Resources for product teams from industry experts
Don’t count on breakthroughs. Move ahead early and find the market for the current attributes of the technology. You will find it outside the current mainstream market. You will also find that the attributes that make disruptive technologies unattractive to mainstream markets are the attributes on which the new markets will be built.
— The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail (Management of Innovation and Change) by Clayton M. Christensen
The “what” of service design may seem like the job of managers, not designers. But the “how” is different. And further, the approaches, methods, and skills required to do it (the “how”) in fact turn the “what” into something different. The work that managers see as analytical and abstracted becomes generative and materialized. The disconnected stuff of organizational life becomes connected and a shared matter of concern.
Organizations are revealed as dynamically constituted in the multiple interactions between people and things and other people, in many places, over time.
— Service Design: From Insight to Implementation by Andy Polaine, Lavrans Løvlie, et al.
As a good rule of thumb, proprietary technology must be at least 10 times better than its closest substitute in some important dimension to lead to a real monopolistic advantage. Anything less than an order of magnitude better will probably be perceived as a marginal improvement and will be hard to sell, especially in an already crowded market.
The clearest way to make a 10x improvement is to invent something completely new. If you build something valuable where there was nothing before, the increase in value is theoretically infinite.
— Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future by Peter Thiel, Blake Masters
Continuous transformation—an organization’s capability to test and learn from experiments having to do with its own structure and processes, promoting the best-proven techniques company-wide while limiting or discarding the rest—is what will give that organization the ability to thrive in the modern era.
It’s my last suggestion as an addition to the toolbox of the entrepreneurial management function. Let’s formalize and systematize that approach, so that we build up a critical mass of like-minded entrepreneurs who can tackle the full heterogeneous range of challenges we’re likely to face in the twenty-first century and beyond.
— The Startup Way: How Modern Companies Use Entrepreneurial Management to Transform Culture and Drive Long-Term Growth by Eric Ries
If you have a strong vision, you are the catalyst for the change. You are the spark for the fire. And hopefully at this point, people are bought into the vision, because then it’s bigger than you. A good vision takes off on its own, and is bigger than your own ego, bigger than your own fear.
— Engineering Management for the Rest of Us by Sarah Drasner
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