Age of Product’s Food for Thought of January 24th, 2016 covers: Minimum viable products best practices, the misallocation of talent for yet another on-demand service, how not make irrelevant products, agile meets “good enough” philosophy, agile estimation techniques, what is technical debt, the failure of side-projects, patterns of disruption, the year of WeChat commerce, scaling a product from the niche to the masses, and Silicon Valley’s unicorn valuation problem.
: A Minimum Viable Product Is Not a Product, It’s a Process
It’s the same story again and again. First, a team comes up with an idea. Next, they build a minimum viable product (MVP) as a proof of concept, spending a lot of time arguing about which features to include or exclude from the MVP. Finally, if the MVP works well, they plan on building the full, mature, stable product.
: The Instant Gratification Economy
Millions of people-hours of effort, imagination, ideas, plans…a generation’s most talented engineers and managers, thinkers and visionaries, entrepreneurs and academics mopping their brows working furiously on the noble challenge of…curing cancer? fixing climate change? extending the human lifespan? mining asteroids? eradicating global poverty? Nope….same day delivery.
(via Co.Design): How To Avoid Making Products No One Wants
Product thinking gives designers the ability to build the right features for the right people. It helps solidify understanding of the user experience as a whole; not purely as the design of features. It makes sure designers tackle real user problems and reduces the risk of building something nobody wants.
(via Medium): Are You Being Too Agile?
Agile turned me from a chronic futurist into a raging pragmatist, which was quite a turnaround. I now often refer to myself as “a reformed perfectionist”, as I really do have an innate desire to do everything immaculately, but through learning how useful software can be built one highest-priority step at a time.
I’ve come to realise that “good enough for today” is a great motto for most facets of life.
(via Scrum Alliance): Agile Estimation Techniques
One of the key advantages of adopting an Agile work flow is the team's ability to estimate new work effectively.
(via Medium): Towards an understanding of technical debt
The term is being abused, or at least dangerously overloaded. There are at least 5 distinct things we mean we say “technical debt”.
(via Wistia): Why Most Company Side Projects Are Destined to Fail
CEO Chris Savage the failure of the "50 Grove" side project – a video production market-place – within Wistia.
“We didn’t have the time or means to give 50 Grove what it needed, so the enormity of the project put us all under a lot of strain.”
(via Deloitte Univ Press): Patterns of Disruption Case Studies
Disruptive innovation doesn't just happen at random. History shows that it’s possible to identify specific patterns of disruption—disruptive strategies that, when combined with certain marketplace trends, can topple industry incumbents.
(via Medium): 2016 will be the year of conversational commerce
Nearly a year ago today, I wrote a post inventorying the forebears to what I believe has become the dominant trend of consumer computing apps in 2016, a trend that I dubbed Conversational Commerce and have tracked with the hashtag #ConvComm.
(via Version One Ventures): Moving from the niche to the masses
But, the key question is: after you nail down a niche, how do you expand into the mainstream and capture a bigger piece of the pie? There are three strategies…
(via Forbes): Silicon Valley’s $585 Billion Problem
VCs have pumped up the value of the “unicorn” startups. Now tech IPOs are in trouble. Good luck getting out.