business
-
🔮 Can we predict product development schedules?
Estimating or predicting product development is difficult. Teams often end up adding a 2-3x padding to any estimate, because bitter experience has taught them not to depend on their own estimates. There will always be a high degree of varia…
-
🤝 A release is what unifies Engineering and Business
Some feedback on yesterday’s post (What is a release): What specifically flows into the two points? Value? Effort? Perhaps a better way to phrase this is these are the two points of focus that unify the development team with the rest of t…
-
🏆 What is the ultimate platform success?
The ultimate platform success is when an internal platform turns into a sellable product/service, or an open source project. Perhaps some companies succeed by starting out building a platform as a product, but the greatest platform successe…
-
🏗️ The difference between Product and Platform
Product is what you build. Platform is how you build. Most people build the first and outsource the second. After all, the product has the IP—the secret sauce—the valuable part. However, we observe in successful companies a focus on their i…
-
🗂️ Git has an unfortunate name
Git, which was created 20 years, and various hosting platforms, has revolutionized software development workflow and collaboration. The name Git was chosen by its creator, Linus Torvalds, and has a humorous backstory rooted in both practica…
-
📈 What do we mean by scaling?
This can mean many things: More units sold More customers served More people doing the work More features More innovation More models produced More model options More quality We could go on, but basically we mean more of something over ti…
-
⬆️ The business case for improvement
As discussed previously, improvement is sometimes hard – really hard. So how do we justify it? The payback comes when we improve something once, and then something else gets lots easier many times. An example might be automating a release p…
-
Why Open Source for Product Development
(this topic is also discussed in a podcast episode) One of the paradoxes in product development is Open Source. How can you personally or as a company benefit from participating in Open Source projects? Why should you share your great ideas…
-
Business Contracts
Business contracts are often executed when two companies work together. At the most basic level, a contract should describe a common understanding between the two parties. The contract should assist and aid the relationship. However, many c…
-
Switching to Wordpress
After using Joomla for several years, I’m switching my web site to wordpress. As I mostly use my site for writing technical articles, it makes sense to use something that works very well for just that. So far, I’m finding Wordpress very p…
-
Implementing Asterisk
Over the past month, we have been working on implementing Asterisk in our office. Asterisk (http://www.asterisk.org/ ) is a complete software PBX (Private Branch Exchange) that runs on top of Linux. Asterisk supports a number of features …
-
Things that work!
Running a small business has a special set of challenges, and if you are not careful, the overhead can quickly consume you. This article is a list of things that I use in my business that work well for me, and help me to be efficient when …
-
Economics and Finding Outsourcing Talent
Economics In One Lesson by Henry Hazlitt presents an interesting and logical view of economics. The book presents many ideas that seem right (like saving) and provides very logical arguments to back them up. Even though the book was origi…