Joe Lamantia.org

Voice Over and Video – Flying Blind On a Rocket Cycle: Customer-Centered Product Strategy
I’ve recorded voice-over narration for my ProductCamp Boston 2024 session, Flying Blind On a Rocket Cycle: Customer-Centered Product Strategy For Machine Intelligence. Originally presented live for a cozy in-person audience, the driving (*cough* – the Italian word for driver is ‘pilota’…) concept behind this case study format was recreating the experience of doing product strategy for an emerging enterprise technology space in real time, by offering the audience a sort of co-pilot’s (*cough* – not a GenAI co-pilot…) view through the windshield for shared learning purposes.

This particular story of building out new analytics products, categories, and portfolios happened a while back in tech terms, in the pre-transformer era of AI, when deep learning was new. In addition to being strongly enterprise focused, unlike much of the readily available material on product strategy, it’s timely on more than one level thanks to abundant parallels with our current AI-focused moment.

Recall there was considerable debate at the time around the core concepts, expressed via rhetoric like ‘machine learning is just glorified statistics’. (Search for this, if you’re feeling nostalgic for richly sardonic memes and gifs focused on IRML, often shared via pre-lapsarian social platforms.) Now we’re having a very public global debate about whether GenAI is [also] a new and transformative general purpose computing paradigm, built on probabilistic computing, or just a stochastic parrot that’s been wildly scaled up in terms, of compute, data, etc. for short-term gains. The rhetoric now takes what used to be technical perspectives at heavily niche conferences – NIPS before Zuck, anyone…? – and makes them the subject of public conservations about the stock market, featuring well-known AI academic and industry leaders and tech CEO’s of all types talking live on leading business television programs during investors’ liquid lunch windows.

Yes, as you may be thinking, these are in fact explicitly product strategy conversations happening out loud – with a hefty dollop of geo-politics… – which I’ll come back to another time.

For easy listening — we went quite fast in the first-run live talk — I’ve added bit more depth to the narration, and shared the recording in two parts. [And I think I’ll add a concluding / bookend segment that summarizes the business strategy perspective, given the close linkage to product strategy thats’s set up at the beginning of this story.]

Thanks for listening, and please share your perspectives.

Part 1

Part 2

For reference, here’s the original session description:

“Using the product strategy cycle as a guide, this session shares a case study on the growth and evolution of B2B product portfolios driven by machine intelligence for a leading SaaS product maker. This case study reviews a series of new product efforts; outlines the methods, tools, and practices that powered opportunity assessment, product discovery, and strategic planning; traces the evolution of product portfolios; and considers business outcomes from building and growing a portfolio of new analytics products and services for Oracle over the course of several years.”

This case study illustrates and demonstrates:
- Crafting customer-centered product strategies for new machine intelligence / AI / ML technologies
- Building and evolving customer-centered products and portfolios, and new product categories
- Establishing effective, innovative, customer-centered product strategy capabilities and practices for emerging spaces
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joe lamantia

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November 19, 2024

Categories: Product Development, Technology
‘The Present Future: AI’s Impact Long Before Superintelligence’

In The Present Future: AI’s Impact Long Before Superintelligence, Ethan Mollick offers,

Organizations need to move beyond viewing AI deployment as purely a technical challenge. Instead, they must consider the human impact of these technologies. Long before AIs achieve human-level performance, their impact on work and society will be profound and far-reaching. The examples I showed —from construction site monitoring to virtual avatars—are just the beginning. The urgent task before us is ensuring these transformations enhance rather than diminish human potential, creating workplaces where technology serves to elevate human capability rather than replace it. The decisions we make now, in these early days of AI integration, will shape not just the future of work, but the future of human agency in an AI-augmented world.

In a word, YES. I’m inclined to break this down further, following the thinking on the individual elements – but for now it’s enough. The call is timely, given the choices we’re making in the US (and in many other countries) about our vision of the future.

Now, if we knew where to find people – perhaps even professionals – who focus on ‘the human impact of technologies’. 😉

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joe lamantia

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November 4, 2024

Categories: ShortPosts
Talking Product Strategy for Machine Intelligence @ ProductCamp Boston
Many thanks to all the organizers, volunteers, hosts, participants, and everyone who helped make ProductCamp Boston 2024 happen – it was great to see a strong, local, community-powered event like this ‘back online’!

