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AKF partners have authored the industry-standard references on technology scalability, growth, and product strategy — used by engineering organizations around the world.
The Art of Scalability teaches technology executives, engineers and architects how to solve technology scalability problems through changes in their architecture, processes and organization structure. The book provides a set of models and approaches that help back office, web services and other platforms scale. Rather than focusing on the optimization and tuning of existing systems, the book offers models developed by the authors to help companies rethink their technology architecture.
There are three problems that hyper growth technology companies often experience. The first is downtime of their site — potentially costing millions of dollars — most often the result of an architecture that doesn't scale on demand as consumer transactions grow at ever-increasing rates. The second is a failure in company and organizational process to quickly correct not only current availability issues, but the longer-term needs for future scale. The third is the failure of the organization to correct outages and processes, resulting in more and more time spent on technology failures and less and less time spent on new products and features. The Art of Scalability teaches the reader how to solve all three.
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Scalability Rules brings together 50 rules grounded in experience garnered from over a hundred companies — including eBay, Intuit, PayPal, Etsy, Folica, and Salesforce. It's written and organized to be easily read and referenced for rapid application to nearly any technical environment. The rules are technology agnostic, and have been applied to LAMP, .NET, and even midrange system architectures.
Intended for engineers and architects of all skill and experience levels, Scalability Rules abstracts practical rules of scalability into easily understood, numbered principles with supporting information — simple and easy to reference in formal meetings and informal discussions alike. For junior technologists, these rules serve as an overview of basic scalability concepts in front-end and back-end systems. For senior engineers and architects, it's a reminder of best practices and a manual for implementation on nearly any hyper-growth platform.
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The Power of Customer Misbehavior presents, in clear practitioner language, the newly discovered drivers of viral growth — product misuse, self-identity, and technological features. This information comes from academic research conducted over several years and presented at numerous conferences, with several papers stemming from the research under review at top-tier journals. The book presents these newly discovered concepts as simple, actionable principles for the reader.
It's the first book to explore the idea that customer misuse of current features is key to viral growth through product development informed by that misuse. It also introduces the concept of self-identity as a motivator for participation in social networks as well as product purchases, and discusses technological features — such as the user interface and page load time — and their impact on user adoption and retention.
Buy on Amazon →Talk to an AKF partner about your specific challenge. The first call is always free — no pitch, no pressure.