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 "...

Last week was an interesting edition of the ProductTank Brighton meetup hosted by Pure360 . The topic was " Product Management in Unusual Places ". Reading blogs and books it is easy to think that Product Management falls into two distinct groups of "B2C" and "B2B". Yet there are some more interesting cases lurking in there. Faye Wakefield from Comic Relief started with a talk on "When everything MUST be alright on the night, how do you test, collect feedback and iterate?" . Her situation is unusual as the focus for the year is pretty much on supporting seven hours of television once a year. Most of the donations come during this time. The key goal is to collect donations so the culture is risk averse in experimentation. S o this is an extreme environment for risk appetite. What was similar here was small user base interacting over time a large period of time. This is not suitable for doing A/B tests, or other experiments, to discover how to i...

In this post, I'd like to make a short plea for better product documentation. One of the entry points to the Cronofy API documentation has an explicit link "for Product Managers". This link takes you to their use cases page. Over the past few years, I have looked at plenty of API documentation. From PDFs to the current trend of a GitHub repository and wiki. This was striking in how unusual it was. But if your product is an API then why should it be? In the technology service industry should we go further? Should there also be a "for testers" link? This could be like the Cronofy Product Managers link. It could reuse existing information but highlight and target them for a specific audience. For example, take the developer sections about rate limits and validation. Then add testing tips about your API for integration testing. Stripe has good developer documentation . Yet you have to scroll down a couple of pages of information before reaching the words "...

Photo by Sebastiaan ter Burg So having a good roadmap with themes it is now important to get the work delivered somehow. Unless the developers have done something similar enough before. You need some way of discovering how to chunk up the work. What you call this doesn't really matter, but I have used the agile term "spike".  According to a comment in the Agile dictionary , this is a rock climbing term. A spike is driven into the rock face to help support the climbers. Although it does not get us closer to the top it allows us to go faster and have a safer climb. Likewise, a development spike doesn't produce the feature faster, but it provides a foundation to move forwards. In a project kick-off meeting, I remarked about how successful the spike had been. A developer there joked that I should write a blog about it, so here it is... "challenge accepted". I have been reflecting on what I feel made the spike successful. This particular...