About three weeks ago I misjudged a steep bank in woods near my house while on my mountain bike. I fell right over the handlebars and broke my collar bone, cracked four ribs and punctured my lung. I'm pretty much back to work now. I can attend meetings, take phone calls and even write using the Dragon dictation software. It'll be another three weeks before I know if I will have surgery. My left clavicle is sort of healing, but my doctors will make a final decision in three weeks time. All in all quite frustrating, but good to be on the mend.
The experience has given me some time to reflect on what I've been up to this year so far. A lot of the work I'm doing is product strategy, but for some clients my role is more of CTO, helping them to commission appropriate technical services and understand the wider implications of what their product is. The product strategy aspect of my work tends to focus on ensuring there is a understandable benefit for someone using their application. It is all too easy to focus on the feature set or the business to business side of a new endeavour. This means that the core user experience, which is often the only experience gets short shrift. Being able to the question “why would they tell anybody about using your application" is often a useful prompt.
Building Social Web Applications by Gavin Bell.
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