Video

Cheap sensors are readily available, data is easy to gather, analyse and visualise, and there are people and companies interested, and cash available for experimentation. However, in this age of Internet of Things, the combinations of sensors, hardware, software and data being created are still relatively simplistic. At ProductTank April, Patrick Bergel, Founder and CEO Read more »

We are at the dawn of the Internet of Things (IoT), and in time, we will be living in a world where we’ll have to manage trillions of connected devices. At ProductTank April, Yodit Stanton, a software developer and founder of opensensors.IO, explored the implications of building services for cities, bringing together the physical and Read more »

The world, we are told, will become a vast ‘eco-system’ of conversant devices, buildings and virtual environments. But somewhere behind all these ‘machines’ are people, and it’s the people that, ultimately, make interactions ‘smart’. At ProductTank April, Usman Haque, founding partner of Umbrellium, founder of Haque Design + Research  and founder of Pachube, a real-time data Read more »

Thou shall not say “Because that’s the way we’ve always done it.” This was among the lessons we learned from Dave Wascha, Chief Product Officer at Moo.com, at ProductTank March. As Dave said, “This is the most scary, terrifying, insidious thing we face as product managers, and the older you get the more baggage you Read more »

It’s not easy to build a great product culture.  At ProductTank March, we heard the truth from Tim Warren, the Head of Software Experience for Connected Products at Tesco: Their product culture isn’t perfect (whose is!), but they’re working towards it and making great progress.  Tim talked about 12 lessons learned along the way. Some of Read more »

We’ve all been there: the “infections” that product teams are subjected to, slowly wearing away the team’s performance. To counter this you need to build an immune system for your product team so they can fight off the infections, be healthy, and work together to build great products. How? Mairead O’Connor (@maireadoconnor) provides pointers for Read more »

Challenging your assumptions can pay off. This is what UK retailer Marks & Spencer (M&S) discovered when they created a digital lab and started applying Lean Startup techniques to their products. At ProductTank February, Hemal Kuntawala (@hemalkuntawala) talked us through some of the specific insights and assumptions they wanted to challenge.  Each assumption is met with a Read more »

What are the elements of a successful product? It’s never one thing but in addition to building an awesome product, it’s also about external factors (like market maturity, demand, etc) and of course marketing. It’s never just “build it, and they will come” but about achieving the right fit between all three. Skeptical? Over 450,000 Read more »

Building for the mobile era today is akin to the early television era.  We’re right at the beginning and we’re just starting to see the effects of the mobile revolution.  Think, the first real mobile app store is only 6 years old. Runar Reistrup (@runarreistrup), CEO at Depop, was building for mobile years prior, when there Read more »

Imagine you’re building a new product – say a Death Star. And it’s solving a particularly pesky problem – getting rid of Rebel Scum. You don’t really care what it looks like or if it’s particularly efficiently designed – so it tends to be seen as an engineering problem. But in the rush to market Read more »