Month: January 2019

“Internet-era ways of working” is an excellent collection of points (somewhere between the design principles and TODO list items) on how to organize the work / business / project in the modern age. Some of these are obvious and well-known, others are a bit less so. Read the whole article for more details, but here are the main items:

1. Design for user needs, not organisational convenience
2. Test your riskiest assumptions with actual users
3. The unit of delivery is the empowered, multidisciplinary team
4. Do the hard work to make things simple
5. Staying secure means building for resilience
6. Recognise the duty of care you have to users, and to the data you hold about them
7. Start small and optimise for iteration. Iterate, increment and repeat
8. Make things open; it makes things better
9. Fund product teams, not projects
10. Display a bias towards small pieces of technology, loosely joined
11. Treat data as infrastructure
12. Digital is not just the online channel

I’ve been thinking a lot about this subject over the last few years. Some of the items above I practice almost religiously (7, 8, 9, 10). Some I think I do, but I’m not sure (2, 3, 4, 6, 11, 12). Some I’m still figuring out (1, 5, 11, 12). But overall, I think the article is insightful as much of this, even the most obvious parts, are quite difficult to put in words.