
Why Products Fail - bootload
http://www.businessweek.com/innovate/content/may2007/id20070518_332210.htm
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palish
Oh snap, without even reading the article I can predict what is going to be
said: The product was useless.

~~~
palish
Hum. This article turned out to be targeted at big company types, not
entrepreneurs. Innovation at big companies almost never works anyway. The
authors of "In Search of Excellence" did excellent research on just that, and
found that inventions which had big impacts almost always came from companies
with less than a few dozen people.

~~~
bootload
_'... Hum. This article turned out to be targeted at big company types, not
entrepreneurs ...'_

I think the below extract could / should be applied to any startup. The point
being made here is to create cheap in-expensive (money and time) rapid
prototypes. In the process discovering new insights.

_'... Sketches, he argues, are quick, inexpensive, disposable, plentiful,
offer minimal detail, and suggest and explore rather than confirm ... The
value of sketching is less in the artifacts themselves than in the cognitive
process of working through dozens of ideas, of considering as many options as
possible, and allowing each option to raise new questions ...'_

This particular technique is extremely useful when the next step, _"translate
design to code as quickly as possible into a working prototype"_. Speed from
idea to code allows crappy ideas to be exposed faster and is a technique
(rapid development of ideas into code) was used by Joshua Schachter for
various projects leading up to delicious.

I think the article and the book are slanted towards big business because they
have less constraints (more money, resources) and hence have problems tackling
the design process. It might also be written for companies that do not create
product and either make money by the hour or contract, not product ~
<http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/FiveWorlds.html>