I’ve posted the slides from my session, “Flying Blind On A Rocket Cycle: Customer-centered Product Strategy for Machine Intelligence” over at Slideshare (an original Web2.0 service that’s still active…). We covered ~3 years of hands-on effort building a portfolio of advanced analytics and ML / AI products, services, and infrastructure in just 30 minutes, using the conceit of ‘looking through the windshield’ at oncoming business and customer questions in real-time to recreate the experience of learning to navigate the product strategy cycle. I’m positive there are further questions, thoughts, and comments, and I welcome feedback from folks who were in the room, or who follow along now.

Here’s the session overview:

Using the product strategy cycle as a guide, this session shares a case study on the growth and evolution of B2B product portfolios driven by machine intelligence for a leading SaaS product maker. This case study reviews a series of new product efforts; outlines the methods, tools, and practices that powered opportunity assessment, product discovery, and strategic planning; traces the evolution of product portfolios; and considers business outcomes from building and growing a portfolio of new analytics products and services for Oracle over the course of several years.

This case study illustrates and demonstrates:
- Crafting customer-centered product strategies for new machine intelligence / AI / ML technologies
- Building and evolving customer-centered products and portfolios, and new product categories
- Establishing effective, innovative, customer-centered product strategy capabilities and practices for emerging spaces
Flying Blind On A Rocket Cycle: Customer-centered Product Strategy for Machine Intelligence from Joe Lamantia

This was my first longer-form public talk since 2018, when I shared an overview and retrospective on building product a strategy function for emerging spaces at UX Strat. (That talk references some of the same delivered products, while emphasizing how to approach and engage with different stages of product and technology lifecycles.)

As a nod to the (pre-Xitter [with proper pronunciation…]) past, here’s the ‘going on stage’ tweet from that last talk:

We are pleased to welcome Joe Lamantia to the UX STRAT stage to talk about “Pioneering Product Strategy in Emerging Spaces,” in Providence RI, Sept 16-19: https://t.co/HnZH4UN7P3.
UX STRAT is a single-track conference about strategic UX / Product design.#uxstrat pic.twitter.com/kqIb4rlVAZ
— STRAT (@uxstrat) September 4, 2018
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joe lamantia

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November 1, 2024

Categories: Product Development, Technology
16 years of @mojoe: (re)publishing a twitter archive
Shortly after Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter was finalized in 2022, and after approximately 16 years and some 13.5k tweets as @mojoe, I moved to mastodon and the fediverse as my preferred short-form social network platform.

In a narrow sense, my account is ‘just a collection of tweets’. But, thanks to the comparatively long span of time I was active, it also serves as a defacto window on my explorations and progression through several different professional eras. The changing shape of my social and interest graphs, and the record of public sharing and back-and-forth interactions, encode a set of meaningful relationships and participation in a long-standing global community. In short, it’s a slice of history worth ‘saving’, in some form.

Like many, I intended to remove my data from twitter immediately after moving. Being honest, my motives included a dose of pique at what I saw as the rapid, willful ruination (yes, as in destruction…) of one of the few genuinely innovative global social utilities to emerge from the Internet era. (The list of durable, valuable things to come out of the recent Cambrian explosion of new digital media is unfortunately short…). Mostly, I wanted to avoid advancing the various political and cultural agendas of Twitter’s new owners.

Last week, after several unsuccessful attempts, I was able to download a viable copy of my twitter data, and use open-source tools to generate several versions of a portable twitter archive I can publish and manage independently.

In the intervening 18 months, I’ve realized these postings and conversations offer largely historical perspective and value for me – and surely only peripheral utility for anyone else – so it’s sufficient if I have control over the account and the data going forward. In practical terms, this means publishing an archived copy of the account here, on a platform I control, with the ability to delete or de-activate the dormant original as needed. I’ll leave the mothballed account as a bridge to the rapidly growing fediverse, for interested folks.

As a benefit of the DIY builder approach to a Twitter archive, I spent more time in the code-focused web application spaces I first re-touched as part of reconstructing my original blog, and setting up JoeLamantia.org as forward-looking platform. I don’t see returning the strong developer focus of my very first technology / Internet roles, but learning basics of wp cli, working with python and javascript, and navigating text data manipulation was a rewarding return to my roots.

