Techno-optimism: immersive technologies

Many people implicitly believe that anything natural is better than anything created by humans, despite ample evidence to the contrary. Cooking on wood is much worse than cooking on an electric stove. Walking long distances is much worse than taking a car, train or plane. Sending an email is much better than having a courier … Read more

Techno-optimism: flying cars

One of the main complaints people have about the age we live in is that we were promised flying cars in the 1950s and 1960s and we got Twitter/X and 140 characters instead. The good news is that there are quite a few companies out there that are developing really compelling prototypes of flying vehicles … Read more

Techno-optimism: asteroid mining

Earlier in this series, I already discussed that we’re likely to go interplanetary during this century. Humans getting off this rock and spreading through the solar system is probably the best insurance we have against extinction due to a threat that wipes out Earth, such as an asteroid or all-out nuclear war. Of course, even … Read more

Techno-optimism: quantum computing

One of the historical facts that many do not know is that when computers were first developed in the 1940s, several computer architectures were explored that were quite different from the Von Neumann architecture that we ended up with. One of these was the dataflow architecture, where execution takes place based on the availability of … Read more

Techno-optimism: clean and free energy

Many worry about us destroying the planet and changing the climate. I think there’s little doubt that humans are an important factor. The rate at which the temperature is increasing seems to be much faster than during earlier periods. Also, it will cause migration of people as some parts of the world have simply become … Read more

From Agile to Radical: system and software architecture

When I wrote my first book in the 1990s, it was on software architecture. The central tenet at that time was that we had to be careful and intentional about the initial design of the architecture as subsequent changes were considered to be impossibly difficult. So, as a community, we developed techniques to assess architectures, … Read more

Strategic digital product management: imaginate

We’ve already talked about exploration as an activity in an earlier post. We need to conduct exploration activities, of course, to find new functionality to add to the existing offerings and to identify new offerings to create. However, exploration is also a mindset and a viewpoint we need to take for the activity to even … Read more

Strategic digital product management: technology

Many, including those in R&D, may view technology as part of the R&D realm and outside the scope of product management. The thinking is that the product manager decides what needs to be built and R&D decides how to build it. In practice, however, the technology choices are so influential on the strategic options available … Read more

Strategic digital product management: exploration

Product management consists of multiple dimensions and so far, we’ve discussed the underlying principles as well as the scopes. The third dimension concerns the activities of a product manager or the activities conducted as part of product management by anyone in the company. These activities can be structured in many different ways; here, we’ll divide … Read more