Make it Happen

How long to hold a grudge?

2010-05-29T22:02:00.000-07:00

Not against people, but against brands and companies?

The oldest grudge I have right now is 17 years and counting. Unless you count the fact that I will never buy a Chrysler because my father had a bad experience with Plymouth back in the 60s.

In 1993 American Express wronged me. Won't go into the details, but suffice it to say I will never do business with them. Ever. Ford and GM both pissed me off in the 90s, even after giving GM multiple chances to make good (my fault for being naive).

I'm a rational person. My Myers-Briggs Type Indicator is INTJ - the NT being the "rational" quartet. I am rational in almost all aspects of my life: dealing with my kids, deciding who to fire and promote at work, which charities I donate to, etc. The one exception is when I'm a consumer. Why does the iPod succeed when there are mp3 players with better storage per dollar? Why do people still buy from iTunes when DRM-free options such as Amazon MP3 exist?

Consumers are fickle. They are a challenge to understand. They are unpredictable.

Which is why it's imperative that every aspect of the customer's interaction with your brand goes well! You just don't know what sets off customers. And every small problem a customer encounters erodes trust in your brand.

Seth Godin for quite some time has talked about the new era of marketing. Consumers are in control now. Traditional marketing is ineffective at best; damaging (yes, that's right damaging) at worst. And he talked of this in the era of email and Internet message boards. "Back then," information spread virally around the web at amazing speed. Today, with twitter and facebook dominating the scene, things move even faster.

Speaking of social networks, its interesting to see how companies have responded to these tools. Those companies that are consumer-focused and known for customer excellence tend to use them well, those that have horrible customer experiences tend to struggle.

Xbox does this right - they have a twitter account (XboxSupport) that users can fire questions to. And they staff and respond to it. And when they respond anyone following them can see what they've advised.

Comcast, on the other hand, likes to respond with "Can I help you?" Can you help me? Why the frick are you asking the question? Do you really think I would say "no, I like not having internet access that I pay $60 a month for." (Yeah I would dump Comcast in a minute... if I had an alternative).

It was 10 years ago when Amazon cut it's marketing department and put the budget into free shipping. You know, an actual benefit for the customer. Why haven't more companies learned this lesson?

Ignoring your customer touchpoints isn't a smart way to do business. Some customers hold grudges a long time. 17 years. Maybe longer.

Using the concept of Impact in your sprint planning

2010-02-04T11:31:00.000-08:00

The most common problem I see with people chartered with execution plans (project managers, program managers, whatever) is their blind scheduling of tasks using only priority and resources as their criteria. Let's take an extreme example. Assume you have two deliverables: the first is considered "highest priority," will result in a 10x decrease in operational costs, and will take 12 months to implement. The second one is not considered as high of a priority. It will result in a 5% decrease in operational costs, and will take 5 days to implement.

In my experience (assuming there are ample resources for deliverable #1), most execution planners will blindly execute the first deliverable followed by the second deliverable based on priority rather than consider the impact of reducing 5% of operating costs over the coming year. This is because most people who are chartered with execution have been considition to look at priority first, and resources second when scheduling work to be done.

Of course in the real world things are not so cut-and-dry and not so drastic. But the point is still the same: you should set your execution plan to maximize your output as a function of time. And here's the kicker: that should be your only criteria. And it's simple, really: start plotting out impact over time on a chart and look at the "area under the curve." Compare your scheduling options and you'll see why scheduling by impact is the best way to deliver value.

Most people will ask me at this point "but doesn't priority cover impact?" And the answer is "yes but's that irrelevant." It's irrelevant because it covers the impact of the deliverable only. It doesn't take into account impact as a function of schedule - the idea that changing around the scheduling of tasks will have different total impact over time.

Give it try on your current project. And start delivering value, sooner.

Microsoft releases a Silverlight 4 Facebook Client

2010-01-26T10:10:00.001-08:00

Download it here. I had to uninstall Silverlight 3 in order to get it to install 4, but the Facebook client is really sweet. Better way to organize information.

Five free tips to speed your execution

2010-01-12T20:41:00.001-08:00

Being at Microsoft almost two years now I've gotten to see how people, processes, and attitude contribute to speed of execution. Peers often ask me how I got things done, even without "approval," and by (gasp) not following Microsoft's heavyweight processes.

Here's what I tell them.

Serialize your tasks. No matter what you're doing, what your roadblocks are, etc, this is a simple math problem. So long as your goal isn't "get a bunch of things done at exactly the same time (such as cooking a meal or a product launch) you will automatically increase your speed of execution simply by serializing your tasks instead of parallelizing them. Don't believe me? Try this out: pretend you have three tasks, each take 1 day to complete. Parallelizing them (spending an equal amount of time on each), you will finish all three at the end of day three. If you serialize them, you finish task 1 on day 1, task 2 on day 2, and task 3 on day three. Both approaches take three total days to complete all three. But serializing them gives you an average deilvery time of 2 days instead of 3 days (33% improvement). And you get the benefits from task 1 two days early and task 2 one day early. Always focus on one thing and get it done.

Identify the least amount of work to move the needle. Smart people like to solve for the perfect solution, the 100% solution. Smarter people move the needle along the way. This is a cororally to the above. You can deliver an 100% solution in a month. Or, you can deliver a 25% solution this week, a 50% solution next week, a 75% solution the following week, and finally an 100%. The key here is once you've identified that 25% solution that moves the needle, get moving on it! Don't wait until the next phases are defined before you move on phase 1.

Help others win. If you have a great idea, let others in on it. Let them win. Let them look good. Let them have some credit. Don't hoard it. You'll be shocked how fast things get done.

Fail Faster. Startups know this very well. You will get things wrong more than you will get them right. And meetings, documentation, and brainstorming will not avoid the need to learn (although applied properly they will help you move forward with execution if you are getting others to contribute to your cause). So get on with failing. Now.

Ask for forgiveness, not permission. A long time ago I heard "you will move as fast as you can make decisions." Amen. Every time you ask for buy-in, approval, etc you will slow yourself down. I work with a lot of Sr. PMs and I work with a lot of Jr. PMs. I never hear a Sr. PM say "I need to get my boss' sign-off" - they just do it and make it happen.

One caveat: know when care is required. The last bullet doesn't apply in all cases. You've got to know when moving forward does require input, approval, or buy-in. But the opposite is the important piece: know when you can aggressively move forward on your own and Make It Happen.

Oh yeah, one last thing: prioritize. I have probably 50 suggestions to help speed execution. But notice I kept the list to five. It's enough for you to get moving, without having to read a post 10 times as long.

So get moving :)

I just don't buy it re: Apple

2010-01-06T10:59:00.000-08:00

Just got done reading this article on how Apple is going down the wrong path with their "closed" systems.

As I like to say, I'm a PC-and-a-Mac. I have nothing for-or-against Apple or Microsoft. I love iPods, hate iTunes Music Store (but love iTunes for managing my music library, love iPhone, hate Windows Mobile, love Xbox and Xbox Live, am indifferent to my iMac and indifferent to my Windows laptop. And I love Amazon MP3 :)

I heard this "open system" line five years ago as iPods really took off. Apple hasn't lost it's leadership position yet. Instead, they continue to innovate, deliver value to customers, and reap the profits. They have a solid business model (deliver a seamless end-user experience software to sell music as a loss-lead to sell devices at a huge profit).

Did the Wintel decoupling of hardware and software enable Wintel to beat Apple in the 80s? Maybe. Maybe not. I think they delivered something cheaper and easier-to-use. Was that because of the decoupling? I think so, but Apple could have played the price war with them (especially when Apple had the market share). Apple chose not to, they lost.

Here's the key point: open platform is not an end-user requirement.

Google or Microsoft will take market share from Apple when they build a better product or innovate a better model (something that beats the device-software integration currently done very well by Apple).

When will marketers catch up?

2010-01-05T15:38:00.000-08:00

This chart is mind-blowing. How, in the year 2008 (when this analysis was done) can marketers still be so far behind on where their audience is? It's not 1998 anymore.

Here's what else is interesting: Google (and a number of online advertisers) has made a killing despite the low investment from marketing in this area. Imagine what happens when marketers do get with the times. Or, what happens when companies realize they can reach more of their audience with less dollars and that their ROI is higher online than TV (have they not realized that yet)?

Or maybe they never learn. Sigh.

Five web UX guidelines

2009-03-20T07:41:00.000-07:00

In the year 2009, I am dumbfounded at the number of rookie mistakes companies make on the web. I'll keep this short and simple, you should absolutely abide by these when building ways for your users to interact with you.

Understand that every little delay you introduce to your customers creates abandonments. Studies have been done on page load times, additional fields, text entry errors, etc, and they all lead to the same conclusion - every bump in the road creates abandonment.

Make your text fields forgiving. Google is a master at this. Doesn't matter whether I enter Mar 20, 3/20, 20 Mar, etc. Google figures it out. I don't get an error message saying "please enter in the form mm/dd/yyyy". Same goes for phone numbers. This is trivial to do in code, absolutely no reason it shouldn't be done.
Make it clear why required fields are required. Some are obvious to the user, most are not. A simple "why?" link giving the user the ability to learn more about why you required their birthday, SSN, and underwear size is easy to do.
Your user is not going read everything you show them. You have three seconds (used to be five) to give them a reason to read for another three seconds. And so on. You screw up those three seconds? Good bye.
Your competitors are a click away. Take a look at their sites. What do they do to make things easier. Amazon allows me to return items doing no more than sitting at a computer and dropping the item on the front porch. Why do Best Buy and Walmart make me go to their store? Yes, this has everything to do with UX - your processes are exposed through UX.

Yes, there are only four there. That's the point - do more with less. Always look to what can be removed from your site to add clarity, not what can be added.

Google makes LIFE's images available

2008-11-18T10:41:00.000-08:00

Now this is a great application of the web, combining Google's image search with what is arguably the finest image archive out there, LIFE's image archive.

I wonder what the usage rights on for LIFE images?

Hell hath no fury...

2008-11-18T09:49:00.000-08:00

... like a mother insulted. Or something like that. At least that's the way the weekend appeared after Motrin released a viral marketing video aimed at, well, not sure what. Google on "Motrin Moms", and you'll be up to speed in no time.

I watched the first shot across the bow from JessicaKnows, one of the twitterers I follow, and I watched the fury grow from there. Soon I checked out the hub-bub, and while I didn't see why the video was that bad, I certainly understood the reaction. Duh.

Yes, I'm late blogging on this, I figured I would wait for the dust to settle a little and see if I have any insights combing through the rubble. Whenever I see good or bad marketing attempts, I like to try and dig into the deep, root cause on why marketing is successful or fails.

I've read a lot of the reaction on this, and much of it centers on the "baby carrier" and "official mom" specifics. But there's a deeper learning here, one that I haven't seen made mention of yet:

Don't trivialize mom or the job she does

It's not just baby-carrying moms that were upset (and no, not all moms were upset), it was a broad section of moms that felt trivialized and talked down to. This is where Motrin failed. And it is such a fundamental principle. I've been at social gatherings with moms in the room, and believe me, we husbands of moms know when to start slowly backing out of the room with our beer and take cover.

The ad looked like something a few 20-somethings put together, with a voiceover from a 20-something that didn't sound old enough to be a mom, with an attitude that came off as condescending. Ouch, a no-no for the most important customer segment out there.

When I was at Whirlpool, we had a saying that guided our innovation: Mom is a tough customer. Amen to that. It kept us focused that we would never be able to pull the wool over our customer's eyes, and forced us to maintain a high bar on our innovation projects.

Don't guess what your target segment's needs and attitudes are, engage them and find out.

My Innoview with Robbie Cape

2008-10-11T10:48:00.000-07:00

In a previous life I spent three years running Whirlpool's Connected Home Technology group, where we researched a myriad of home-based solutions that leveraged information technology. I still have a lot of passion in this area and keep a watchful eye on it, so I was intrigued when I first caught a glimpse of Cozi, based here in Seattle. I thought it would be a perfect match for the Whirlpool brand, so I reached out to Robbie Cape at Cozi and put him in touch with some former Innovation contacts at Whirlpool. Sure enough, Cozi and Whirlpool have partnered up to help busy families.

I wanted to undersand Robbie and Cozi a little deeper, and Robbie has graciously agreed to talk about Cozi.

JR: What gave you the inspiration for Cozi?

RC: The needs of the family inspired Jan and I to build Cozi. We saw an incredible gap between the needs of the family and the degree to which technology and software were addressing those needs. That represented a wonderful opportunity for a couple of guys who love to (1) build simple technology experiences, and (2) address the needs of the typical "consumer." The Cozi vision was the perfect problem for us.

JR: Where have you found the greatest adoption for Cozi?

RC: Cozi has been adopted right across the United States; there is no one area where we have more adoption than others. Cozi tends to appeal most to families with kids between the ages of five and fifteen. Cozi families tend to have multiple PCs in their home and are comfortable with the internet, and they are far from "techy". In fact, most Cozi families talk about themselves as "no tech - no time".

JR: What was the biggest challenge getting Cozi to market?

RC: I'd say it's the same thing that challenges every startup: staying focused. It happens to be one of the things that this team is really good at, so it came naturally to us. Jan is exceptional on this front and he constantly reminded us that we needed to stay true to our original vision for v1, deliver on it, and then begin to iterate. That's what we're doing.

