Ink & Switch is doing amazing work leveraging technology like CRDTs to create novel highly-interactive multiplayer interfaces. Here’s their work on Upswelling which is a git-like take on writing and editing.
Category: Product
It’s super lovely that Berlin has a lab which does these kind of user tested innovations on city processes. The work that needs to be done is written up here and it’s relatively straight-forward (there are just no short-cuts).
What we need with the Bürgeramt though is not 10% more appointments but the automation of at least half of the processes there to no longer need human intervention. We needed that 10 years ago.
Going through these presentations by Matt Jones the main thing I’m left wondering is if anybody still does any real design and thinking work anymore, when it comes to technology or if all of it now is just flinging shit against the wall (which it very much looks like).
“When Jake Knapp was running those design thinking workshops at Google, he saw that for all the excitement and Post-its they generated, the brainstorming sessions didn’t usually lead to built products or, really, solutions of any kind.”
“He believes that a justice lens can help foster collaboration and creativity in a much broader way that goes beyond our current power structures.”
https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/02/09/1067821/design-thinking-retrospective-what-went-wrong/
Important prototyping work to show how German government forms can be much better and much friendlier than what’s out there right now.
Getting anything like this to production will be very very difficult without a lot of systemic changes and groundwork done first.
Planning should be about confidence intervals and de-risking, not about loading capacity full with commitment.
Discord has been executing near perfectly and it looks like they’ve built-in most of the functionality of Discourse now. That’s an absolutely amazing complementary feature to the ephemerality of the chat stream.
https://discord.com/blog/forum-channels-space-for-organized-conversation
It’s understandable that organizations try to make their word legible and simplify things. In fact, it’s one of the reasons for the organizational boundary.
The problem is that monoprocess pretty much entirely does not work for any creative/agile endeavour. Things are valuable exactly because they are complicated and messy.
A nice article about Box’s transformation and especially that chart contrasting burn v. growth is one of the most important things for any startup to keep in mind.
A lot to like in this article (“They avoid scrum and SAFe like the plague.”) but I’ll settle for adopting the core thrust of it and just retiring the entire concept of a PO and never have to debate “What is the difference between a PM and a PO?” ever again.