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Peter Merholz
Areas of Expertise:
  • management
  • product strategy
  • product design
  • user experience
  • ethnography
  • agile processes
  • consulting
  • training

Biography

Peter Merholz is President and one of the founders of Adaptive Path. For more than six years, Peter has been instrumental in developing Adaptive Path's ability to provide world-class consulting, training, and public events.

At Adaptive Path, Peter began with a focus on information architecture, and over time expanded his knowledge to include product strategy, user research, and practice development. He's worked with a wide variety of clients, from large companies such as Intel, Vanguard, and United Airlines, to smaller, avant-garde firms like SocialText (an enterprise wiki startup) and Rojo (an RSS feedreader acquired by Six Apart).

Peter's personal blog, http://peterme.com/, and his essays for Adaptive Path demonstrate his foresight on issues of information architecture, organizational change, and product strategy. He has the perhaps dubious distinction of coining of the term "blog" in 1999 when it was still a nascent genre.

Multimedia

Webcast: Adaptive Path's Subject to Change: Creating Great Products and Services for an Uncertain Wo
May 15, 2008
This is a free live event. Scheduled for approximately 45 minutes. The way most organizations think and work on products and services isn't suited to the unpredictable world we live in. Instead, companies need new ways of thinking and working to...

Blog

Peter's blog posts are hosted at:
http://peterme.com

Married.

May 12 2008

Among the many reasons I’ve been posting so infrequently was wedding planning. My own. Last Saturday, Stacy and I conducted our ceremony at the Hillside Club in Berkeley. Ryan posted a set of 16 beautiful photos from the event. To be truly forthcoming, Stacy and I were already technically married, having… read more

Design will have a seat at the table - what do we do with it?

May 09 2008

Of late, there’s been some discussion about whether the role of design will have a seat at the table — you know the table, the large mahogany one where all the important decisions are made. Adaptive Path’s search for a CEO (or, as one candidate put it to me yesterday, “It’s… read more

The latest issue of Wired - articles worth reading!

March 17 2008

I’ve been disappointed with Wired for, oh, 10-12 years now, but the latest issue had three articles that deserve your time. A psychologist who is competing with math and stats nerds on the Netflix challenge. Social science reprazent! Chris’ article on Free! I love that he’s able to use Wired as a… read more

Jill Bolte Taylor at TED2008

March 17 2008

When I wrote about TED, I mentioned Jill Bolte Taylor’s awesome (and I don’t use that word lightly) talk. It has been posted to the TED site, and if you have 18 minutes to spare, it’s well worth it. It probably it won’t have the power of seeing it live,… read more

Ubicomp happens

March 14 2008

The latest issue of Interactions magazine features an article titled “When Users ‘Do’ The Ubicomp,” (subscription required to read the whole thing) which is the first academic-ish article I’ve read that addresses ubicomp the way I think about it. Ubicomp futures tend to be portrayed as planned, coordinated, intentional, purposeful connections… read more

MX 2008 - Giveaways!

March 10 2008

We’re trying something new this year with the MX 2008 Conference… We’re GIVING THINGS AWAY! To remind you — MX is our two-day confab on the emerging discipline of creative leadership, and has perhaps the most stellar collection of presenters we’ve ever had. It’s designed for people who’ve been around the… read more

The fluorishing of post-apocalyptic stories

March 05 2008

I’m reading Earth Abides a post-apocalyptic (virus wipes out nearly all humanity) novel from 1949. I mentioned this to Matt, who pointed me to this post, “What’s Causing the “Earth Without Us” Craze in New Scifi Movies?” Annalee posits stuff I’ve heard elsewhere, but reading Earth Abides made me realize another… read more

Another thought on TED

March 04 2008

I only just realized that TED featured no “business people.” There were people in business, but no CEOs who are known for being CEOs, no grand business leaders, those types of folks. I find that a curious omission. I don’t know if it’s purposeful. It strikes me as a potential… read more

My first TED

March 03 2008

I just got back from attending my first TED conference. I know there’s a lot of curiosity (and some misplaced antipathy) for TED, so I thought I’d share my experience. TED is easily the premiere conference experience I’ve ever had. Spending $6,000, you’d definitely hope so. The level of production is… read more

Tranformation

March 02 2008

Typically, I hate William Safire’s essays. He’s a pedantic blowhard who has a remarkable ability to take the joy out of language. Still, he can raise some interesting points, as he does with his recent take on “transformative.” That word has been on my mind lately, as it crops up… read more

Personal informatics…

February 25 2008

…is a meme I suspect I’ll be tracking. I don’t know where I first heard the phrase, probably from Blackbelt, but I suspect we’ll all be coming to grips with it more and more in the next few years. The blog The Quantified Self seems to be getting at aspects… read more

Gender and design for interactive media

February 24 2008

I was talking with a colleague about gender at Adaptive Path. She pointed out that girly girls don’t succeed as well at Adaptive Path, in a way that suggested this was problematic, because we’re not being accepting of femininity. The women who succeed tend towards tomboyishness. I thought about this, and… read more

I’m more popular than porn

February 12 2008

It’s a little hard to discern (because of a bug in display of popularity ranking), but my slidecast, The Experience is the Product, is the most popular slidecast on Slideshare, with, as of this post, 90040 views. | View | Upload your own The second most popular slidecast, Kamasutra (NSFW),… read more

Why I’m Voting for Barack Obama

February 05 2008

Tomorrow is Super Tuesday, and I’ve decided I’m voting for Barack. He and Hillary are nearly identical on matters of policy, but there’s an important distinction when it comes to tone and approach. The poisonous behavior of the Bush administration has sparked an anger and anxiety in the national psyche… read more

Yahoo! has a mission?!

February 04 2008

I’ve been intrigued by the discussion, in the media, on blogs, and on mailing lists I’m on, about Microsoft’s move to acquire Yahoo! The initial reaction from most folks is a knee-jerk negative — folks basically don’t like Microsoft, and so they don’t like the ide read more
Peter Merholz

"This book will make you think. Hard. And that’s a good thing. Because you may not be able to outspend or outwork the competition, but you can certainly outthink them. Today, that’s just about all that matters."
--Seth Godin, Author, Meatball Sundae