Nonfiction
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Are AIs Intelligent and does it matter?
Read more: Are AIs Intelligent and does it matter?Years ago, I asked a very intelligent friend what he thought of Artificial Intelligence. After the briefest pause he replied, “I think we are a pretty good simulation of it.” It took me a moment to understand what he meant. I guess Turing had it right in 1950 (or Denis Diderot in 1746, or René…
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Can we build our own AI?
Read more: Can we build our own AI?Yes we can! What we have today is a form of AI that is trained to solve a particular problem. (Let’s save Chat-GPT et al until later.) We’ll focus on machine learning using neural networks. We start with a set of data about a particular problem. It could be handwritten characters we want to recognise,…
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Why use AI in creative tasks?
Read more: Why use AI in creative tasks?I first considered this question forty years ago. In the early 80s I had become fascinated with the use of computers in art and design. Studying architecture, I was frustrated with the process of drawing my designs and intrigued by the promise of computer aided design. I have always had an attraction to the counter-intuitive,…
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Are your products on cruise control?
Read more: Are your products on cruise control?What some of those furloughed employees have been up to during lockdown… Boy are we looking forward to getting out of lockdown! One of the coping tactics that I use, and I know others do too, is imagining what life will be like in a post-covid world. Putting aside the downright depressing idea that we…
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Thank You
Read more: Thank YouAll of us leave a trail of small impacts on others as we travel through life. A kindness here, a mistake there, a product that helps, a book that makes a reader cry. We often know nothing of these little touches on others’ lives. Sometimes, these nudges turn out to have a much greater effect,…
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Quality Product Time
Read more: Quality Product TimeHaving decided to give up full-time work my successor and I decided that we should make a final trip together to visit key customers in the US. It was a great trip to NY and LA, visiting many of the major post-production, film and television production facilities. At one such visit I had just explained…
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Why Autonomous Vehicles Will Never Live up to the Promise
Read more: Why Autonomous Vehicles Will Never Live up to the PromiseThe problem of 99% products and what to do about it.
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Who’s your hero, David Bowie?
Read more: Who’s your hero, David Bowie?Who’s your hero Mr Product Manager?
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User Time vs Compute Time
Read more: User Time vs Compute TimeWe obsess about how long an operation takes in software rather than its impact on the user.
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A Touch Less Sensitive
Read more: A Touch Less SensitiveTouch sensitive screens are not always a good thing.
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Turkeys won’t vote for Christmas
Read more: Turkeys won’t vote for ChristmasWhy established companies can’t respond to paradigm shifts in the market
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Adoption and e-books
Read more: Adoption and e-booksAdoption is a lot more tricky than we like to think
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Flex Your Creative Muscle
Read more: Flex Your Creative MuscleCreativity is like a muscle – use it or lose it!
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Standards, Sockets and Secret Sauce
Read more: Standards, Sockets and Secret SauceStandards may be good for some, but it can hinder innovation for others?
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3D Movies Go Flat
Read more: 3D Movies Go FlatIt is spectacle, not the 3D spectacles that sells movies
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Final Cut Pro Launches a X the Chasm
Read more: Final Cut Pro Launches a X the ChasmApple proves you’ve got to break an egg to make an omelette
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Harry Potter and the Half-Baked Colour Palette
Read more: Harry Potter and the Half-Baked Colour PaletteWhy, after HD and 3D our televisions need HDR
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Is the US Post industry dead?
Read more: Is the US Post industry dead?A recent Wall Street Journal article rattles the US broadcast industry
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A Terrae Filius for Management Gurus
Read more: A Terrae Filius for Management GurusA court jester to burst the egos of the management gurus.
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You’ll never challenge your commitment
Read more: You’ll never challenge your commitmentWhy, when you need a nudge out of the status quo, you need a really big shove.
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Mega-features and Featurelets
Read more: Mega-features and FeatureletsBalancing strategic and tactical needs on the product roadmap
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Hot keys and cold type
Read more: Hot keys and cold typeDo we assume an ability to enter text easily in our user experience design?
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Let’s Go Surfing Now…
Read more: Let’s Go Surfing Now…Why Product Managers are the Surfer Dudes of high-tech companies
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Listening versus envisioning
Read more: Listening versus envisioningWhy polarized choices about how to create great products are just wrong.
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Hobby horse before the cart
Read more: Hobby horse before the cartMarket needs first, then product. Not the other way around.
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Quality Broadcasting
Read more: Quality BroadcastingThe quality of British broadcasting is going down the pan, and I’m not talking about Ann Widdecombe
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Are you thinking what I’m thinking?
Read more: Are you thinking what I’m thinking?Good story telling couples the listener and storyteller’s neural activity
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effectivus new product process
Read more: effectivus new product processHow effectivus uses an agile and iterative process to help organisations create new and innovative products
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Your strategy is in your DNA
Read more: Your strategy is in your DNAThe first step of strategic planning is accepting who you are
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The Management Myth
Read more: The Management MythMatthew Stewart’s methodical destruction of management theory, and why all management books need a health warning.
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Domain knowledge or process skill?
Read more: Domain knowledge or process skill?How important is domain knowledge for a Product Manager?
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Future Proof Products
Read more: Future Proof ProductsHow the Hoover Keymatic was created and sold to solve tomorrows problems
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Projecting simplicity
Read more: Projecting simplicityStrategy models and frameworks hide the complexity that we wrestled with
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Seeing the world differently
Read more: Seeing the world differentlyHow can we create good products if we can’t see the world as others do, and how can we create innovative products unless we see the world differently?
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Presenting Precision
Read more: Presenting PrecisionDigital Vision bring a beautiful new control surface to market
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Preposterous procurement
Read more: Preposterous procurementDoes the procurement process block innovation and competition?
