Technical debt builds up in software over time. It is the summation of all the liabilities built into the technology over time. It impedes the ease of adding new features and increases the cost of keeping the product functioning. For those that do not understand technical debt, it is enraging. Why Technical Debt is Important Assume a software product that solves a problem that a self-referential group of people (a market segment) is willing to pay for that product. Assume that the product has just enough features (m) that results in more customers (n), consumer retention (r) and market penetration (p) that all feed directly into the recovery time of an investment (I). These variables are at the core of[…]
Author: Christopher Berry
The Circa app (As of January 2014) is notable for the choices the designers made. And the choices they made. The color palette is consistent. The leading is consistent and generous. Upcoming information is faded and effectively previews content. The app can be used with gestures from one thumb, making it great for one thumb use. Just the right number of stories are presented on each day. They made quite a few good choices. They chose to hide most social sharing under a button, instead of surfacing all the options directly within the app. They chose to invest in making good recommendations about related content. They chose to invest in designing an elegant right rail breadcrumb that both respects the[…]
“The End of Facebook” trumpeted the headline. 46 points in 46 minutes on Hacker News. “Facebook Screws Social Media Marketers!” trumpets Business Insider. “Facebook is losing teens” states Global Web Index. Here we go with the bandwagon. Hop on! Only that this time isn’t going to be quite like the last time(s). Teens have fled to their smartphones They’re computers they can control. They’re computers that aren’t tied to the family room, where parents can seen them. Small screens offer a degree of privacy and intimacy that larger screens, even the tablet, just can’t replicate. Facebook saw that a long time ago and snapped up a few cool startups. Ditto Twitter. Ditto Google. And the rest of us are behind[…]
A strategy is a set of choices that, when combined, cause a sustainable competitive advantage. Conscious, reinforcing, choices, are powerful. That’s what you learned in B-school. I’m far more pessimistic that strategic choices are generally conscious. I’ll explain. A set of deliberate choices, that constitute a strategy, might be: Because we chose the same aircraft we save money on maintenance. Because we chose the same aircraft we save money on ticketing. Because we chose the same aircraft we compete exceptionally well on specific flight pairs. Because we chose a large set of direct point-to-point flights without going through hubs, we save money on baggage transfer. Because we simplify baggage, we can turn planes around more reliably. Because we turn planes around[…]
Speaking at a data conference is hard. Programming data conferences is hard. It’s damn hard. It’s hard to predict who’ll show up in your audience. It’s hard to predict if what you’ve planned to say will align with your audience. It’s even harder to predict if who you’ve chosen to talk will align to who is likely to show up. Image below most certainly related. I’ve had incredibly patient mentors when it comes to this. And I’m still optimizing. And I still find it tough. Heuristics for speakers: Shilling doesn’t work You never close a sale during a presentation. Worse, you turn leads off. Putting your ad first puts the audience last. If it’s about causing awareness of your product[…]
It’s the results, genius! It’s the results. The purpose of any sort of data analytics or data science is to get results. It isn’t about the spreadsheet that comes three weeks after the campaign. It isn’t about sandbagging numbers. It isn’t the few slides in the Quarterly Business Review. It isn’t even data entertainment. It’s the results. Great! So what’s the deal? Why is so much time expended on activities that don’t directly tie to getting results? Analytics Maturity It’s because of maturity, or the sum of experiences that an organization/culture chooses to remember. Very good models of analytics maturity exist. Stephane Hamel has a great one. Stances inform tools and tools cause experiences. Where you stand affects which, if[…]
Planning is preparation of the mind. It’s impossible to quantify every variable, every assumption, and every potential future state. Attempting to do so will simply boil the ocean and frustrate everybody around you. Analytics leaders tend to be very specific types of folk. Here are a few heuristics that might be useful for us in particular. Backcasting Backcasting is primarily an expression of preferences. The exercise almost always begins with an enunciation of a preferred, desirable, future state. Consider the following statement: “By 2016, we will be a 1 billion dollar company.” Such a statement, be it vision statements, stretch goals, or just goals, are typically not based on any sort of forecast. It’s entirely possible, and very likely, that[…]
Ben Firshman ported a Super Nintendo emulator to javascript. JSNES has a few games (ROMS) ported over too, included Super Mario Bros and The Legend of Zelda 2. That’s pretty cool. Quite a few people grew up with the Super Nintendo. Some of us even looked into going to school to code for it. The code was a form of assembly. It wasn’t abstracted behind a layer of nice language. But I suspect that quite a few shops had kits to make development easier. Developers usually had to manipulate memory directly. They had to. They only had a few memory busses and 21MhZ to work with. No clean garbage collection for them. All of this can now run in a[…]
Forrester’s own David Cooperstein wrote a tour de force in competitive strategy in the age of the consumer. If you have a subscription, it’s well worth a read. The high level summary is that the economy has evolved from competing on factory size, to competing on distribution, to competing on information, to now, competing on consumer. The way that competitive successes will be generated in the future, during this age of the consumer, is by competing on the consumer. You don’t have to buy the thesis to think about it. Here are a few points to consider: Sometimes it really is the thought that counts Identical items, packaged and marketed differently, cause difference in preference, loyalty, and retention in the[…]
A charrette is an intense, collaborative session, that enables designers to draft a solution to a very complex problem. It’s a technique first used by artists. Then designers picked it up. And then later still, urban planners. And then a few brave souls wisely invited stakeholders in on the process. Finally, this approach would evolve into software development and web development. It is very applicable to solving analytical problems. First, consider the natural law below. In analytics, the proportion of what we don’t know always grows as more knowledge is added. The more imaginative the analyst, the steeper the curve. Get three or more analysts into a room together[…]