Design on Hi from Dwipal

Top-down vs. Bottom-up product development

Tue, 25 Jan 2011 07:50:00 +0000

We were recently discussing a new feature for my new startup TheIceBreak that involves building functionality that has never been done before. In order to design it, we relied on a few assumptions that are difficult to validate without actually building the product.

This reminded me of the fundamental differences between dogfood-style (bottom-up) vs vision driven (top-down) product development, and the companies that follow them: Google vs Apple, and how this approach defines how products are built.

Google has a strong bottom-up culture and believes in being extensively data driven. All the products that are built at google go through extensive number-crunching and analysis before (except the 20% projects). It is very difficult for someone to justify a brand new product as there might not exist enough existing data to validate it. Also, someone who is a small contributor might not see the ‘big picture’ and help move the company in that direction.

Apple (or Facebook), on the other hand, are driven by vision. There is, of course, a lot of data analysis that happens to get to the vision, but they repeatedly build new products which create a brand new market that never existed before. They have changed the company focus multiple times in a major way that it affects more than 50% of their revenue or users. It usually involves the high level teams define a clear product vision for the company, and everyone works towards executing on that path.

Creating something that is truly groundbreaking is extremely difficult to validate using existing data, so it relies on someone who has a clear foresight on what is going to be useful. It is very difficult to create something using iterative, data driven techniques that will change people’s behavior in a major way. It is, however, a great way to do incremental improvements to an existing product and get big results and can work quite well until someone ‘changes the game’. Top-down, vision driven strategy can refute the existing mindset to create something truly revolutionary, but it relies on a ’leader’ to be able to analyze the data they have and define this clear ‘vision’.

Having a clear overall vision for a company also helps the teams to know what’s good and what’s bad, and they have a clear path that they can execute on and be highly successful. This vision has to be broad enough to cover global trends, but also sharp enough so it can actually be followed, and it is absolutely the most critical thing for the long term success of a company.

One can also argue that the difference is similar to a democracy vs dictatorship. On paper, under the ideal conditions, dictatorship based governance can be more efficient. However, its more prone to ‘rouge dictators’ which leads us to the belief that democracy is better in the long term.

In the end, getting the right vision is extremely difficult (and a lot of people actually find it boring to try writing one down), but might be the biggest factor in determining long-term success of a company!

Comments

None (May 15, 2013):

Great post! Your examples really enforced the bottom-up versus the top-down strategies. It is so important for companies to establish which product design would fit them the best. From custom product development to the simplest form, the process needs to be stragically considered from beginning to end.

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Presentation Zen

Thu, 06 Jan 2011 18:33:00 +0000

Just finished reading the book ‘Presentation Zen’ by Garr Reynolds.

Its a really good book if you want to do an actual presentation, when you are the speaker on a podium and everyone else is listening.

The concepts in this book revolve strongly around keeping the ‘deck’ as simple as possible with heavy use of images, etc. The author also suggests that instead of adding more details on the presentation, there should be a separate handout.

This approach makes sense for one-way presentations to a large group of people, and there are some really good points made.

I find that this approach is not very useful while presentating to a smaller group of people whome you are more involved with, like a product review with the team. Such presentations involve a lot of discussion, and its good to have all the data cleanly presented. There are lots of charts and tables (though, less bullet points), which does not blend well with the style in this book. People also expect to be able to just ‘read’ the deck and understand the key messages.

There needs to be a balance between keeping the deck at a high level vs adding details. It needs to have enough details that people can recall the presentation by looking at the deck, but not so much that it overwhelms them.

Web 2.0 Logos

Tue, 07 Feb 2006 01:48:00 +0000

LOGO2.0_2 Originally uploaded by Stabilo Boss.

Found this on flickr, has logos of all the great Web 2.0 companies. (No, yahoo, ebay, google etc. are not on it and yes, YouTube is there in the list.).

In case you are wondering where these compnies are.. someone has done a great job using google maps. http://www.fourio.com/web20map/

Comments

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None (September 12, 2013):

I don’t know if it’s just me or if perhaps everybody else experiencing problems with your blog. It looks like some of the text on your content are running off the screen. Can somebody else please provide feedback and let me know if this is happening to them too? This may be a issue with my internet browser because I’ve had this happen previously. Appreciate it

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Comments

alprazolam online (March 12, 2007):

None (September 12, 2013):

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jessicasteve (April 28, 2017):

Michael Smith (April 30, 2017):