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Serendipity in New Product Development
Read more: Serendipity in New Product DevelopmentThree types of serendipity: how do these apply to product discoveries as opposed to scientific ones?
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Marketing Metaphoria
Read more: Marketing MetaphoriaBook review and thoughts on connecting to customers
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Seeing the future comes [un]naturally
Read more: Seeing the future comes [un]naturallyDispelling two myths of scenario planning
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The Product Manager’s Toolkit
Read more: The Product Manager’s ToolkitBook review gets robust criticism from author
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Cold-Cuppa Checklists
Read more: Cold-Cuppa ChecklistsBook review of Atul Gawande’s ‘The Checklist Manifesto’
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New Revenues from Existing Technology
Read more: New Revenues from Existing Technologyeffectivus helps client develop win-win partnerships
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Segmenting Storm
Read more: Segmenting StormHow user interviews led to a new segmentation of a market.
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Authoritarian leadership and innovation
Read more: Authoritarian leadership and innovationWhat has Korean Air flight 801 got to do with creativity and innovation in your company?
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Mari case study
Read more: Mari case studyGetting into the detail of how a product really meets a customer’s needs.
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Mind the creative minds
Read more: Mind the creative mindsWhy some businesses are scared of creativity and why they need to embrace it fully.
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Powerful liars
Read more: Powerful liarsPowerful people make better liars. I wonder if the same goes for organisations?
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A Sense of Perspective
Read more: A Sense of PerspectiveThe benefits, or otherwise, of having an intimate knowledge of an industry.
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Magic Marketing
Read more: Magic MarketingHow to entertain your trade show stand visitors and completely fail to deliver your message.
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How the iPad could change the world
Read more: How the iPad could change the worldIs there an industry the iPad could wipe out at a (touch sensitive) stroke?
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The Early Adopter Gullibility Curve
Read more: The Early Adopter Gullibility CurveWhat does the mythical kill switch tell us about consumer adoption?
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Remember Parallax Software?
Read more: Remember Parallax Software?Old time memories for old time digital artists
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Barriers to adoption
Read more: Barriers to adoptionWhy the benefits of innovation are not necessarily enough to overcome the barriers to adoption
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Researching new product markets
Read more: Researching new product marketsThe bubble popping continues; why market research is so important, but so inexact.
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Apple differentiates the iPad
Read more: Apple differentiates the iPadYou can take a feature too far.
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Make the tough stuff look simple
Read more: Make the tough stuff look simpleHow technologies, like special effects and small children, should hide their light under a bushel.
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Effectivus’s predictions for 2010’s technology products
Read more: Effectivus’s predictions for 2010’s technology productsEffectivus gets to be a grumpy damp squib ‘cos he didn’t get to go to Vegas
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A (very) long adoption curve
Read more: A (very) long adoption curveHow some technologies, however appealing, appear to take forever to be adopted by consumers.
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The devil in the detail of product design
Read more: The devil in the detail of product designHow often is your use of a product frustrated by some little detail?
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Rotten to the core?
Read more: Rotten to the core?Is Apple about to breach its psychological customer contract?
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Engineering accuracy
Read more: Engineering accuracyWhy can some engineering be so accurate and others so inaccurate?
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We don’t make that sort of product here
Read more: We don’t make that sort of product hereHow companies turn their back on gold plated commercial opportunities
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Management Science or just Superstition?
Read more: Management Science or just Superstition?Just how solid are the bedrock subjects of Management Science?
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An Application for Professor of Bubble-Bursting
Read more: An Application for Professor of Bubble-BurstingWhy MBA schools need to embrace what they fail to do as well as what they do so well.
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The Tyranny of the Served Market
Read more: The Tyranny of the Served MarketThe problem of growing beyond your established market for SMEs
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Fear and Loathing in Strategy
Read more: Fear and Loathing in StrategyWhy the most common motivator for strategic decisions is the wrong one
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Invideate
Read more: InvideateThe act of planting a graphic image in someone else’s mind without warning
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What is a product specification?
Read more: What is a product specification?No product specification survives first contact with the user
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Great demos
Read more: Great demosGiving a good demo is more than taking the audience through the features
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Give it a (code)name
Read more: Give it a (code)nameThe importance of naming new concepts and product ideas
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There is a hole in my product
Read more: There is a hole in my productWhy uncertainty and indecision are natural in the new product development process
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Limited only by your imagination
Read more: Limited only by your imaginationWhy an apparently simple marketing phrase can completely fail to market your product.
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Hippocratic Oath for Product Managers
Read more: Hippocratic Oath for Product ManagersIf Harvard MBAs have started taking an oath to ‘serve the greater good’ isn’t it time that Product Managers jumped on the bandwagon?
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The road to salvation for “Pants 2 You”
Read more: The road to salvation for “Pants 2 You”How to change ‘Pants 2 You’ into a customer focussed organisation which is honest and open in its approach to improving the customer experience.
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“Pants 2 You” is a poor customer message
Read more: “Pants 2 You” is a poor customer messageWhy corporate culture and individual employee behaviour has to be compatible with understanding and empathising with your customers.
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The art of writing very little
Read more: The art of writing very littleA picture may be worth a thousand words, but how do you describe it in just 30?
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Tell me a story
Read more: Tell me a storyCustomer stories that get your team into the mind of the customer
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The Poverty of Business Plans
Read more: The Poverty of Business PlansWhy do we continue to put so much faith in these works of fiction?
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Redboard
Read more: RedboardA software product that solves real problems comes to market ready and proven.
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Invention, discovery and the role of collaboration
Read more: Invention, discovery and the role of collaborationWhere do our ideas come from and can we really call them ours?
