Black Swan Farming is all about developing products that customers love and teams love building. To do this, we help organisations tilt 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
What do we do?
We tilt the playing field in three key ways:
1. Assessment & Advice
We seed change in your organisation by engaging with your leadership and teams to understand your context and the outcomes that matter for you. Then we help you to study the system, collecting and analysing from a number of key perspectives: the value delivered, the flow of work, and the speed of critical feedback loops. Together we then help you design a set of initial steps to get started on a journey to discover better ways of working.
2. The Farmyards
We help you bring your best ideas to life – and quickly discover the Black Swans
Need to quickly develop or test an idea or concept? The Farmyard is for you. We’ll help you to understand the problem and test potential solutions – improving your chances of discovering product-market fit. We have kick-ass development teams in London, San Francisco and other slightly more exotic places with all the skills to quickly develop products and services that users will love.
3. Learning
We help you to learn and grow by showing you better ways to approach product development. Our training and workshop events are designed for people who are leading product development work: Product Managers, Product Owners and Project Managers. We teach new skills that will help your teams discover, nurture and speed up the delivery of value.
- Leading Product Development
- Product Owner Training Programmes
- Cost of Delay Workshops
- Designing Effective Experiments
- Jobs-to-be-Done & Customer Research
What’s common through all of this is that we help you understand what is fundamentally different about Product Development. Then tilt the playing field to improve your chance of success.