Part of the Process

Photo by  Annie Spratt  on  Unsplash I never used to see the point of "end of year round up" blog posts. But the journey that I've been on during the past year has lead me to reflect on what I have learned. The beginning of the year started off with me thinking about being data informed . This was balanced by a survey that showed this work had paid off . Since then I have put in processing to help collect and report on what we guided us to detect changes. Learning R and creating a repo to share the data processing recipes  has been the culmination of this. Data isn't just an important topic for product management, combined with ethics it's a topic that is increasingly touching our lives. My interest was first piqued in my reading during April .  Later in the year as GDPR started to loom on the horizon I took a course on Ethics and Law in Data and Analytics . This was a great course that covered not only some philosophical exploration of what it means to

Photo by  Andy Kelly  on  Unsplash This week I attended a webinar on AI in the aviation industry. I don't envy anyone in doing a summary of AI in under an hour leaving enough time for the rest webinar! IT's a shame that one bit that gets missed is the role of supporting technology or ecosystem in innovation. Looking back one of the big factors allowing AI to become useful has been the supporting technology. Namely, speed of processing power and availability of memory. Taking a different industry, the Netflix business model was helped by increasing broadband speeds, encoding formats, and again processing power. The change in the shape of overheads was probably a key enabler. Switching to an internet streaming business allowed the delivery mechanism to scale on demand. Going to the root of both of these, Get off the grass by Hendy and Callaghan had the best history that I have read of Silicon Valley. The innovation didn't come from research into completely new techn