Wednesday, October 2, 2013

Priorities

The online article "Postmortem of a Venture-backed Startup -  Lessons Learned from the rise and fall of @Sonar" that I have read recently, contains a particular sentence that made me reflect on the current planning of my master thesis:

You do not have 20% time. Identify your top three priorities. Throw away numbers two and three.

Putting this strategy to work, an hour has been spent on identifying the major priorities of the project and which would get the most valuable outcome for a successful research thesis:


  1. Holding a detailed user study with
    • early stage prototype
    • staged data
    • different user / user-groups
    • detailed recordings and evaluation
  2. Having a fully working application to
    • present
    • deploy
  3. Deploying an application inside a live business environment to
    • observe worker using the piece
    • evaluate the additional value to the business
    • prove the concept

Afterwards, priorities two and three have been excluded.


As hard as this proactive decision is, it is a valuable thing to do and important to focus on the one and most important priority for the project.

The really interesting article can be found here.

Finally, here's another famous quote that can also be found in this article: 

“Focus is saying no to 1,000 good ideas.” — Steve Jobs

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