slow thoughts

  • Sundar Pichai in da House : Google’s CEO on AI, the Digital Divide and the Future of Robotics

    His soft spoken reflectiveness feels about as far away from your typical tech-bro as is possible to imagine.

  • Introducing Straddle, a Framework For Validating Startup Ideas

    I’m often dreaming up frameworks. Very few of them spread beyond my mind, but here’s one that I think has stood the test time.

  • Disruption Disrupted : How Big Tech Keeps Innovative Startups at Bay

    Everyone who read Clayton Christensen *knows* that startups will eat incumbents for breakfast. That’s why they call it disruption!

  • The Patron Driven Value Proposition

    When I was I kid I was a great fan of the ace fighter pilot Biggles. I couldn’t get enough of his adventures, so when I’d been through the stack in my grandmother’s attic I went to the local library. I ought not have bothered.

  • Preparing For the Next War

    Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital by Carlota Perez studies the intersection of technology and innovation. Reading her feels like looking at one of those images optometrists use to diagnose colour blindness; where before there was just a jumble of dots, patterns emerge.

  • Girly Stuff

    The system has always worked hard to hide the fact that women are just as brilliantly ingenious innovators as men are.

  • Sometimes Slowing Down Will Make You Go Faster

    There’s a reason why there’s such a cult around speed in startup culture. Whoever reaches the market first has a huge advantage, so you better get there before your competitors do, because the first mover advantage often eclipses the importance of who has the best product.

  • Where Is This Road Taking Us?

    Queues are the Viet Cong of software engineering; the asymmetrical threat you can’t predict, except that it’ll always find a way to bite you.

  • Product Spells D-E-V-I-C-E + S-E-R-V-I-C-E

    Marketing should be seen as civilised warfare and segmentation is one of its most discussed and least understood concepts. 

  • Customer Value as North Star

    Just because you’re metric driven, doesn’t mean you’re going in the right direction.

  • Take Me to the Moon

    Communicating what you want done is the essence of product management, but finding the right level of abstraction can be hard.

  • Product People Will Get Us Out of the Fix

    The essence of ‘product people’ is really to see what’s needed in the world and to create something out of nothing. I’m confident they will keep doing that whether anyone is paying them or not, just like the jazz musicians kept jamming right through the great depression. It will be a slog for a while, but who said it was ever going to be easy?

  • Imagine the Unthinkable

    An insight is by definition contextual, which means it normally doesn’t translate well. An insight to me might be gobbledygook to you. That’s because its value largely comes from how I arrived at it. 

  • Beyond What They Want

    If you can unpack the unrelenting stream of incoming feature requests and reach a deeper implied level you can build a product that doesn’t just give people what they think they want, but what they really *need*.

  • Follow Your Fans

    I don’t know if it’s true that dog owners end up looking like their pets, but it’s a fact that a company will forever bear the DNA of its first avid customers.