Category: Product

News 2.0 – two years on

Here are some snippets from a two year old post about my “news 2.0” prototype. “IMO, there is a sweet spot between the two [social networks and traditional media]… It means making content fresher via smarter use of content and tweets… Of course, traditional media also has to become more social. It’s where people go…… Continue reading News 2.0 – two years on

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News feed personalisation

My two last posts have looked at how to infer a user’s interests based on their browsing history. This post looks at how to translate that into personalised results. At Metro, we’d like to do this for our news feed results (generated by a top secret algorithm). The ideal The most accurate results could be achieved…… Continue reading News feed personalisation

Top categories: a probabilistic approach

Here is a common scenario. A sequence of article headlines is shown to a user. The articles have different categories. The user reads some of the articles. Which categories does he like? Which categories does he dislike? Probability to the rescue… Consider the example of an app that shows 10 headlines. Each article has a…… Continue reading Top categories: a probabilistic approach

How to drive innovation

Scott Cook (founder of Intuit), “… when you have only one test, you don’t have entrepreneurs, you have politicians, because you have to sell. Out of a hundred good ideas, you’ve got to sell your idea. So you build up a society of politicians and salespeople. When you have five hundred tests you’re running, then everybody’s…… Continue reading How to drive innovation

The sweet spot between media and social networks

Hypothesis: Users want a combination of mainstream news (for the water cooler) and long tail (personal) news. Facebook and Twitter already do a pretty good job of this. They offer freshness and relevance. But they often lack coherence (unlike traditional media). And they lack simplicity (unlike traditional media). You have to register before you can…… Continue reading The sweet spot between media and social networks

Unleash the entrepreneurs in your team

Marketplaces are extremely powerful at co-ordinating scarce resources. It’s possible to use it to co-ordinate software development teams. Lets see how. There needs to be competition between buyers and sellers. Development teams sell their services, and business units buy their services. Buyers You need multiple buyers. For example: the Content team, the Commercial team, and…… Continue reading Unleash the entrepreneurs in your team

Britain’s Got Talent: The ultimate in Agile

BGT embodies Agile. Think of acts as products. SMALL STEPS. Iterative. Every week takes the show one step closer to finding the Next Big Thing. EMPIRICAL FEEDBACK (aka experiments). An act’s potential is measured using audience votes. SELF-ORGANIZING TEAMS. Bottom-up. Some of the acts could never be conceived in a board room. (Susan Boyle, anyone?). FAIL FAST, FAIL OFTEN. Doomed…… Continue reading Britain’s Got Talent: The ultimate in Agile

Product owners: the cold hard stats

This week i had agile training. It stressed the importance of dedicated product owners. The trainer told us that the bare minimum is 50% of the product owners time. Where i work it’s common to have a nominal product owner who can only spare 5-10% of their time. This effectively means that 80-90% of requirements are…… Continue reading Product owners: the cold hard stats

Re-Organise for Resilience – Highlights

Here are my highlights from the intro of Re-organise for Resilience, the latest book on my reading list. “The second group [of companies who made it through recession]… came out of adverse markets not only mere survivors, but actually having leveraged adverse markets to catapult themselves far ahead of their competitors. These firms find ways to embrace…… Continue reading Re-Organise for Resilience – Highlights

Product Owner Essentials

From “Getting Real” (37signals). Underdo Your Competition Fix Time and Budget, Flex Scope Less Mass Lower Your Cost of Change Embrace Constraints Half, Not Half-Assed Start With No Hidden Costs Rinse and Repeat The book contains loads of other useful advice too. Genius.