Douglas Talbot

The saying "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM" is at its essence about risk management. The traditional wisdom goes that if you buy from a big company, you're going to be safe. It may be more expensive, but big companies project an image of stability and reliability, so buying their wares is seen as the prudent choice. Except, it isn't. Certainly not any more. Meta killing Workplace is merely exhibit #49667. Any company that hitched their wagon to Workplace just got served with an eviction notice. In a about a year, the data will go read-only, and shortly after that, it's game over. Now companies from Spotify to McDonalds, along with millions of others, have to scramble to find an alternative. Simply because Meta can't be bothered to maintain a platform that's merely used by millions when their consumer business is used by billions. This, right here, is the risk of buying anything from big tech like Meta and Google. Their main ad-based cash cows are so fantastically profitable that whether it's the millions of paying accounts on Workplace or the millions of live websites once hosted by Google Domains, it all just pales in comparison, and is thus one strategy rotation away from being labeled "non-core" and killed off. Buying from big isn't the sure bet they want you to believe. Buy from someone who actually needs your business to make the wheels go round.

Ah, very sad to hear that. A lovely man; carried his enormous achievements with quiet humility but with tremendous good humour. RIP.

Very interesting article about why almost all UK infrastructure projects are late, massively over-budget compared with our European neighbours. Our planning system, political wrangling and a lack of civil service expertise is to blame.  Things have to change! thetimes.co.uk/article/from-h… @sundaytimes @vote

Be careful. Most "products" are, in fact, projects. 9 red flags (and how it should work): 1. Large PRD: You start an initiative by documenting everything. 2. Feature factory: Implement the requirements. Don't ask why. 3. Waterfall: All the requirements are collected in the "initial phase." 4. Gatt roadmap: A time-based, feature-based roadmap. 5. No discovery: No need to validate ideas before implementing them. 6. No designer: There is no Product Designer on the team. 7. No analytics: You have no idea how people use your product. 8. Customer in charge: Powerful customer(s) make all the decisions. 9. No strategy: You try to maximize sales by satisfying all customers and grasping every opportunity. - Here is a better way: 1. Your cross-functional team is empowered to solve the problems. 2. PM, Product Designer, and Lead Engineer perform Product Discovery together. Continuously. 3. You have an outcome-based roadmap. Preferably Now-Next-Later. 4. If you commit to a date, you do it rarely and only after the Discovery. You never commit too early. 5. You manage the value, usability, feasibility, and viability risks by experimenting. 6. The riskiest assumptions are tested before the implementation. 7. Choosing, instrumenting, and tracking the right metrics is key. 8. You ship incrementally, measure the outcomes and learn from it. 9. Tradeoffs are essential. What you do, but also what you don't. You respect your market and the unique value proposition. - And if your product hasn't been launched yet: 1. Discover the market and define a unique value proposition, business model, initial vision, and strategy. 2. Test your business idea with the help of MVP prototypes. Before the implementation. 3. You define the go-to-market strategy and validate key assumptions. Messaging included. 4. You can't rely on product analytics before launching the product, so you rely more on customer interviews and data from your experiments. 5. The Product Trio performs the Initial Product Discovery, like in an existing product. You always need a Product Designer and Lead Engineer. 6. Once you ship, use product analytics and apply Continuous Product Discovery. - Hope that helps. What are your thoughts? - P.S. It's just 1 of 6 free issues I published today in my newsletter. The link is under my profile: @PawelHuryn

If you interview 100+ Executives in companies and then write up your understanding of their perspective (the standard model for 'academic' business books these days) then the results are interesting but it can't then be quoted as 'research shows' without ethnographic validation of both said executive opinions and your interpretation. That checks with the reality of employee experience. You also need to indicate how you overcame the issue of entrainment bias after the first few interviews; but then is always a market for things people want to believe & you might be lucky and create the next management fad

