strategy
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🛣️ The two ditches
Along roads, there is often a ditch or some undesirable obstacle on either side of the road you want to avoid. The same can be said for most of life, including product development. There are two common errors: Build it all yourself: You dr…
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🛩️ Why did the Wright Brothers succeed?
While Samuel Langley had $100,000 (equivalent to $3.5 million today) in funding, a team of engineers, and Washington connections, the Wrights were bicycle mechanics from Dayton, Ohio with a fraction of those resources. Langley’s approach wa…
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🔄 The release circle
As previously discussed, a release is useful and quality. What counts as a release? One way to think about this is to view the release as a circle with two attributes: What (it contains) Who (it’s for) Initially, there is not much in the …
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🔗 Platform thinking does not mean we don't use other platforms
On the contrary, platform thinking readily embraces other tools and platforms. The difference is: We add our own tooling, integration, and workflows into the mix. We own the integration points so we can readily swap out/in 3rd party compon…
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⏳ The long-term compression timeline
Below are several timelines illustrating long-term compression comparing a product development timeline: 20 years ago Today Today with Platform Thinking The big effect of long-term compression is that negative consequences can hit much ea…
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🏆 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…
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🤔 Why > How > What
Why? Is this the right thing to build? How? Can it be done efficiently, repeatedly? What? The deliverable. These are listed in order of importance, which also corresponds to the level of difficulty. The trouble with “How” and “Why” is thes…
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⏳ The "long-term" may be closer than you think...
A common objection to “Platform Thinking” (proactively build your platform from the start) is: there isn’t time right now; this can be done after the 1.0 release when there is ample time and resources. The “long-term” can be defined as when…
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🚀 RDPD - Release Driven Product Development
Yesterday we talked about Test-Driven Product Development. Release-driven product development is another perspective. Build the release/deployment mechanism before implementing the design. Automate as much of the release as possible. This …
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🏗️ 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…
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⚙️ Three aspects of product development
Finding and leveraging existing technology. Developing some of your own technology. Mixing it together. All three are necessary.
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📈 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…