Part of the Process

Slightly delayed post due to going on holiday! My week's reading started with Hofstadter’s Law and Realistic Planning By Jane Collingwood where she outlines how "pessimistic-scenario generation is not an effective de-biasing technique for personal predictions .”  this got me thinking about how much of what we do in our lives is shaped by the people who provide us with the services and products that we use. This article by Monzo is a perfect example of ethical product design should be done. They have thought about what their mission is, who their users are and what issues they might face. Compare and contrast with stories of how Uber use psychology to exploit drivers to see the negative face of "disrupting industries" when that is the sole aim.  Again working conditions can have an impact even in subtle ways. There is a case here for Product Design and OS professionals to   provide more support on reporting usage to users . Computers are much better at this...

So, I've mentioned my side project a couple of times I should start to elaborate a bit more. I won't share the name or details just yet. Not because I'm worried about someone stealing it . Rather the idea, hypothesis, and validation are the next instalments of this story. When embarking on this journey as a side project it had to be fun and interesting. A chance to try a different experiment to my day job. Different tech stack, different tools. While being useful to people. So I set to work with a collaborator on something to meet these needs and we discussed a basic idea. The first thing was creating a Trello board. One of the first cards was "think of a name". Next came looking at the front-end stack that was lightweight and easy. A PaaS provider that had a free option and integration with source control. This also needed a free private repo option. And it was vital to have a pipeline that built and deployed a working version of the code on commit. Luckily...

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 ...

Moleskin Smart Writing Set   As a product person, I am always thinking about unmet needs, ways of working, and pain points. One of those in my professional life is taking notes. I have tried Evernote on a tablet, into Word on a laptop but always come back to pencil and moleskin notepad. This then is a bit of faff in finding notes at a later date or sharing with colleagues. Scanner apps that create PDFs help, but I usually forget and take a photo that I then ping off by email. Imagine my excitement when I heard about the reMarkable tablet in development: The paper tablet for people who prefer paper. Here to replace your notebooks, sketchbooks and printouts. Paper-like reading, writing and sketching with digital powers. Sounds great! This has the potential to do for note taking what the Kindle did for eBooks. But it is still only on pre-order and my birthday was this month. So for around the same amount of money I have got two tools. The Moleskin Smartpen with "pap...

I started this blog over 5 years ago now and it feels like an exciting new chapter in my life is beginning, so thought I share some of this and what it might mean for my humble blog. I started to write about my work and how what I saw measured against the theory. Although w ork is an exciting place at the moment. With three projects due to go live in the next three months that will complete the vision that has guided me in the past 2 years. I won't write about them too much here as we now have a much more active work blog that I'm scheduled to write on. Some of the things that we have discovered during this work will lead to new features that I'd also love to talk about, but need to keep under wraps until we are ready to reveal them! So what will I be writing about? Well, more book reviews and more meetup reports. Also something personally exciting as I am starting a side project that allows me to apply lessons learned from HBX CORe , Impact Mapping , Jol t by Justin J...

BOOK REVIEW: Fifty quick ideas to improve your user stories by Gojko Adzic and David Evans It has taken a while since my last book review to get the time to do much reading with moving. But here is my round up of "Fifty quick ideas to improve your user stories" by Gojko Adzic and David Evans Formats : Paperback, ePub, Mobi, PDF Where can I get it? From Leanpub , Amazon or any good bookshop.   Who is it for? Anyone involved in a software development project working in an iterative manner. As long as they understand some of the basics around user stories, e.g. they know what INVEST stands for. What's it about? As the title suggests "how to improve user stories", but it is a bit more than that. It covers the whole process including planning and iterative delivery activities. What's the book like? Each double page spread follows a similar style starting with an introduction to a new tip. Often illustrated with an anecdote fro...

Looking at my notes I forgot to blog about November's meetup "From Startup to Corp: The differences, and how to adapt to the change ." sponsored by 15below . There were three very good talks on the difference between very small companies and massive ones . Some highlights from the three talks: Don't feel like you have to aim for moonshots if you aren't Google Ventures - you only get a limited number of bets compared to GV, so a 10% incremental improvement every year is nothing to be ashamed of ! Don't feel too embarrassed by your peers - if you start of at the same time as JustEat but have a much more niche market it's OK to have more modest growth . Just because you can see everyone doesn't mean that they know what you are doing - large organisations have the privilege of knowing communication is poor so actively do things to encourage it, in a small startup you have to make ensure people are informed . Large organisations ca...