Internet-era ways of working

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.

The Tool that Will Help You Choose Better Product Ideas


Itamar Gilad, of ex-Google fame, has an excellent post – The Tool that Will Help You Choose Better Product Ideas – which describes a process for selecting better product ideas and implementing them with confidence, minimizing the risks and maximizing the team efficiency.

Unlike many other similar posts, this one is very practical, detailed, and relies on iterations, feedback, communications, and ties together different roles within the company or the team.




Why you should stop using product roadmaps and try GIST Planning


Why you should stop using product roadmaps and try GIST Planning” is an interesting look at project management.  While I don’t GIST is easily implementable in most companies, mostly due to the change resistance, familiarity and tools, I still think it’s an interesting approach that deserves attention.




This is why you shouldn’t interrupt a programmer


Yup.  This is exactly why you shouldn’t interrupt a programmer.  It takes him at least a few minutes to get back to where he was, irrelevant how brief and unimportant the interruption was.  And that’s why we invented managers (interrupt them all you want!), asynchronous communication (emails, ticketing systems, etc), and other tools and processes.




Products Over Projects


Martin Fowler has an excellent article on the “Products  Over Projects” subject.  It depicts the differences of both, with advantages and disadvantages, especially in areas like funding, team management, and iterations.

It’s a great read for anybody involved in software development, product and project management.