Rob Grady

Here is a great collection of Coming Soon Pages from Smashing Magazine

If you haven’t been reading Steve Blank’s Blog you are missing out on some of the best entrepreneurial gold around and his recent series of posts on the Customer Development Manifesto are a great place to start

In product development you can generally find a number of ways to solve a problem but the right solution depends on successfully defining the problem and hopefully not deriving it from a solution. In web systems development its especially easy to have our armchair ‘experts’ help define solutions before trying to define the problem.
We use [...]

From Implementing Lean Software Development, “Development is the process of transforming ideas into products. There are two schools of thought about how to go about this transformation. We might call one the deterministic school of thought and the second the empirical school of thought. The deterministic school starts by creating a complete product definition, [...]

Kris Jordan posted a summary of Jason Fried’s keynote speech “Be a Software Curator” from the Web 2.0 conference in New York last week. While I don’t always agree with Jason’s product philosophy completely I think he’s spot-on with regard to knowing when enough is enough on the number of features. “Take this water bottle, [...]

From the Wikipedia entry on Dogma
“Dogma (the plural is either dogmata or dogmas, Greek δόγμα, plural δόγματα) is the established belief or doctrine held by a religion, ideology or any kind of organization, thought to be authoritative and not to be disputed, doubted or diverged from.”
Have you ever noticed that when it comes to development [...]

Today there are a number of software methodologies and depending on your bend (and amount of scarring) you’ll likely lean in one direction or another. From waterfall to agile and everything in between, software methodologies create a lot of discussion, heated debate and confusion. If you’re in an influential position or at least in a [...]

In my previous post I commented on the segregation challenge that faces product management and the development team. It isn’t uncommon to find execs, engineers and other process freaks trying to put everything in a little box but in an effort to optimize the world, you often overlook the benefits of collaboration and creativity.
One ’school [...]

Great post and I love Rule #1
“Make sure you know what you are building. Many project delays are because the ‚Äúcustomer‚Äù- the manager, corporate head, (you?) doesn‚Äôt actually know what they want.”
Too often in the project-based world getting a solid vision of what is trying to be accomplished is tough. The other ‘gotcha’ that always [...]

There have been a few posts (here and here) regarding the role of developers in requirements gathering. While some might see the removal of requirements as a way to get developers closer to the customer or gain efficiencies in development, that topic is for a longer post. The best projects and best results have been [...]