Product
Book Announcement List
I’m writing a book for innovators based on two decades of experience founding and running startups, and my experience at Amazon. I’ll publish in Q4/2024. If you are a (pre-)founder, product/tech leader, executive, researcher, business professor, or you work in [...]
Accessibility Thinking
Accessibility in tech has, for as long as I can remember, been associated with disability inclusion. For most people, the word accessible is associated with blind or hard-of-hearing people. But there’s so much more to it! Accessibility has a broad [...]
Collaboration vs. Coordination: Why aren’t you achieving as much as you could?
The word collaboration gives the warm and fuzzies to people. If you see it in a job description, you are more likely to apply. When you hear an exec talking about it, you go, “Yes! Let’s collaborate more!” Collaboration makes [...]
Budget your software initiatives, don’t estimate them
For more than a decade, I stopped using estimations for features and projects. I *budget* them. The more I do it this way, the more I realize this is the right way to build agile software. When Estimating Software projects [...]
Not all problems/opportunities are created equal
It’s easy for builders to get down on a tactical level and lose sight of the big picture and, sometimes, lose sight of something’s original purpose. As far as I observed, this is a symptom that affects most employees in [...]
A new way to define Product Vision: In the form of a question.
We all know the entrepreneur who’s doomed to fail. The one that has a solution, but the problem doesn’t exist. So over the last decade, there was a valuable shift in defining the problem first in the form of a [...]
When the technology becomes morbidly obese
Last week’s massive ransomware cyber attack (WannaCry) is the consequence of technology becoming morbidly obese. Not different from its cousin, human morbid obesity, it happens because people decide to postpone things they know they should do in the short-term because [...]
Seven Principles for a world of technology for all
Bill Gates letter to Microsoft employees in commemoration of Microsoft’s 40th anniversary is brief, but it hints at what’s to come. If you look at the progression of technology in ten year blocks (2015, 2005, 1995, 1985, 1975) you get [...]
Grab people’s attention by the symptom, not by the cure.
We might think highly of what we’ve created. We might think we have a great, unique, and revolutionary solution for a problem. We want the world to know about it. We speak in witty form, touting our approach, and… No [...]
The Art of Forgetting Your Own Product
File this under “Ignorance is Bliss” — As product builders, we have a deep understanding of how our product works, from a functional point of view (i.e. how to get a task done) to the value proposition (how to use it right [...]
The Unmet amp; Unspoken Needs of Customers
Identifying big opportunities is part science, part art. If someone pitched you in 1999 that we need to create a fully open micro-blogging platform that each person can post up to 140 characters for anyone to see, your reaction might [...]
Attention Cannibalization
If you come from a business or marketing background, revenue cannibalization is something you are familiar with. It’s the concept of a business launching a new product line that is creating revenue by taking revenue away from another product line [...]
Are you the user or the product? The tale of Parents Night Out vs. Kids Night Out.
You might have heard the phrase “If you are not paying for the product, you are the product” as a way to describe tech consumer companies where their business model is advertising. It’s a very limited — and wrong — way to explain the [...]
Which feature you’re going to remove next?
We have a problem. We think that more is better. We say that less is more, but we don’t act on it. We say we want less, but we pick the product with more. We say we’ll build a simple [...]
