Subject To Change: Creating Great Products & Services for an Uncertain World, Adaptive Path

Posted July 25th, 2008 by Taran

When Adaptive Path decides to share some of it's knowledge outside of the Adaptive Path blog, it's worth taking notice. Peter Merholz, Todd Wilkens, Brandon Schauer and David Verba got together and wrote Subject To Change: Creating Great Products & Services for an Uncertain World: Adaptive Path on Design (Adaptive Path), a book whose title and authors cannot fit within the title of this book review. Fortunately, the book is not as thick as the title would indicate.

The trouble with designing just about anything these days is uncertainty. While business is risk, business is also mitigating risk, and the book promised some insights into mitigating risk by dealing with the uncertain world we live in. How could one not consider reading the book? From the high school kid with a dream to the CEO of a Fortune 500 company, dealing with uncertainty is a necessary aspect of success.

The Book

The book is only 164 pages between bibliography and covers - relatively light but by no means diminutive in content. Throughout the book there are real world examples dating back to the days of Eastman Kodak and up to the present day success of the iPod (the latter's success still confounds this reader).

The chapters are broken down into bite size chunks that should be chewed thoughtfully. Phrases such as 'The Experience is the Product' and 'Stop Designing Products' hit home when it comes to modern products, and those two phrases (Chapters 1 and 5, respectively) seem to split the book in perspectives while retaining a flow of information that is most certainly easy and informative reading. It can also be very contextual when looking at things that are happening now, as I noted with Hewlett Packard recently.

A lot of the book had me nodding my head thoughtfully. There were a few things that did not sit well with me, such as the mentioning of the OLPC as something that is a success - indeed, the OLPC seemed to have left out a lot of the very foundation that the authors deemed necessary in the book. There was only one mention, so perhaps that was a mistake.

The other thing that caught me was how the authors leapt from the Waterfall model and leapt straight to Agile programming when Agile programming is pretty much an iterative model that simply gained traction because of a perceived need by business people - plus a catchy name. The Spiral Model, as well as others, were around for some time - but the principles of these iterative models may have been lost when someone attempted to explain them to management. Indeed, the Agile Manifesto of 2001 was at least 10 years behind the Software Engineering processes that were being used in conjunction with object oriented programming.¹

There are a lot of interesting tidbits in the book, so the few things I perceived as flaws were well balanced. Overall I have to recommend the book (and might suggest an errata). The book is very easy to read, and is well designed in that one can pretty much put it down and come back to it without being lost.

The book is poignant and has a lot of data to support the tools for success that the book outlines. While it does seem to gloss over some things, such as leaping from the Waterfall straight to Agility, the points are well made and are not confusing even when one has to wander away from the book and be agile. This book is highly recommended to anyone involved in any form of business or looking to be in any form of business. If you liked the Cluetrain Manifesto, you'll love this book. A word of warning for readers from this reviewer, though - for many of these ideas to be successful in a business, the business itself has to absorb the intelligence wrapped between the covers of this book.

The book scores a KnowProSE.com 8 out of 10.

¹ I think the authors did a disservice by skipping this part, as the entire success of the 'Agile' methodology hinged on a large demand from business and a neatly packaged name. It simplified processes that existed before, and in this was was a great example of what the book was about. The experience is the product, and let's face it: people who wrote books about Agile processes probably did better than those who wrote about more academic software engineering.

This is a pet peeve of mine; I've been involved with Software Processes for a long time and championed iterative models on more than one occasion prior to the entire Agile scenario starting. That the same concepts have taken hold under a different guise is educational in it's own way, and over time has given me tools for better championing things. That is what the book is about, so it really isn't that big of a deal - but to be accurate...