product development

Agility is increasingly moving from being an ad hoc approach used for capturing an emerging opportunity in app development to becoming a core capability in maintaining competitiveness. We are in a continuous and disruptive market environment that can be best characterized as volatile, uncertain, and moving at breakneck speeds of change. To keep up with this, innovation needs to happen in ultra shorter cycles and must scale at the same speed. Long gone are 12-24 months of planning cycles.

I've talked before about how Product Management is becoming an increasingly pivotal function in many digitally facing organisations. Reading this Quora answer about some 'best-in-class' product management processes led me to Marty Cagan's thought about 'Product Discovery Teams' which he explains in the short video below.

Courtesy of my dear friend Peer Munck (Founder of MunckMix, a music distributor), I just had my first ride in a Tesla Roadster, the $129,000 electric sports car. It blew me away, because I was reminded what can happen when innovators lovingly create something that has design integrity — by which I mean the solution (e.g., the Roadster’s total reliance on battery power) does not compromise on critical dimensions (e.g., speed, handling and range).

Recently, there has been a lot of buzz on the Internet about two similar events. What happened was basically this; The Masters of the Universe had proclaimed their decrees like dictators and the only thing the rest of the world could do was, for a lack of a better phrase, gnash their teeth in frustration.

The better the product, one expects, the fewer the flaws one will find. That’s why Lexus is at the top of the quality surveys, and why Yugo went out of business. That’s perfect logic, until you get to true luxury products. One of the counter-intuitive marketing characteristics of real luxury products, according to J. N. Kapferer and V. Bastien, authors of The Luxury Strategy, is that they may be less than perfect. To some degree, these flaws actually increase the luxury appeal of the product.

by: Jonathan Salem Baskin

Best Buy plans to expand significantly its private label technology products business, believing that customer feedback in its stores will let it make simple improvements that the big name brands might miss.

Such vertical integration might be torn right from Capitalism 101, but I'm not sure that I buy it.

by: Matt Rhodes

Over the past few days we have posted five types of co-creation. From those which involve only the customer and their own product to those which don’t involve the brand at all. These types can be seen as on a spectrum of co-creation with the following characteristics and variables:

by: Matt Rhodes

by: Design Translator

Today I presented “What is Design?” at the Invent Singapore Conference 2008, Design for Life workshop.

by: Design Translator

Wow a burst of link love and pointers from all my friends today seem to revolve around this theme. So I thought to compile it all right here in one place!

1) Managing Successful Client and Designer Relationships: Adaptive Path Blog.