What job are people hiring your product to do?

I am a product guy, dating back to my days as a design student at Stanford. I’ve been a fan of Clay Christensen ever since “The Innovator’s Dilemma,” and even interviewed him for the student newspaper when I was a Harvard Business School student. Which is why I’m shocked that I hadn’t heard of Clay’s … Continue reading What job are people hiring your product to do?

Why it’s so hard to work with designers

I often hear folks complaining about how hard it is to work with designers.  “They’re prima donnas,” people say.  “They always insist on getting their way.” As a proud holder of a design degree from Stanford, I feel unusually qualified to respond to these criticisms. Design is ultimately about making choices with limited information.  It … Continue reading Why it’s so hard to work with designers

A Tale Of Two Americas (and a failure of imagination)

I really enjoyed this recent rant that appeared in the MIT Entrepreneurship Review, “The Unexotic Underclass”: http://bit.ly/11oslgw The editorialist, C.Z. Nnaemeka writes eloquently and movingly about Silicon Valley entrepreneurs’ tendency to focus on a target market that resembles that of a Hollywood sitcom: Young, white, and improbably blessed with money and free time. “Those who … Continue reading A Tale Of Two Americas (and a failure of imagination)

How The Arnell Group Botched the Pepsi Logo With Crimes Against Design

Aaron Perry-Zucker at Fast Company describes the new Pepsi logo as “branding lunacy,” and I could not agree more. If you have time (and a lot of bandwidth–it’s over 10 MB) and want to either laugh or cry, you should download the Arnell Group’s design brief, which invokes the golden ratio, the Mona Lisa, the … Continue reading How The Arnell Group Botched the Pepsi Logo With Crimes Against Design