One of my old business partners, Kedron Wolcott (co-founder of Rapid Logic), forwarded me the following cartoon, which captures the paradox of developing breakout new products and services. 
Simply put, there are so many cooks in the kitchen AND so many definitions of what is the kitchen AND so many ways of defining the customer AND so many ways of defining what the customer really needs that most new products/projects simply fail.
There are good and clear strategies and tactics that one can deploy to mitigate these challenges, though. Past posts of mine have focused on the methodology of "starting in the middle," the importance of not confusing chicken parts with chicken and the integral-ness of codifying/tracking key metrics of success (and then iterating based on the resulting data). And this doesn't even begin to speak to marketing and selling side of the equation, which you can read about elsewhere on this blog.
But, to be clear, even on a good day, this stuff is hard. I am about two-thirds of the way through reading, "Dreaming in Code," a book about the (seemingly) ill-fated Chandler project, which spotlights these challenges from a software development perspective. Plus, I see it in my companies on a daily basis and and of course experience what comes out of the "kitchen" as a fanatical, but pragmatic, consumer.
Some days you spotlight solution paths. Others, you shine a light on the impact of negative gravity. Enjoy.
It's interesting how different people look at the same picture and see different things.
The first time I saw this cartoon, I thought of Alistair Cockburn's essay "The Unknowable and the Incommunicable", which is the first or second chapter of his book Agile Software Development.
As a tangent, when I saw this cartoon I was visiting SomethingAwful's Serious Hardware/Software Crap discussion forum. Someone posted Mike Morgan's "If Architects Had To Work Like Programmers" story: http://www.stsc.hill.af.mil/resources/tech_docs/gsam3/appene.pdf
I am also reminded of one other essay. Larry O'Brien's story "The Last Time I Saw Elvis": http://www.sdtimes.com/fullcolumn/column-20060601-03.html
Posted by: John "Z-Bo" Zabroski | October 13, 2007 at 05:56 AM
By the way, if you're into Dreaming in Code, then you might be interested in reading Raymond Chen's book The Old New Thing. If you want to sample his writing, then read this blog post: http://blogs.msdn.com/oldnewthing/archive/2007/09/05/4751155.aspx (His blog has the same name).
Posted by: John "Z-Bo" Zabroski | October 13, 2007 at 06:05 AM
Thanks, John. The friend who forwarded along the graphic also pointed me to a site called Worse Than Failure that deals with examples of good, bad, agile and ugly development practices: http://worsethanfailure.com/
Specific to Dreaming in Code, interesting reading but having built a bunch of hardware and software products, very little is new or told in a way that is specifically compelling. The most worthwhile book in this area, IMHO, is Inmates are Running the Asylum, which at the time was a bit of a revelation but probably is dated at this point.
Posted by: Mark Sigal | October 17, 2007 at 02:51 PM
It doesn't have to always be totally new. A lot of people like reading things like Worse Than Failure or watching The Office.
I read Worse Than Failure every now and then when it comes into my RSS feed through a third party. The site used to be called something else, but they changed it to increase it's marketability :-)
Posted by: John "Z-Bo" Zabroski | October 19, 2007 at 05:53 AM