dataSmarts

In this video I talk about the importance of an open interface to allow for integrations across platforms. If you are a product developer or have software company this is a critical item for you. In almost all software arenas, clients are looking to bring in the best-in breed for various functions. If you want to be part of that ecosystem you have to be positioned to integrate with other plug-ins or systems. We like to use Swagger to document and share our APIs with partners. If you haven't checked them out you should. www.swagger.io

We have all heard of the MVP. The Minimum Viable Product has been a theme of the last 10 years. It is a tremendous tool in the product development life cycle. I would like to introduce another and maybe even more powerful idea... the MBP - minimum buyable product. What this is, is the minimum product version that you can actually sell to clients and start to get real feedback and make money from. This is a key item when it comes to ensuring your product vision is aligned with the market and is incredibly helpful when it comes to initial valuation and raising further capital, as needed.

In this video I give you two different approaches to determining market fit for your products. One assumes you have an installed base and the other is for those that are trying to build from nothing. Product development is hard and what you absolutely dont want to do is build a product only to realize that it doesnt resonate with customers. This is a huge waste of time and money. These two methods might help you avoid that.

In this video I provide some tips on establishing communication with offshore teams. Often when working with offshore teams you are facing both cultural and language barriers. If these are not taken into consideration they will put a strain on the relationship. One way that I have found to gain greater value of my development teams is by going through a question asking exercise. In these instances I will send over requirements or a wireframe and set a deadline for questions. I dont want an estimate or timeline. I just want questions. Now, when they come back to me with questions I try to do my best to be very gracious and not-condescending and that builds trust between me and my new team members. Try it out and let me know what you think.

More is not always better but less is. When you are building your applications you need to steadfast in preventing bloat. There will be a never ending flow of new ideas, feature requests and add-ons that you have to guard against. Now why do you care?! The goal should be to have the smallest possible consumption gap possible. This means only including key features that your clients will actually use and NOT having lots of extraneous items that never get used. Think about an application like Excel. It can do 1 million things but most people probably only use about 20% of the features. The case can be made that the other 80% of features could be removed and not risk upsetting the workflow of most the Excel users. Don't build your application with 80% waste. It takes too long and costs far too much. Less but better.

I answer questions from Quora and Reddit on: What is the hardest skill to teach in software engineering? What are my thoughts on the NPS metric? How involved should your customers be in product decisions? dataSmarts specializes in helping small and medium sized businesses find value in data and analytics. The videos, podcast, blog posts and how-to documents found on this site are designed to help you take advantage of the insights that can be derived out of data analytics and software development. ​ Whether you are just getting started or working on something more advanced, dataSmarts is passionate about helping you turn data into information.

If you are in product development you have probably heard about Eric Reis and The Lean Startup. You probably also throw the word MVP around. I am here to expand on that thinking to other domains. My belief is that the MVP approach should be taken with all things creative. In everything you make you should start to think about where and how quickly you can get feedback. What are some areas that you think you can start taking the MVE approach in? #saas #productdeveloment #ericries

Have you ever wondered about device id targeting? How is this information captured? How is it used? This quick video explains the basics of how the location data is captured and used by brands/ agencies. This is by no means a full explanation of all the facets of location based targeting but does serve as a good introduction. #deviceid #locationtargeting #facebookaudiences