Effectivus

Years ago, I asked a very intelligent friend what he thought of Artificial Intelligence. After the briefest pause he replied, “I think we are a pretty good simulation of it.” It took me a moment to understand what he meant. I guess Turing had it right in 1950 (or Denis Diderot in 1746, or René […]

Yes we can! What we have today is a form of AI that is trained to solve a particular problem. (Let’s save Chat-GPT et al until later.) We’ll focus on machine learning using neural networks. We start with a set of data about a particular problem. It could be handwritten characters we want to recognise, […]

I first considered this question forty years ago. In the early 80s I had become fascinated with the use of computers in art and design. Studying architecture, I was frustrated with the process of drawing my designs and intrigued by the promise of computer aided design. I have always had an attraction to the counter-intuitive, […]

What some of those furloughed employees have been up to during lockdown… Boy are we looking forward to getting out of lockdown! One of the coping tactics that I use, and I know others do too, is imagining what life will be like in a post-covid world. Putting aside the downright depressing idea that we […]

Short story submitted to the Mogford Prize 2020 Chef stands grandly and full-bodied in the middle of his domain, his kitchen. Smoothing the crisply starched linen over his ample frame, tweaking his moustache and adjusting, again, his high pleated toque. The kitchen door bursts open and the waiter scurries in. ‘Two at table three didn’t […]

All of us leave a trail of small impacts on others as we travel through life. A kindness here, a mistake there, a product that helps, a book that makes a reader cry. We often know nothing of these little touches on others’ lives. Sometimes, these nudges turn out to have a much greater effect, […]

Having decided to give up full-time work my successor and I decided that we should make a final trip together to visit key customers in the US. It was a great trip to NY and LA, visiting many of the major post-production, film and television production facilities. At one such visit I had just explained […]

The problem of 99% products and what to do about it.

Who’s your hero Mr Product Manager?

Do your tax lawyers and brand marketers agree strategy?

We obsess about how long an operation takes in software rather than its impact on the user.

Touch sensitive screens are not always a good thing.

Why established companies can’t respond to paradigm shifts in the market

Adoption is a lot more tricky than we like to think

What Steve Jobs said and Henry Ford didn’t

Creativity is like a muscle – use it or lose it!

Standards may be good for some, but it can hinder innovation for others?

Time for cinema to wake up and smell the roses?

It is spectacle, not the 3D spectacles that sells movies

Apple proves you’ve got to break an egg to make an omelette

Why, after HD and 3D our televisions need HDR

A recent Wall Street Journal article rattles the US broadcast industry

A court jester to burst the egos of the management gurus.

Gain it, use it, spot it and defend against it.

Why, when you need a nudge out of the status quo, you need a really big shove.

Balancing strategic and tactical needs on the product roadmap

Watch out for the heavy impact of the HiPPO on your roadmap

Do we assume an ability to enter text easily in our user experience design?

Why Product Managers are the Surfer Dudes of high-tech companies

Why polarized choices about how to create great products are just wrong.

Market needs first, then product. Not the other way around.

Why we should be concerned about our data in the cloud

The quality of British broadcasting is going down the pan, and I’m not talking about Ann Widdecombe

Good story telling couples the listener and storyteller’s neural activity

How effectivus uses an agile and iterative process to help organisations create new and innovative products

The first step of strategic planning is accepting who you are

Matthew Stewart’s methodical destruction of management theory, and why all management books need a health warning.

How important is domain knowledge for a Product Manager?

How the Hoover Keymatic was created and sold to solve tomorrows problems

Why are ideas valued so lightly?

Strategy models and frameworks hide the complexity that we wrestled with

How can we create good products if we can’t see the world as others do, and how can we create innovative products unless we see the world differently?

Testing STORM with the wider market

Digital Vision bring a beautiful new control surface to market

Does the procurement process block innovation and competition?

Three types of serendipity: how do these apply to product discoveries as opposed to scientific ones?

Why your optimal strategy may be sub-optimal

Book review and thoughts on connecting to customers

Dispelling two myths of scenario planning

Book review gets robust criticism from author

Book review of Atul Gawande’s ‘The Checklist Manifesto’

effectivus helps client develop win-win partnerships

How user interviews led to a new segmentation of a market.

What has Korean Air flight 801 got to do with creativity and innovation in your company?

Getting into the detail of how a product really meets a customer’s needs.

Why some businesses are scared of creativity and why they need to embrace it fully.