JR: What has been the biggest challenge growing the business?

RC: The biggest challenge has been acquiring customers. It's almost always a tough nut for a company starting with little marketing money. For us, it was especially hard since we didn't build in viral from day one. Why not? Because we needed to stay focused on what families were asking for. While sharing matters to them, it wasn't their #1, #2, or #3 requirement. And while it might have helped us get the word out on Cozi faster, we decided to optimize for the needs of Cozi families rather than for the growth of our user base. What's much harder to find is GREAT people who have the drive, experience, and ability to execute. I urge entrepreneurs to find the best partner (you need a partner to get through the challenges of a startup) and ensure their first few employees are all about execution. If you can execute, there is no stopping you.

JR: What other ventures have you been involved in?

RC: Cozi is my first startup. Before Cozi, I was at Microsoft for 12 years; I had a bunch of different jobs there, the most interesting one was the six years I spent on the Microsoft Money business. My last "job" at Microsoft was to build a startup team (we started with 2 people!) to help Microsoft figure out how to deliver annuity value to our best enterprise customers. It was fun to do a startup at Microsoft before I did one in the "real world."

JR: Can you talk about what's next in Cozi's future?
RC: Family Life - Simplified. That's what's next. We will continue to work with laser-like focus on delivering on this promise, simply. It turns out to be really hard to design, build, and deploy simple software; it's much hard than it looks. We are also focused on building the revenue side of the business so we can continue to build value for families for years to come. Thankfully, things are going very well on that front.

JR:Thanks Robbie for taking the time to post your thoughts, and best of luck to you and Cozi!

About Useless Meetings

2008-06-24T22:46:00.000-07:00

So I'm reading more and more about people complaining about useless meetings. Nothing new, Dilbert (ok, Scott Adams) has made a fortune on this topic. But for some reason I feel people are feeling more and more helpless about it.

You control how useful meetings are. Yes, you. Even as an attendee.

There are four types of meetings:

1. All-hands. Ok, I admit I don't have any secret recipe to make this one more effective. Which is why I usually skip them. Worked for Amazon for three years, Whirlpool for three years, and I attended exactly one at Whirlpool. Once I found out how useless they were, I used my time more wisely.
2. Your meetings you call. Clearly this is up to you how useful they area.
3. Meetings that request your presense, and you're integral to the meeting. Meaning you are providing input. Here, you can keep this on track by asking up front for the goal and agenda of the meeting. And making sure the meeting organizer keeps on track. Or you punt for those organizers that have a track record of wasting your time.
4. Meetings that request your presense, and you're not integral to the meeting, at least on the surface. These tend to be the meetings that fill up your calendar, at least in larger companies. Whether they be reviews, status meetings, whatever. These can be easily solved by talking to the organizer. Why are you there? In a previous life I went to my boss basically asking to have an hour of my week back by skipping out on one of his weekly metrics meetings. He told me why he wanted me there, that I provided value by helping his techie managers think through business problems and offer a customer perspective to issues. This was a perspective I didn't realize, and it made me realize why my boss valued me on his team. All of a sudden those meetings weren't a waste of time after all - they were opportunities for me to reinforce my value prop to the team and strengthen my performance.

In short, you control whether meetings are useful. Take control of your calendar - you own it, your time is a precious resource, use it wisely.

And I recommend anything by Tom Peters to shake yourself from the "I'm a trapped employee" mentality to "I'm a free agent" mentality.

The new era of advertising

2008-06-06T10:49:00.000-07:00

Google gets it.

I wondered when this would happen, and great to see Google make inroads here.

Can you imagine the disruption this is going to cause in marketing departments?

Now, there are a lot of problems with measuring advertising, but imagine what you can collect with advertising campaigns in a much more fine-grained, accurate manner.

People who watch this channel also watch this channel. Not from anecdotes or surveys, but from user behavior (so have different campaigns on those channels).
People saw x seconds of your commercial before they switched the channel.
x eyeballs actually saw your commerical.

and so on.

This is a baby step that will eventually change how we think of advertising. And not just TV advertising. Satellite radio can do the same thing.

Marketing as a Customer

2008-05-12T14:00:00.000-07:00

This is something I've been thinking a lot about lately, primarily because my wife is a manager at a local restaurant.

She does a great job. She only works a few nights a week, and usually she tends bar. She has a loyal following, people ask for her by name, and customers come in when she knows she's working. The policy is that the restaurant closes at 9pm, but she will keep the place open until it makes sense to close. As long as there are customers coming in, leaving good tips, she keeps it open, and creates customer loyalty. She's been doing this a couple of years, and the results for her have been impressive.

There is a flip side to all of this - you have to be a good customer for her to do this.

This gets me to thinking - how do I market myself as a customer? Yes, indeed, noodle on that for a bit. As a customer you are marketing yourself on why you should get a better deal, better service, better treatment, etc than other customers. Being a customer might be good enough. Then again, maybe not. Do you have a value proposition

I recently put this to test when Washington Mutual hit me for two overdraft fee recently. I have a sizeable amount in a savings account at WaMu, enough that WaMu makes more money on my savings in one month than they do on fees. I asked for a refund, and I did not get one. Clearly, I did not market myself correctly, as my value proposition was clear and beneficial to WaMu.

My recent Fathead experience, I must have marketed myself correctly. They sent a replacement Fathead despite it being out of warranty.

Pay attention to how you market yourself as a customer. It will have an impact on your customer experiences.

Bittersweet news on Clearwire / WiMax

2008-05-07T08:38:00.000-07:00

Great to hear that $3.2B is going be to invested in Clearwire, but not so great that Comcast is one of the investors.

I'm waiting for Clearwire to be available in Snoqualmie so I can dump my Comcast broadband connection. Can't stand Comcast (hence we have Directv, despite their faults). Maybe I need to go back to dialup.

Interesting that Google is investing so much. I truly hope there is choice in software apps/services when WiMax is ready for primetime.

Painful to watch WiMax emerge so slowly. So much promise five years ago that has largely been untapped.

Shocked at the number of companies you CAN'T contact

2008-05-05T11:29:00.000-07:00

I just tried to contact JellyFish's online tech support. They provided an email address to contact. I sent an email.

It bounced.

No support? I can't contact you? Won't be buying anything from you, that's for sure.

Are you chasing potential customers away?

About Brand Value

2008-05-05T08:52:00.001-07:00

Brands can add value to products or they can destroy value. Take a high-performance sedan. Put a BMW or Audi label on it, and you can charge more. Put a Ford or Chevrolet badge on it, and you will have to charge less to sell it.

That much is obvious, and the reason companies have brand managers (my recent experience with Fathead is a great example of companies aggressively managing their brand).

Problem is, brands in general do not resurrect, and never do so without doing something radically different. Nintendo thought outside the box and targeted a new customer segment with its Wii. Result? Resurrection of a dead brand. Sega is still dead, because they haven't done anything different. Apple resurrected its brand with the iPod. But even with these examples, we have examples of TiVo (dying), Sears, Cadillac, Sony, etc. as brands that once they started dying, they have been unable to resurrect themselves.

Reason is: brand value is a trailing indicator. The data in sales, revenue, and margin, which you are using to measure brand value, occurs after people have devalued your brand. Your reduced brand value is out there and having and impact, and you must now overcome it... which is really, really hard.

You must course correct and take action (again my Fathead example is a good one) before your brand is devalued. Audi fixes problems on my car before they are problems. Coach fixes their products even if I am the one that broke it (yes that is true).

The good news is that Web 2.0 makes this possible. People complain about their problems and experiences on blogs, instant messages, domain forums, etc. That information is out there and available to mine. Fathead found me through a blog post. They were looking. Smart of them.

Back to declining brand value. What is Yahoo going to do that is different from what it currently does? In three years they will kick themselves for not taking Microsoft's offer. And I think Microsoft will be thankful for not paying a premium for a dying brand.

So-called E-commerce Experts and self-awareness

2008-05-02T09:38:00.000-07:00

Credibility is important. I just dropped my RSS feed to E-commerce Times, as I just read a horrible article by a "so-called expert" complaining about the way Amazon and other retailers their shopping experience. I didn't see any justification for his complaints, just that "it's not like what brick-and-mortars do." If this is their definition of an expert (and this is the level of advice they give), then I can't justify taking time out of a busy day to read their articles.

About the article, I find it amazing that a "Creative Director", apparently in the e-commerce space, doesn't understand customer intent and context in their shopping experience, and the difference between brick-and-mortars (where this is a customer cost component to get to a brick-and-mortar that must be overcome) and online shopping (where the cost of participation is very low which drives lots of one-off sales... hence the success of woot.com). Do Creative Directors really not perform contextual studies to understand customer behavior? I assumed that was a prerequisite to expert advice on design.

By this person's logic, woot.com cannot possibly be successful because no brick-and-mortar store sells only one product and a different product every day at that.

Instead, this Creative Director would do good to study these success stories and learn from them. It is not the e-tailers that don't get it, it is he that doesn't get it. Self-awareness is important, and a reason it is key to good Emotional Intelligence.

I feel bad for his clients, who are getting bad advice from a so-called expert.

By the way, this is my favorite interview question when I interview designers: why do successful online entities to apparently "stupid" things according to design theory? The answer, of course, is that they have data to justify their decisions.

Turning singles into doubles

2008-04-30T09:21:00.000-07:00

I vividly remember a saying from my youth from Detroit Tigers' Hall of Famer Al Kaline: you make doubles between home and 1st base, not 1st and 2nd base. His point was clear: you can't ever make up ground on a slow start.

I see project teams try the equivalent all the time. They do not build the discipline, the know-how, the process into their project up front. Instead, they take a lacadaisical approach, thinking they have a lot of time, and thus not fully utilizing their time to develop the right processes. Suddenly, scope creeps in, things change, they get behind on their project, and all of a sudden they are in a crisis - there is no way they are going to hit their date. The next action is usually to "sprint real fast to second base" hoping to beat the throw - working long hours, scrutinizing the plan, cutting scope, etc. I have yet to see that work.

You need to develop the right culture, the right discipline, and the right process as the first phase of your project. There are going to be problems, there are going to be corrections. That's ok. Pay your dues early. When it's time to sprint to second, you'll be way ahead of the throw.

My definition of a stupid question

2008-04-23T08:37:00.000-07:00

Stupid questions should not be confused with simple questions.

If a question has only one logical (or possible) answer, that can be deduced by the asker, then it is a stupid question.

I get these types of questions a lot as a Product Manager. I view my job as making things less ambigious. If there are multiple ways to do something, my job is to pick that way. Beyond that, the team should be able to find their own way. This creates engagement, makes their jobs more interesting and meaningful, and can help drive innovation (input from many instead of input from one).

One way I accomplish this is by a) clearly defining the customer segment and their behaviors/values, and b) setting up prioritized design guidelines. Both give program managers, developers, designers, etc the tools they need to make decisions for themselves. I've watched some very impressive decisions made by the team, simply based on their understand of our customers and how they behave.

My job is not to document the obvious. That's inefficent.

Then again, maybe that is why I am changing jobs.

Jeff Bezos' presentation at Startup School 08

2008-04-22T14:54:00.000-07:00

View it here. Very nice introduction into all of Amazon's Web Services offerings.

What makes a good product manager?

2008-04-22T11:29:00.000-07:00

Pragmatism.

Yes, I'm jumping right to the point. What makes a good product manager is understanding reality.

Your product is not as good as leadership thinks it will be.

It is not as bad as sales says it is.

It is not as well-positioned in the customer's mind as marketing says it is.

It is not as difficult to support as customer support says it is.

What you have to do is be the one without the filtered glasses, and see things from a realistic perpective. Only then will you be able to prioritize your features and get your roadmap right.

Those stakeholders will milk you for everything you have to get their requests in. You need to be pragmatic. Nobody else will.

Seth says it much better than I do

2008-04-22T11:23:00.000-07:00

That's why I read his blog every day.

Here is his guidance on customer service. I especially like the point on responding to customers who have taken time out of their very busy lives to contact you. That's a free marketing touchpoint, and it shocks me the number of companies that blow it. Perhaps its time that those touchpoints go to the marketing department instead of the so-called customer service department.

I wonder if Fathead is reading it :)

Smart positioning by iRobot

2008-04-22T11:17:00.000-07:00

I've bought three iRobot products in the past, and I love them. Two Roombas and a Scooba. Even though the Scooba is broken, and I've had to replace one Roomba, they are great. Keeping my eye out for a deal on a Scooba.

Anyway, I got an email today inviting me to be part of the iRobot Advisory Panel. Sounds cool! Turns out to simply be an opt-in to receive survey invites, but so what... "Advisory Panel" sounds much more engaging than "surveys."

I signed up. Nice job iRobot.

What can I do to make you happy?

2008-04-22T10:10:00.000-07:00

This is a common statement that companies use when they've screwed up with their customers. Maybe its a good line, but it doesn't work for me. Then again, I'm an INTJ type that is all about efficiency and optimization, and also we are less than 1% of the population.

Why doesn't it work for me? Because in my experience companies that truly care about their customers and giving them a great experience already answer that question. They don't ask you, they offer. Audi, Coach, my favorite restaurants, etc all take care of me without asking. Sears, that crappy pizza joint in Michigan City, Lincoln, GM, all have to ask, probably because they truly don't know what custmoers care about.

