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In the recent fantastic piece on The Verge covering interviews with the top brass behind the Amazon Kindle, the ultimate product vision behind the Kindle series of eReaders is articulated beautifully. From the article: For Amazon, paper is more than a material for making prototypes. It’s the inspiration for the Kindle of the future: a…

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The Product Manager isn’t just a middle-man. If you’re a PM, and your answer to every question is: “I don’t know, I need to go and ask ___”, then I’m afraid you’re doing something wrong. You might not be able to give engineering estimates, but you should know your team and your technology well enough…

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In case you missed it (although the tech press have had little else to report on today, it seems), some guy launched a kickstarter project with the ambitious goal of raising $10 to make a potato salad. (Link) The project description: “I’m making potato salad. Basically I’m just making potato salad. I haven’t decided what…

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I came across two interesting pieces of Microsoft news today. Firstly, Microsoft have bought the company behind a Visual Studio plugin called UnityVS which enables developers using the cross platform game engine, Unity, to write and debug their Unity programs directly within Visual Studio. Unity has support for all the major mobile operating systems, and…

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The newly launched Amazon Dash device (link) is a single-purpose hardware device that allows users to scan the items in their fridge or pantry that they’re running low on, and an order is automatically sent to Amazon’s fresh grocery service. I find it very interesting because it is representative of how you can now build…

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There are lots of lessons behind the curtains of the $19 BN Whatsapp acquisition by Facebook. There’s lessons about the scale and value of social, about the continually evolving mobile platform. There’s of course the rags-to-riches story of the founders going from food stamps to being billionaires in just a few short years, and a…

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There are many frameworks available to help product teams develop and express a customer value proposition. One of my favourites is this Value Proposition Canvas, which was based on the canvas from the creators of the Business Model Canvas. Expressing the proposition on this canvas is a great way of forcing you to think through…

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Last week Facebook announced the new Paper app – an app that turns your Facebook news feed into your own personal newspaper. At the same time they announced Facebook Creative Labs and promised further small, single-purpose apps. This is all part of a growing trend from Facebook to un-bundle their core mobile product/service into smaller,…

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I’ve been thinking a lot about the future of location-based services lately. The first thing that occurs to me: nobody talks about location-based services anymore. There are just ‘services’. It occurs to me that Location, in and of itself, is not an ‘experience’, per se. It is an enabler of experiences. Allow me to explain.…

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Benedict Evans, the well-known mobile industry analyst, has posited that we actually have no idea what it will mean in five years to “install an app on my smartphone”. The market and the technology that powers it is changing and evolving so fast that there is no way to know how the industry will look…

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