Four Laws Of Software Economics

Interesting set of software rules that define product development (put up here). Seems like we all know these but good to have somebody put up these so nicely. I have summarised those below but for complete description of the same, do visit the site. 

1. Your development team will never, ever, ever be big enough. So you have to apply The Law of Ruthless Prioritization at every level to focus on the few truly important items
2. The Law of Build Once, Sell Many - Software has high fixed development costs but also the opportunity to add users at near-zero incremental cost.
3. The Law of Whole Product- Customers buy solutions, which includes software but are framed by careful segmentation and great marketing/sales. We want to offer the shortest Mean-Time-To-Joy (MTTJ) such that customers find us, try us, immediately see our value, and sing our praises to others in the right segment.
4. The Law of Strategic Judgment- Voice of the Customer mechanisms, user forums and business value analytics are all important inputs to a product direction and prioritization of the short-term backlog. But none of them deliver definitive answers. As executives and product leaders, we have to weigh many inputs, make hard trade-offs, synthesize a strategy, and own the (uncertain future) results. We have to develop and apply judgment.

Indian e-com by numbers

Some interesting numbers around Indian e-com sector (Source- IAMAI in association with IMRB International) - Link here

The Next Disruption of Music

Interesting article around how technology is shaping the music industry.

 

• Automated algorithms are creating lyrics and tunes. 
• People are flocking to stadiums to hear their favorite artists but are instead being served by Electronic Dance Music (EDMs) 
• Apps like Spotify which knows ALL, viz. which songs you skip and exactly when you skip them, artists which you like and the mood you’re in when you listen to each, will probably use this data to create a song which will sell!

'Technical Debt' in Agile

Here is an interesting article on what is technical debt, a term we frequently use in agile development and club everything related to system and workflow improvement under it.

As per Peter Green, author of this article, Technical debt is the conscious choice to get to market faster by skipping some steps required for long term code sustainability. For example, team discovered an issue during its regular testing before release of that feature but decided to skip that for the cost of reaching out to market early. Something which was not thought of by PdM or poorly written code to save on time or missed out tasks during regular testing are NOT examples of technical debt.

Btw, here’s a video of Ward Cunningham himself explaining the debt metaphor: http://youtu.be/pqeJFYwnkjE,  and some ways in which it has been misunderstood since he coined it, starting at 3:15.

Lean vs Agile vs Lean Startup

Ever since I was introduced to concepts of Lean, Agile and more recently to Lean Startup, I knew these are all related but how exactly wasn't very clear to me. I looked around on web but couldn't get a satisfactory answer. Last month, I had a chance to hear Adobe's agile gurus, Peter Green and Hart Shafer on this topic. While I cannot share the wonderful presentation due to copyright issues here is a very brief gist of it (with my own interpretations and inputs) -

• Agile, Lean and Lean Startup are all related to each other as they talk about responding rapidly to changing environment.
• All of these have distinct principles but they are still related. IMO all of them flow from Deming's Plan-Do-Check-Act model.
• Lean and agile both talk about how to complete work to deliver a product. 
• Lean comes more from manufacturing background and therefore focuses on pull and value stream mapping. 
• Agile comes from software development and therefore talks about team organization which lean does not say anything about. 
• Lean Startup talks more about aspects other than actual product development viz. product ideation, customer discovery and sales. It focuses on customer experimentation
• A combination of all these practices will result in maximum productivity for end-to-end product development. 

How to Earn 60 PDUs and Maintain Your PMP® Certifications

In case you own PMP/ PMI-ACP and are unsure of how to fill in mandatory PDUs, here is a good article - http://www.izenbridge.com/blog/how-to-earn-60-pdus-and-maintain-your-pmp-certifications/

It gives tips to get for people in hurry and for people who have time and there are interesting ways to earn without spending any money.

Top 10 Indian E-Commerce Sites Traffic Comparison & More

Nice information with graphics - http://trak.in/tags/business/2014/06/04/top-10-indian-e-commerce-sites-comparison/

One of the graphic copied here for reference -