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Tuesday 8 December 2009

The balance of great products and rapid evolution

I wanted to link to Andrew Chen's recent article, Does every startup need a Steve Jobs, because it's a useful discussion about the differences between technical feasibility, design-led desirability, and business viability, a triplet productized by IDEO, and one that we also identified a decade ago at Razorfish (wow, it's really a decade ago!). As for the question in the title - no, I don't think that's the only way to create greatness, though clearly if you have Steve at your disposal, you could do worse than have him run everything. :)

Seriously though, at least in this consumer-targeted software business that I'm familiar with, it's crucially important to have those three principles well represented at every level of the business. Sure, it's possible to create a successful business with just two or perhaps even just one of those viewpoints, especially if you can get away with copying someone else but just doing it with better economics. However, to create something new and be successful, it'd be a mistake to ignore business, technology or design. Sadly, of the three, design is the one most commonly ignored. According to this interview of Ken Auletta of his new book, even Google ignores it, Marissa Mayer notwithstanding.

Anyway, what I'm particularly interested about is how can you marry great design with incremental, rapid iterations on the market. I'm pretty sure I've understood how to iterate out in the open with regards to technical work, and relatively comfortable with iteration regarding business aspects. I've yet to come up with a really convincing argument for iteration and design on a very granular basis - well, I can convince myself, but I'm having less success convincing designers. :) If anyone cares to share their secrets, I'd love to hear more.

Tuesday 26 February 2008

A look back at GDC, and forward to ION

Much to my regret, I had to miss GDC San Francisco this year, but I've been following with interest some of the session transcripts and got feedback from my colleagues who just returned. One thing I noted in particular was Raph Koster's comments on the iteration speed of web developers (measured in days  or weeks typically) vs that of game studios (where the difference might be six months for a casual Wii title and four years for a triple-A PS3 title -- of course iterating inside the development team, but with little consumer feedback). It seems Raph has taken a lot of this onboard in the development of Metaplace, as seen in their pre-release "postmortem" session.

Of course, I noted this because this pretty much reflects how we (Sulake) have been modeling not just our development process but our business management methods driving that development. That is, make the iteration cycle ever faster, learn to do big changes in very, very small chunks, incorporating metrics- and testing-based learning all through the cycle.

Also, I'm going to be talking about this very topic this May in ION 08 in Seattle. Looks like I missed a lot of interesting discussion relevant to that session, so I hope I won't be repeating too much of what was already stated in GDC.

Tuesday 8 May 2007

Using conflict as an opportunity

I ran across notes from an interesting workshop dealing with problem situations in projects, where problems are anything from missing estimates and deadlines to outright intra-team vandalism and violence. The interesting part (to me, anyway) is the concept of pre-conventional, conventional and post-conventional organisations and the differences in approach to conflict. Personally, I've always felt most at home in a situation where conflict (of priorities and objectives, not between people) is understood to be a resource that helps progress to be made, and it's taken quite some time for me to learn to understand different types of personalities in this respect. I probably still don't, or even understand my own behaviour in all conflict situations, so happily I still have something to learn better :)

A longer paper about the ideas behind the workshop is here.

Thursday 26 April 2007

Tietoviikko on agile development

I'm quoted in this TiVi article on agile software development.

Yhtiö otti ketterät prosessit käyttöön vuoden 2006 alussa. Tänään ketterää kehitystä tehdään viiden hengen tiimeissä. Pilottimaana toimivassa Suomessa julkaistaan joka kuukausi uusi versio palvelusta, joka viedään myöhemmin muihin maihin.