“Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door.”

–Ralph Waldo Emerson

Is there any more familiar quotation related to innovation?  I doubt it.  However, “build a better mousetrap” was actually a misquotation. What Emerson really said was…

“If a man has good corn or wood, or boards, or pigs, to sell, or can make better chairs or knives, crucibles or church organs, than anybody else, you will find a broad hard-beaten road to his house, though it be in the woods.”

–Ralph Waldo Emerson

So there you have it.  The original quotation wasn’t about innovation at all.  It was about quality.

The thing that strikes me most about this quote is the last bit about “though it be in the woods”.  I think the implication here is clear.  You may not be a marketing genius or have the best location but if you build quality products that people need and want and you can get people sharing their experiences with your product, you’ve got yourself a winner. (more…)

No tags Hide

This particular post deals with the benefits and challenges of product management.  Where it’s been and where it’s going as it relates to open source.  First, I know what you’re thinking … product management in open source? That can’t be, and in some cases its true (See the summary of Pidgin’s resizable textbox).  In other cases there is too much “traditional” product management and not enough community driven product management.  So what is the happy medium and how should open source projects approach product management?   In this post I’m going to look at how community driven PM differs from traditional PM within a commercial open source project.

Let’s start by looking at a definition of product management.  Product management is discovering, documenting, and prioritizing user stories with the objective of maximizing some combination of users, sales (more…)

No tags Hide