Looking for answers

This is the end of a beautiful summer, and also one of the warmer recorded in France. I’m continuing my journey in the product management world and today I’m living in the product marketing one too. I will blog about this later. During this first half of this year, I read several articles on big data and started to understand how important the data science discipline is. Being able to define a direction/goal to search, collecting the proper data, then using a collection of techniques to extract something others can’t see - it sounds like magic. Also, when I listened to the Udacity Linear Disgression podcast episode “Hunting the Higgs”, I understood people with these skills can be better at solving a problem than the domain experts themselves. Katie Malone explained that in a competition to solve a particle physics problem, the best results came from machine learning people. Then I read the article about Zenefit on the vision mobile website : “Zenefits is an insurance compan...

Happy new year 2015. After 10 years inside the walls, I’m moving outside!! Time is running and I have been working in the software world for 13 years and promoting the “software agile thing” in my area, for 6 years. Today, I need to step back. As my professional life has moved from R&D management to Product Marketing Management, my professional focus has shifted and I need  to improve my skills in this area. I’m writing this article because I would like to thank my growing network and  make sure you won’t be surprised by my new area of interest, that could be outside of your own. I imagine a few of you, shaking your heads, uttering a pfff of disappointment and saying: Franck and his books, his constant learning curve. For what? This is really simple: Without a sense of progress, I get bored in my professional activity. In 2009, for the first time since beginning in this sofware development world, I had a sense of accomplishment. As Agile was the main change we ...

I used to believe the age of creativity in business, was the wave of new products based on the Internet and the future wave following the expiry of 3D printer patents (2014) . When I read Niels’s paper , I understood the collapse of craftsman-age creativity at the beginning of the industrial era, but I didn’t connect it to the different objects I saw, touched and used in my life. Last week, I visited a West African Museum in Lyon and I would not have expected this tour to open my mind to the different building ages. While we were walking in the museum, the guide explained the objects exhibited and we understood most of the collection was composed of pieces bought from the end of 19th century to the mid 20th. The objects created by one tribe were totally different from objects sculpted by another. Also, the signification could be totally different from one tribe to another and also us. Those objects were considered as art by Western people at this time, but in fact were day-to-day o...

English version below. Dans le document " Organiser pour la complexité ", Niels propose des principes d'organisation pour adapter son organization à la complexité. La maturité de ce document est le résultat d’années de travail qui se matérialisent dans ses  autres présentations disponibles en ligne . Ces idées font parti d'un mouvement plus large nommé "Beyond Budgeting" qui se défini comme "un mouvement après le commande et contrôle, pour un modèle de management avec plus d' empowerment et adaptabilité" Vous trouverez parmi les cas d'utilisation réalisés par " l'International Center for Outperformance ", celui de la société FAVI (Voir diapositives en fin de ce billet) . Niels a aussi publié quelques  notes intéressantes sur ce sujet. François Zobrist qui est au centre de la mise en place du management à la FAVI donne dans la vidéo ci-dessous, un témoignage au CJD Biarritz. Vous trouverez des similitudes avec le docu...

English version below.  Nos organisations peuvent avoir des difficultés à définir une structure interne qui réponde aux contraintes sociales et économiques externes. Celles actives dans des domaines soumis à des contraintes de changements douces, peuvent se contenter d’améliorations continues. Par contre, dans la plupart des domaines technologiques, les structures managériales ne permettent pas d’affronter l’accélération créative/économique en cours. Nos organisations IT ont trouvé des principes d’amélioration par la gestion en flux, le fast design et la validation anticipée (Agile, Devops, LeanStartup, etc.). Néanmois, d’un point de vue managériale haut niveau, il n’y a pas vraiment de principes adoptés et mis en place dans la globalité de l’entreprise.  L’année dernière, grâce au mouvement #stoos , j’ai redécouvert le mouvement “Beyond Budgeting” (première rencontre ALE2011 ) et ai vraiment apprécié le document de Beta Codex “Organiser pour la complexité”. J’ai décidé...

I wish you a wonderful new year 2013, filled with a lots of great products developed in a healthy and agile environment. Please find below, a video from Bassett & Partners.   "The 18 minute "Connecting" documentary is an exploration of the future of Interaction Design and User Experience from some of the industry's thought leaders. As the role of software is catapulting forward, Interaction Design is seen to be not only increasing in importance dramatically, but also expected to play a leading role in shaping the coming "Internet of things." Ultimately, when the digital and physical worlds become one, humans along with technology are potentially on the path to becoming a "super organism" capable of influencing and enabling a broad spectrum of new behaviors in the world." Source: nickfinck : Connecting - interaction design and the user experience

The second ALE (Agile Lean Europe) main event occurred in Barcelona the 29th-31st August 2012. At the beginning of the second day, an energising passion could be felt and those who were in Berlin last year, understood that the ALEnetwork magic is repeatable. I would like to thank all the organisers for this gift and hope others will follow their example. A thousand tips, smiles, books, domains of knowledge to discover, etc. are now somewhere in my brain. Some of them will reemerge later, some are already digested. So here below are those currently on my mind.   People in action ALE participant engagement is probably the most astonishing differentiator with other events. During the full three days, at every moment, the attendees proposed, shared and enlightened workshops and sessions. All of them are passionate, with different levels of knowledge. Most of them have an activity related to the ALEnetwork, like organising an event for their local community, running online pr...