Disqus - Latest Comments for simoncast

Re: Product Managers: 5 ways you can make an engineer’s job easier

Simon Cast — Mon, 28 Apr 2014 03:30:59 -0000

The detail comes in defining the problem clearly rather than the solution. In this case thing of specs as the problem definition rather than the solution definition. Bearing in mind that the problem specs will detail expected end behaviour (without dictating how that behaviour is achieved).

Re: Fear or the fallacy of intuitive UX

Simon Cast — Wed, 08 May 2013 10:18:00 -0000

Great to hear it was valuable Damian.

Re: How to Sell Your Roadmap Without Selling Your Soul

Simon Cast — Tue, 16 Apr 2013 12:15:00 -0000

One of the changes we made to roadmaps in ProdPad to improve their value to product managers and PMs was to remove dates completely. So now a roadmap consists of current, near term and future. I describe the rational in this post http://www.prodpad.com/2013...

It has been interesting to see how our clients have reacted to using roadmaps with out dates. One interesting feedback we've had is that it improved the engagement a client had with their customers. By seeing what was future the customers felt able to present their desires about changes. This didn't happen with date based roadmaps, I suspect because when people saw dates they assumed it was fixed.

Re: @500Startups alumnus @switchcam moves into public beta with its multi-camera video creation service | LAUNCH

Simon Cast — Mon, 25 Feb 2013 18:20:19 -0000

Sounds the same as Vyclone http://www.vyclone.com / @vyclone

Re: How to Make Products People Love

Simon Cast — Mon, 22 Oct 2012 14:59:26 -0000

This is a summary of the presentation and not a word by word post. The full presentation video will be posted later.

For Marty the product discovery process covers the human behaviour and I think that also comes out of doing the tests and usability studies where you look at how people use stuff as opposed to what they say they want or need.

Re: Everything a product manager needs to know about experiments

Simon Cast — Mon, 20 Aug 2012 10:28:30 -0000

No we didn't try different text for those particular experiments as we went for significant layout changes were as changing the button text isn't a significant layout change.

We did other experiments with button text and sign-in versus sign-up made little difference (certainly nothing statistically significant).

Re: API’s in your product – the good, the bad, the ugly

Simon Cast — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 04:31:43 -0000

Whether Facebook/Login solves a real problem depends on the product. The benefit is that users don't need to keep creating new passwords & logins for each service or app they want to use. For the Product is removes the needed to maintain authentication and also gives you access to profile information and friend lists that you can use to enrich your application.

It can lower barriers to users to start using your application with the downside you get lots of signups but not much in the way of long term engagement. The friends & profile information can be useful but this is often so badly included that you may as well have not done it. The promise of having the profile & social graph is not being realised at the moment.

Re: What, exactly, is a Product Manager?

Simon Cast — Wed, 05 Oct 2011 11:22:59 -0000

You also become the walking encyclopedia of what the product is and can do. You'll spend a lot of time telling commercial what can be done already and how to do it.

Re: Product Focused vs. Customer Focused Product Management: What’s the difference?

Simon Cast — Tue, 13 Sep 2011 07:52:07 -0000

Some initial thoughts.

You can argue that Product Focus is the initial part of solving a problem and then the customer focus comes once you've got a product that solves a customer problem and you are focused on refining to improve the solution.

Using the example of iPad. The initial iPad proved the solution (whether the market knew there was a need) and then follow on has about improving the solution; the customer focus. I am wary of confusing customer focus with market analysis. Both customer & product need to start with an idea of a problem that needs to be solved. In some cases the problem is well defined (e.g. CRM) and it is about producing a solution that solves the customer problem better. Other cases you suspect there is a problem or need there (e.g. iPad) but can't prove that until you get something out there.

Asking customers what they want, often leads to that inevitable "Faster horse". Customers think within the boundaries of what they already know. They aren't looking at whether there is a better solution (a car) to the problem of getting from A to B.

Re: Release Early and Often – Where Ljubljana Seedcampers Need Discipline

Simon Cast — Wed, 03 Aug 2011 03:40:30 -0000

Thanks Phillip. Glad you liked it. Releasing before you are comfortable does take courage. Good point about using early release to refine the focus.

Re: List of the top 100 Twitter influencers in Australia

Simon Cast — Wed, 01 Jun 2011 14:04:52 -0000

For those interested in more detail on the algorithms, I did a blog post a while back that goes into more depth http://blog.peerindex.net/o...

Re: List of the top 100 Twitter influencers in Australia

Simon Cast — Wed, 01 Jun 2011 13:59:45 -0000

Good to see Australians doing well on PeerIndex. I do suggest encouraging everyone to register as that will give a much better reckoning.

Re: List of the top 100 Twitter influencers in Australia

Simon Cast — Wed, 01 Jun 2011 13:57:03 -0000

You can also set people to be collaborators to help you manage the list if you want Ross.

Re: List of the top 100 Twitter influencers in Australia

Simon Cast — Wed, 01 Jun 2011 13:55:37 -0000

Tweet well! :) Tweeting stuff that produces a strong response from the community is the best way to grow your PeerIndex. Of course spamming URLs will get you punished :)

Re: Doing the Numbers: Dunbar, Klout, Peerindex, and Patient Panels

Simon Cast — Tue, 31 May 2011 19:02:08 -0000

Dunbar's number and PeerIndex always grab my attention. I wrote about some of Dunbar's research as it pertains to PeerIndex in these two blog posts "Importance of Trust" http://blog.peerindex.net/i... and "Building Trust: Measures and Cost" http://blog.peerindex.net/b...