I don’t like this sort of politics. Societies are made up of individuals with different backgrounds, opinions, economic interests and moral and philosophical positions. The primary job of politicians in my view is to at least try to navigate these differences (guided of course by their own hopefully well-thought out political philosophy) with the aim of building a stable consensus - a necessary foundation for a well-functioning and prosperous society. That’s very hard of course, but it should be the desired destination. Nobody gets everything they want in a democracy, because a free society is a collection of individuals who hold different views, but also nobody should feel absolutely defeated. This is not compromise in a wish-washy sense of the word - it’s the very essence of and indeed the guarantor of our freedom as individuals. As Feynman memorably said, democracy is based, like science, on a satisfactory philosophy of ignorance; running societies is very hard, and nobody really knows how to do it, so we regularly change direction whilst building on the achievements of the past. Understanding this requires humility, and the instinct to unify rather than to divide. Seeking division therefore runs counter to everyone’s interests because it undermines a key idea underpinning democracy itself - the idea that individuals have legitimately differing views. To Mr Sunak - topically - I would say read some post-war Oppenheimer. He was aiming to persuade national leaders not to do what this article says you want to do, because in the context of countries with atom bombs, that would be literally playing with fire.

Ford is 20 years behind Tesla. I don't believe it. When I looked at ECUs a decade ago, the protocols for communication weren't even standardised. You're talking architecture from the 80s and endless excuses for why. 30 to 40 years seems more apt. linkedin.com/posts/hrvojepa…

New Zealand is following the same policies and path

"It's rarely the terrible decisions, processes, or even people that'll sink your organization. It's the accumulation and inertia of the mediocre ones. The insidious nature of inertia is in its ability to compound the cost of action as time goes on." world.hey.com/dhh/breaking-t…

If you're unable to create a majestic monolith with basic programming tools like encapsulation and namespaces, you don't have what it takes to improve upon the situation with a distributed swarm of microservices. Your spaghetti code will just be on five different plates.

Great stuff, how to get real systemic insight! lnkd.in/g3b5es7m

Huge thanks to everyone at the Christchurch AI Meetup and Custom D Ltd for hosting my talk, reprised from Tech Week, 'demystifying modern tech (AI, Blockchain and Quantum computing). The crowd was awesome, with insightful questions. I highly recommend get…lnkd.in/dZKTbPjA

AI doesn't stop 🤯 In the last 5 days: Meta's MusicGen Amazon Review AI StabilityAI Uncrop Runway Gen-2 For All Wordpress Jetpack AI Chinese LLM > GPT-3 ChatGPT for Enterprise Google Bard 30% Better Here's what you need to know:

Very cool, yet another application which should be changing how we think about our digital strategies, and assuming you are doing strategy well you'll be updating it now :) lnkd.in/gnwrq6bT

@dhh I was wondering if you had a chance to factor in environmental / sustainability costs into this decision?

"We could actually run the entire Basecamp Classic application on a single Dell R7625! That's $333/month amortized over 5 years. And this is still a large SaaS app that's generating literally millions of dollars in revenue per year!" world.hey.com/dhh/cloud-exit…

I have ranted about the absurdity of the term "full stack engineer" (I mean, show me the web dev who also writes their own device drivers 🙄) but I'd like to recant. Annoying it may be, but it's the term we've got to describe the most significant shift in eng roles since devops.

thanks to Canterbury Tech for putting on an amazing #techweek23 and promoting the capabilities in Christchurch. lnkd.in/gAWbw_ii

For any of you out there who organise or belong to a technology focussed community group, have a look at the Friday monster meetup! We'd love to see you participate to promote your group. We are trying to build the Canterbury technology sector and enthusi…lnkd.in/ghMyYPvv

X : How long will the data centre argument go on for? Me : Back in 2018/2019 I tweeted this. If it stands up then the laggards will still be arguing over cloud in 2035. You've got ages of this yet.

Particularly love the team discovering their project was only part of a greater whole service in the eyes of the customer