People still don't get viral marketing

2008-04-21T13:45:00.000-07:00

Let your customers do your marketing for you. PLEASE!

I went to the Chicago White Sox web site. I expected to find a widget that I could put on my blog, showing what place they were in, their latest game results, and their next game. No such luck!

They are missing out on free promotion, and worse yet, letting others take up that valuable real estate on the web.

The web is real estate, you have to grab it now.

What marketing opportunities are you missing?

Don't assume you understand what your customers want

2008-04-21T11:22:00.000-07:00

When I worked at Whirlpool, we spent a lot of time developing concepts and solutions that would help our target customer segments automate their tasks and activities. There was only one problem... that's not what our customers valued. We assumed that anyone would like to have things done for them. Bzzt! Wrong.

No, instead what we learned was that our customers were cravers of information, and that they still wanted to be in control. Don't manage their energy consumption for them; instead, give them information on where their energy usage goes, and they will manage their energy based on that information.

I had an experience on Saturday that left a bad taste in my mouth. In our typical "plan what we are doing Saturday night on Saturday afternoon," Amy and I started calling around for other families that didn't have anything going on. Turns out our neighbors would be around and would love to join us for pizza and socializing. So our menu consisted of gourmet Chicago-style pizza for the adults, and take-n-bake pizza for the kids (no sense letting the kids have our pizza!).

So, at about 5:45pm, 15 minutes before our guests arrive, I fire up the oven and head into town (Snoqualmie Ridge) to pick up a couple pizzas for the kids. I like Nick-n-Willy's because they have the pizzas pre-made - just grab and go. So I grab a couple pizzas and give them my discount card. The lady gives me an explanation that while she will honor our card I am supposed to buy a pizza from the menu that's not pre-made. The problem is she took about 5 minutes to explain this to me. Or at least she made it feel like five minutes. At that moment in time, I wasn't worried about saving a couple bucks, I was worried about getting back home to meet our guests and finish prepping the house. If she would have just said "we don't honor this because of this statement on the back" I would have been fine with it. Instead, she spent a lot of time explaining to me how much she was helping me by honoring the card. Problem is... she wasn't helping me, she was frustrating me.

I am not sure why, but this little hiccup during my day bothered me. I mean it really bothered me to the point where they did damage to their brand.

Never assume you understand what your customers want.

Motley Crue debuts song on Rockband

2008-04-15T11:14:00.001-07:00

The marketing game is changing. Here's yet another example - Motley Crue to debut new song on Rock Band. Awesome!

Fathead and poor customer service

2008-04-15T10:42:00.000-07:00

Several months back (like September), we purchased a Fathead for our play room redecoration project. It was a Purdue football helment and fit in nicely in our football themed room, painted in Old Gold (Purdue's official shade of gold).

We got the product, layed it flat, painted the room, and waited two months to put it up so that the paint dried right. We put it up, and while we had some problems with it, overall it stayed up with some minor peeling. After a month or so, it came tumbling down and we could not re-attach it to the wall.

We are busy people, so it took us a while to contact Fathead about it. I was quite surprised at their response. They said they were sorry for the defective product, but that we were outside the 60 day warranty window. They would however be more than happy to sell us a Fathead at 25% off retail price.

I was stunned. Fathead doesn't have a product if it doesn't do the only thing it is supposed to do - STICK TO THE WALL.

I had planned on buying other Fatheads - for starters Detroit Red Wings for my bedroom and Star Wars figures for the kids' Lego room. Clearly, if Fathead doesn't think that their product will work for more than 60 days, and if they won't take care of "defective products" (their words), it doesn't make sense for me to drop $100 on each of these Fatheads.

With the cost of one replacement product and shipping Fathead had the opportunity to sell us more Fatheads. Not to mention the viral marketing opportunity lost by people now not asking "Cool where did you get THAT?"

Are you intentionally chasing away your customers?

Attaching a Google document to a Gmail message

2008-04-10T09:57:00.000-07:00

So of all the things I figured I would be able to do with Google Documents, attaching a Google doc to a Gmail message I figured would be a no-brainer.

I can't figure it out. I looked, I Googled, I searched help, no such luck. I had to save the Google Doc to a file on my computer and then attach it to my message.

This seems like an obvious use case, and a trivial implementation. What's the deal?

This is an example of what I am talking about when I say "you need more than raw brainpower" to companies that claim to hire really smart people. Sometimes really smart people don't see the forest through the trees.

Conducting online surveys

2008-04-09T11:09:00.000-07:00

My first rule of online surveys: don't make it harder for the respondents than it has to be.

I have yet to see an online survey that does it right. Amazing. Every time I'm asked to perform many extra, unnecessary clicks just because the survey company can't figure out how to put more than one question on a page.

One of the great things about the web is that we can get very detailed data and metrics on web usage. If you mail a survey out, you don't know why it wasn't filled out an returned. If you email a survey, while you may not learn why it isn't completed, you can at least learn where in the process the participant abandoned. And you can use that data to improve your survey tool.

I understand it is the job of these companies to find candidates for surveys, and no question they deliver value there. But they are overlooking an opportunity to improve their response rate for their customers at little or no cost.

Seth Godin hits the nail on the head

2008-04-09T08:41:00.000-07:00

We discovered and practiced this at Whirlpool several years back: your inbound customer calls to your call center are a perfect way to market to your customers. Whirlpool changed from "avoid phone calls at all costs," to "invest in the call center to drive customer loyalty."

Marketing at the customer service level does not mean sell the customer something. It means deliver value for the customer (via help) so the customer perceives greater value from your brand or product. In turn, they spread word of mouth and become repeat customers.

By the way, trying to chit chat with your customers and "be nice" is NOT necessarily delivering value. I become irrated when I call a company only to have the person on the other end take 30 seconds out of my busy day to ask me how I am doing. A simply "how many I help you?" suffices.

Are you taking advantage of ALL of your customer touchpoints?

Exactly what I've been waiting for

2008-04-08T09:47:00.000-07:00

Google announced Google App Engine today, and while I haven't used it yet I am on the waiting list and I took a look at their docs. They announced it at CampFire One last night, and its already gotten good reviews.

It appears to be the integrated web development and hosting environment I've been looking for (I don't do a lot of development anymore but I always have a need for doing a little development). To date I have yet to set up a dev/hosting environment; every time I've tried something has gotten in the way relative to usability or functionally working. Hopefully Google App Engine works :)

What is Gibson thinking?

2008-03-25T08:05:00.000-07:00

I have an XBox 360. Guitar Hero II was an interesting idea when it came out, and although I am not a musician or even musically inclined, I bought it. The best game I've ever played (at the time). Fun, good music, gameplay, you name it.

Guitar Hero III came out in late 2007, as did Rock Band. Both were even bigger hits, the ground being laid by Guitar Hero II. I ended up buying both.

That's a lot of money on three video games, as each comes with its own instrument controllers.

And here's the kicker: I've since spent additional money on Amazon MP3 buying up the songs I like from the games (some of which I have never heard before). In addition, my six year old son now has an interest in music and wants to learn to play guitar.

So why is Gibson continuing to sue to stop sales of Guitar Hero?. It's irrelevant whether Guitar Hero infringes on one of Gibson's patents; Activision and retailers are creating a demand for Gibson guitars. Their innovative games are helping Gibson, and Gibson wants to stop that? Really? I understand Gibson is simply trying to position itself for a share of Guitar Hero (and I assume RockBand) profits. Still, it seems like they should be taking a more partnership approach rather than an aggressive stance.

I also think this highlights the problem in our patent system. Harmonix and Activision bore the risk of bringing these games to market, including developing new types of controllers for the games. While someone like Gibson bears some costs in developing intellectual property, it's the companies that launch products that bear more risk. Sure, in some industries developing technology is a huge investment.

The patent system should protect those that invest significantly at a high risk of not getting a return. Any other use case is simply gaming the system. At the expense of our market and our customers.

Are you missing out on high return opportunities because you can't see the forest through the trees?

Google sorting out the medical record mess

2008-02-28T07:53:00.000-08:00

At least that's how I interpret what they are doing.

It has amazed me for 10+ years that of all the things I *can* do online, aggregated medical history is something that isn't done yet and isn't done in the name of confidentiality. I don't hear confidentialty when TransUnion, Equifax, and someone else collect my financial information, aggregate it, and score it, so why shouldn't my doctor here in Snoqualmie have access to my records of my doctor in Michigan City, my doctors in Chicago, and my hospital visits in Michigan?

If this indeed is what Google is doing, kudos to them for doing it. About time someone did it!

A good article on raising the bar on usability

2008-02-15T10:27:00.000-08:00

Read it here. Philip is right - very few people know how usable their products are... or even know what usability really means. Hint, usability does not equal efficiency!

You need to blog

2008-02-08T02:40:00.000-08:00

I just ran across the TSA's blog. They've been up and running a couple of weeks. The TSA. You know, that arcane organization that has illogical rules, terrible service, and unmotivated (and underappreciated!) employees? Yes, they have a blog, and apparently they listen to public input.

People expect a public face of you now. Really, they do. If you don't, something is amiss. You're hiding something.

Microsoft, Yahoo, and Google

2008-02-03T22:12:00.000-08:00

By now anyone browsing the web (which means you :) ) has heard about Microsoft's big $44B+ unsolicted offer to purchase Yahoo. I'm not real certain whether that's a good deal for Microsoft, but it appears to be a good deal for Yahoo.

I did find Google's response interesting. A shot fired across the bow pointing out Microsoft's past legal transgressions, posted by one of their attornies.

Does Google fear a strong competitor? Or are they genuinely worried about Microsoft's past practices?

Why do companies intentionally upset their customers?

2008-01-28T11:13:00.000-08:00

Some number showing up as "Verizon Conference" calls every day. My wife answers the phone, and they ask for me. She explains she is my wife and asks if she can help. The person always says no, and hangs up. Every time for the last couple of weeks.

So today, I happen to be home snowed in so I can't get to work, and the same company calls. This time my wife hands the phone to me with a visibly frustrated look on her face. I take the phone, and the person goes into a long-winded explanation that they are from Discover and they are thankful for my business. The person starts to ramble about something, when I finally ask "what is it that you want?" Oh yes, they reply, they ask if I am planning any events in the future, and starts rattling off things like weddings, birthdays, yada, yada, yada. I tried to ask again "what is it that you want?" but I cannot get a word in edgewise. The arrogance that I have time to chit chat to a stranger without getting my permission is incomprehensible to me. I finally had to hang up and get back to that document that I need to send out in the next five minutes.

Capital One (my Visa card) just earned my business by default.

First, I don't like companies that are not respectful of my spouse. You called us, we didn't call you. My wife runs our house, she's smarter than I'll ever be, and has better judgement. Talk to her.

Second, I don't like companies that disrespect my time. I am not sitting idle all day waiting for random marketing people to call me. If you want my business, make yourself available when I look for it and I am ready for it.

Discover pulled a classic example of a violation of my five second rule for prospecting - they didn't give me a reason to keep listening, because they never told me why I should keep listening.

Are you driving your customers away? Do you know why? Do you even understand basic customer behavior?

Why Companies Fail

2008-01-26T09:34:00.000-08:00

I don't keep up on primetime TV shows in real time; instead I record them then watch a bunch in order when I get a couple spare hours in the evenings before bed. One of the shows I watch is The Apprentice, including this season's Celebrity Apprentice.

I just got caught up on the last two episodes, and if the Gene-Simmons-being-fired doesn't epitomize corporate America, I don't know what does. And that's not good. Here we have this season's top talent, bringing new good ideas for his clients, and he gets fired.

Now, I understand Trump's rationale. That doesn't mean I agree with it. I could pontificate for hours, but let me try to be succinct.

No wonder Kodak is struggling. I know its not fair to judge an entire leadership on just two execs; however, I also have enough experience to know that at the exec level there is a certain culture and likemindedness. Their judgement of the best display for the show came down to "well Hydra used the work 'ink' which is what we asked them to do." No thinking outside the box here. "It's a Kodak World - Welcome", although a better idea, lost. Wow.

But this is what is rewarded in the business world - do what is asked of you, not what's best for the customer or the company. It's what kills innovation, creativity... and ultimately your brand.

And don't get me started on a company that thinks they can win the photo space by having cheaper ink. I can't believe that was allowed outside a brainstorming session. Talk about desperation from a company. Would love to see their data on consumer insights that backed that notion. I wonder if they've even seen the data that more and more people are having others print their photos due to the convenience and cost.

I know not all companies are like this. I have some friends at Google and one cool thing I hear about Google is that "the best ideas win." Must be a great culture to work in :)

Now, on to Trump. I understand that the two other team members brought into the board room with Gene were not responsible for losing. But is that what decisions should be based on? Shouldn't they be based on who gives you the best chance to win moving forward? Sure Gene showed a poor choice in judgement but does that override his other talents? That's like the Seahawks dumping Matt Hasselbeck instead of the backup QBs because "well the backups didn't cause Seattle to lose!"

Trump could have shown his leadership capabilities and kept Gene and fired one of the weaker team members. Would have improved his talent pool. Apparently that is not the goal. Amazing.

No wonder Dilbert is so popular.

What if the best ideas, the best execution, and the best people, won at your company?

So what's happening to ebay?

