What Business Are You In?
It's pretty hard to develop the right products when you're not sure what business you're in. Or what business you're not in. A few years ago I joined a small company and was asked to design a new delivery platform for their content and interactive applications. The platform, which would manage user profiles and transactions over time, needed to be a very sophisticated system that would underlie all the company's products. I diligently began investigating the user requirements and existing products that did similar things. As I gathered data, I realized what a large undertaking this would be. I talked to the development team and began to get an idea of the resources that would be required, and did some thumbnail calculations. Something was wrong. The company's strength was in developing interactive content - video and accompanying web-based activities. While a new back-end platform was clearly needed, this was not something that they had experience develop