In terms of outcomes from building this kind of historical corpus, in addition to easily citing my own tweets – something to be discrete with – it can be fun to see what’s in there. A friend used the lightweight query capability to identify tweets with ‘design’, and got back this summary from ChatGPT:

“Here is a summary of the provided tweets from mojoe’s Twitter archive, focusing on the 610 results related to “design”:
1. Design Thinking and Innovation:
- Several tweets reference articles and resources on design thinking, such as “The OTHER Design Thinking” by Humantific and “Innovation Matrix: Design-Led Innovation from Philips.” These tweets suggest an interest in different approaches and frameworks within design thinking.
1. Design-Related Discussions:
- Interaction with other users about design, such as a mention of a “design fiction lecture” and a critique of certain design practices as “design-washing” and “data-washing,” indicating a critical view of superficial design implementations.
1. General Themes:
- The remainder of the tweets covers a broad range of topics, including political opinions, social commentary, and personal thoughts on various issues. These tweets do not directly relate to design but provide context on mojoe’s broader interests and viewpoints.
Overall, the tweets reflect a strong engagement with design thinking and innovation, alongside a diverse array of other topics.”

As quick summaries go, this is not bad. It’s not the most insightful, but it spotlights some of the more distinctive and impactful (read, condensed, and sometimes provocative…) instances of phrasing that twitter’s shorter-form conversation architecture encouraged. However, as soon as analysis moves beyond gauging and describing purely functional aspects like framing, contents, structure, etc., you’re in the ambiguous territory of ‘aiming for good taste‘. Of course, good taste is ultimately the goal of most forms of assessment – including specialized critique – but it’s also something to be careful to ask for from an LLM, even when you’re feeling generous about their current capabilities.

With a corpus of meaningful linguistic data I’m familiar with as the originator, I’m (moderately?) inclined to keep exploring new LLM-based tools to understand where they’re relevant.
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joe lamantia

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September 4, 2024

Categories: Internet and Media
Dead Media and The Wayback Machine: ‘I Should Have Gone With .org’

In 1995, Bruce Sterling and Rudy Rucker announced the Dead Media project, looking ahead (after a bit less than 5 years of public Websites) to the inevitable moment when the Web itself would become a dead medium.

Think of it this way. How long will it be before the much-touted World Wide Web interface is itself a dead medium? And what will become of all those billions of thoughts, words, images and expressions poured onto the Internet? Won’t they vanish just like the vile lacquered smoke from a burning pile of junked Victrolas? As a net.person, doesn’t this stark realization fill you with a certain deep misgiving, a peculiarly postmodern remorse, an almost Heian Japanese sense of the pathos of lost things? If it doesn’t, why doesn’t it? It ought to.
Bruce Sterling – Dead Media Project

Brewster Kahle launched the Internet Archive year later in 1996. As Kahle recounted in 2021, the archive “…started by archiving the most transient of media, which was the World Wide Web’s pages.” and has grown to include the digital archives of a small Caribbean nation.

JoeLamantic.com in the Wayback Machine

In addition to a few moments of nostalgia — I remembered watching the original airing of these countdowns (on actual cable television, no less) — just three minutes of viewing one recording offered several unexpected rewards. I was inspired to share the videos for Devo’s Satisfaction and Weird Al’s Dare to Be Stupid with my kids, as examples of how interpretation and satire (they’re not yet at the stage where appropriation is a meaningful concept) are powerful creative methods with a very long history, that are also fun to practice – as they see peers do every day in their own new digital environments. It demonstrated the complete new media lifecycle, showcasing the reality that what’s happening on TikTok right now likely appeared on MTV 40 years ago, which — when MTV was the new new thing — was itself a fantastic example of how ‘the future composts the past‘. I felt prompted to get together with an old friend, thanks to the spotlight on Wall of Voodoo’s Mexican Radio – a meme shared with high school friends, before memes became memes.

