Data is a Product

Now, bear with me on this one! The whole analogy piece has been done before, so apologies if this one has already been done. I'm not plagiarising, it just occurred to me that this made sense. For some nice examples of stretching an analogy, check out Darth Vader as a Project Manager and Leadership Lessons from Captain Kirk . And yes, I do enjoy the odd Sci Fi movie now and again! Google Maps & Product Management It's all about scale. As a Product Manager, you need to be able to think about things on the macro and micro level. Now for the analogy... StreetView If you search for a location on Google Maps and use the StreetView application, you get a great look at where you actually want to be. Just in the same way that a Product Manager will focus on one task at a time. For example, I may need to write a presentation for an event: Great, let's focus on that. However, I'll also need to be thinking about the wider piece and how my presentation will fit in wit...

Hello! Following up on my earlier posts about how free products like Facebook, Apps, loyalty cards and so on are less about benefiting you and more about generating marketing leads for the companies who supply these products and services to you; Google have launched something else for us all to enjoy. Thanks to Martin Eriksson (@bfgmartin) for the very pertinent Tweet: Google Drive was launched to much fanfare this week offering up to 5GB of online storage for free with additional storage available (up to 16TB for a monthly fee). For more on this, check out Wired . OK, so this is great right? 5GB of space to back up all of my pictures, important files and maybe some of my music? Where do I sign? Hold on though; before you sign up, think about what you're actually giving to Google. According to their terms and conditions (nicely described here alongside those of competitor services by ZD Net), you could be getting more than you're expecting. In essence, when you sub...

I attended the 1st Big Data Insight Forum this week where organisations like Microsoft, Teradata, EMC Greenplum and Orange explained more about this 'revolution'. The take aways for me were quite simple. It's all about the 3 V's: Volume - the amount of data Variety - the types of data (text, social network updates, address, behaviour, pictures and so on) Velocity - the speed of collection, storage and analysis Simply put, Big Data is not really that new. It's all about analysis of data. The interesting bit is that, thanks to the falling cost of data storage and growth of analytical tools like Hadoop and Splunk, organisations can now get at more of the data that they used to ignore (data exhaust) and make decisions more quickly. The event was very useful in helping me to inform my decisions on how I can build future products (that while I may not describe them as 'Big') will use lots of different types of data and help users make decisions quickly....