What we've learnt from creating a simple CFT case library for business.
Originally published 14 June 2022, last updated 15 June 2022.
One obvious open question is what the default frequency should be. We’ll have to iterate on that question separately.
For me, things got hardest when I got behind on the cases, but I could have occasionally have handled a couple at a time. Things I wonder:
As I went through this, I would have appreciated something like “Receive an article, think about it for a day or a few days, post a response, and receive the next case immediately.” It would be interesting to shape the “next case” based on the responses to the previous case.
Oh wow. This certainly can be done, but let me get the basic infrastructure up first. I’ve added it to an ideas queue, for consideration after I’ve pinned down more basic things (and written a dozen more cases!)
Yeah - and I fully agree that it would be premature to build anything programmatic around this.
However…
I keep thinking about a talk I heard at devopsdays atlanta several years ago from a company who built an entire SaaS product where the backend was just people getting emailed a spreadsheet, then uploading a PDF report some time later. All the tooling was built in Zapier. Similarly, in the short run, you might be able to explore some scale opportunities by building things to be built off manual labor. (“This person posted a comment in the forum, so I’m going to email him tomorrow”)
Interesting. I read this, but haven’t read much of the alpha – (I’d say I’m “too busy” but get annoyed when other people say that, so will leave it at I’m trying to get some new products out myself and haven’t made it a priority) – but I would read a case study on the business/economics of selling a library of case studies via Commoncog (or a case study on the economics of Commoncog in general).
I haven’t read enough of the Alpha to be comfortable filling out the exit survey, so I’ll note two things here:
I’d appreciate the ability to choose my own pace of case delivery. One a day might have worked for me at some point in time, but not this month, given other priorities. At some other point in time, I might have wanted to get the whole set at once, for reading over a weekend, to be able to quickly compare/contrast and draw connections between cases. (I’ll probably do this when I make time to get to the ones I haven’t read.)
As part of the case delivery I’d also appreciate a link to a repository on Commoncog where I can read all the cases in a sequence, and not have to trust that a later email search will resurface everything.
I’d probably do this at some point 
At the very least, I’m doing a repositioning exercise for the site that I think you might be interested in, and — seeing as this is the second repositioning I’ve done in so many years — I’m likely good enough at this at this point that I can write it up.
/nods — Thanks for the feedback, @mgoodrum, I plan to build both. (And, also, I hope things are getting better or at least ok on your end sends hugs)