Tag: strategy

  • Don’t be a “leader”

    Successful leaders must recognize that their role is much more than the endgame of a specialist. Leading requires constant learning and a balance of specialized and broad knowledge.

    Source: Don’t be a “leader”

  • Competitive Analysis and Strategy To Win

    A product’s success is not only defined by its features. Whether it can win in the market to a large extent is owed to the environment it is offered. Customer requirements, competitive offering, market climate, environmental conditions, total cost of ownership (TCO) can have an impact on the products success. A competitive overview is essential for any product manager and a competitive analysis can help sharpen the view.

    Product School just today let Joao Fiadeiro share the experience he gathered during his tenure at Google as a Product Manager for Youtube.

    Competitive Analysis and Strategy To Win by YouTube PM in Product School.

    Competitive Analysis
    Competitive Product Analysis

    Source: Competitive Analysis and Strategy To Win by YouTube PM – Product School

  • Going all-in on AWS is a recipe for success

    Gousto believes going all-in on AWS is a recipe for success, diginomica writes, and it’s undeniable there is no way around public cloud for digital services & offerings. It’s a pretty steep thesis to build a strategy relying on one particular hyper-scaler to make a business a success. In the end, customers purchase experience and not technology.

    (more…)
  • Culture eats Strategy for Breakfast

    “Culture eats Strategy for Breakfast” is a quote that is often attributed to Peter F. Drucker, but was apparently coined by Ford’s Mark Fields. Whoever said it, both have plenty of business acumen to take some credit for the thought behind it. There statement has lot of truth in it, looking into corporate structures.

    With the arrival of digitalisation it is more true than ever before. All verticals struggle with fundamentally changing markets, forcing them to innovate in technology and services, and strive for new business models. In this environment it is crucial to embrace change, which enterprise culture often outright rejects.

    Change Management has been a topic in management and HR for many years, and never has been so fundamental to organisational success as it is nowadays. Technology is converging at a breathtaking pace. The Internet of Things, as an example, requires electrical & mechanical engineers to cooperate with computer scientists and data analysts to produce a product a usability engineer designed jointly with a designer. Fundamentally different schools of though define the success of a product, and even consumer and enterprise grade of products converge in their appearance.

    At the same time, the technologic ecosystem has outgrown individual organisations capabilities. Partnerships with technology vendors require management while intellectual property needs defence at the same time.

    Organisations develop anti-patterns like “Silo Thinking” or “Not invented here” syndrome. While these cultural behaviours are tolerable in less dynamic situations, their effect can quickly go out of bounds and create a substantial counterforce to any change infused through external factors.

    Embracing an open ecosystem and building on technologies developed outside the own organisation are fundamental to innovation. This open mindset is a prerequisite for any change into agility. Any strategy aiming for change ignoring these behaviours will be eaten by this exact culture. For breakfast.

  • Planning for 2016

    David Cummings has a few words on startup planning for 2016. Not only for startups, but also for established mid- and large companies planning ahead is an important activity, in particular planning the next year at the end of past year.

    My primary customer has been a company that builds and markets tools for “Business Intelligence”. These tools basically collect data from all kind of sources, process them and generate metrics and calculate trends.

    However, it is up to the department to interpret these metrics and make a decision on what shall be done. The business intelligence will help to make a more profound decision, but the strategy has to be crafted manually.

    A strategy shall also be the scale against which metrics are measured. And each year or quarter is a good moment to review metrics and strategy, in order to assessing the validity of a strategy. Think of it as a feedback loop.

    via: David Cummings: Planning for 2016

  • Die Qual der Wahl.

    Die Qual der Wahl.

    Um als Läufer angemessen trainieren zu können, braucht man ein bisschen Ausstattung. Man braucht Schuhe, Hosen, Shirt, aber auch Schrittmesser, Pulsgurt und GPS Sensor, vielleicht einen Höhenmesser. Um Entwicklungen über Zeit verfolgen zu können, benötigt man ausserdem ein Smartphone, in einem dem Modell angepassten Armband, das sich mit allen Teilen über Bluetooth verbindet und die Ergebnisse in einem Cloud-Service festhält, wo man sich mit Freunden messen möchte. Von einem fundierten Ernährungsplan zu schweigen, der die richtigen Inhaltsstoffe in ausgewogenen Dosen den Körper zuführt.

    Man hat in jeder dieser Kategorien eine reiche Auswahl aus einem unübersichtlichen Angebot. Alleine in Sachen Schuhen wird der Markt bedient von adidas, Nike, Asics, New Balance und vielen mehr, die jeweils hunderte von Modellen anbieten, für jede Anforderung. Man braucht Schuhe für Asphalt, Schuhe für Wiesen, Schuhe für Wald, Schuhe für Strecken mit Steigung und Schuhe für Sprints. All das in den passenden Farben für die funktionale Kleidung. Kleidung, die wenig wiegt, windschnittig ist, Schweiß gut ableitet und zu alledem auch noch den Geschmack des Trägers treffen muss. In der Kategorie der Gadgets haben in der Vergangenheit Polar und Garmin den Markt allumfassend mit einer Handvoll Geräte bedient. Dieser Tage kann man “Wearables” von einem Dutzend Hersteller wählen, die wahlweise Schritte, Herzfrequenz, Hautwiederstand, GPS, Schlafrythmus messen und manchmal sogar die Zeit anzeigen. Die meißten davon sind wahlweise kompatibel mit iOS oder Android, und sogar für Windows Phone findet sich sicher eine Applikation, mit der ein Traingsfortschritt gemessen werden kann. Dort werden Daten der Gadgets in “HealthKit” oder Sport Trackern eines weiteren Dutzend Anbietern vorgehalten werden, über den zeitlichen Verlauf festgehalten mit virtuellen Trainingsplänen verglichen und automatisierte Verbesserungshinweise gegeben. Gerne beinhalten diese Apps und Services auch Hinweise zur richtigen Ernährung, die persönliche Gesundheit und individuelle Leistung verbessern sollen.

    Und so ist man gewissermaßen gezwungen, viel Zeit zu investieren und die bestmögliche Voraussetzung zu schaffen, um ein Ziel zu erreichen.
    (more…)

  • Recovery Strategy Considerations

    The setup, maintenance, and execution of the recovery strategy must cost no more than the value of protecting the relevant technological asset or business process.

    Ensure that the financial benefit of the chosen strategy equals or outweighs the total cost of the strategy.