Thoughts on behavioural economics, emotional design and customer engagement

This week, I’ve been discussing with friends and colleagues what ‘customer engagement’ could or should mean. There’s a cadence to the change in vernacular of design. ‘Customer engagement’, we think, is ripe for a meaningful redefinition. My colleague puts it like this In many ways Customer Engagement has become old hat.  Omnichannel has become trite … and …

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Thinking differently (frugal innovation in the Global South)

It was terrific to have the opportunity last October to talk at Mobile Developer Summit in Bangalore, India. One of the coolest things was freedom of topic. A lot of the time, when giving some kind of public talk, the topic is kinda set already. Perhaps the organisers have a theme, or there’s something specific …

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Marketing traction is hard

A colleague asked whether I agreed with Andrew Chen’s article about it being hard to gain traction for mobile products via (ageing) marketing strategies. He asked: Do you agree with his observations? What does it mean then for new players? Here’s my response: I agree that it’s harder, but it also misses the point. The argument …

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Talking about product innovation at Agile Australia 2013

Speaking with Kate Linton at Agile Australia 2013 was a load of fun. We talked about product innovation in large enterprises. We walked through characteristics that are helpful for innovation, as well a bunch of methods and techniques used on recent ThoughtWorks projects around the globe. Check it out for yourself. The Intrapreneur’s Playground – …

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An approach to end-to-end product development

There are a number of different models/approaches/frameworks for product strategy and delivery. Many of them I don’t like terribly much, because of a tendency to break apart the sum components (business strategy, design, delivery) into disparate phases – often with gating process in between. This is mostly unhelpful, and not conducive to responding to change – either because of what is learnt along the way, or some other business factor.
So, recently somebody asked me what my ideal approach for end-to-end product development looks like.
It’s a straight-forward question, but not an entirely straight-forward answer.

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