RAFFIAPALM

Resources for product teams from industry experts.

  • Opportunities framed from your company’s perspective: Product teams think about their product and business all day every day. It’s easy to get stuck thinking from your company’s perspective rather than your customers’ perspective. However, if we want to be truly human-centered, solving customer needs while creating value for the business, we need to frame opportunities from our customers’ perspective.

    No customer would ever say, “I wish I had more streaming entertainment subscriptions.” But they might say, “I want access to more compelling content.” Review each opportunity on your tree and ask, “Have we heard this in interviews?” If you had to add opportunities to support the structure of your tree, you might ask, “Can I imagine a customer saying this?” Or are we just wishing a customer would say this?

    — Continuous Discovery Habits: Discover Products that Create Customer Value and Business Value by Teresa Torres

    Source: Amazon Kindle
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  • The ability to create rich, detailed models of natural and artificial phenomena and to process large volumes of experimental data created by a new generation of scientific instruments that are themselves powered by computing makes computing a universal intellectual amplifier, advancing all of science and engineering and powering the knowledge economy.

    Cloud computing is the latest technological evolution of computational science, allowing groups to host, process, and analyze large volumes of multidisciplinary data. Consolidating computing and storage in very large datacenters creates economies of scale in facility design and construction, equipment acquisition, and operations and maintenance that are not possible when these elements are distributed.

    — The Fourth Paradigm: Data-Intensive Scientific Discovery by Tony Hey, Stewart Tansley, et al.

    Source: Amazon Kindle
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  • Even though sales is everywhere, most people underrate its importance. Silicon Valley underrates it more than most.

    The geek classic The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy even explains the founding of our planet as a reaction against salesmen. When an imminent catastrophe requires the evacuation of humanity’s original home, the population escapes on three giant ships. The thinkers, leaders, and achievers take the A Ship; the salespeople and consultants get the B Ship; and the workers and artisans take the C Ship. The B Ship leaves first, and all its passengers rejoice vainly. But the salespeople don’t realize they are caught in a ruse: the A Ship and C Ship people had always thought that the B Ship people were useless, so they conspired to get rid of them. And it was the B Ship that landed on Earth.

    Distribution may not matter in fictional worlds, but it matters in ours. We underestimate the importance of distribution — a catchall term for everything it takes to sell a product — because we share the same bias the A Ship and C Ship people had: salespeople and other “middlemen” supposedly get in the way, and distribution should flow magically from the creation of a good product. The Field of Dreams conceit is especially popular in Silicon Valley, where engineers are biased toward building cool stuff rather than selling it.

    But customers will not come just because you build it. You have to make that happen, and it’s harder than it looks.

    — Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future by Peter Thiel, Blake Masters

    Source: Amazon Kindle
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  • The role of a leader is not to come up with all the great ideas. The role of a leader is to create an environment in which great ideas can happen. It is the people inside the company, those on the front lines, who are best qualified to find new ways of doing things.

    — Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action by Simon Sinek

    Source: Amazon Kindle
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  • Curation covers a wide range of activities, starting with finding the right data structures to map into various stores. It includes the schema and the necessary metadata for longevity and for integration across instruments, experiments, and laboratories.

    Without such explicit schema and metadata, the interpretation is only implicit and depends strongly on the particular programs used to analyze it. Ultimately, such uncurated data is guaranteed to be lost. We must think carefully about which data should be able to live forever and what additional metadata should be captured to make this feasible.

    — The Fourth Paradigm: Data-Intensive Scientific Discovery by Tony Hey, Stewart Tansley, et al.

    Source: Amazon Kindle
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