November 2015 saw the release of a number of highly anticipated games, including Star Wars Battlefront, Call of Duty: Black Ops III, and StarCraft II: Legacy of the Void. (Sadly, the release I was looking forward to the most – XCOM 2 – was pushed back until February of 2016.) Last, but certainly not least, was the release of Fallout 4 – an RPG by Bethesda Softworks that takes place in a post-apocalyptic nuclear wasteland.
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Here’s a quick riddle for you: what do lean development and content marketing have in common?
Originally, the first response to cross my mind was nothing. After all, lean development is focused on eliminating waste, while content marketing is all about generating content with the end goal of driving consumer action. If I were asked to give a good analogy, trying to find common threads between lean development and content marketing would be like trying to compare apples to spaghetti – it just doesn’t make sense to do that!
At least, that’s how I used to think.
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Let me start off with a bold statement: we now live in a golden age of content creation. Never in our history has it been easier to capture, nurture, and grow our ideas in electronic formats, and publish those ideas to audiences worldwide.
Unfortunately, the ease of creation results in an overabundance of content, which leads to some headaches. The technicalities involved in the storage and retrieval of all of that information are two of the most obvious ones. But there are some other problems when it comes time for the average user to understand and summarize all of that data.
What do I mean by this? Let’s take a look at product reviews as an example.
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Lean manufacturing is not a new phenomenon. Based on the principles of avoiding unnecessary waste and amplifying quality, the underlying concepts of lean manufacturing trace a path through history as far back as Henry Ford. A second philosophy – agile software development – shares many compatible ideas with lean manufacturing. The agile manifesto, developed in 2001, stresses importance on human interactions, and high responsiveness to change across short development cycles. In the software development community, combining both approaches can be highly productive. Eliminating waste, responding to change, and focusing on finding and developing what has real value often results in rapid development of high-quality software.
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