I spent the last few days with writing strategy papers for several brands. There isn’t much time and even less data to base my conclusions on and the easiest option would be to write down my own vision from scratch.

However I prefer to get people on board.

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compromise · team

Imagine you’re a business owner. You know what you want to get developed, you have the budget for it and you know when you need to see a result. You have someone to manage your development team (call him the product owner if you like) and the team seems skilled.

Now what do you need unit tests for?

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Test Coverage · Test Driven Development · Unit Tests

Yesterday I bought a washing machine. It is the third one I bought in my life and it struck me how similar buying an ordinary appliance such as this is to getting a website developed.

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Sustainability · Web development

A strategy paper in a nutshell is a document declaring a goal and describing a way to get there. The goal however is often mistaken to be the description of a final outcome or a sales volume or likely.

That’s important too but first should come the mission statement.
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business plan · business value · strategy

Years ago I was developing a quiz tool. It could’ve been anything but in this case it was a quiz tool. The all-in-one solution solving it once and for all.

Instantly becoming legacy code.. (more…)

Legacy Code · synergies

Developers tend to hate legacy code. It’s messy and inflexible and no fun to work with. Most of the time that’s a direct result of quick and dirty work so it seems logical to aim for building sustainable high quality code instead so that the code last for long without becoming a burden.

Only sometimes the long run doesn’t matter.

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development · Separation of Concerns · Sustainability · time to market

When I want to start a new project on a website or mobile app I get asked for a business plan at some point. That’s fine for most cases but there are cases in which a business case makes no sense at all.

It helps to realize what a business case really is.

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business plan

The first time I’ve become aware of cinemagraphs was when watching the Harry Potter movies. You might remember the newspapers they had where all pictures moved. Faces blinked, scenes unfolded. Just slightly not like a full video.

Will our (digital) newspapers become like this now?

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cinemagraphs

When talking to startup-ers you can hear a lot about their ideas what they want to do and how they want to do it, who they are and how they started out. Lots of details of everything but the most important answer often isn’t explicitly answered.

What does it do for the user?

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startups

So what is this startup? What exactly is it we do? What do we make of it? How are we going to present it? Who is our audience and how do we reach them? How will we earn some money with all of that? Who do we need for which tasks? Let’s focus on the first step and care about the rest later.

Or better not.

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Business · startups · strategy