2008-01-19T17:52:00.000-08:00

I've been a long time user of eBay, and have also followed their business performance over the years. Their core marketplace growth has disappeared. Amazon surpasses eBay for the first time

Speculation ranges from high seller fees to high risk of fraud on eBay.

I think the reasoning is more simple: everyone else has caught or surpassed eBay.

For a long time (5+ years) eBay was pretty much the only place to find, purchase, and receive "stuff" online. If you received your item, and it was even close to the condition in which it was described, you as a buyer were thrilled. This model served eBay very well. As their marketplace grew, people started

Problem is, the eBay experience has not improved. The rest of the e-commerce world has. Consumers now get better selection, better prices, better service, and a more streamlined experience from the rest of the web than what eBay provides.

I just purchased a couple "Stuff and Scruff" thingys that hang over the back of the front seats of a car, providing some organization for our kids' stuff, and keeping the kids' shoes off the back of the front seats. I found it through Google at an e-commerce site that looks like a mom-n-pop shop or one run out of the seller's home. It was easier for me to find something like this through Google than through eBay - Google provides access to a wider selection. If users are finding products through Google, then sellers have to keep up. As the e-commerce world grows up, it is inevitable that others are going to hang their shingle on the web and offer goods directly, providing their own experience to customers, their own customer service, and their own promotions. Sellers used to use eBay as their channel; they've now figured out how to do it without the help of eBay.

What happens if your customers bypass you?

Is there a problem with perfect?

2008-01-18T09:43:00.000-08:00

I don't disagree with Seth Godin very often. In fact he's probably the one person (besides my wife and kids) that change my current thinking about a topic. But I disagree that there's a problem with being perfect.

His hypothesis is that being perfect is a) not remarkable (to still one of his older phrases) and b) only remarkable when you screw up.

I agree with b, as I think most people will. On a, I do believe perfection *is* remarkable. "FedEx" it is a statement of being perfect. They are the de facto standard when needing to overnight something. That FedEx is a verb in our language is a testament to "perfection being remarkable."

My favorite restaurant is Jak's in Issaquah. The best steakhouse I have ever been to, and that includes the great steakhouses of Chicago. They are simply perfect. Been there about 10 times over the last two years, and always a perfect experience. Wine is always at a perfect temperature. My steak is always a perfect cut cooked to a perfect medium rare and delivered to me at a perfect temperature. In fact my first bite of a Jak's steak is always better than I anticipate. The UFO potatoes (their specialty) are always perfect. As is the timing for the service staff, their service, and their atmosphere. It's perfect; as such we remark about it. I've even blogged about it multiple times.

However, I don't think perfection is an end-all-be-all. Perfection is a business choice companies need to make. I don't always opt for a perfect meal; in fact, I rarely do. I spend way more money on imperfect.

Here's my take on being perfect:

1. If you are going to be perfect, you have to be perfect, period. FedEx cannot screw up.
2. It's important for Product Managers to recognize when something is "good enough" and when you're overserving your market. Google Spreadsheets has adoption because it is "good enough" and Microsoft Office has overserved the market.
3. Make a strategic decision whether to be perfect. Sometimes (most times?) the goal is not to be perfect but to move the needle.
4. Understand that most customers in most situations do not value perfect.

I remember proposing an impressive appliance diagnostic solution for Whirlpool and talking to their customer support organization. The solution include communications with an appliance over the phone, Artificial Intelligence, and a voice (over phone) menu to collect data. The most challenging part was the voice interaction, and we hadn't worked out all the kinks by the time we talked to the CS team. I thought we were at a disadvantage because our voice component worked only half the time. Interestingly enough, they thought it was great because it worked half the time. Why the discrepancy? I was comparing our 50% solution to my personal goal of a 100% solution. They were looking at my 50% solution as compared to their current 0% solution. My solution moved the needle 50% for them! As such they loved it.

Clearly a case where perfection should not be a goal. And there are numerous ones in the business world where understanding what is "good enough" is the difference between success and failure.

A smart move by Yahoo and great news for OpenID

2008-01-17T13:16:00.001-08:00

OpenID finally got its flagship account customer in Yahoo. This has been a long time coming and I'm glad a major player has jumped on the OpenID movement.

This is also a smart move by Yahoo. To date this has been a classic chicken-egg scenario. By moving first, Yahoo can cement its logins as the de facto standard for a "universal login" (universal login is how I think users/customers will view OpenID). It creates brand share of mind for Yahoo. I know I will start using my Yahoo account.

Side note... if OpenID was named "UniversalLogin" instead, I bet we would have seen more movement in this space than . OpenID doesn't resonate with the layperson; UniversalLogin does.

Integrating the online and offline worlds

2008-01-16T09:37:00.000-08:00

The line between online and offline is disappearing. Companies (some, anyway) are getting better at understanding how to use online tools to integrate into their operations and customer experiences.

Best Buy hasn't yet. I tried ordering something from Best Buy for Christmas. I chose instore pickup. I went to the store to pick it up. I waited in line for 15 minutes without anyone showing up at the special "in store pickup" counter before leaving the line, picking up the product off the shelf, going to regular checkout, then going home and cancelling the original order (which was tough to do with Best Buy's site broken). That is not a good experience for customers. Clearly they don't "get" the online space.

Progressive does get it. After a new car purchase I was able to go online to change vehicles, all online, all in a matter of about three minutes. They even told me the new insurance rate and the difference between that and my old rate. They get it.

ING Direct gets it. They allow management of account products (CDs, how to renew, moving money between accounts). They have sensible security precautions. It's a breeze to use (and good rates to boot). I've tried to set up new accounts at FNBO Direct and WTDirect, only to find that those banks don't get it. FBNO Direct has a weird login name policy, and neither has the ability to manage money easily. WTDirect doesn't even save bank account information when transferring money - you have to re-enter it every time.

Amazon has an amazing return experience. If a product is broken, I go to amazon.com, tell amazon I want to return an order due to a defect. They give me a label to print out, I package the item back up, put the label on it, set the package by the front door, and wait for UPS/Fedex to pick it up. In the meantime they are shipping a replacement item right away. Not only is that a great experience, it's better than what brick-and-mortar retailers can offer. Retailers need to understand the benchmark Amazon has set and reset their bar.

In the end, companies that "get" how to use online tools to enhance their customer experiences will win, and will win big.

Innovation is not the goal

2008-01-16T09:11:00.000-08:00

I think it's time to kill the buzzword Innovation. It's become overused. According to some, everything is innovative. According to some, you aren't a good company unless you're known for innovation. I think they're wrong, and I think innovation as a buzzword has become so mainstream that the business world is losing focus on its customers. I say this as I continue to experience worse and worse customer experiences and become more and more frustrated by companies like Apple (who can't get their browser to work properly), T-Mobile (who screwed me over on a rebate), etc.

I think Good To Great should be required reading for everyone who thinks they operate in the innovation space. Good to Great is not about innovation - it's about businesses that broke out of "good" corporate performance and evolved to "great" corporate performance. And they were innovative in the process (more importantly they had great leadership that enabled that innovation). And that's the point. The goal was not to be innovative. The goal was to create great business results. Innovation happened to be a tool companies used to drive growth. The companies listed in Good to Great (Abbott, Fannie Mae, Circuit City, Gillette, Kimberly-Clark, Kroger, Nucor, Philip Morris, Pitney Bowes, Walgreen's, and Wells Fargo) aren't exactly companies that scream "innovation" are they? Walgreen's? Fannie Mae? Gillette? Nucor? Let that be a lesson.

If you are focused on Innovation, you are focused on the wrong thing. Focus on your customers and/or your business.

Why would I...?

2008-01-10T12:41:00.001-08:00

This is a question that every product manager must answer. Why would your customer take the time to use your product? Why yours? Why not what they already use?

Squidoo is an interesting offering. You can build web pages around any knol you choose. I tried it. I built one for Purdue football. And I put some content on it. And I checked the traffic. Wow, I get more traffic to my personal blog than I do to my Squidoo page (which is zero). Which begs the question: why would I put time into building a Squidoo page? Especially when blogs are easier to build/maintain than a Squidoo page?

Usability in your Product Development

2008-01-10T10:54:00.001-08:00

So how does one specify usability requirements in the product development process? Remember, usability is not the same as efficiency! I often see teams try to optimize on efficiency thinking they are getting usability - and are then surprised when they don't get the results on their usability tests that they expected.

I generally define usability requirements as a section in and of itself. I tackle it this way (yes this is high level):

1. Define the profiles of the users that will use the product. This is important. Include your "anti-users," or people that won't use your product.
2. Define the primary functions the user needs to be able to perform.
3. For each profile, define what the usability expectation in. I generally define this as "x% of users will understand how to perform the primary functions the first attempt and within so many seconds; y% within second attempt." Repeat for secondary and tertiary functions. This does not have to be complicated; however, it does have to be thought through.
4. Then prototype and usability test. Ask the participants to perform the primary and secondary functions and measure. While in an ideal world you want to have participants that meet your profiles defined in #1 above, in my experience you don't need a lot of participants to perform a usability test - I've done it with as little as one (because one usability test is infinitely better than zero).
5. Expect to find new, unanticipated findings from your participants! I have yet to do a series of usability tests that did not uncover something I would have never thought of testing for.

It is important, IMHO, to break out into primary and secondary functions. This is where most usability fails, in my experience. I've seen designers design for a secondary experience at the expense of a primary experience. A good product manager will prioritize their features/functions.

It is also important to be reasonable in your usability expectations. Another mistake is to try to have perfect usability for everyone. That won't happen, especially for something that's new-to-the-world (for stuff that's not new-to-the-world the usability has already been done and de facto standard interfaces have already established themselves). Instead, set a goal of "moving the needle" and managing to that.

The importance of listening to your customers

2007-12-28T10:20:00.001-08:00

I think this blog post says it all. Google, we're more interested in quality than your time to market.

Listen to your customers. They'll tell you what they want. You don't need to guess.

Is the online market getting overserved?

2007-12-17T08:55:00.000-08:00

I've been getting a number of requests to "trust someone on Spock." What is Spock? After going to their site, I don't have much of a clue. At best I can figure out, it looks to be an aggregator of one's online information and content.

While I do agree that the social networking space could use an aggregator, it also occurs to me that the social networking solution I've built up over time (blogs, email, RSS reader, LinkedIn) work good enough for my needs. As such, sites like Facebook, MySpace, and now Spock overserve my needs.

And I think that's where a lot of the older crowd gets their "I don't get Facebook" attitude - it doesn't improve on the needs relative to what people have put in place to date.

Where do I think the online market is underserved?

Personalization: with all the investment into social networking I am very surprised very little, if anything, is being done in the personalization space. Why doesn't Google do a better job knowing whether I am trying to buy something or whether I am researching a topic? Why am I not made aware of products relevant to me that are being promoted?

I have left a long trail on the Internet over the last 20 years. Why isn't that being used today?

I know I will get the "well it is being used." To which I respond "Bull." It's being used in a superficial fashion. I want deeper personalization. Sites that know my interests, my values, my history,

JetBlue gets it

2007-12-07T11:45:00.000-08:00

A while back I shook my head at Boeing's failed Connexion initiative.

I think companies that are thifty by nature (or even by design) understand cheap ways to test product ideas. JetBlue is taking a much smarter approach to putting Wifi in its planes: it's starting with one plane and providing a stripped down service.

The idea here is not to give users the best experience. The idea is to see how valuable the idea is. They can track how many people try to access the service and how often they do it. Given that current user's alternative is zero access to the Internet, I imagine anyone interested will be happy with a "better-than-nothing" offering.

And, if the idea doesn't have any wings (no pun intended), then JetBlue gets off cheap. And that's the point.

Good for you, JetBlue.

Facebook CEO issues apology

2007-12-05T14:00:00.000-08:00

Since I've blogged about this recently, including this apology from Mark Zuckerberg about their approach to Beacon.

PayPal's new Storefront Widget

2007-12-04T09:10:00.000-08:00

I am going to try and sell my Baby Einstein videos through PayPal's new Storefront Widget. Was easy to set up, will see how it works in production.

Facebook's About-face

2007-11-30T17:31:00.001-08:00

I would love to think that I had something to do with Facebook reversing course on its opt-out Beacon program. Apparently Facebook will require opt-in on every event it tries to share with someone's network.

Good for Facebook, but did they *really* need to hear from the Internet community that this was a bad thing? Seems a little arrogant on their part.

And, oh the irony... apparently Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg wants a little privacy of his own. Oops.

I don't get Facebook

2007-11-23T21:05:00.000-08:00

I interview a lot of candidates for Product Management positions. One of the topics I touch on during interviews is branding - do prospective product managers understand the impact a brand can have on their product, their customers' perception of the product, and the value created from the product. I usually asked for examples of brands that create value and brands that destroy value.

Being a product manager of web-based, software-as-a-service products means I keep my eye on industry trends. And one trend I've watched with interest is Facebook. Facebook appeared on my radar in mid-2006 when an external partner talked about them being a competitor to LinkedIn. At the time you could only sign up if you had an email address from a college or university. They've since grown and have been reported on every hour by every media entity ten times over. They are the biggest thing since The Beatles. Or so I read.

Putting aside the quality of their product offering, I believe they have made a big mistake with Beacon. Beacon is their offering which allows third-parties to publish messages to a user's Facebook profile, providing the user the ability to opt-out of the notification. That's right. Let me say that again. Users have to opt-out from telling their entire network what action they just performed on a third-party website.

