Riffs and essays on product, strategy, creativity, and innovation
Blogging pioneer Dave Winer’s blog, Scripting News, turned 30 the other day which got me thinking (even more than I have been recently) about my own online writing journey. Like a lot of people, I started writing online with Blogger and Wordpress (when you had to run it off a thumb drive), but was soon swayed by the promise of social media.
There was a post on Farcaster recently talking about the movie Dazed & Confused and the time difference between when it was set and when it was released.
I've just spent two weeks on holiday with my wife and children which was the first time I'd fully disconnected from social and news media for the best part of a decade.
Social media has devolved into an ego-boosting playground. We’ve traded meaningful connections for retweets, likes, and the illusive promise of going viral.
Facebook don’t test. Why would they? With an active user base of more than one billion, it’s all-but impossible for them to create a staging server which bears any resemblance to their live environment at all.
I’ve taken so many bullets for my development team that I’m starting to look like Butch & Sundance. A recent update to one of our systems led to a 500% increase in support tickets, all a result of issues that looked trivial on paper but had a huge impact on the customer experience.
Setting off on a journey without a map is fine, if you’re not bothered about where you’ll end up. If you’re trying to destroy a Death Star, though, then you’ve got to stay on target. The same is true if you’re trying to build world class products.
Military strategists can teach you a lot about leading a business team. Before the 1960s, there was no such thing as strategy in business. Strategy was for military historians and the future battlefield leaders being trained at academies like Sandhurst and West Point.
As former Intel CEO Andy Grove said in his seminal book High Output Management, a team will perform only if peak performance is elicited from the individuals in it.
Most Product Teams try to steer clear of Key Performance Indicators. What works for business-as-usual functions like Customer Support and Operations doesn’t always work for teams whose primary goal is getting new features into the hands of customers.