A blog about the philosophy of technology
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From the Super Bowl to Super Products
Later this evening Super Bowl XLIX is played. One of the teams playing has reached it more frequently than any other team in recent decades. The Patriots are a remarkable team, that we could learn a lot from about product development and winning against the competition in a highly competitive market (disclaimer – I always…
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Product Idea Triage
When I was training to become a fire fighter in my younger days, we also had training in wartime disaster relief. This is where you learn how to set up emergency hospitals in tents and rescue injured people from collapsed and collapsing buildings while everything is on fire around you in the middle of a…
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What is a successful product?
Every company wants to be a success. One key ingredient in that is successful products. A successful product will look different to different companies, but usually it can be tracked by KPIs. For any business it is very important to find the right KPI and be wary of so called vanity metrics. What’s your “On…
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The dark side of addictive products
Are products such as Facebook, Snapchat and Flappy birds just benign habits or are they crack grade maliscious addictions? When does product “stickiness” turn from a simple habit into an actual addiction? As anyone my age growing up, Star Wars was a huge influence on my world view. I was againstof the dark side and…
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Product Roadmaps – Comet Landings or Soccer Games?
A product roadmap is a plan, but a plan can be many things. At one extreme you have the kind of planning that just brought Philae to the Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenk where everything is calculated down to the smallest detail. At the other end is the plan for a soccer game, where you may not even…
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How to manage a globally distributed product team
Building a product alone is difficult. Building it with a team is harder, but building it with a distributed team is even harder. Still, today it is rare that any company is building any product with a 100% local, in-sourced on site team. That is why one key ability in building a succesful product is…
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Is Microsoft the new IBM? a tale of two pivots
Microsoft and the advent of the PC caused the hardware giant IBM to pivot away from their original core business, hardware, to professional services. Now Microsoft itself is forced to pivot because its core business is being disrupted: it used to be consumer oriented software, but that game is now lost to Apple and Google.…
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Experimentation in product management
Traditionally new products were developed according to the founder’s idea that was written down, which the engineers built. The last few years this pattern has changed. Across the internet there has been a shift in mindset to bring the customer into what we are building. There is a growing awareness that we are wrong about…
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Big Data From a Product Perspective – Different Views
The hype surrounding big data at the moment is reaching a climax. While it is evident that we have more and more data and that there are valuable insights hidden, the situation is different if we look at big data as the products that are actually offered. If we look at big data from a product…
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Is Google Glass the Next Segway and What Can We Learn From It?
About a decade ago one of the most hyped products in Tech was the Segway. It promised to revolutionize public transportation. The hype was almost hysterical. It was impossible to get your hands on one, unless you were especially favored and it was overprized. The hype for google glass is similar today, only a select…
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