The Internet community "revolted" when businesses automatically signed up users to their marketing email lists, claiming "well they can opt-out.". It didn't take long for businesses to realize the PR damage they were causing themselves and reverse course, now having users opt-in in a non-intrusive manner.

When I buy something online, I really don't want to take an additional step to opt-out of telling my entire Facebook network what I just did. If I want to tell them, I can tell them (I can do that today). I understand the benefit third-party websites believe they will get... but are they willing to create friction and privacy concerns for a marketing play? Didn't that fail already with email?

As for Social Ads, I just don't buy that Facebook users are using Facebook as a medium for commerce or commerce research. Until they have the ability to send someone a real drink through the Internet, that is.

And why the hype on Facebook when they have yet to turn a profit, yet to acquire half the accounts of MySpace, and still not even close to Yahoo on total page views. Haven't I seen this episode before? Bubble 2.0 anyone?

And finally, I just don't get Facebook as a product. Tried it for a couple of months. Zero value to me. I get much more value from email, RSS readers, blogs, others' photo sites, etc than I did from Facebook. I suppose Facebook is interesting to those that are new to the Internet and unfamiliar with existing tools that do a better job (which is what I believe propelled the growth of MySpace), and certainly there is a market for that. But not at the level it is getting press.

Oh yeah... I just disabled my Facebook account.

I think Red Octane is missing the boat

2007-11-19T12:40:00.000-08:00

Guitar Hero III is a big hit. The wireless controller is great. Co-op gameplay is way cool. Another great set of songs.

Yet they really seem to miss out on monetizing this platform. Why not have additional albums as a download for an extra fee? Or record a video (using XBox camera) and have them sell you a version where they provide a background? Or create a marketplace where the community can create their own songs/scores and let others try/buy (try for free, want to play again? pay a fee). And so on. Now that they have created a great core, expand it.

This seems so untapped. The potential is there. Innovate and monetize.

Reagan's Rules of Product Management #8: Leadership

2007-11-06T15:07:00.001-08:00

Want to be a better product manager? Hone your leadership skills.

As much as I think of leadership, I generally don't equate it to what I do as a Product Manager. I think of my role as a leader to motivate people to do the right things (which sometimes is counter to my product, which is ok), to motivate others to think about their careers in different (better) ways, and to provide leadership on customer-focused products and how customers think. Funny that I usually don't consciously think about how leadership affects my outcomes as a Product Manager. I say usually because it does occur to me from time to time.

One benefit of being a strong leader as a Product Manager is the increase in productivity you can accomplish with your product. While product managers are generally skilled enough to cover all aspects of their product - marketing, business development, support, product development, design, etc - where's the productivity in that? No, better to have others pulling for you and stepping up to deliver functionality... hence making your product better without having to lengthen the calendar time to achieve such functionality.

I am releasing a product this month, and I am amazed at members on my team are saying to me "don't do that... I'll do it." Designers. QA Managers. Tech writers. Software Developers. Program Managers. Business Development Managers. They are all pushing the product forward, without me even asking them to. Wow. More than making me feel great, it is all about delivering more to your customers... and that's what it's all about, isn't it?

My five second rule for product management

2007-10-10T06:44:00.000-07:00

Last month I talked about my five second rule for prospecting. It is a synopsis based on my years of experience selling consulting services to corporate clients.

Well, guess what - the same human factors that expose the five second rule for prospecting apply to product design and management. That is: you've got five seconds to give a prospective customer or product user a reason to keep learning about your product. Or five seconds to figure out how to use a particular aspect of your product. And with products, the reality is that you have less than five seconds.

Why are point-and-click cameras so popular? Why is Google home page so productive? Why are home shopping channels so popular and profitable? They make things easy for the customer. Not necessarily efficient, not necessarily high performance, not necessarily powerful, but easy.

I am going to pick on my favorite travel site, Expedia. Go to their "get help" page, and you are treated with a plethora of options. I don't have time or bandwidth to sort through their site. Instead, why not ask why I am here? Present five options, I click one, I move on. Now present me with five me options. I click one, I move on. Oops, wrong move, I back up. Better slim down my choices than abandon before I can figure out my next move.

On a related note, to the extent possible, don't make the customer think. Information should be where customers expect it. Product behavior should be what they expect. Why when I use my oven when the timer is running I can't turn it off? Invariable I end up turning off the oven, then restarting. Why are they making me think and fumble through this? Your customers don't have time for unnecessary conveniences.

Just like my five second rule for prospecting, this is not rocket science. Retail stores organize themselves for this reason. Apple simplified MP3 players for this reason, and integrated the ability to download music to an MP3 player for this reason.

Get back to designing your products. You have five seconds to capture your customer.

What happened to eBay?

2007-09-20T08:22:00.000-07:00

As I write this eBay's stock still remains at 2/3 its 2004 price, and eBay is still trying to figure out how to get back to the growth numbers it enjoyed in the late 90s and early 00s. I wrote about eBay's strategy on cleaning up its marketplace a year ago, but I didn't delve into eBay from a product management perspective.

Making the assumption that eBay is struggling, what do they need to do to right the ship? I really don't think this is that hard. First off, eBay has some strong assets:

They have a large base of buyers and sellers

They have the ability to scale their search, display, and transaction processing

And, since eBay's business model is predicated on a) listing fees and b) selling fees, if eBay has an issue, it's probably on the buyer experience side. If you have a happy buyer community, the listing fees and selling fees will follow.

I don't claim to have all the answers, but I know where eBay should start. It's Reagan's First Rule of Product Management: define their target customer! As a longtime customer of eBay, it is apparent that eBay is all over the map chasing new customer opportunities. They started off in collectibles, added cars, solicited commodity items and new products, etc. In doing so, they've lost their niche - their one area they can claim for their own.

eBay can certainly stretch their brand beyond their core (which I assume is the collectible and used item market); however, they can't do it at the expense of their core. eBay can certainly revisit the question of who their target customer segment is, and they may determine it is different than when they started. But they simply can't be all things to all people. Ask Sears. GM. Dell.

And, once you've defined that segment, no future product decisions should interfere with that segment!

As I've talked about in the past, I don't buy or sell on eBay much anymore. What used to be several transactions a month has become a transaction or two a year for the past three years. And gee that's the same time period that eBay has struggled with its stock.

Define your target market, eBay. You have the assets to win that space.

My five second rule for prospecting

2007-09-18T09:57:00.000-07:00

A LinkedIn Question got me thinking about this, so decided to blog about it. It's about my "secret" to successful sales when I was doing consulting.

In a previous life I did my own independent consulting, doing software, architecture, and strategy for my clients. I sold my own services - no third-parties, no brokers. So I had to be good at creating my own prospect pipeline.

I learned cold-calling, prospecting, and pipeline management while on the job (I did consulting for about eight years before I went to work directly for one of my clients - Whirlpool). It was quickly apparent that the difference between an engaging conversation on a phone call, or a return email/phone call was my ability to communicate to the other person "what's in it for me?" as quickly as possible. If I got the right message across, I was granted more time to give the other party a reason to keep listening. Repeat.

I dubbed this "the 5-second model"... basically you have five seconds to give the other party you are trying to convince a reason to give you five more seconds...until the other party is asking engaging questions. At which point you will have an engaged prospect and you can throw the 5-second rule away and enjoy a normal conversation.

To be clear, the "5-second" internal is a metaphor for being concise and to the point. Your timing will vary.

Your 5-second windows should revolve around the following, and in the following order:

What is the prospect's problem that you are trying to solve?

(optional) How are you aware of said problem?

What can you do to solve it?

Why are you credible in solving it?

While this sounds obvious, I see this rule broken all the time, including when people call me. You can't break it, and persistence is not a substitute for the 5-second rule.

So, why does this rule work?

People are busy. Duh, right? Unfortunately, a lot of people don't respect the time constraints of others. The 5-second rule respects those constraints.

People's cognitive thinking follow the 5-second rule. When confronted with a cold call, people generally ask "what does this person want?", "how did they find me?", "can this benefit me?", "can I trust this person?", "how can I learn more?". The structure above addresses those questions.

What's does this rule mean from a practical standpoint?

Research will yield a better result. While you could call lots of people as, say, a divorce attorney hoping to get lucky and stumble upon someone in marital dire straits, you can be more effective if you knew your audience ahead of time. In my case as a software consultant I researched the projects my prospect was working on, the technologies they used, and their current staffing levels and gaps.

No chit chat. Not in the first 30 seconds, anyway. Don't ask about their day. Tell them who you are only in the context of it being relevant to their problem. Get to the point!

Focus on the prospect's problem, not your solution. It may not be immediately apparent how your solution solves their problem. You can use one of the 5-second slots you've earned to talk about the solution and the fit to the problem.

It works regardless of delivery mechanism. Email, phone, brochure, you name it.

Try it. I was successful targeting VPs, GMs, SVPs, and even CXOs using this approach over eight years.

Understanding where battles are won

2007-09-08T12:56:00.000-07:00

With online content and information services, I tend to stay fairly loyal to one particular service, occasionally heading to their competitors to give their service a try. Things like search, maps, travel, news, and financial content (as opposed to financial services like my bank or brokerage) fall into this category.

I continue to find that Microsoft and Yahoo just don't get where I believe the battle for customer loyalty is won in this space - the input. Assuming each is "pretty good" at returning content from search, the differentiator comes down to who understands what I am asking?

I just tried to find directions on Live Maps (or whatever it is called) and a) I couldn't figure out even how to get to that functionality and b) Live Local Beta (which is where maps.live.com redirects) couldn't understand my input!

Likewise with Yahoo - every time I try their SMS search, it hiccups and gives me a laundry lists of formats to follow. Contrast that to Google. I type in "weather 98065" and guess what I get? The weather for zip code 98065. I could also type in "98065 weather", "weather for 98065", etc.

Google does the same with Calendar. I was at my son's first soccer practice, I got the soccer schedule, and I opened up my Windows Mobile device (a T-Mobile Wing for anyone who cares), navigated to Google Calendar, and just started typing in games as single-line text entries - "home soccer game 6pm sep 14". And it worked. I didn't need to ask for format, and I didn't have to go through the frustration of retyping on an unfriendly input device like a mobile phone.

What service am I likely to use? One that has rigid entry constraints? One that requires a user manual to use? Not hardly.

I don't know if Google's SMS search results are better than Yahoo's. I never get that far on Yahoo!

What absolutely shocks me is the number of sites that still think in terms of form fields instead of open text. Or the number of sites that can't recognize a phone number in the format "xxx.xxx.xxxx". Wow, 10 years after Google showed us a better way of text input, we are still thinking in Cobol.

I am convinced this is where the battle line for customers is won. And I believe it is the reason for Google's success in the search space. Would love to see the data, though :)

It's the people, stupid

2007-08-30T12:48:00.000-07:00

Jason Kilar was the first SVP I presented in front of when I joined Amazon back in 2005. I worked with him on Webstore by Amazon's 2006 operating plan, and I loved the perspective he had on the business I owned. I learned to not just gather, analyze, and present data; I learned to ask myself am I doing the right thing, the right way, and follow that immediately up with how are we going to win? That was very refreshing for him to step away from the raw numbers and ensure I understood the big picture and the strategy behind Webstore. My personal and professional growth is a function of a number of experiences in my career, and my interactions with Jason definitely shaped who I am today.

People are the difference in whether innovative concepts succeed or fail. YouTube wasn't the first online video service (Google beat them to it by a long shot), but YouTube had great people - people that founded PayPal and turned it into a success. That was the difference. You might argue that YouTube had a better user experience than anyone else out there, and I would agree. And I think that better experience was a function of the people at YouTube who "got it."

Jason moved on from Amazon, and he now heads up Hulu, which looks to be a promising video content site and I would expect to do very well with Jason running the show. I've signed up for the beta, will see if I am invited.

Oh yeah... good luck Jason! I'm rooting for you.

We "deserve" free Wifi?

2007-08-28T07:37:00.000-07:00

I really think it's cool that Google is funding free Wifi access in the Bay area. I assume there's a business value behind it - the more people are spending time on the web, the more hits Google's Search Engine and AdSense products get. A nice, innovative approach to driving business. Kudos to Google.

I enjoyed the quick read on their blog this morning until I got to this line:

we continue to hope that EarthLink and The City will find a way to enable all San Franciscans to enjoy the free WiFi network they deserve

Maybe I'm being petty, but I really hate the entitlement mentality for luxury items (after all you need a device capable of Wifi before using it). Wifi is not an entitlement, although I would suggest there are legititate reasons municipalites would provide such a service to their communities for free.

When I ran my consulting businses out of Michigan City, Indiana, I was part of the Michigan City Technology Task Force that decided that free wifi in Michigan City made sense. But that wasn't out of entitlement for the residents, it was purely a community economic development decision - the benefits for the community outweighed the costs of providing the service. And my friends in the Seattle area would be shocked to learn that we proposed such a solution without proposing to raise taxes!

Google's innovative approach to driving web traffic is good. Let's not oversell what it is, though. You can, and will, damage a brand that way.

