“There is not one answer.” Anyone who works on product development needs to read this MIT Technology Review article, which mentions some intriguing research by Professor Maria Yang on basic product design lessons, including sketching: “Yang has found that the very existence of those visual representations matters greatly: designers who do even basic, preliminary sketching […]
Product design lessons from MIT: Sketches matter! Read More »
Time to return to one of my favorite design-related topics, the 2016 OECD skills survey. This time, instead of talking about product design as it relates to Amazon, we’re going to turn to a more general area of audience trends. It starts in a strange place – in the never-ending analysis of the ongoing crypto
Why haven’t companies learned from this 2016 OECD skills survey? Read More »
Amazon aggregators (aka “Amazon roll ups”) buy up-and-coming brands that sell products on Amazon. The idea is to buy lots of small Amazon-based brands (FBA or FBM), and achieve growth via economies of scale with more efficient marketing, sourcing, logistics, and back-office operations … in theory, at least. VC-funded aggregators had been raising lots of
Amazon roll ups: operational vs. intangible challenges Read More »
I received two fantastic pieces of news this week: Lean Media is a finalist in both the IBPA Ben Franklin Awards and Foreword Reviews INDIES competition. (See update at the bottom of this post) The IBPA and Foreword Reviews award programs are established, respected competitions that highlight the some of the best fiction and nonfiction
Lean Media book is a finalist in IBPA and Foreword Reviews competitions Read More »
If you follow news about tech startups, you have undoubtedly heard the term “pivot.” It’s a hot idea in Silicon Valley and other tech hubs, and is closely associated with the Lean Startup movement. In The Lean Startup, Eric Ries defines a pivot as a “fundamental change to [a startup’s] business strategy” borne out of
What is a Lean Media pivot? Read More »
As I have noted many times on this blog, I actively solicit feedback from potential readers about chapters, diagrams, examples, and other elements of the book. Feedback helps me understand my audience, identify elements that are working well, and also head off potential problems. It’s Lean Media in action. This week, I am soliciting feedback
Lean Media in action – gathering feedback for the book design Read More »
When I first started to devise the Lean Media framework for media production, I expected to encounter others working on similar methodologies. So far, though, I have yet to find any structured frameworks that are expressly about making media. That’s not to say that media people don’t think about what we do. We in the
Media analysis and the lack of production-focused frameworks Read More »
Regardless of whether they use Lean Media methods or not, media pros frequently rely upon surrogate audiences to understand the market for new media. Surrogate audiences are groups of people who like media that’s similar to what you are working on. Let’s say you are producing a new TV show, Rodent World, which explores the
Surrogate Audiences and Lean Media Read More »
The following post is excerpted from my draft manuscript about Lean Media. Please leave comments below to help me improve the draft! Looking at the Lean Media flowchart, some creators may be aghast at the use of “prototype” to describe early or incomplete versions of a work in progress: The concern is understandable. The term
How different industries refer to prototypes Read More »
In my July update, I mentioned the development of the three principles of Lean Media, which came out of my work on the Lean Media book as well as my spring presentation to a small audience that included media people. In this post, I will describe the 3 principles of Lean Media in more detail, and present a diagram
The 3 principles of Lean Media (v 0.3) Read More »