Trust signals are a method for overcoming the limitation that is represented by Dunbar's number. This has allowed our societies to grow larger and more complex. PeerIndex is working to help support temporal strong connections allowing us (humanity) to do that would otherwise not be possible. For example creating adhoc company to deliver a one-off service that would otherwise not be valuable enough to overcome the cost of forming a traditional company.

Re: List of the top 100 Twitter influencers in Australia

Simon Cast — Tue, 31 May 2011 06:20:35 -0000

Great list! I was thinking of putting one together myself. Did you realize that that there is an embed option on PeerIndex lists along with a suggest feature?

Re: The Engagement Index – What Twitter is all about

Simon Cast — Thu, 05 May 2011 15:28:38 -0000

It is a very interesting idea Mark.

At the moment we are building variations of engagement measures into the algorithms at PeerIndex. You can see the data you are talking about on your dashboard if you register with PeerIndex. For example, we show the unique number of people you mention and who mention you along with the number of tweets with URLs.

Dealing with spammers and other variations of game playing does make it more complex. Algorithms like these will need to evolve over time as various gaming & bot behaviours are encountered and dealt with.

If you would like to discuss further with use please email simon[dot]cast[at]peerindex.net or @simoncast

Re: Pig Queries Parsing JSON on Amazons Elastic Map Reduce Using S3 Data

Simon Cast — Wed, 27 Apr 2011 07:59:21 -0000

Nice post. I've been meaning to get JsonLoader() going as we store a lot of the data as JSON.

Would it be possible to compile the JARs on a mac machine and then use them in EMR or do the JAR files need to be compiled on the EMR master to work?

Re: Curation

Simon Cast — Sun, 27 Mar 2011 11:32:03 -0000

We added curated groups about 2 weeks ago to PeerIndex and it has been fascinating to watch our users create all sorts of groups. What we are seeing is very much like Kirk's point about Art being stored in a warehouse versus art being curated into a gallery.

In our case people a curating a community. Or more accurately their perception of the community. Some examples of groups being curated are:
* Su Butcher's group on Architects http://www.peerindex.net/su...
* Lucy P. Marcus's group on Corporate Governance professionals http://www.peerindex.net/lu...

Other groups are simply location based, for example:
* Martin Reid's group on Hampshire, UK http://www.peerindex.net/qu...

To me one of the most powerful aspect of curation is unlocks knowledge and understanding that is contained in people's heads which would otherwise be hard to discover or determine algorithmically. Most importantly curation unlocks human judgement. Case in point is the group Technology Elite curated by Jack Schofield http://www.peerindex.net/ja...

This is Jack's judgement of who he feels is part of the technology elite. Different people will have different judgements to who is in the community which is perfectly valid. Whether you consider a group or list valid will be partly reflected by your judgement of the person doing curating. I don't see the expert vs hobbyist as much of an issue as long as people can make judgements about the person doing the curation.

I'm really excited to see how our users evolve the use of groups and how we can fold the human judgement into PeerIndex to improve the service.

Re: Curation

Simon Cast — Sun, 27 Mar 2011 10:46:43 -0000

We add

Re: On algorithm changes and things we learn along the way

Simon Cast — Thu, 09 Sep 2010 08:29:36 -0000

Our aim is to have the rankings correct by tomorrow after we do a re-calculation by 3am GMT Friday.

Re: iPad - The Freedom Device

Simon Cast — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 08:58:12 -0000

If it worries that much - don't use it. Use andriod or WebOs pads when they come out. The point is not about the iPad per-se but the combination of portability, ease-of use and engineering that opens up some startling possibilities.

Re: Explicit vs Implicit Social Nets

Simon Cast — Sat, 13 Feb 2010 09:28:04 -0000

I see this as where developers value the algorithm over the system. Social networks exist only within broader context. Without understanding what that broader context mistakes will be made. And increasingly dangerous mistakes.

I'm not sure that algorithms will be able to adequately determine the context of a social connection to make a valid decision on a connection. Social networks change, evolve over time connections form & fade sometimes very quickly. None of the social network services capture the dynamic nature of users networks.

The danger with this implicit friending/following is life is messy and as you pointed out Fred, a maze of interconnected networks where the only join may be you. I don't think it is potentially dangerous, implicit networking generation is very dangerous. Particularly with something as personal as email.

Re: Google fail, content farms and point in time business models

Simon Cast — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 10:08:57 -0000

I think there is a large disruption coming that isn't related to social search to Google. I've been following the idea of using various analysis techniques to divine the user's intent when searching and broadly I think there is far too little information from behavioural analysis to make a reasonable determination.

Instead a more direct and I think more effective method is to ask the person directly. Put a large friendly box asking say "Where do you want to go" in case of a travel site or "What do you want" for product search which encourages users to enter queries such as "I want to go to Scotland for a fun weekend" or "I want a green washing machine for less than £400". Both queries are very explicit out the intent of the searcher something otherwise difficult to ascertain with current keyword or form based search.

The disruption to Google (& content farms) is that this makes niche or vertical search much more attractive to users and it is harder to create the content that ranks well to these very explicit queries. It will be interesting to see where this goes but I don't think content farms are something to get to worried about rather there is a strong possibility that Google will need to return focus to its search results in order to stave off vertical search services that offer better and more effective service.

Re: Unexpected Innovation

Simon Cast — Sun, 03 Jan 2010 08:01:27 -0000

There are already light systems that have a count-down timer for green lights for example Turkey http://www.flickr.com/photo...