Why I love Dinner Impossible

2007-08-25T11:03:00.000-07:00

This is one of my favorite TV shows to come along in a long time. At first I didn't really understand why I enjoyed it so much, then it hit me. It matches my personality. I love the idea that Robert Irvine will accept a tremendous challenge without knowing all the details. That's the point - set a deadline, set some success criteria, then figure out what it takes to meet the challenge. I love it. He has no idea who is helping him, what tools he has available, what space he has available, etc. He accepts the challenge, then assesses what he has, adapts, and ultimately wins.

Again, I love it!. The business world needs more Robert Irvines.

Some will argue this is a fault, some a strength. I think it's a strength. One of the biggest blockers of execution is people who need every t crossed and i dotted before making a decision or moving forward. Very few people can start with a deadline and a goal and work their way backwards into a solution to meet the challenge. This is arguably the difference between entrepreneurs and corporate mentality (if you can't tell, the lack of entrepreneurship in corporations, well, gets to me).

Change happens. Expect it. Adapt to it. Do whatever it takes. To expect the obvious is to set yourself up for failure.

I remember running my own consulting firm, and having a lot of people ask "how do you know where your next client will come from?" I always answered the same: I don't. And that's the point. Not knowing had zero to do with the success of my business. Maintaining a prospect pipeline, executing relationships and negotiations, and delivering value was what made my business successful. Yes, clients backed out of deals. Yes there were times I was unbillable. But more often than that I was turning down clients, turning down work from existing clients, etc.

Make it happen. The decision comes before the data.

Amen.

Solve mobile banking in a different way

2007-08-24T22:32:00.000-07:00

I'm seeing a lot of investigation into mobile banking. That's interesting - using a ubiquitous technology to attempt to solve problems to an ancient institution. Sounds like a natural evolution of banking. But if you think about this, I'm not convinced mobile banking solves problems. What would be the use cases where I need to bank by phone? Do I really need to check a balance or transfer money instantaneously? Seems like in all use cases I can wait until I am in front of a computer, ATM, or teller and conduct my business in a less rushed manner. Not to mention I really don't want another reason for Seattle drivers to be on their phones while on I-90.

I'm also convinced its time for an innovative bank to step up and change the banking game. Why do we have separate checking and savings accounts? Why is online banking still so primitive? Why isn't Quicken better integrated with online banking solutions? Why is ING Direct able to give me terrific rates and Washington Mutual can't compete? Why in late 2007 we still don't have online bill presentment integrated with banking while leaving control to the consumer (credit card companies are the only ones that have mastered this).

There is so much inefficiency in banking (and payments while I am at it, since I think of the two as two sides of the same coin).

A note to the banking industry: don't chase technology. Build better products.

Podcast with Robby Walker and Wayne Crosby of Zenter and Google

2007-08-11T21:19:00.000-07:00

Not my podcast :) but here's the link,

Best states for doing business

2007-07-11T12:33:00.000-07:00

I found this to be an interesting read. Not surprising Washington is in the top five, and not surprising to see so many midwest states at the bottom.

"Quality of life" is a hard metric to rank, and while I understand how they did it, I don't put a lot of stock in any ranking system that ranks Indiana 12 spots ahead of Washington relative to quality of life!

Apple's new disruptive innovation - the iPhone

2007-06-29T11:01:00.000-07:00

The iPhone will change the mobile phone industry, but probably not in ways most people are thinking. I love the idea of the new interaction interface, and I love the idea of getting the entire internet on my phone. However, the genius behind the iPhone, in my opinion, is the ability to activate the phone and service from iTunes. That's huge. This convenience factor will drive a new consumer behavior, and consumers will expect phone activation to be this easy for all phones (or any device for that matter... have you seen how terrible the Harmony Remote Control configuration is? Argh.) That will put Apple in the driver's seat, and phone carriers and manufacturers will be paying Apple to offer activation via iTunes. Mark my word.

Amazon takes top spot in BusinessWeek IT 100

2007-06-27T09:17:00.000-07:00

Ok, not sure how authoritative a source BusinessWeek is on IT or tech companies, but they put Amazon on top of the tech heap. Nice to see Amazon recognized as a technology company and not just a retailer.

Google acquires Zenter

2007-06-19T16:16:00.000-07:00

I innoviewed Wayne Crosby from Zenter a couple months back, and Zenter has been acquired by Google. Congrats to Wayne! And enjoy the Mountain View area.

eBay vs. Google

2007-06-14T09:17:00.000-07:00

I know this is old news, but eBay took the kid gloves off last week by pulling their SEM dollars from their Google channel. Timing was such that it coincided with eBay Live, and Google's attempt to hold a "freedom of choice" party to encourage the eBay community to push eBay to support Google Checkout.

Now, I don't disagree that the timing had to do with Google's antics; however, companies as big as eBay don't just pull their SEM spend without having some good data to suggest that you aren't going to lose out on the deal. Something tells me that eBay is questioning their strategy on keyword bidding (and I've been right about eBay before :) ). This is something I haven't seen talked about in the blogosphere. Google is an impressive company with an impressive track record. But just like IBM, Microsoft, HP, Dell, and a plethora of other companies, they are assailable. Everyone is (Steve Jobs, are you listening?). However, the real insight here is: is SEM spend on Google really worth it? eBay is challenging that notion. What if they are right? SEM spend won't go away, but it will mean that SEM customers will spend less and less for keywords (I've learned firsthand that many small businesses find keyword bidding too expense and generate a negative ROI) in the e-commerce space.

I am looking forward to the next year in this space. I predict this is the first chip in Google's armor, and they will need to figure out a way to address (Google Analytics is a good way to counter... show customers their ROI in a measurable way) if they want their stock to keep climbing.

Our team is growing

2007-04-11T10:29:00.000-07:00

We here in Amazon Web Services are creating new products... and we need help! I don't have a LinkedIn posting yet, but we are hiring UI designers (AJAX/Web2.0 design a huge bonus), software testers/QA, and program managers. Interested in hearing more? Email me at amazon.com prefixed with reagan at.

My Innoview with Wayne Crosby

2007-04-10T14:55:00.000-07:00

Yes, I'm coining a new term - "innoview." Don't know what it means, I'll let the audience decide.

Wayne Crosby (wcrosby at gmail.com for those that want to reach him) and I launched a complete rewrite of Webstore by Amazon last year, bringing a large dose of creativity, innovation, and bar-raising customer experiences to the market. I truly enjoyed working with Wayne and he was arguably the largest reason for the success of the product and its launch. Wayne is now off to bigger and better things, namely launching a new company after incubating it via Y Combinator.

JR: Tell us a little about what you are doing now.

WC: In January, Robby Walker and I founded Zenter, Inc. with the goal of building the next version of presentation software - not just PowerPoint online. For the first 10 weeks of 2007 we did nothing but design, code, sleep, and leave our apartment once day for a little tennis. All of the hard work seems to have paid off. We have written 40k lines of code, filed 2 provisional patents, created several million dollars worth of value, and have already talked to acquirers in this short time. It's been the most exciting and rejuvenating 3 months of my life.

JR: Congrats on your rapid success! What gave you the inspiration to try Y Combinator as an avenue to launch a new company?

WC: In early 2006 Robby and I started talking about doing a startup. Y Combinator had completed 3 sessions at that point, so we contacted several of the teams and most seemed to be doing well and had nothing but good things to say about it. Y Combinator was founded by Paul Graham and the team that built and sold Via Web to Yahoo! The product was re-branded as Yahoo! Stores and became the #1 ecommerce application. With my background in ecommerce (Go Daddy's Quick Shopping Cart & Amazon's WebStore) I felt like Y Combinator was a natural fit for us. We spent about 2 weeks brainstorming about a product that we felt would benefit from a program like Y Combinator. We settled on Presentation Software and haven't looked back since.

JR: How has your concept been received by the community?

WC: We have received almost the same reaction from everyone (technical, business, angel investors, and VC). At first people don't understand why we would want to do PowerPoint online. However, once they see a demo and understand that we are not PowerPoint, but the next generation of Presentation Software, they get really excited about it. At first I was hesitant to the idea as well. I thought "Presentation Software isn't sexy - I want to do something that is going to be innovative and revolutionary." But I realized with that thought there was something there. Presentation Software is a proven multi-billion dollar industry that has not had a significant feature upgrade in 15 years. I then asked myself, "What would make it sexy, innovative, and revolutionary? If PowerPoint were built today without the desktop limitations of yester-year what would it look like?" Low and behold we have been able to get a lot of people excited about Zenter. We are still in private beta, but have given several demos and have been picked up on quite a few high profile blogs including:
business 2.0,
TechCrunch,
webware,
several investors,
and of course this one.

JR: Was Y Combinator what you expected?

WC: It is the truth when I say the 3 months at Y Combinator were THE BEST experience of my career thus far. Robby and I laugh about what it would be like to do this without Y Combinator. The instant credibility and connections you get by just being part of Y Combinator are amazing and really give you the greatest chance for success. Y Combinator does not give very much money to their startups, and they ask for about 5% of the company. Many people on the blogs feel this is too little money for so much equity. As someone who has been through it, it was a bargain and I would do it again in a heartbeat. It comes down to the famous watermelon vs. grape analogy. Would you rather have 95% of a watermelon or 100% of a grape?

JR: Mmmmm.... grapes. What was a typical day or week like at YC?

We basically lived by the following schedule 7 days a week for 3 months.
10am - Noon: roll out of bed and stumble into the living room to sit at the computer, check email, blogs, news for the day and start coding
Noon - 12:30: eat our $2 Lean Cuisine lunch - My personal favorite is Swedish Meatballs
12:30 - 7pm: Heads down coding, music played all day long and we alternated days to pick the play list which worked well
7 - 8: Kick Robby's ass at Tennis on the apartment courts. I think I may have won 3 sets over the entire 3 months. But they were always like 6-4 and it got us out for some exercise.
8 - 9: Make and eat gourmet dinner - mostly tombstone pizza, but occasionally Red Baron when they were on sale. Care packages from family were also extremely helpful to make sure we didn't eat too poorly.
9pm - 4am: Code like the wind - maybe do a design session or two if we are trying work through something particularly hard.
4am - 10am: sleep

Tuesdays were a special day. Every Tuesday night Paul Graham makes dinner for all of the Y Combinator companies (including several past session startups) and invites a special guest speaker to give advice. This year's lineup was very impressive and included:
Joe Kraus: Founder of Excite and JotSpot
Evan Williams: Founder of Blogger and Twitter
Greg McAdoo: Partner at Sequoia Capital
Mark Fletcher: Founder of OneList and Bloglines
Paul Buchheit: Creator of Gmail and Web 2.0
Ron Conway: World's largest Angel Investor
Sam Altman: Founder of Loopt - one of CNNs top 25 company to watch in 2007, and arguably Y Combinator's most successful company to date
Jame Hong: Founder of Hot or Not
Bradley Horowitz: Head of Yahoo! Small Business Mergers and Acquisitions

Over 60% of the speakers play or played an extremely important roll in our company. For example, we were struggling with a name for the product when Evan Williams came to speak. He owned Zenter.com and we ended up trading a little stock for the domain and to get him as an advisor. He now has an active interest helping Zenter succeed and even offered office space to us in San Francisco.

JR: So, with the sleep and eating schedule its basically like college? Watch what you eat or you'll end up with my physique. What was different at YC from what you expected?

WC: One of the hardest things about doing a startup is surrounding yourself with successful and supportive people. This was one of the main things that attracted us to Y Combinator. However, when we applied I was thinking these roles would be filled by Y Combinator founders and some of the speakers. I completely underestimated the value of fellow entrepreneurs who are going through it. Y Combinator companies have an incredible bond and help each other out more than I ever expected. There is an apartment building in San Francisco nicknamed the "Y-Scraper." The apartment has an unusually high percentage of Y Combinator startups in it. The eight there now are:

Every one of them is on the path to greatness and it creates an environment like none other in the world.

Also, Paul Graham is ALWAYS right. But at the same time, he lets each of the teams figure things out on their own without forcing his view. For example, Every week at the dinners he would say, "Just build something people want - don't worry about raising money now" and then would hear people say something like "Raising money takes a long time, plan on 6 to 8 months". This was petrifying to us. We were watching our small round of seed funding run out day by day and we were supposed to plan on 6-8 months after we started the fund raising process to see more. Shouldn't we start ASAP? I can only speak from my experience, but building something people want is the hard part - raising money was easier than I expected.

JR: What was the downside of your experience YC?

Y Combinator requires you to move to either Cambridge, MA (Summer session) or Mountain View, CA (Winter session). The night we submitted our application to Y Combinator, we found out my wife was pregnant with our first child. The hardest decision my wife and I made was me going off to do a startup while she remained in AZ. We bought video phones and used Skype video conferencing every night to stay in touch. The video phones helped a ton, especially since I only made 1 trip back home in the 3 months. Looking back it was absolutely the right decision for me, the family, and our future - but it sucked not being around her for 3 months.

JR: What advice would you give entrepreneurs now that you have been through this experience?

