90% of Everything is Crap – Adrian Howard on The Product Experience

At ProductCamp Southwest UK earlier this year, Adrian Howard ran a session that focused on something he termed 'Sturgeon's biases' – where he talked about how the experience of being in a community was not evenly distributed, about the fact that like-minded people tend to group together, and that 90% of everything is crap. We enjoyed it so much that we invited him to join us on the podcast to explore the topic in some more detail.

Quote of the Episode

I sometimes half-joke that most of my job is just getting people in the room and forcing them to talk to each other and listen to each other – and really, that's where a bunch of problems just disappear.

Listen if you'd like to learn more about

• Communities of Practice
• How to communicate well
• Learning from failure
• Integrating product, development and UX effectively

Links mentioned in this episode

• Follow Adrian on LinkedIn and Twitter, and his work at Quietstars
• Adrian's video on Lean Personas at Mind The Product
• The Failure Swapshop
• 'Metcalfe's Law' at Techopedia
• 'Gresham's Law' at Britannica

Hosts

The Product Experience is hosted by Lily Smith and Randy Silver.

Lily enjoys working as a consultant product manager with early-stage and growing startups and as a mentor to other product managers. Lily has spent 13 years in the tech industry working mainly with startups in the SaaS and mobile space. She has worked on a diverse range of products – leading the product teams through discovery, prototyping, testing and delivery. Lily also founded ProductTank in Bristol, the Product Managers' meetup with regular events and talks on Product now with 800+ members and growing. Now the Head of Innovation at Go Compare, Lily also runs ProductCamp in Bristol and Bath.

A recovering music journalist and editor, Randy has been working as an interactive producer and product manager across the US and UK for nearly 20 years. After launching Amazon’s music stores in the US and UK, Randy has worked with museums and arts groups, online education, media and entertainment, retail and financial services. He’s held Head of Product roles at HSBC and Sainsbury’s, where he also directed their 100+-person product community. Now a trainer, Discovery and Leadership consultant, he's spoken at Mind the Product Engage (Hamburg and Manchester), the Business of Software, Turing Festival, a number of ProductTanks (London, Zurich, Manchester, Birmingham, Bristol, Oxford, and Brighton… so far!) and at conferences across the US and Europe.

Music

Our theme music is from Hamburg-based Pau, featuring ProductTank Hamburg’s own Arne Kittler on bass. Listen to more on their Facebook page

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