Creationism in digital products
A few years ago, Jerry A.
Coyne published "Why the theory of evolution is true".
A beautiful book, packed with facts and reasonable arguments.
The time has come, Coyne says, to put all the evidence on the table, to see if creationists can provide an equal amount of proof.
The whole thing is intimidating; you might not be convinced, but what is clear is that you would have to work hard to gather a similar amount of evidence, linked into a general theory.
In the development of digital products, a Coyne is missing.
And there is a lot of creationism left over.
When I wrote "Circumstances", I wanted to once again underline precisely one of the most common mistakes in any company's product strategy.
There is nothing new in that article, although that is precisely what is new.
In 1960, Theodore Levitt published "Marketing Myopia", which over time has become a classic.
When Christensen, Cook, and Hall They recovered Levitt's message summarized it a few years ago in a quote I used in class: > People don't want to buy a quarter-inch drill.
They want a quarter-inch hole!
Neither Levitt's nor these latter's are articles published in some new magazine trying to make a name for itself with spicy messages: they all publish under the umbrella of Harvard Business School.
They all belong to the areas of marketing and business administration.
Christensen, Cook, and Hall had already published other articles in the same direction, although considering that they heard it firsthand, in 1960, the diagnosis of the problem, undoubtedly the qualifier used by Levitt, myopia, hit the mark.
Why did it take us so long to reach the same conclusion?
In 1995, when Alan Cooper published the first edition of his "About Face", he explained that he made a specific proposal for developing software, and ultimately products, because the prevailing approach seemed to him to be fundamentally flawed.
From another angle, from another domain, Cooper pointed to the same problems that Levitt had placed at the center of the debate.
Through interaction design, Cooper proposed his own methodology, Goal-Directed Design, which, among other things, incorporated Personas as a specific tool for the discipline.
In 1998, he published "The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity", where he summarized the problem as follows: > The real interaction designer's decisions are based on what the user is trying to achieve.
The goals of a few decades ago are the jobs-to-be-done of today.
We keep trying out nomenclatures for the same problem, but our shortsightedness won't let us down.
Raynor and Christensen published "The Innovator's Solution: Creating and Sustaining Successful Growth" in 2013, and in that book, they gathered a good array of what they claim to be historical evidence: how many companies have been successful building products born from the study of circumstances and purposes.
That is, far removed from the segmentation and attributes of marketing tradition; Far removed from the resource management and code of traditional software development; far removed, in short, from the belief that the way we organize ourselves internally is a mirror of what's out there.