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Monkey tennis, or the (low) value of your ideas.

29th of September 2018 ~ tagged ideas, project management, app development, monkey tennis

Never before has it been easier to have a world-changing idea in tech and see that idea through to a finished product. The internet has made the collectivisation of information possible for the first time in our history and mobile devices now mean we all have access to this information from wheresoever we find ourselves killing time. Low barriers to entry, cheap credit and widespread skills mean that almost anyone can wake up one day with an idea, borrow money, hire a small team or agency, and launch a finished product a few short months later.

So all you need is an original idea, and success will follow automatically from that. Right?

Well, not exactly. Three problems:

Why do HK businesses need websites?

27th of September 2018 ~ tagged project management, web design

I realised early in my career that any client who can't answer that question – quickly – is not going to be much fun to work for. And it's amazing how many people can't. 

There aren't that many reasons why you would need a website. Generally – and I'm assuming you're a small business based in Hong Kong – they boil down to variations of the following:

Avoid this major obstacle to launching your product on time (or ever)

29th of June 2018 ~ tagged project management

 «On s'engage et puis… on voit» ~ Napoleon Bonaparte.

Minimum Viable Product (MVP) is one of those concepts which everyone says they think is a good idea at the beginning of the project, but when push comes to shove, they find it very easy to forget. And nothing could be more natural, you want your product, your precious idea, your baby, to be perfect before anyone gets to look at it and to judge it. 

Trello and the beauty of simplicity

26th of June 2018 ~ tagged project management

Trello has changed the way I work.

Inspiring in its simplicity, it is extremely powerful when you get to know it. Its list-based interface lends itself cleanly to multi-stage processes such as sales lead tracking and bug management. Drop incoming sales leads in at one end, and then shunt them into successive lists as things progress, the lists I use on my Sales board are as follows:

  • Active conversations

  • Proposal sent

  • Deposit paid

  • etc. 

The board gives me at-a-glance a summary of that whole potentially-complicated area of the business. So perfect for the job that it could have been created to be a sales lead tracker – but it wasn't.