Just saw this article about Elizabeth Gilbert’s new book.  This is author of “Eat, Pray,Love”, and her new book is called “Beyond Magic; Creativity Beyond Fear”.  I did not read her first book, but I may read this one.  I think it expresses a key magical component of great products and effective development teams.  Great products, like artists, depend on discipline, readiness, audience and…a little magic.  Examples include the GIMP, Uber, and Salesforce.com.

The analogy is better for great product development teams.  These are cross functional teams that include product mangers, marketing, testing, system architects and hardware and software developers.  Creating a product without a cross functional integrated team is like  having an idea for a painting and then saying, “oh its a good piece of art, I will just hire a couple painters to do it”.