WC: I'm far from an expert on this one - but here is my advice for whatever it's worth:

Get something - anything - out to the world. Pick a product that matches the resources you have available to you. Last January I started 2 side projects as my first venture into entrepreneurialism. First was a real estate site that aimed to streamline the existing processes that exist today. The second was a sudoku website, www.counttonine.com. The real estate project ended up being too large of a project to get off the ground with 1 person working part time on it. However, the sudoku site has exploded since its launch. It currently has more than 10 million page views per month and continues to increase 10% or more each month. Count to Nine has supplied a nice supplemental income while we got Zenter off the ground. It was an easy side project and ended up being what enabled me to make the transition to focusing on a startup full time.
Surround yourself with other entrepreneurs. If you are not in a startup hotspot - you have one option. MOVE. I am a big believer in being immersed in a culture that supports entrepreneurs. I look at it like this - there are so many things that you cannot control that dictate if a startup succeeds or fails. The location of the startup is something you have complete control over. Why not maximize the chance of success by moving somewhere where you will be surrounded by people who understand what you trying to do? For example, when I returned to AZ and told people what we were doing I often got, "You aren't serious are you? YOU are going to directly competing with Microsoft?" Most people thought we were crazy. In Silicon Valley, people are excited about it and want to talk about how they can be involved.
Pick your co-founder(s) carefully. Get a co-founder you can spend every minute of every day with - pick someone you have worked with in the past that you have a good working relationship with. DO NOT attempt to do it alone. In my opinion the best products come from small teams of 2 to 4 people. No one person is good at everything, so pick someone that compliments your abilities.
Try and stay in the middle ground emotionally. Startups are a rollercoaster of emotions. Everyone will warn you of this, and it is next to impossible to avoid, so just know it is going to happen. One day you might think you are going to be a multibillion dollar company, the next you might think you are going fail miserably. The truth is probably somewhere in the middle - statistics say probably closer to the fail side. But don't let fears of failure stop you. I would challenge you to find an entrepreneur that has "failed", however you define it, and ask if they would have changed the experience for anything. I looked and never found one.
It's your company - you know best. Although this is a true statement, you should always listen to people. If people are telling you that something isn't right in the product - they are probably right. Use the opportunity to really understand why they are saying that and brainstorm and see if you can come up with a better solution. It's the cheapest and best usability testing you can get.
Keep your physical health in check. It's easy to not eat right and not exercise when doing a startup. Don't let it happen. The days that we ate poorly or didn't exercise were noticeably less productive than others. We quickly realized this and scheduled a daily tennis match to get us out of the apartment and moving around. Try and find a sport where you and your co-founder(s) are evenly matched. A little friendly competition is really healthy and it's a great way to settle decisions that don't really matter.
Build something people want. Paul Graham would be disappointed if I didn't include this one. This is the mantra of Y Combinator. It sounds obvious, but most startups don't do it. Spend time really thinking about of your product. Is it something you yourself would use? Is it so much better than existing solutions that you would make the change to use it? If it is, you're on the right path.
Think virally. Mark Fletcher had a great definition for this when he spoke at Y Combinator, "A viral product is one where users experience benefits created by others that use the product that would not otherwise exist." This is really powerful. When this works, your users become your marketing department. Think of your product in this way - do users have a reason to tell other users to try your product? If not, I'm not going to say your product is doomed, but it's an uphill battle.
Get a mentor. Find someone who recommends good books to read, someone who can give sound advice on product vision, someone who can help navigate raising money, someone who has done a startup in the past year or two, and someone who is working on a complementary product to yours. These roles don't need to be, and really shouldn't be, filled by one person. I have several mentors and all have been the difference between success and failure at different stages of my career.
Don't rely too heavily on existing libraries for your differentiators. This is always a delicate point with engineers. I'm not suggesting reinventing the wheel every time you start a new project. However, the features that are going to differentiate you, by definition, need to be yours alone. For example, Zenter relies heavily on JavaScript to provide a rich end user experience. We looked at several libraries (Dojo, jQuery, Prototype, etc.) and in the end developed a meta-language on top of JavaScript to meet our needs, using a tiny part of Prototype. That decision has enabled us to do things that would not have been possible if we just relied on existing libraries.
You don't have to start a startup to be a part of one. There are a lot of great startups out there that are looking for people with the entrepreneurial spirit. It's a great way to test the waters and see if it is for you. (Shameless plug: Zenter is hiring! If you have crazy JavaScript or Java skills we want you. Email us at "jobs at zenter.com").

JR: I'm Java 1.0 Sun Certified, can I apply? Seriously, can you talk about what's next in your future?

WC: In the short term, we are focused entirely on getting Zenter out of private beta. We have several media events that are scheduled for next month, so more heads down coding until then. After that, the focus is going to be on building Zenter into a $100m company with growth (piece of cake?). Also, my son is due on May 22, 2007, so it's a delicate balance between getting ready for the new Crosby and getting Zenter launched. It's a great problem to have.

Longer term, I feel I have found my calling as an entrepreneur. The startup environment is very addicting, and Zenter will not be my last. We have compiled a list with dozens of ideas just waiting for some spare cycles to get going. Hopefully they won't sit idle for too long.

JR: Congrats again on your upcoming child - all I can say is don't miss the birth or you'll be writing songs like Harry Chapin (as a father that song always brings tears to my eyes and definitely focuses me on the right things in life). As always, thank you Wayne for your time. Of course I wish you the best of luck in your future endeavors, more so if they involve me :)

UPDATE - Zenter bought by Google

How not to handle customers

2007-04-04T17:35:00.000-07:00

This is amazing. Forget the anecdotes... how can you terminate a customer on a whim? And that's exactly what Comcast has done. Terminating customers who have not violated any terms and conditions agreement is paramount to a whim.

If Comcast had a problem, simply update the T&Cs, notify customers, and terminate those that violate. Pretty simple, eh?

Ideas versus Execution

2007-03-20T22:28:00.000-07:00

I see a lot of people and companies focus on the idea phase of Innovation. "How do I get my ideas in front of the right people?", "Why aren't great ideas adopted in the marketplace?", "How can I get my company to get more innovative ideas?", "What techniques do you use for brainstorming and generating ideas?"

Sorry, those are the wrong questions (I feel like James Cromwell from I, Robot).

In my experience, ideas are a dime a dozen. It is rare to hear new to the world ideas, in any context.

Innovation, in my estimation, is a function of execution. The willingness of companies to try new things in the absense of data and the ability to execute superbly on those ideas. That's innovation.

I will say this about ideas: the best ideas are formulated by a wide variety of individuals and iterated over time. The Lone Innovator, as a percentage of overall ideas, is not the source of great ideas. Rather, ideas are refined over and over and over and over, across companies, across continents, across people. The best ideas are those that have been refined by a diverse set of people with a wide variety of perspectives.

The biggest blocker to innovation, in my estimation, is a company's willingness to try new things. Or, more accurately, they are waiting for data that doesn't exist (and won't exist until someone executes on said idea). Yes, I'm preaching from Innovator's Dilemma; nonetheless, seems like many people are not getting the message :)

4GL as Service

2007-02-27T16:53:00.000-08:00

Microsoft has created the term "software-as-service," primarily to denote the difference between their traditional software business and the new wave of offering similar functionality either via a web browser or a remote server hosted in the Internet cloud. I recently took a look at Apex, the latest offering from SalesForce.com web services space, and couldn't help but notice the parallel between Apex and 4GLs of the early/mid 90s. Only this time, the 4GL is running in a remote, hosted environment, and not on a server the developer has to own. Way cool. Looking forward to giving Apex a try in the coming days/weeks and see how flexible and capable it is.

Scales of Google Influence

2007-02-27T10:43:00.000-08:00

I'm a big fan of Google. As I've watched SEO turn into "optimize for Google" I've noted two key things:

Google forces sites to have better content. This makes the web better, Google benefits by organizing said improved content better. A net gain for Google.
Sites have figured out how to play the Google PageRank game, Google loses because its metric is tainted (a link is no longer an indicator of value). A net loss for Google.

In other words, there are two ecosystem forces at work here, one benefiting Google, one hurting it. Who will win???

SEO experts have gamed the Google PageRank system, to the extent there is a market for links on a web page. Once that happened, the backlink metric no longer became an indicator of content value. I submit Google has to figure out a new "GPR" algorithm. They need to innovate. What worked 10 years ago is no longer as effective as it once was. They risk being disrupted, just as they disrupted AltaVista, Excite, and Webcrawler (wow, how many readers have even heard of those search engines???).

Or, perhaps that is why they are expanding their product offerings? Are they trying to get in a different game? I like Google Apps. It shows Google is capable of productizing away from their core. The catch is - can they market and brand away from their core? They can with me :)

The Value of Product Management

2007-01-30T05:42:00.000-08:00

As a product manager, I will be the first to admit that much of product management is rote, overrated, anyone-can-do-it, etc. The key word is "much." The perspective that I believe product managers bring to the table is that they understand how consumers think about products. Let me give an example...

I watch The Apprentice regularly, and I've found it to be an interesting measure for me to test my instincts. In the last show, the teams had to create a new dish for El Pollo Loco (fast food chain in southern California), and were measured on total sales. Based on the product alone, I predicted that the "Tortilla" team was going to beat the "Mango" team. Why? Very easy to see that the Tortilla product was not as big a stretch from El Pollo Loco's core offering; as such, it would be easier for customers to identify with and try. A fruit/chicken combo, while tasty, is just too far out there to generate significant sales. This obversation should not be a surprise, and most people understand this basic concept.

So, why wasn't this considered as part of product design? Why wasn't this part of the thought process? Instead, both teams jumped on the "sales and marketing" bandwagon, as if sales and marketing can account for all product ills.

This is the job of product managers: to understand the market, to understand consumers, and to design a product that meets the needs of the market and internal goals/strategies. Sales and marketing exists to communicate benefits of said product, not to cover up for deficiencies in the product or strategy gaps. For some reason, this basic concept, while usually briefly touched upon, is consistently overlooked on The Apprentice.

Ultimately, I am always surprised at what passes muster on Trump's show. Apparently bravado, energy, and communication skills weigh in higher than creativity, knowledge, insight, and accomplishment. A key miss on the show is the notion that the winning team "did it right" and the losing team "did it wrong." If only business were that black and white.

eBay's strategy panning out

2007-01-25T23:36:00.000-08:00

Just like I predicted (ok, you will have to dig through the archive page to find my commentary on eBay's strategies to clean up its marketplace through higher seller fees). See this article in BusinessWeek. To whit...

Positive Pruning

Whitman attributed the solid quarter, in part, to more product listings turning into actual sales on eBay's site. The company's core auction business had suffered last year from sellers dumping slow-selling and patently unwanted merchandise in their eBay stores, as well as pricing some items too high for eBay's bargain-hunting audience. The result was a poorer experience for buyers and inventory that sat on the site far longer than desired, Whitman explained.

Last spring and summer, eBay raised fees by roughly 6% in order to encourage merchants to sell items people want and to price them to move (see BusinessWeek.com, 7/19/06, "Will eBay Fee Hikes Recharge Growth—or Drive Away More Merchants"). So far, the plan seems to be working. The site saw declines in the inventory that languished in eBay stores before selling or that didn't sell at all. "We are moving toward a better eBay marketplace," Whitman said during the call, cautioning that there was still work to do this year. Company CFO Bob Swan said that conversion rates have yet to reach their 2005 levels, but that they markedly improved since 2006.

Indeed, focus on the end customer is always a sound strategy. Despite the uproar from the eBay seller community, eBay did right for the customer, and are rewarded in the stock price. Quite a lesson for everyone in the e-commerce space.

I'm still hiring software developers!

2007-01-25T13:43:00.000-08:00

By the way, I'm still looking for strong software developers for a new Amazon product we are going to launch this year in the Amazon Web Services organization. If you know Java, have some experience with e-commerce or payments processing, love technical challenges, like to innovate, and are interested in shaping the future of Amazon Web Services, please contact me at jvreagan at gmail dot com, or submit your resume directly here.

Real savings from Amazon S3

2007-01-25T08:16:00.000-08:00

An interesting blog post from the SmugMug folks talking about real dollar savings from using Amazon S3.

Prioritize and focus, prioritize and focus

2007-01-19T12:42:00.000-08:00

Let me say it again, prioritize and focus.

This is something I am addressing on my current product... making sure the team focuses on the core issues, the product basics, and getting those right before solving the 10% problems or the fringe problems.

This sounds so basic, but it is a consistent challenge that a leader faces: how do you keep your team focused on the high priorities and what's important, especially if those two are not sexy enough?

What I do is acknowledge that those other issues are important, and are relevant, they just do not rank in priority relative to other features. For example, Amazon.com is a great retail site with lots of features, but none of those features (product recommendations, shipment tracking, cancelling orders, gift options, wishlists) would be relevant without the basics: placing an order, processing payment, emailing confirmation to the customer. While that sounds obvious, and it is obvious, it is still true that many. Take a bunch of Amazon engineers, ask them to build an e-commerce site from scratch, and I guarantee the first questions and focus would be around shipping, promotions, recommendations, split orders, etc. The discussion would not start around the basics.

In addition to acknowledging those fringe features, I document them and put them on a priority board. Acknowledging the importance, and selling the idea that there are simply more important things to focus on, is an important step when these issues come up. In addition, it gives a great respite for engineers that need a break from the here and now and want to spend a short amount of time working on something new - there's a board already set up to pull those ideas from.

None of this is rocket science, none of this is new. That said, I do see teams managed that do not execute in this manner; they may have these tools, but they are not enforcing this as part of culture and execution. That's what needs to change. It will be your biggest challenge in product development.

Innovation is my inspiration...

