One lunchbox per child
Tom Chi and Marty Cagan were the stand-out speakers of a recent conference devoted to product management. (theirs was an outlook more suited to new product development/ reinvention than mid-cycle management)
To summarise -
- product development is product validation - a means of both exploring what you Could do, but just as importantly, deciding what you Should do
- you need a lot of collateral to test as only a small percentage is ever any good
- you'll therefore need to make lots of prototypes - quickly
- you'll need materials that let you work as quickly as you can think (Chi showed how they made basic Google Goggles after a day, testing the balance/weight using just wire and clay)
I think this is very exciting - the realisation of work with quick results.
So what purpose prototyping? Some of my recent work has involved prototyping in the following guises -
Pathfinding - Data x expert + what we can and cannot do
Selling/ convincing - Selling to clients and departments with real, running code - allows them to sell on internally too
Feasibility - see above - satisfies all that the basics are covered - there are many more
So I'm currently looking at people, companies and tools that will let me understand, test, display very very quickly.
But be careful what you wish for - a Tableau genius I worked with said that Tableau "can make things quicker than you can think" - not necessarily a good thing - let's start with speed of thought and go from there.
Detail from recent work for GDS department at UK government
Wow, September has just finished and things are extremely busy.
At After the Flood, we celebrated our first anniversary with the release of two major projects - one for UEFA.com and one for the GDS department of the UK Government.
The site has been modified too, to show off work better and to feature our steady stream of press too, including a recent interview with the Economist Intelligence Unit.
And I've just spoken at O'Reilly Strata - nice to have a full room, hearing about the cross over between user centred design and data product design.
The rest of the year is shaping up to be busy - two current projects in progress and a few more in the pipeline.
I'll be writing a bit more on the end of our first year - but posts will be intermittent while there is a company to run.
I've written an article for Domus.
As an architecture magazine, they are looking to expand their horizons, spearheaded by Dan Hill's Supernormal department.
The new eye magazine is out and I've got a couple of articles in it.
This one is about the current state of information design in industry.
And there is another one that features in a look back at important information design from history.
If you don't know Eye magazine, it is the best graphic design magazine in the world. It is generally a challenge to get designers to say anything insightful, but Eye manages to find those that can.
It is also a marvelous piece of design in itself. Many design magazines abdicate a mission of beauty, worried that their customers will gripe - but Simon Esterson and team are more than up to it.
My company After the Flood has made another video for BBC Knowledge and Learning.
This time we did a film for the upcoming 100 year anniversary of the sinking of Titanic.
It will sit in their Titanic section of the History website
There is more write-up here on the main site.
