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Seeing the future
I found a great quote from the book Meta Products (Rubino, et al) on what makes future thinkers and innovators good at innovating, and I just had to share it: “We’ve studied the ideas of some of the well-known futurologists and innovators such as Juan Enriquez, Steward Brand and Katherine Fulton among many others, and…
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The Product Vision
The Complete Product Owner Act I: The Product This post is part of the “Complete Product Owner” series. The centre-piece for any product team – the guiding north star – is the product vision. Where are we going? Why? What do we do when we get there? How will we know when we get there?…
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Attention to detail
Homer: It’s nothing big; it’s just a lot of little things. Scorpio: Homer, you can’t argue with the little things. It’s the little things that make up life. In the biography written by Walter Isacsson, Steve Jobs recalls watching his father paint the posts for the picket fence in the yard of their Cupertino home…
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The Competitive Landscape
The Complete Product Owner Act I: The Product This post is part of the “Complete Product Owner” series. Products never exist in a vacuum. Products live in a world of competitors and partners, of peripherals, networks and enablers. Products live inside an ecosystem consisting of companies, governments, regulators and consumers. To understand what your product…
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Beyond the flat digital map: what’s next for digital map services
Babylonian map of the world, dated around 6BC. Source: Wikipedia The map has come a long way since the Babylonians carved pictographic maps of their surroundings on large chunks of stone. Ever since the appearance of the first digital maps many companies and products have appeared with the mission to produce better quality, more complete…
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Cracking eggs
They say you can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs. That’s true. You can, however, make an omelet without smashing eggs and getting egg-shells throughout the whole meal. The act of breaking the eggs open is a controlled, thoughtful act. It’s not panic. When you’re working on a new product strategy, fixing a…
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The Product Definition
The Complete Product Owner Act I: The Product This post is part of the “Complete Product Owner” series. A product owner is the owner of a product: so it makes sense to start our exploration of the product owner role with defining the actual product. What is it? What does it do? What value does…
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When you want something done right…
“Well, you know what they say… when you want something done right, you have do to it your bloody self.” My dad used to say this all the time. In fact he still does. How often have you heard it said? A key turning point for a new manager is, I think, the realisation that…
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The Complete Product Owner
The product owner is possibly the most misunderstood, or at least the the least understood, role in agile software projects. Just about everyone you talk to, whether a current practitioner of the role or just someone who works in agile projects, will give you a slightly (or greatly) different description of the role, its scope…
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Good Design is…
In the 1970’s renowned German designer Dieter Rams defined ten design principles that embodied his view of design and product development. He said: Good design should be innovative. Good design makes a product useable. Good design is aesthetic design. Good design makes a product understandable. Good design is honest. Good design is unobtrusive. Good design…