Innovation and optimization are opposite cultures of product development that should not be mixed. This article evaluates the most common approach used to keep them separate: the Internal Startup Model.
‘Innovation’ vs. ‘optimization’ require different organizational cultures that neutralize each other when mixed. But many companies need to do both. How can they succeed?
(There’s a presentation version of this post here.)
The Product Discovery Model is an alternative to the Internal Startup Model for inventing digital consumer products, designed to address many of its shortcomings. The Product Discovery Model reframes the…
The hackathon is a mainstay of tech company culture, but what is its actual value and how can we maximize its considerable potential?
Product managers, in the sense popularized by Silicon Valley, become necessary when the executives of a product-oriented company need to delegate managing the process of product development, because they have too much other stuff to do that can’t be delegated. In that sense, they…
OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) are a two-level What/How scheme for expressing the purposes of a team over an extended period of time, usually a quarter. The Objectives are the ‘what’ and the Key Results are the ‘how’.
Hackathons are one or two day events devoted to free-form tinkering by ad hoc groups of engineers, open to anyone in the group (usually, the whole company). There is a large literature on this mode of innovation…
Some notes on how organizational stages of development correlate with the kind of business model you would expect to find. I use Likert’s “system” nomenclature for compatibility with the broad…