There’s been quite a lot of kerfuffle in New Zealand about the fact that Peter Thiel has been granted Citizenship. Given his background in PayPal, Facebook and other startups, I …
Bezos preaching on Black Swan Farming
From Amazon’s “2015 Letter to Shareholders“: To invent you have to experiment, and if you know in advance that it’s going to work, it’s not an experiment. Most large organizations …
Product Development Payoff Asymmetry
I recently gave a talk at a conference about “Tilting the playing field in product development”. I went through a number of “False Friends” – things that seem like a good …
Jobs to be done
What “job” do customers hire your product or service to do? A lot of the time, customers aren’t actually buying what you think they are. Let’s take Flappy Bird as …
Risk, Uncertainty and Black Swans
Developing new and improved products and services is an interesting problem space. Part of what makes it interesting is the presence of risks, uncertainties, and the possibility of Black Swan events. …
Google, on moonshots
From a BBC interview with Astro Teller, “Capitain of Moonshots” at Google[x]: You must reward people for failing, he says. If not, they won’t take risks and make breakthroughs. If …
“We want to make our software development cheaper”
The desire to make software development “cheaper” is something I hear a lot. It’s also usually a red herring. The irrelevance of “cheaper” becomes apparent when you start asking what …
Information Discovery Value
One of the components to consider when trying to understand Cost of Delay is the value of Information Discovery. This can take on two basic forms: knowing which paths will …
How to make billions of dollars from spare bits
< div>Happy 20th Birthday, SMS. Wow, haven’t you grown?! Sure, you’re still only 160 characters long, but none of us would have guessed 20 years ago how much a part of …