Comments for Silly Features - a blog from Uri Gilad

Comment on SLA is not just for customers – count everything by Show Them The Way – It’s Not Just The SLA

Show Them The Way – It’s Not Just The SLA — Fri, 04 May 2012 10:18:04 +0000

[...] SLA is not just for customers – count everything(sillyfeatures.com) Share this:FacebookEmailPrintDigg Tags: communication with customers, customer experience, Customer Management, Customer service, customer touch points, keep customers informed, Service-level agreement [...]

Comment on The dark and dangerous side of big data by Ethan Ram

Ethan Ram — Sat, 24 Mar 2012 17:17:49 +0000

When you build an algorithm to do some analysis on big data you have to identify and eliminate the outliers before you can actually look at the results. The outliers, like the case you describe above, may shift your results significantly, to the point that they obstruct the real results. I’ve had some strange cases where the weekly trends were looking almost too good to be true… I then found that they were actually too good indeed: had a couple of days with huge number of users comping from a couple of North Ireland towns, and a couple of other days with large numbers from a remote village in Malaysia. Bogus/worms/attacks or whatever you want to call them…
One problem i found is that it’s very hard to eliminate the outliers when you use standard tools like google analytics and the like.

Comment on Just do it – on agile vs. waterfall by eram

eram — Sat, 24 Mar 2012 16:51:00 +0000

Agility is anything from a philosophical view of how to run a large company to the details of who you manage your daily team meetings. I think that for a product mgr in a B2B company the main advantages you have are:
(1) having short release cycles >> you don’t have to plan months in advance only to find out that the business priorities have changed and your development teams are 2 months late so only 30% of the original plan is going happen.
(2) you write less of those documents that devs “forget” to read before they implemented and, instead, become more involved in the development process itself.
(3) Things are much better accounted for. So you end up actually having the feature that you wanted. In the classic waterfall there are like 7 handovers of ownership on a feature. So many times the original reason to have the feature in the first place gets lost in translation.

Glad to see you on the Agile wagon. It IS so much more fun!

p.s. some of my pondering on the subject are here- http://thenullterminator.wordpress.com/category/agile/

Ethan

Comment on Just do it – on agile vs. waterfall by Vin D'Amico

Vin D'Amico — Fri, 09 Mar 2012 17:10:01 +0000

Good point. The “best” process for software development is situational. We should begin every new project by asking questions about the environment, the culture and the situation. Only then can we determine how to approach the project. Thanks for sharing!

Comment on Facebook and real estate – a marketing adventure by NabeWise – online neighborhood assessment « Startups – Classified & Ads « Startups « Startupeando

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 03:17:37 +0000

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Comment on Facebook and real estate – a marketing adventure by NabeWise – clickable neighborhood assessment « Startups – Classified & Ads « Startups « Startupeando

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 03:16:35 +0000

[...] Facebook and real estate – a marketing adventure (sillyfeatures.com) [...]

Comment on The product owner by John Quincy

John Quincy — Sat, 15 Oct 2011 18:00:14 +0000

Pretty good article. I get worried when organizations go full force with ‘agile’ without even knowing what it is or even if they should go that route — and the PO is one of the most misunderstood roles.

You might find this video amusing on how some companies choose agile:

John

Comment on The product owner by A Product Manager? Who exactly this guy is…? « Seeingfuture

A Product Manager? Who exactly this guy is…? « Seeingfuture — Sat, 15 Oct 2011 07:30:28 +0000

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Comment on The hidden costs of the installer package by eram

eram — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 09:22:00 +0000

interesting post.
a couple of additional points:
on the SAAS provide side the decision is actually to part from having a one-version-product to having a per-customer-version. On the development side this also has a large overhead as critical bugs, and even features, will have to be delivered to specific versions and customers – a lot of branching and merging overhead will result.
having 1-2 such customers is usually relatively easy on the operational side. but once you grow to about 5 such customers you’ll have to create a full back-office system to support the operations – so there’s going to be a big jump in expenses before your see the return: a 24/7 support team, support case management system, a build system with proper versioning and smooth upgrades, a technical integration person, post-sales engineers… and managers to run the operation. You may need the operation to be run from another country so add the office space, travelling etc.
This has a potential of becoming a major cause for premature scaling for a startup.

Comment on Tools of the trade (and other software) by Haggai

Haggai — Wed, 11 May 2011 17:58:40 +0000

I know it’s a bit off-topic to your post, but check out http://www.ninite.com. It makes the relocation process easier.