Product development inspired by music

Product development has many challenges and requires a lot of knowledge and hard work to be decently proficient at. One of the aspects that must not be forgotten is that there is a creative side to all development efforts and my greatest inspiration in the creative area has always been music. In this post I will give you three examples from music that has had a big impact on how I think about product development. Read on, even in a worst case scenario you will at least get three amazing YouTube videos.

Mastery
A key aspect of creativity is mastery of the fundamental activities need to produce the desired result. I've seen so many teams abandon great ideas because getting it done was more complex than what was comfortable to take on. The competence level in the team should always allow for most of the work be done in a way that allows the team to pick the best way of doing it, "most" is important because there need to be some challenges that encourages further learning (more on that later).

A fine example of mastery is the saxophone play in "Your latest trick" by Dire Straits, a song that couldn't have happened unless the performers felt confident to play at this amazing level...

Production quality

Too many times have great products been let down by poor overall quality. Finding the balance between getting a product out there and at the same time deliver something that has few enough rough edges to give a lasting impression of quality. Making the product an overall package with a cohesive set of capabilities that provide a meaningful result to the customer takes considerable effort to get right.

If there was ever something that would be the golden standard of production quality my vote would be on the album "Tron Legacy" by Daft Punk, here's a song that exemplifies it:

Exploration

As mastery requires challenges product development as a whole needs exploration. In addition to the value driven exploration that I've written about here, there needs to be attempts to expand the creative boundaries of what the product can be. Allowing for dynamic experimentation of novel things will make the product more interesting for everyone involved.

A group that dared to explore was Queen, as boldly showcased in "Bohemian Rhapsody":