Cardboard Revolution, part 3 — In this series of posts I examine how the Internet transformed the boardgame industry and hobby in the past 20 years. If you haven’t already, you might want to go read the first parts before plunging into this one. In part 2, we examined how the Internet has helped the…

Cardboard Revolution, part 2 — In this series of posts I examine how the Internet transformed the boardgame industry and hobby in the past 20 years. If you haven’t already, you might want to go and read the first part before plunging into this one. When bringing a product to market, two of the first…

Cardboard Revolution, Part 1 — Maybe you’ve noticed it? The growing number of boardgame cafés in cities around the world. The expanding footprint of the games section in your local book store. The appearance of specialised boardgame shops at even the most exclusive high street adresses. Boardgames are invading wish lists and Christmas eves, family…

Most companies have some concept of shared services. HR, IT, PMOs and other teams often provide a centralized service across the organisation. …

5 features that modern developer tools have and modern productivity tools don’t… — Two years ago I decided to take up coding. I had been on the outskirts of it most of my career, running product, data and design teams. As I followed the online courses and wrapped my head around javascript, react, redux, next.js, …

Product Managers come from a wide variety of backgrounds. This diversity is part of what makes it a great line of work, but it comes at a cost. I have met, hired and managed product managers from a very wide range of backgrounds: People with no formal training who worked…

When corporates setup startup divisions or new ventures the first order of business is staffing. While hiring is always challenging, it is especially so for a corporate venture or innovation unit in the early stages. Hiring for uncertainty Often initial recruitment must preceed clarity on what exactly the team will be doing and…

Surprisingly often we expect our colleagues to be useless. — Lots of our working life is spent disagreeing. Designers disagree with developers, finance people disagree with procurement people, marketing disagrees with customer care and everybody disagrees with HR. As a manager I have often felt that my primary job was to manage disagreements. Done correctly disagreements quality assure decisions and…

Anarchy isn’t really a viable model, even (especially) for a corporate startup division wanting to get s*** done. When corporates setup innovation hubs or agile shops (sometimes for the wrong reasons), one of the key expectations is to rip through the red tape and build a team focused on execution…