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": a few rare breakthroughs disproportionately drive returns, revealing themselves only through exploration and iteration. It is also a domain full of false friends — things that seem helpful but actually 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. Hello. 👋

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 to tra

4 steps for improvement

This is a riff of something that Everyday Astronaut got from a SpaceX interview with you-know-who. Yes, I deleted a step. Mostly posting this here so that I can refer to this tweaked version. Step 1.
We are totally (inter)dependent

This email Steve Jobs sent to himself (a year before he died at age 56), is both poignant, and (I think) relevant to today, where the rate of change is so fast, new technologies are creating new uncer
The Age of Agents – Product Dev for AI

Way back in the “nineteen hundreds” (as my kids call it), product development was relatively simple. We lived in an offline, disconnected world, where great products were largely defined b
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

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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