Powerful people make better liars. I wonder if the same goes for organisations?

Is your customer focus two faced?

The benefits, or otherwise, of having an intimate knowledge of an industry.

How to entertain your trade show stand visitors and completely fail to deliver your message.

Is there an industry the iPad could wipe out at a (touch sensitive) stroke?

A product marketing guide to Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt

What does the mythical kill switch tell us about consumer adoption?

The user interface gets very personal

An effectivus view on seven pricing strategies

Old time memories for old time digital artists

Why the benefits of innovation are not necessarily enough to overcome the barriers to adoption

A review of Malcolm Gladwell’s book

The bubble popping continues; why market research is so important, but so inexact.

A review of Bill Buxton’s book

You can take a feature too far.

Will 3D TV take off like The Stewardesses?

The first ‘most stupid’ product award of 2010 goes to…

How technologies, like special effects and small children, should hide their light under a bushel.

Effectivus gets to be a grumpy damp squib ‘cos he didn’t get to go to Vegas

A seasonal cautionary fairytale for technology companies in five lessons

How some technologies, however appealing, appear to take forever to be adopted by consumers.

How often is your use of a product frustrated by some little detail?

Is Apple about to breach its psychological customer contract?

Chance is highly underrated by the management gurus, I wonder why?

Why can some engineering be so accurate and others so inaccurate?

How companies turn their back on gold plated commercial opportunities

Fulfilling unmet needs is not enough

Just how solid are the bedrock subjects of Management Science?

Why MBA schools need to embrace what they fail to do as well as what they do so well.

Act now, think later

The problem of growing beyond your established market for SMEs

Why the most common motivator for strategic decisions is the wrong one

The act of planting a graphic image in someone else’s mind without warning

No product specification survives first contact with the user

Giving a good demo is more than taking the audience through the features

The importance of naming new concepts and product ideas

Why uncertainty and indecision are natural in the new product development process

Why an apparently simple marketing phrase can completely fail to market your product.

If Harvard MBAs have started taking an oath to ‘serve the greater good’ isn’t it time that Product Managers jumped on the bandwagon?

How to change ‘Pants 2 You’ into a customer focussed organisation which is honest and open in its approach to improving the customer experience.

Why corporate culture and individual employee behaviour has to be compatible with understanding and empathising with your customers.

A picture may be worth a thousand words, but how do you describe it in just 30?

Customer stories that get your team into the mind of the customer

Why do we continue to put so much faith in these works of fiction?

A software product that solves real problems comes to market ready and proven.

Where do our ideas come from and can we really call them ours?

Why we should set our users free.

How tradeshow messaging gets lost in the hullabaloo.

Is our increasingly sophisticated and smart software products making our users more stupid?

Commerce, Technology, Market

boujou was the world’s first automated camera tracker

Matador was an innovative paint and 2D animation software package for the television and film industries.

Why clear product manuals are so important and need to be planned for from the beginning.

Or when “no” can be the right answer and lead to innovative features

Engineers who deliberately fall foul of Fowler

Tomorrow’s Weather Today (in 1989)

Why a compelling product vision can shorten your long list of requirements.

Hardware stillstore for broadcasters

Feature bloat and Mrs Armitage’s bicycle

…or how a lesson from viral marketing could improve all our collateral.

Some of us have been here before. Dire economic figures, redundancies, turmoil and opportunity. Yes, that’s right; opportunity.

Could it be that silver is a bigger prize than gold?

A look at some of the advice on offer in these “challenging times”

Picking new staff can be difficult, especially if you rely on the irrelevant details to sift and sort.

Is your new product name an ace or a dog?

Building competitive edge into your products is more complex than ‘more is better’.

This hierarchical view of your product’s features will help in prioritizing new feature development.

Giving up is hard to do, even in product development.

Do you really think about the ways in which your user interact with your products?

…or why the most obvious questions are oft ignored

The old sales adage of “you are not selling drills, you are selling holes” is good to remember, sadly few of us do

Lots of ways to get in touch.

Some people like their ‘wherefores’ and ‘of the first party’, we like to make things plain.

effectivus is a trademark of Steeley Solutions Ltd

effectivus is a trademark of Steeley Solutions Ltd

Every month I send out a short email with links to new articles I’ve written that month. Like the articles it is intended to be a “coffee cup moment” – giving you something unexpected, entertaining and challenging – just something to get your mind out of that rut and to think about things in a […]

Freeman Christie a brand and communications consultancy