Joel Liu's Library tagged pm →  View Popular, Search in Google

It's easy to make a list of everything wrong with your product and spend eternity trying to fix it all. It's harder to reconcile imperfection with the reality of limited resources and business objectives.

The Android ecosystem will remain fragmented because every single phone+manufacturer+carrier combination requires a decision and engineering resources to upgrade. I could never recommend an Android phone to anyone but the anti-Apple hordes.

Tick-tock in action

Year 1: First the "Tick"

Intel delivers new silicon process technology, dramatically increasing transistor density while enhancing performance and energy efficiency within a smaller, more refined version of our existing microarchitecture.

Year 2: Then the "Tock"

Intel delivers entirely new processor microarchitecture to optimize the value of the increased number of transistors and technology updates now available.

I have seen people very wrong-headedly trying to apply rules to all employees because of one misbehaving person, under the misguided notion that this is somehow "fair". For example, a long time ago there was a person in the admin group that was basically a slacker - came in late, left early and didn't work very hard. Management got really annoyed by this and made a "Everybody in by 9am OR ELSE, no exceptions" rule. Well you can imagine how that went down will all us geeks who were slaving 14 hours a day till the witching hour to fix problems. They managed to piss off the most productive people in the building, instead of standing up to one person and saying "you will be in by 9am, because that is when your manager needs you, and if you're not, you will be fired".

So, unless you are managing an organisation that is so large, and you trust your middle management so little, that you can not address problems on a case-by-case basis, then stay away from sweeping rules. I'm with the OP on this one.

4. Force business to iterate in design, not in development

There’s nothing a developer hates more then spending months on something that once the business guys see it they realize they want to do something else.  I won’t hand anything off to the developers until I have thought it through and iterated through it with the business guys as much as humanly possible.  There are many decisions that can be made off of drawings rather than programming it.  And business will quickly realize that getting the designers to change their designs is a thousand times cheaper than paying expensive developers.

Steve Jobs: “Originally, we weren’t exactly sure how to market the Touch. Was it an iPhone without the phone? Was it a pocket computer? What happened was, what customers told us was, they started to see it as a game machine. Because a lot of the games were free on the store. Customers started to tell us, “You don’t know what you’ve got here — it’s a great game machine, with the multitouch screen, the accelerometer, and so on.”

“We started to market it that way, and it just took off. And now what we really see is it’s the lowest-cost way to the App Store, and that’s the big draw. So what we were focused on is just reducing the price to $199. We don’t need to add new stuff — we need to get the price down where everyone can afford it.”

Freemind is a good open source mindmap editor for the desktop.

Or you could try my online, browser-based mindmap app. http://thoughtmuse.com ;)