The Productologist

The Inmates are Running the Asylum by Alan Cooper

I have been meaning to read this seminal text on application development and usability for some time (read: years), but somehow it always ended up on my reading list just below something else. After seeing some others reference the book and discuss conference talks where the author expanded on his theorems, I decided to bump The Inmates are Running the Asylum to the top of the list. After finishing it up, I was surprised, to say the least.

I was at a SVPMA meeting last month where the presenter, Barbara Nelson from Pragmatic Marketing, was giving a talk about the “Politics of Agile” and during the course of the discussion, she brought up examples of products that she had managed in the past. What I noticed was that when Barbara talked about the products, she always referred to them as “her” products. That’s what I like–making the product personal.

I wrote earlier about how I was confused about why someone would base their business on someone else’s APIs. I found this article on Programmable Web about a company called YottaMusic that had done just that and gotten bit by the API owner (Rhapsody) discontinuing support of the API.

You can read their write up and check out other reports.

From what I have read, it sounds like the YottaMusic service was a well-liked enhancement to the Rhapsody service, but they developed their product based on undocumented APIs.

Thoughts? Am I missing the boat on this?

I was in a meeting a few days ago where we were discussing the schedule for the upcoming release of my product. To my knowledge, everyone in the room already knew what the schedule was, but we have an internal wiki that we use to track release dates and that page had TBD in several slots, hence the meeting. What was really driving the meeting was that members of the exec team had different dates in their heads and when this came to light, there was an immediate scramble to get everything reconciled.

I wouldn’t label myself an environmentalist, but I try to do my part. I recycle paper, aluminum and glass in my home. I make homemade notepads out of old printouts. I drive a Honda Civic on my workday commute. I use reusable containers instead of disposable ones. When I have to print documents at work, I print two-to-a-page and double-sided. I also fancy myself a new life re-user.

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