Finally, in one of those instances of retrospective cultural insight clearly signaling Jim Cramer on Mad Money is Dr. Demento’s Wall Street alter ego (Ok – this might be a stretch. But – just watch for a few minutes – there are a whole host of parallels – and they’re both totally lifting off of The Wizard of Oz…)

archive.Joe Lamantia.com as restored

Having this kind of public, open, and largely free archiving infrastructure built into your digital environment is also useful as a form of insurance for being a ‘net.person‘ as Sterling was referring to in the Dead Media manifesto: mature digital ecosystems like the algorithmic Web of the 2010’s naturally include predation, parasitism, and other evolutionary dynamics, that can lead to the hijacking of your named .com, and it’s conversion into an unlicensed offshore crypto casino.

Thankfully, the Internet Archive’s cumulative snapshots of my original .com, running back to the early 2000’s, made it possible to rebuild and publish Archive.joelamantia.org. And the umbrella domain JoeLamantia.org, is worth several orders of magnitude less than its .com predecessor, just by virtue of the ambiguous / ambivalent (if you appreciated the reference to appropriation, then you’d probably say ‘intentionally undetermined’) .org extension. Maintaining it as a .org should make future hijacking (even) less likely. This is probably as it should have been from the beginning, given the site’s historically non-commercial purpose and focus.

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joe lamantia

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July 12, 2024

Categories: Internet and Media
JoeLamantia.com archive: 15 Years of Thinking Out Loud

JoeLamantia.com complemented my formal professional work in technology, design, product, and strategy, beginning with the early(ish) Web moment of the middle 90s.

For approximately 15 years, beginning about 2000, the site shared practice-related tools, methods, frameworks, industry and academic publications, professional presentations, and evolving perspectives (after 2006, genuinely raw thinking out loud mostly happened via Twitter).

The final postings publish industry analysis on the then-emerging field of data science, with a broader frame of the expansionary category of analytically-driven business products and services. My roles at the time emphasized product strategy for B2B software applications and B2C platforms powered by predictive models built from collections of business, consumer, and research data – composite assets newly recognized as Big Data. I described this as the machine intelligence space, to clarify the focus on new technology and product development outcomes, and distinguish the broader category of AI.

From 2016 onwards, with ‘software eating the world‘, my professional roles shifted to leading scaled / scaling product development groups, with charters emphasizing innovation powered by the expanding stable of human-centered technology disciplines: information architecture, interaction design, user experience, content strategy, design research, product strategy (still not well-articulated…). With broad success and growth within the business context (read, steady buyers), the questions shifted from foundational — e.g. codifying ‘What is User Experience?’, and shaping ‘How does it even happen?’ — to operational — ‘How is this done better at scale? In new channels? For the entire business? With customers around the world?’

To answer these basic ‘get it done’ questions on crafting human-informed products daily within large business contexts, the cross-border communities for product development, technology, and media spun up a healthy circuit of professional gatherings, and a layer of complimentary social forums. Conversations that originally took place via small group gatherings and niche news groups or listservs, shifted to Big Conferences, and Big Social Platforms.

In that landscape, there was less to share directly in the blog format. Also, there was the rest of life: family, home, community.

Then in 2018, after a series of minor maintenance and administration incidents, that show how the social Web and the entire Internet environment was changing to a regime of financialized surveillance capitalism, and algorithmically amplified predation, there was no ‘there’, there. JoeLamantia.com went dark, as far as sharing my work was concerned. The domain was doing a different job, for different audiences. and stayed that way.

Before I decided to focus fully on looking ahead and making new things for the new spaces of the early Web, I’d planned to study history, media, and technology – essentially looking in the other direction, as a scholar. I *almost* did a PhD at U. Chicago or Pitt (thanks to both programs for seeing potential and offering opportunity). This path not taken taught me the deep value of a historical perspective, especially when you’re considering where to go next, and how to get there.

Now, almost exactly ten years since the last original post in June of 2014, following a modest technical reanimation effort, I’m happy to offer a restored archive version of JoeLamantia.com. It’s not *everything* that was written, said, or shared — but it’s most of what mattered. We’re back.

To move forward, we’ll be reflecting on some of the “practice-related tools, methods, frameworks, industry and academic publications, professional presentations, and evolving perspectives” shared, to assess and learn from them by looking in both directions.

Thanks for your consideration: then, and now.

