Tag : lean

This is a post about strategy, written with these assumptions in mind:

Lots of marketing strategists are increasingly interested in product innovation.
More and more innovation companies will adopt Lean methodologies.
Migrating strategists will have a massive shock and appreciate some tips.

You’ll be relieved to note that this isn’t a philosophical post. It’s a practical one. Because after all, we’re interested in making things, which means less talking and more doing...

On Wednesday night I was talking to someone that works in innovation for local government. I wont go into too much detail about her position or the organisation she works for. She was asking about the way we work at Made by Many and we talked about the cross-over between lean practices in manufacturing, product design, Lean startups, innovation and UX. I was fairly  surprised and dissappointed by what I heard.

I've been learning about trade-off curves recently and they seem pretty useful for learning and making decisions when designing products.

If you really want to understand the application of Japanese management philosophy beyond its interpretation as Lean Manufacturing, forget about tech startups and take a look at the street food industry in the UK.

Ideas are a critical to the invention, evolution and optimisation of systems of any kind, whether we're talking about organisational change, inventing new products or startups or helping fix problems with older products and systems. In western culture, an abundance of ideas opitomises the creative spirit. But new ideas also come with insidious taxes. Aside from being the building blocks of any thoughtful endeavour, ideas can also be incredibly damaging to productivity and progress. 

Toot toot! Picle 1.0.3 is in the app store. It isn't the overhauled socially integrated version that I wrote about previously, but it does include something that we have had a lot of requests for, converting picles into movies. There are also new notification screens for uploading stories and the uploading of individual Picles has had some improvement tweeks made. 

Last week we had our first Picle strategy meeting since getting back to blighty from SXSW. We have digested a lot of feedback from tweets, emails, reviews, articles, as well as testing it out ourselves, and it was time to step back and take a look at where we're at.

We started off by evaluating how the launch went and how people have responded to the concept of Picle. Stuart drew this rather rudimentary graph of the potential life span of Picle.

We're proud to announce that we're running a Lean Startup workshop in collaboration with the folks at Leancamp as part of Internet Week Europe (7-11 November) in London. Read on to find out about the event and how to sign up.

I did a little talk at the MeetDraw Presents Silicon Beach conference last week in Bournemouth. It was a lot of fun and I met loads of great people including @matlock, @nicoleyershon, @GregHadfield, @somnesia and @stevebuzzpearce.

A while ago, Nicki was preparing a presentation for SheSays and she asked me for my take on where good ideas come from.

Working with potential users introduces an element of chaos into the creative process. By bringing in this foreign element you set the scene for serendipitous discovery.