Eric Larkin
Recent posts by Eric Larkin
Do you remember HeathKit? The company that sold circuit board and resistor kits you could assemble to make your own electronics? Building a HeathKit was no great feat of engineering—it came with a fixed list of parts and the schematic—but it helped you understand how electronics work by letting you assemble your own electronic products. [...]
Recently, we’ve been taking a new approach to product development at Arena. Traditionally, our main goal in developing new product features was to go-live with well-architected, fully-designed and ready-for-use products. While this approach has worked well for us over the years, changes in software development and delivery have got us thinking a little bit differently. [...]
When it comes to product management, standard processes and theories work 90% of the time, but the last 10% is certainly an art. At Arena, we try to find a balance between listening to our customers, and looking ahead to see the possibilities of where technology is going so we can take the best advantage [...]
It’s been a satisfying couple of months for the Arena product team. We went live with the Summer ’11 release of our core application. We launched several new applications including Arena PartSaver, Arena PDX Viewer and Arena Drop Box. And finally, we stopped supporting version 6 of Internet Explorer (IE6). If you have friends who [...]
I was fascinated by the video in Marc’s recent post about the official soccer ball of the 2010 World Cup. What struck me was the highly optimized combination of handwork and custom tooling involved in the manufacture of a high-quality commodity product. For example, the inner shell panels are die-cut from sheet (tooling), then sewn [...]