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joe lamantia

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July 12, 2024

Categories: Internet and Media
From Domain Hijacking to Offshore Digital Casino: My Blog Goes Cyberpunk

I first registered JoeLamantia.com in 2001. It was not serving an educational institution, or a military organization, or offering technical infrastructure, and obviously not a digital government site, so I chose the .com top-level suffix, meant for a general purpose Web presence. I’d founded a startup at the same time: an Asia-Pacific B2B marketplace for surplus consumer goods from pre-WTO-China. The domain was a personal digital presence – ok, a hedge – in case I needed to find work… Like so many, the startup did not survive the .com crash and post-9/11 venture capital market shutdown. (I ended up speaking and writing about the entrepreneur experience some years later.)

Joe Lamantia.com after hijacking

From then on, I posted on professionally related topics, for the growing Internet and technology / design / product community. The site and all content was open-access (creative commons as of 2002): I was not interested in competing with large industry media outlets, tech-focused or otherwise, if that had even been feasible. It ran Google adds for a brief window in the mid 2000’s, largely to confirm the hypothesis that generating meaningful revenue was at least a full-time job, if not fundamentally impossible. The largest quarterly ads payout, from ‘peak’ traffic to timely topics that were top in Google rankings, was well under $100.

Joe Lamantia.com as faux blog

For the next 15 years, I continued publishing, happily embedded deep in the long tail. Topics included design and strategy as part of product development. Deep dives on information architecture visualization. Design systems, patterns, and enterprise architecture. Design ethics and social media. Pre- Saas-gold rush enterprise software. Ubiquitous computing and augmented reality. Data science, big data, and product strategy for machine learning / AI.

My professional context shifted to leading larger teams. The final posting was 2014.

In 2018, possibly fraudulent transactions triggered my bank to automatically issue new cards for all my accounts, including the card on file as the default payment method at my domain name registrar. Thanks to unfortunate coincidence, the registration renewal cycle activated soon after. Automatic payment failed, the domain’s registration was ‘released’ …and one of the new generation of sniping bots grabbed JoeLamantia.com immediately.

Joe Lamantia.com as automated content farm

This was… a bit of a surprise.

As it turns out, my explicitly non-commercialized name domain was worth thousands of dollars in the algorithmic attention economy. This thanks to a history of relatively high search engine rankings — back before Google search was enshittified — and resulting steady traffic around a series of hot topics, accumulated over more than a decade of early publishing on what was originally long-tail nerdery, but became new categories of technology, global-scale media, and big business. What started as sharing evolving professional perspective, morphed into vulnerability to financialized (also) surveillance capitalism‘s algorithm-powered automation.

JoeLamantia.com went dark.

The content farm in decline

Then it turned into an astro-turf content-farm, surfacing as an automatically generated faux-blog that nominally addressed topics like data science and business intelligence / analytics, but primarily functioned as a siphon for inbound organic traffic around the original content and topics. Like petro companies w/ fossil fuels, the site’s new model was commercial extraction of accumulated natural resources — link capital — via ‘mining’ of information architecture.

I tried to purchase the domain back several times over the next few years. Meanwhile, the focus evolved from narrow content extensions of the original topics, to general-purpose digital working and life adjacencies, to self-help filler. It was not directly a honey-pot or powering scams; more so an ersatz pathway that lead to schlock content from providers like taboola and outbrain. Spam, but not toxic or dangerous.

The site wound down, as financial returns from the traffic streams declined. Eventually, it was abandoned, like the Garamontes civilization using fossilized water to construct short-lived cities in the arid Sahara desert. I stopped checking on it.

Joe Lamantia.com as a digital casino

Then, in 2022, I discovered JoeLamantia.com suddenly pointed to an unlicensed Indonesian online casino – an offshore crypto-digital gambling site. It’s served as some sort of mirror / domain redirect since.

In an oddly satisfying way, this feels like one of the most cyberpunk possible outcomes for a personal .com domain that began as a small portfolio site twenty years before, when the Web was new(ish). It’s not as big as an international pop-star’s avatar being used as a Russian malware vector, but we can all hope there’s even more exciting things coming…

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joe lamantia

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July 12, 2024

Categories: Internet and Media