Recently I attended a Product Management session put on by the UC Berkeley Center for Executive Education in Santa Clara, California. In this post I am not going to catalogue all that was talked about or even cover the bullet points of each day. In this post I am going to give an overview of…
This morning I sent an email to my development and QA team leads. It was a response to a discussion we had all had a couple weeks ago about the definition of Agile Software Development and whether my plan for next year (2013) was more Agile than our current approach. Below is the bulk of the email.
“Scope down. It’s better to make half a product than a half-assed product.”
Sounds boring doesn’t it, but it is rather interesting even if you don’t have to run as many meetings as I do. A few weeks ago I had the privilege of attending a four day facilitation training put on by Leadership Strategies. The course I took is titled “The Effective Facilitator” and was taught by…
I’ve been thinking about why Harley-Davidson had a significant negative Net Income for the year of 2009. My thinking led me to look at the number of models that H-D has. They seem to have very few engines and very many models per engine. This seemed like a slow moving and high cost product strategy.…
Allow me to start by stating simple facts of the case: Cadbury is a medium size British maker of higher quality everyday chocolates and chewing gums. Kraft is a huge multinational consumer packaged goods conglomerate. Cadbury chocolate, when made in Britain or Australia, is sweet but very good. Cadbury chocolate, when made in the USA…
As we all know Steve Jobs, Apple CEO, announced a new Apple product today. For better or worse this product is called the iPad. While I don’t like this name, I understand why they chose it. The word tablet is associated with a PC or full computer. That combined with the fact that the iPad…
I have had this idea bouncing around in my head for the past 10+ years. The idea is relatively simple and exists in certain, more industrial environments. My idea is to have a product that would enable the user to stop the flow of water at the sink by activating a foot pedal. This would…