From the category archives:

featuritis

Maintain Forward Tension

by Pete Abilla July 20, 2008

One principle in Wing Chun is the maintaining of forward tension.  To explain, I’ll draw the distinction between Tension and Energy and show how this principle in Wing Chun can be applied to Change Management. Tension is a type of Energy A Wing Chun maxim goes as follows: soft and relaxed strength will put your [...]

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On Customer Obsession

by Pete Abilla April 15, 2008

I’d venture to say that most products and services are bloated with features that customers most likely don’t care for;  I’ve been part of product development teams where the focus is on features, with an implicit goal to stuffing as many features as possible — in consumer packaged goods and in software.   This is the [...]

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Featuritis and the Customer Experience

by Pete Abilla November 18, 2007

The more I learn and practice ethnography and design-thinking, the more I notice subtle but incredibly frustrating experiences.  For example, I had a frustrating experience with a faucet that was in the hospital room where our adopted baby girl, Mylie, was born.  This faucet is an automated one — with a sensor.  So, whenever an [...]

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Ask Mary Poppendieck Anything!

by Pete Abilla November 11, 2007

In August 2006, Mary Poppendieck was nice enough to entertain questions from my readers on the topic of Lean for Software.  Some great questions were submitted and Mary answered them.  Well, she’s willing to do that again, so please submit your questions for Mary and she will answer some of those questions.  I will then [...]

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Aza Raskin on Google Search Results

by Pete Abilla November 6, 2007
This entry is part 2 of 5 in the series Aza Raskin

In a previous post on Ethnography, I invited Aza Raskin, founder of Humanized and son of Jef Raskin, the inventor of the Macintosh and author of The Humane Interface: New Directions for Designing Interactive Systems — to possibly answer reader’s questions about design, visual management, ethnography, genchi genbutsu, man-machine interactions, or anything related.  Several readers [...]

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Root Cause, Genchi Genbutsu, & Design Thinking

by Pete Abilla November 3, 2007

One Pillar of the Toyota Production System is "Respect for the Human" or, more commonly known outside of Toyota as "Respect for People."  That Pillar has given rise to an approach to improvement that is uniquely Toyota’s and is starkly different than the Taylorist approach proposed by Frederick Winslow Taylor, which fails to see the [...]

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Complexity Creep

by Pete Abilla June 5, 2007

What if your company only had one product?  One feature in a product?  What would life in that world be like?  Then, as an excercise, slowly add one feature and one product at a time, and see how that world changes, which processes are added, and how complexity begins to accumulate.  Lean and Six Sigma [...]

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Shmula Now at eBay

by Pete Abilla April 27, 2007

I resigned from my previous position with Ancestry.com; after considering 3 offers, I accepted a position with eBay.  Our family will still be in Utah (eBay has a large office here), but I’ll most likely travel to other offices also.  I’m very, very excited to be at eBay.  From a high level, I’ll be leading [...]

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Complexity: Different Ways, Same Output, or is It?

by Pete Abilla April 7, 2007

There are outputs and the processes that produce those outputs.  In a business, if there are many processes that produce the same output — that can be a silent killer for a business. Consider an inventory management system, where associates on the factory floor are to use a scanner-based tool to adjust physical inventory in [...]

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