Essential Links in January 2023

The last month saw a lot of drama around a product that a lot of people care about. Wizard of the Coast, the company behind Dungeons & Dragons, supposedly wanted to change the license, under which their product could be used by others - companies and fans.

Up to now it was easy to incorporate and extend the roleplaying world around the Open Gaming License that WotC defined in 2000, to make the content of their creations usable by the public. And this license surely was part of the raging success of Dungeons & Dragons in the last 2 decades, because there was a limitless community building their worlds and their creativity around the 20-sided die and the planes of a fantastic world.

Their plans leaked and showed a glimpse of a very restrictive, money- and revenue-driven spiderweb of legal obligations for any creator out there. The uproar was real.

Countless fans and other companies cancelled their collaboration with WotC, cancelled their subscriptions on dndbeyond.com, Wizards main community portal around D&D. Many organizations and companies put out press releases to announce their discontinuation of OGL usage and the creation of their own creator-friendly community-founded models. These organizations, communities and ventures have all contributed to the wild success of the D&D franchise (there's even a fan-budgeted/kickstarted animated series on Amazon Prime now).

Now, Wizards of the Coast has ever been quite restrictive with their creations. And they are - without doubt - implementing some of the better known worlds and fantasies of the RPG genre. But they are not the only ones. And as much as they now change plans, apologize, open up with Creative Commons (with a lot of sugar-talking and humbleness) the inflicted wounds do not seem to heal. The chasm between the company and the community has grown drastically. They did not make friends.

Why do I talk about that? It's all about product strategy and how I see my product. Some see their product by the value it may bring to others. Some see their product by the value it brings for them. That's a huge difference.

Strategy

• How to set effective goals in your strategy.

Product Development

• John Cutler on ProductOps (did not know this was a thing)
• Here's a short yt video on Pricing Design, a book by Dan Mall on how you can construct prices and what you should consider.
• Even more on pricing by Paul Boag at smashingmagazine.com
• Here is an interview with the founder of the note-taking app Joplin, where he talks about product design challenges and feature design
• John Cutler changed his job. And in the process he wrote down his own product enablement principles. This is a very interesting read!

UX & Design

• The people working at Disney are experts in animation with the goal to enrich the experience of their audience. Here are some of their principles.
• Sunset is a beautiful palette in a beautiful Color Mixer tool (hey, it's about the tool, not about the palette)
• The UXKnowledgeBase is an invaluable resource for all things UX

Tech

• Marc Benioff on hiring and laying off people. To be frank: if you do not know whether you need more people, don't hire them. Hiring people rarely is a solution design.
• From the team behind my favorite writing app comes the end of all writing.

Software

• Rule One, Page One of software development.

Agile

• The Agile Hub is a community of product owners, scrum masters and agilists from all over the world.
• Here is a great list of recommended lean events worldwide
• An extended article on card, conversation, confirmation (from xp) and about accepting phases of work
• Maybe you just need one objective in your OKR by C. Wodtke
• Here's an extensive discussion/article around the OMTM - the One Metric That Matters (and how to find it)
• A great list of examples around OKR

Yourself

• You don‘t want goals, you only want the rubberband: About Growth Loops by Anne.

I ran 158 km in January so I am only ~10 km behind my goal of 2023 km in this year. Yay!