you really doing it like this?" Or is it research with a project mindset? Getting better week after week The question to guide setting up product discovery is “How do we get better week over week” We make product decisions every day, so if we want to be truly customer centric then we need to engage with our customers every week so that our decisions are infused with their input. Need to avoid cognitive bias because we are thinking about product all day every day, check the decisions with what our customers expect.  Shooting here for co-creating with a product mindset. Otherwise you...

My week has been book-ended by Meetups! To finish off was the  ProductTank Brighton session looking at what developers need from product people and how changes impact them. Dorothy Wingrove kicked off the evening with a lightning talk on ' How to Build a World-Class Rock Paper Scissors Bot '. Dorothy went through the concepts needed to build a bot to play the well known game. As she showed the very simple code needed to execute each strategy - each on one slide - and going to meta-strategies she showed how very complex and adaptive behaviour can be built. This was the best illustration of the impact of "just one small change" I have seen. With each change having a knock on effect needing a further change. I'd recommend anyone responsible for managing the software development process who doesn't have a technical background to see this talk if you get the chance! (thanks to Craig for booking her in) Next was the "main event" of the evening a pan...

Last night I attended the first WordUp Brighton event of 2018 . Tammie Lister talked about the new WordPress editor, Gutenberg, and Dave Potter gave a talk on security. This was outside of my usual bubble as I'm making more of an effort in 2018 to explore the local "tech scene" outside of day-to-day concerns. Dave started off with a great look at "security". This wasn't the talk I was expecting from the title but brilliant. I had initially thought it would be about things like hacking, but it was more to do with the security of business processes. So important things like back-up and retention strategies, which introduced the hot topic of GDPR! How hosting impacts those. Also other things to look out for in hosting that can impact your business continuity, like what do hosts do when they see network spikes ... will they just take down your instance or a whole server? Tammie then did an intro to a new WordPress editor from Project Gutenburg. This look...