BLACK SWAN FARMING

Tilt the playing field of product development: discover, nurture, and speed up the delivery of value

Product development is the domain of "Black Swans": returns are dominated by a small number of outsized successes that only reveal themselves in the doing. It is also a domain full of false friends — things that seem helpful but slow you down and spin your wheels. Avoiding these traps is half the battle.

Black Swan Farming is about understanding these fundamentals, and making them work for you — to build products customers love and teams love building.

Written with aroha ❤️, by Joshua Arnold , standing on the shoulders of giants...

Kia ora. Merhaba. Hello. Hola.

Black Swan Farming is all about developing products that customers love and teams love building. To
Cost of Delay

“Cost of Delay is the golden key that unlocks many doors. It has an astonishing power

The Age of Agents – Product Dev for AI

In a world before software started eating the world Product Development was more simple: Focus on the Customer Experience (CX) and success would eventually follow. Then, along with the rise of the Int
Ackoff is Awesome

The late Dr Russell Ackoff had an incredible ability to see and say things that capture so much. For instance, anyone who’s worked in the public sector should recognise this one: “A bureau
Projects in Name Only (PINO)

When people talk about “projects” it’s sometimes hard to nail down what they actually mean. Some seem to refer to any loosely organised or directed effort toward a goal as a “p
Local vs Global Prioritisation

TL;DR: neither are a solution on their own. Whenever you have more than one team (in which case Global effectively equals Local) you need both. This post comes as a train of thought after reading and
Faster learning, FTW

It’s taken much longer than I had hoped (because we often don’t share and learn from the negative examples in this industry), but I feel like the end of SAFe is coming:
When will it be done?

This from @sbhigham is pretty accurate. Double the timeframes if your org has more than ~50 people in Digital/Tech. Double it again if you have over 250. This is why I advise orgs to not forecast any
Product Management “Via Negativa”

Love this Twitter/X post from Pawel Huryn. It’s an excellent summary of a “via negativa” exploration of the role of Product Management as part of the whole Product Development ecosys
Partnering with Platform Providers

Loads of organisations are heavily reliant on using platforms provided by others. But how to work in partnership with those Platform Providers can be difficult. Having been on both sides of this in my
“The Business” is BS

A bit of a rant from Threads: Post by @blackswanfarming View on Threads “The Business” – this is a phrase that should be used sparingly in Product Development, if at all. How does it show
InfoSecurity for Financial Services

This may seem a bit off topic, but losing your life savings due to a phishing attack that drains your accounts is a Black Swan event for many folks. Even though phishing attacks are common enough to r

Themes

Prioritisation 29

Cost of Delay 27

Product 22

Flow 19

value 18

Deliver Early and Often 16

Asymmetric Payoff 15

Urgency 15

CD3 13

Strategy 12

Decisions 10

Discovery 10

Conference 9

Systems Thinking 9

Duration 7

JTBD 7

Uncertainty 7

WSJF 7

Complexity 5

Estimates 5

Fuzzy Front End 5

Design 4

Emergence 4

Information 4

Systems 4

Approval 3

Black Swans 3

Cycletime 3

Delivery 3

Disruption 3

HiPPO 3

Increments 3

Planning 3

Funding 2

Iterations 2

Mindset 2

Breaking Work Down 1

Connect

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Cost of Delay – Pages – Posts

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