Resources for product teams from industry experts
Create a culture that rewards people who show that they care. Seek the input of people who have shown a tendency to take risks and share big ideas. Prove that you value your employees above all else by giving them the freedom to ask for what they want, to experiment, and to be themselves.
— The Thank You Economy by Gary Vaynerchuk
Visionaries take a greater interest in technology than in their industry. Visionaries are defining the future. You meet them at technology conferences and other futurist forums where people gather to forecast trends and seek out new market opportunities. They are easy to strike up a conversation with, and they understand and appreciate what high-tech companies and high-tech products are trying to do.
They want to talk ideas with bright people. They are bored with the mundane details of their own industries. They like to talk and think high tech.
— Crossing the Chasm, 3rd Edition: Marketing and Selling Disruptive Products to Mainstream Customers by Geoffrey A. Moore
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
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