Thoughts on partnerships, payments, platforms and the systems that quietly shape modern commerce.
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A brief history of working from the (home) office
When I started my working career in an engineering business, I worked in the office, with no exceptions. The working day started at 8:30 am in the office and finished anytime after 5.30 pm, often later. Technology limitations meant that calls, invoices, meetings, and customer support all happened from a building filled with co-workers (hopefully)…
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Why Business As Usual is Not Good Enough
In business today the acronym BAU (Business As Usual) gets thrown around a fair bit. Usually used to distinguish between major capital funded work – strategic work – and normal operational activity. It makes sense right. You have the strategic stuff and you have the lights on stuff. The problem is that BAU can become…
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You are not creating content, you are creating
In his 2010 Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Mario Vargas Llosa, spoke lovingly about what reading and literature had given him saying “Reading changed dreams into life and life into dreams”. He goes on to say that without literature, without writing the world would be a darker, more tedious place. “We would be worse than we…
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Why Sherlock Holmes would be a great product manager
I was watching the slightly oddball Benedict Cumberbatch in Sherlock tonight watching my wife roll her eyes at the intense thinking faces and very British action when it struck me that Sherlock Holmes would have been a great product manager.
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The importance of story telling in product management
When I was a kid I spent my head locked away in a book anytime I could get. Reading was a way of discovering lives far beyond the fertile plains of Wagga Wagga in southern NSW. It was a way of learning about how the world was different, how people were different, and how I…
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The secret lives of customers
Last night I heard a story. The zoologists at the Melbourne Zoo thought they knew their animals pretty well, but wanted to check out what they were doing at night, so they started videoing what went on. What they discovered surprised and amazed them. There was a kind of clash of civilizations between the native fauna…
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What Jack Dorsey’s Square can teach us about good product management
Square, the financial services business founded by Jack Dorsey one of the Twitter co-founders has just released a pretty cool new appointment and scheduling product. Founded 5 years ago with a elegant mobile credit card reader and app for micro and small businesses, Square now offers an impressive range of products that streamline back-office operations for…
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I checked out Google Domains and GoDaddy should be worried
The domain name business isn’t easy these days. Margins are squeezed by high competition and high acquisition costs, profitability depends on achieving a high attachment to additional services like email or hosting and cross-selling services like privacy, security, or “premium registrations”, and the regulators are requesting more diligence with data verification. Add to that the…
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Is Yo the next twitter?
When the app Yo was released earlier this year I was pretty sceptical. It was too simple to not be a giant troll by some bros poking fun at the mobile/app/social space. I mean it was released on April fools day and only did one thing which was to send “Yo” to a friend via a message…
