Kia ora. Hello. 👋
Black Swan Farming is all about developing products that customers love and teams love building. But with is a unique angle: the need to focus on generating unexpected and outsized wins, and giving them a chance to grow.
Most of the value in building products isn’t spread evenly. It’s concentrated in a few ideas, a few experiments, a few moments of insight. And those ideas rarely look like winners at first. They often look wrong, weird or risky. These are the “Black Swans” of product development.
And there are no sure things. Our best bet is to focus on tilting the playing field of product development: to discover, nurture and speed up the delivery of value.
What’s with the “Farming”?
The name “Black Swan Farming” comes from Paul Graham’s essay about how counterintuitive investing in startups is. His experience at Y-combinator taught him two things about ideas: the returns are heavily concentrated in a very small number of wins, and; the best ideas often look like bad ideas at first.
To succeed, you have to ignore the rules of thumb that actually point you in the wrong direction. This is also true for ideas, innovation and product development in your organisation. Like it or not, the returns tend to be heavily concentrated in small number of wins – for which the value and urgency is often surprising
This site is a collection of articles and ideas, where I’ve worked to explain what I see and do. Sharing the lessons, frameworks, and practices that make that possible:
- How to see the hidden opportunities others overlook.
- How to structure work so you can learn fast, discover what delivers real value, and avoid wasting time on what doesn’t.
- How to embrace asymmetric payoffs, where the potential benefits far outweigh the cost.
What’s common is that we need to understand what is fundamentally different about Product Development. Then tilt the playing field to improve our chances of success.
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Got a question? Need some help? Or just want to say hi 👋, hit me up on LinkedIn.