Part of the Process

First day of a new conference - SofaConf 2020 "A stay-at-home conference"  - that came about in reaction to COVID-19 and lockdown/travel restrictions. Overall very good content so far, lots of sessions that speak to real issues in doing product development in the real world. Slight technical issue with quality of Andy Budd's broadcast that was quickly sorted. The Secret Weapon to Finding Focus - Melissa Perri Melissa explained the build trap, where features are not seen as "what is the business value I want to provide" but rather "here are some features we want as  output". Netflix realised that they were in the build trap with Roku, and getting into competition with hardware companies that they could partner with. So they spun it out and so that they could then double down on their core competency. Now is the time to focus, what can we do to win? .... first you need a good product Strategy framework. alignment builds autonomous teams. The right level ...

Photo by  Sasha • Stories  on  Unsplash This is a follow up to my post on roadmaps and themes . I wanted to talk about experience in a B2B context with a platform product and SaaS-style model a bit more. Most articles out there tend to be from B2C or app products. So about the time I wrote about theme based roadmaps, I was using a combination of spreadsheets, Trello, and JIRA ... all OK for their intended purpose, but all have limitations around use and structure for product people.  Limitations that possibly are blockers in increasing flow and transparency in the product development process. S o, why are flow and transparency important? I think this tweet by John Cutler sums it up PM tip: Help foster an environment where great/better decisions are made...not where you are the decider.  #prodmgmt   #ux   #design — John Cutler (@johncutlefish)  October 4, 2018 The flow aspect allows feedback and course alteration as n...

This week I've been having a bit of think about products for an older audience, prompted by this tweet by Tom Peters ("The red bull of management thinking") Old people get short shrift in the marketplace. STUPID. Old people have the money—effectively ALL the money. AND, these days, years and years left to spend it. Virtually none of marketing budgets are aimed at the oldies. REALLY REALLY STUPID. #ExcellenceDividend — Tom Peters (@tom_peters) June 12, 2018 which prompted questions about how appropriate it was to target digital products and services to older people. I then contributed my (non-scientific) observation Well, just 1 data point but my grandad was in first wave of computer usage in UK accountancy and my grandmother LOVES Skype for talking to her grandchildren, has a better tablet than mine, and is always on the lookout it upgraded her phone, plus I have loads of 70+ FB friends — Neil Chalk (@_neilch) June 12, 2018 The response to that was about ho...

This is  part of a series  about my side project  Bashfully , which aims to give graduates and other new entrants to careers a seasoned professional level way of expressing themselves through the super power of story telling. Following the core principles of being discoverable, personalised and guiding in approach. Photo by  Etienne Boulanger  on  Unsplash Following on from my post on  Building an onboarding process for a green field product  we have building the experience. One of the lessons I pulled out previously was about launching something to get feedback . Even if you don't feel ready. It's easy to know the theory, but hard to put yourself out there! I'm really glad that we did as it allowed some feedback and integration issues to be tested while we polished. Background  One approach that we have taken is to slowly refactor the experience as we add functionality into the edit screens. To start with we had a l...

This is part of a series about my side project Bashfully , which aims to give graduates and other new entrants to careers a seasoned professional level way of expressing themselves through the super power of story telling. Following the core principles of being discoverable, personalised and guiding in approach. So after getting the SEO infrastructure sorted out we are back into an experiment and observe phase.  LinkedIn on Google  LinkedIn is the yard stick that we need to beat. The features that we are honing in on based on the MVP process are discoverability, customisation, and guidance. These allow us to add value as a David fighting the awesome network effect of the LinkedIn's Goliath. As an example to the left is a search result for me going to my LinkedIn profile. There are a couple of points that I like - my name, job title, location, and current employer are all easy to read. The thing that I don't like is that the description is very impersonal. Is ...

Photo by  Andres Urena  on  Unsplash This week I'm going to reflect on a year and bit of using two voice assistants - Alexa and Siri. Although much the same would apply to Google Home. I must start by saying I love Alexa and the echo dot. She does just enough and is unobtrusive enough in my life that I'm not a slave to her ... in the same way as a smartphone. Last month I wrote about one aspect that "we" have not looked into enough - privacy.  “I think it will make for a perfect alarm clock”  Trusted Reviews - Amazon Echo Spot Here it looks like part of the problem with technology is the uncritical approach of what could go wrong, in building and selling. There is no mention of privacy concerns apart from throw away comment about a "mute" feature. As well as the obvious issue of an internet connect camera in our bedrooms. I have been thinking about other issues related to a mindset used to personal in more common use areas. So I have done some di...

I was going to write about SEO and Bashfully , but is usual on software projects other things cropped up. In tandem with my day job I have mainly been thinking about maintaining delivery momentum.One of the downsides of small projects teams is the lack of capacity and time. However, the upside is focus and alignment. We manage this by: Keeping a Small backlog , we're open to opportunity but don't fill a backlog for the sake of it. Each completed feature is usually an avenue to learn and build. Referring to the vision and remembering YAGNI , there have been times that we have rejected ideas as they aren't core to what we are trying to achieve. And others that just aren't right yet (which we immediately discard, no clogging up the backlog!) Talking before starting dev, really simple but not relying on story formats or mock-ups. We talk through what we are trying to achieve and what success looks like. That's the good things that I have learned in this pha...

Photo by  Matthew Spiteri  on  Unsplash Inspired by this tweet I have decided to do a follow up to what I have learned in 2017 , with what I have "unlearned" Try it the other way around…. What have you unlearned / let go of this year? https://t.co/uzbsumUzh7 — Dan Creswell (@dancres) December 30, 2017 I really like this idea, as looking back I suspect most of the time I’ve truly learned something I’ve been able to let go. In 2018 I am going to be much more mindful about whether fear or learning drives adding new ideas/skills/practices this year. I feel that it is much easier to layer on new skills while you learn them, without thinking about what in your tool kit is no longer useful ... or at least if the effort outweighs  the benefit/impact  of not doing it. The main thing I have let go of this year has been no longer worrying about agile/scrum ceremonies and artifacts. Along with the main team I work with, I have moved to a much mor...

When pondering what to write about looking forward to 2018 I had a shortlist of three hot topics: AR Blockchain Artificial Intelligence (AI) I didn't choose AR as I think it will remain a specialist tool, although cool apps like  Star Chart  that my family love exist and Pokemon Go showed how addictive usage in games can be, it's still early days for tool kits like ARKit  to make a break through app. Blockchain is still probably at least a year off. Given the co-ordination needed in business process innovation it takes a bit longer to get into the mainstream. It appears that the processing speed is also a bit of a impediment at the moment. I am watching this field with interest though as it has potential to change the way companies process transactions. (Edit:  although this is now the subject of a 15below tech take ) Which leaves AI. I chose this not just because it's been my key interest my whole adult life, but also because it is making another bi...

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...

It's now about 4 years since I started to think that the "As a ..." user story format wasn't the best starting point for building long running products. One of the things that I found and liked was the jobs story format . The situation When collecting the data I didn't do proper JTBD interviews as such. But I did extract the info from pre-sales calls, product demos, and talking to users. Plus enriching the collected date with the known strategic goals 15below as motivation , i.e. reduce support overhead. I have adapted it a bit and marked it up for our dev teams here. But here is an example for a password reset function. Main thing is that as a B2B supplier we have four distinct groups that could appear in the stories. 15below (us as supplier) as an org,  our clients, their users,  and the client's customers  Here is a simple example for a password reset function all the words in bold are entities that have a defined meaning in a glossary, ...