As my silence here reflects, the past month has been insanely busy, putting the finishing touches on 8.5. And simultaneously designing what's next. As usual, there are already more things I want to do than time to do them.

In my engineering "childhood," we just built the next logical extensions of what we had just done, or if someone had a cool idea, we'd do that, after doing some logical calculus of what fits under the curve til the next release. I'm not sure if it's my perspective changing because I am more part of the process than I once was, or if things have changed (or both!), but now what goes in to the next release seems much more disciplined.

What goes in has to provide real value, and it has to make a difference. Now I'm not a marketing person, so I don't really have or have access to the data to predict that adding feature A will generate Y positive result. Yet I know inside me that many of the things we are considering will make a huge difference, and I have a strong sense of which are most important. I know it intuitively, I know it instinctively. INFP that I am (though the F edged out the T only by a small margin), going on instinct works for me :-) But I find I need to be able to *prove* it.

It's too soon to be saying what we're looking at doing next - still much more to figure out. But it is fun to be trying some ideas out!