eROI Days Email Agency » sierra

Kathy Sierra: Breakthrough Innovation

Ryan Buchanan — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 19:00:23 +0000

Got some great ideas from the Breakthrough Innovation talk at SXSW. Instead of looking at incremental changes and feature bloat, look at game-changers (e.g. Wii, iPhone) by focusing on one thing you do really well – so well that you’d put it as the word or phrase on your super hero outfit. A phrase that does NOT work would be something like “Increased Productivity.” A lot of her points reinforced what I recently read in the book “Made to Stick” by Dan and Chip Heath. If you are in a product development cycle like we are here at eROI, this session was uber-relevant. Check out the video and my tweets below.

My tweets—-

#sxsw session on making breakthroughs – we often get into an arms race w/ competitors and hit a brick wall1:34 PM Mar 16th from TweetDeck

breakthroughs with ideas or performance – Kathy Sierra seems like she’s gonna be a rockin speaker #sxsw1:35 PM Mar 16th from TweetDeck

you need to help people kick ass to breakthrough the competition1:39 PM Mar 16th from TweetDeck

flight vs. invisibility – 2/3 of 2,000 person audience chose flight as their main superpower, 1/3 chose invisibility, how ’bout you?1:44 PM Mar 16th from web

Would you put your product feature on an action figure like a superpower?1:47 PM Mar 16th from web

Superset game. Example with arrington and o’reilly. Take om the bigger thing than immediate large competitor like google in search1:49 PM Mar 16th from web

What would it be like if you didn’t know how to do something and didn’t know limitations2:04 PM Mar 16th from web

Gamers with goal of shipping game in asx hours start to finish2:05 PM Mar 16th from web

Less camp, more jam. Less talk, more doing and making the actual product2:06 PM Mar 16th from web

Focus entirely on what it takes to make your employees better at what they do2:08 PM Mar 16th from web

What movie are your users in?2:10 PM Mar 16th from web

If you want incremental improvements, ask your users. -f you want breakthrough, ignore everybody2:14 PM Mar 16th from web

Breakthru: ask other people,s users2:15 PM Mar 16th from web

Be brave. Fantastic idea gets screwed by the ease of use police2:17 PM Mar 16th from web

Re-examine the half-made or dead products2:20 PM Mar 16th from web

What did gary do? Wine guy – video2:24 PM Mar 16th from web

Gary: huge self-esteem issue of wine foe americans. Talk about it in a totally different way2:27 PM Mar 16th from web

Don’t mistake narrow for shallow. example: lolcats2:28 PM Mar 16th from web

Spotting misused quotations – an entire blog on this2:30 PM Mar 16th from web

Be amazed. Celebrate innovation. Its amazing.2:33 PM Mar 16th from web

Book outliers says it takes 10,000 hours to be amazingly good. How can we take shortcuts to greatness of innovation1:50 PM Mar 16th from web

Deliberate practice to get to kicking ass in less than 1000 hours.1:53 PM Mar 16th from web

Tiger woods spends 80% time on strengths1:54 PM Mar 16th from web

Coders need to carve out time for practice, then code like crazy the right way they have practiced.1:55 PM Mar 16th from web

Make the right thing easy and the wrong thing difficult1:57 PM Mar 16th from web

Get better gear and offer it1:58 PM Mar 16th from web

More monitors truly makes some of us more productive2:01 PM Mar 16th from web