Tag: Asymmetric Payoff

Citizen Thiel spots an Asymmetric Opportunity

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 don’t think it’s that controversial that NZ would want to attract someone like Thiel to get involved in our economy. I also don’t think someone’s…
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 embrace the idea of invention, but are not willing to suffer the string of failed experiments necessary to get there. Outsized returns often come from…
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 idea, but actually lead us into trouble. The last of these was “Certainty”. The story here revolved primarily around the stochastic nature of product development –…
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 an example. One job to be done — that this fiendishly difficult game did beautifully — was to provide a simple, fast mechanism to brag…
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. For some category of risk, we can calculate the probability. The roll of dice. A roulette wheel. The lottery. Because we can calculate the probability…
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 you don’t reward failure, people will hang on to a doomed idea for fear of the consequences. That wastes time and saps an organisation’s spirit.…
“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 is it exactly that they would like to be cheaper. Before long you’re dividing the cost by meaningless measures such as number of projects, features,…
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 likely lead to success, and; knowing which paths will likely lead to failure. What would it be worth to simply have better knowledge – not…
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 our lives you would become – the most widely used data application in the world with 3.6 billion active users. By utilising a bit of