2007-01-18T10:53:00.000-08:00

... leadership is my aspiration

I stole that from an Amazon employee, but I LOVE it! Perfectly summarizes my drivers and goals.

This is too funny

2007-01-17T22:24:00.001-08:00

How to deal with telemarketers

Now this I like

2007-01-17T13:48:00.000-08:00

Well, kinda. Just stumbled across a new search engine that actually incorporates human screening of sites into its search results. Pretty interesting concept; I won't repeat it, you can read about it there.

I certainly don't think this is scaleable, nor do I think that I will get the best results just because a human has interjected. What I *do* like is that they've acknowledged the problem in the current search engine space - there is too much crap out there, and a search engine's job isn't about finding related content, it's about filtering out crap. Knowing the problem is half the battle.

Innovation in the kitchen

2007-01-08T10:58:00.000-08:00

Very good move for Whirlpool, nice to see them try to take this concept to market. Wish I could say this was one of my ideas while I was at Whirlpool, but alas, this wasn't my baby(although I knew the guy that championed and sold this idea).

I like the name Centralpark as well - good brand name for this concept.

2008, eh? I won't be in the market for a new fridge then, sigh :(

Blogger labels: The new meta-tag?

2006-12-22T20:42:00.000-08:00

Hmmm... so blogger.com now supports labels for posts. Since its a Google product, I am guessing that labels will influence search engine relevancy, especially if the label appears in the title or post text. Same would apply to tags at other sites.

Meta-tags haven't been relevant in SEO for a couple of years now, but perhaps Google is thinking about (or has done it) giving weight to content tags? This is pure speculation, I haven't the foggiest idea. Although I have noticed that I have gotten a lot of traffic to my personal blog when search engine queries match my labels. Interesting.

Chalk one up for Google

2006-12-13T12:09:00.000-08:00

This is an amazingly innovative, yet simple (since options are already traded) concept that Google has innovated - creating a market for their employee stock options. One simple concept that just raised the value of their compensation packages measurably. Well done, Google.

Unspun by Amazon

2006-11-29T08:56:00.000-08:00

Unspun by Amazon. Enjoy.

I'm hiring in a big way

2006-11-05T21:43:00.000-08:00

This week's BusinessWeek's cover alludes to the sizeable investment Amazon is making in Web Services and exposing the Amazon platform. I have openings for TEN software developers... come make history as Amazon continues to lead the world into Web Services. See the job listing here, and contact me for more information.

MySpace downturn

2006-10-30T10:01:00.000-08:00

I opined on this in a post last month, but looks like others are catching on. Washington Post had an artcile about the downturn in MySpace usage by, yes, the fickle teen market.

Don't bet on teen products... bet on teen companies. Big difference.

At least Google was smart and put performance numbers behind it. And, YouTube is not a teen fad product.

Google and Youtube

2006-10-17T08:19:00.000-07:00

Ok, as a blogger I'm obligated to opine about Youtube and Google. After all, everyone else is.

Wow, $1.65B for a 65 person company, less than a year old, with lawsuit written all over it, no profits, little revenue, and lots of customers.

Like most of the rest of the world, I’ve scratched my head on this one. A deal between Youtube and Google makes sense. Buying them? Huh? What did Google really buy, a brand? Maybe, but for $1.65B? Sheesh.

As I’ve blogged before, déjà vu all over again. I’m seeing the same mistakes made 10 years ago during the irrational exhuberance phase of the Internet. But one thing did occur to me… Google could have paid cash for Youtube. And that’s the difference.

When AT&T bought TCI for $70B (yes, B), and then sold it for $47B, it was “well, they can afford that kind of mistake.” Welcome to Web 2.0. Maybe this is what Web 2.0 is really about. Companies that leverage the web to create real, significant cash flow. Google can spend $1.6B and not bat an eye. They will cover that in the next two quarters. It's 1% of their market cap. Heck, the traffic uptick last week alone might have been worth it.

The two dimensions of risk

2006-10-15T09:15:00.000-07:00

I was hiking in Tiger Mountain Saturday, crossing a log that served as a bridge over the stream 10 feet below. The log had carved "X" notches in it for traction, and was a consistent size end-to-end. The log protruded about three feet past the edges of the embankment for the stream. I noticed that my anxiety (I was carrying Garrett on my back, and I am always careful when others around... like when I drive... but I digress) lessened once I had crossed the chasm, but was still on the log. My risk of falling hadn't lessened, but my risk of injury (to me or Garrett) had lessened.

Ok, not earth shattering (yes you may now address me as Captain Obvious), but it did remind me of the two dimensions of risk. That is:
1. What is the probablity an event will occur?
2. What level of damage can happen if it does occur?

Rarely, when risk is discussed, do people talk about each axis independent of each other. And I rarely do as well. Instead, we lump them together and address. Last year, on my first product at Amazon, I actually broke my risk list into the two dimensions, and thoroughly confused the hell out of everyone, even after I explained what I was doing :) That was kind of strange for a company that loves data.

What's interesting to me is the relationship for #2 between damage and brand strength. One of the key reasons big companies cannot move as quickly as startups is that there is more at stake to lose when a big company screws up. The brand (which carries significant value) can be damaged, deeper pockets means bigger targer for lawyers, etc. As such, for large companies each decision carries a bigger risk component, and in turn more risk mitigation. This notion is often lost on those who have worked for a company during the time a company has grown from a small business into a Fortune 500 company. But it's a valid rationale - there is more at stake for large companies.

Microsoft iPod

2006-09-30T08:28:00.000-07:00

Like most Web 2.0 sites, YouTube is not nearly as easy to find good content as it was a year ago. (Side note... I think that is why Google is going to have YouTube's lunch... YouTube has to figure out how to scale discovery). However, I did find this video on . I had heard about this from friends at Microsoft (they got a big kick out of it) but hadn't seen it yet. Very clever, and a great lesson in Product Marketing.

We recently went through this when launching WebStore and Fulfillment by Amazon. Fortunately, a couple product managers got together, and instead of proliferating the use of inconsistent names for Amazon Services products we drove to simplicity for the customer (merchants) in renaming our products and designing the external website. Not sure we hit a home run, but I would argue we did a nice job driving toward simplicity.

Makes me wonder what Zune will look like :)

Following

2006-09-22T15:02:00.000-07:00

It occurred to me recently: with all the study on leadership, what it is, how to be a good one, how to measure it, etc, there is no discussion on being a follower. Think about it! By definition, leaders have followers, and it can be argued that there are far more followers than leaders (and of course an individual can perform both roles simultaneously). Why is so little written about following? Is there no market for it? Do followers not pick their leaders? Or, probably more accurate, are followers not interested in being better followers or finding better leaders? Would the world rather complain a la Dilbert than better their situation?

I'm in a great career situation right now for one reason: I chose the right leader to follow. I am going to help change the world, and I am doing it at the ground floor, because I sought out an opportunity with my current boss.

It takes a team to deliver anything non-trivial. That's a truism for leadership. It's also a truism for followers.

Ramblings on Web 2.0 and its evolution

2006-09-21T10:25:00.000-07:00

Deja Vu. All over again. As I watch the hub-bub over web 2.0, I feel like I'm watching a history channel movie about. Tons of "Web 2.0" sites in the works, getting funding, etc, most of which don't solve a problem, don't have a business model, or focus on too narrow of a space to create any value. Wow, apparently people don't learn from history.

Don't get me wrong, some great concepts in the Web 2.0 space, and I love innovation. Gmail. Flickr (even though I don't use it as it doesn't meet my needs). RightCart. But, here we go again, I keep reading how the world is changing. Those are alarms going off in my head.

Tagging. I like it. Makes many of the sites I use useful. At least it did. But it doesn't, and won't, scale. Sorry. Tagging is just another semantic name for directories, without any support for hierarchies (in fact I would rather have directories than tags). Just like Yahoo! had to evolve from a directory to a search service due to scaling, Web 2.0 services will have to figure. Already tagging is pretty useless in Technorati as a content discovery tool.

AJAX is here to stay, no question. About time, frankly. I think Ruby will make a big impact too. It's too slow, I know. So is Java. Or so it was said back in the mid-90s.

Side note: consider that it was Apple that finally commercialized digital music.

MySpace. What happens when the millions of teenagers decide MySpace is uncool? It will die as fast as Friendster did. I actually give MySpace another year, and in fall 2007 new registrations will stop and usage will decline in favor of another fad site. Actually, a company in the apparel space, which is an industry that understands fads, would do well to figure out how to tap the same trendiness.

I think the economics of the next generation of the web is going to be driven more by disruption caused by SalesForce.com (AppExchange) and Amazon.com (EC2, S3) than by site eyeballs (gee, where have I heard that before). Heck, I think SecondLife has a better chance of surviving Web 2.0 than most anyone.

I also like what Zopa is doing. A real business opportunity leveraging the Internet, much as PayPal has done for payments. And I do like all the work being done in the travel space to align flight arrangements with real user use cases rather than just "find a list of flights between point a and point b."

We'll see how it plays out. Maybe I'm clueless about this and showing my age and can't relate to this space. While we aren't to the level of irrational exhuberance in the Nasdaq that we saw in the late 90s (yours truly was caught up as well), it seems like we are following that path. I expect in 5 years some clear winners will emerge, with very few of today's darlings falling in that bucket.

Yet another post without a point. A free lunch to anyone who's read this far.

Your invisible competitor

2006-09-19T17:14:00.000-07:00

As a product manager, it is my job to perform good competitive analysis.

For example, in examining eBay over several months, I reached a conclusion: eBay had to do something about their core eBay marketplace getting so cluttered with commoditized items and Buy It Now auctions. (Disclaimer for those unaware, I work for Amazon.com). As I watched their ProStores and Express offerings, it became clear to me: eBay was executing a strategy to clean up their core marketplace for their customers. That's why the screaming from the eBay seller community is falling on deaf ears: eBay wants those sellers to sell through ProStores or Express. Often times, this is easy to do from the outside - no trees to try to see the forest.

(Side note... as an eBay fan, I applaud eBay's move... maybe I can start finding stuff on eBay again)

But what about future competitors? While it's obvious to look at existing competition, big or small, it's not so obvious to take a look at non-existing competitors. Sometimes it is obvious - Google, for example, is showing it's taking on all comers in all spaces of software applications. Any online offering is likely to compete against Google now or in the future.

I have begun looking at future entrants to my space and predict what they will do. What will their value proposition be? What strengths will they leverage? Where will they be weak? What will their roadmap be? What market segments will they target?

Try it. Extremely interesting stuff. Better yet if you do this for a no-name, startup that enters your space.

WebStore by Amazon

2006-09-19T06:21:00.000-07:00

While we launched this product a couple months back, the PR launch for WebStore is today. Will be interesting to see the public response to it.

WebStore is the product/program I managed for over a year, and WebStore is a complete rewrite, taking advantage of AJAX to deliver a great user experience. It uses Amazon Web Services (ECS, S3, CBOP) as the underlying technology, which means any developer could build a similar offering.

Can't wait until my current product hits the market. :)

Product Testing with real Customers

2006-09-16T10:48:00.000-07:00

I recently completed a Product Trial with T-Mobile.

One of the key reasons I signed up for the trial was to learn how companies do modern day product trails and see if I could steal any ideas. Unfortunately, I didn't get any good ideas to steal! It seemed like this was a marketing trail, meaning they wanted to learn how to position the product and create the right messaging. It certainly wasn't a product development trail. Not surprising, as it looks like T-Mobile is going to launch this service soon. The only lesson I learned was : If you want to measure the alignment of the product to your messaging, you need to get your messaging to the customer before they sign up for the trail and before they start the trial. T-Mobile tried to measure the benefits without explaining what they benefits are. Can't get actionable data from customers if you aren't putting their frame of mind in the context you're measuring.

XPM: eXtreme Product Management

2006-09-01T09:07:00.000-07:00

This is something that has been festering in my head for about the last year: Agile Product Management. As I refine it more and more, and as I apply and learn, I have addapted it to eXtreme Product Management. Why eXtreme? Because I've learned that its in the spirit of eXtreme Programming (XP) that I am finding techniques that work. I interpret XP to be: if it's worth doing, it's work taking to the extreme (and if it's not worth doing, don't do at all).

So, I ended up with the very uncreative eXtreme Product Management. As I usually do before I blog, I Google to see what's out there I the topic I write, and turns out that someone has beaten me to the punch!. Good for them. But, I'm not going to read the article or any trackbacks yet. Instead, as I write this, I am going to execute the following process:

1. Get my thoughts down on XPM
2. Read articles on XPM
3. Augment my thinking with what I read
4. Update and finalize

So, let's get started!

Reagan's Postulates

So, what is XPM? Well, I don't have it all down, and, like XP or Agile, there is no clean, single definition, but rather a set of components:

Postulate 1: Customer pull

If customer-centric is good, take it to the extreme. There is a lot to this one, as it should be. Let customers define your opportunity spaces. Let them pull you to the market. Talk to them. Visit them. Don't survey them. Ask about their problems. Don't push solutions, probe for problems. Form a product advisory board. Expose your ideas to them early, before development, before definition, before.

On my current product I talked to customers before writing the Press Release and the FAQ (see postulate 3). Really changed the way we were thinking about the product and helped us solidify.

Every feature on my roadmaps have an entry for the customer(s) that requested the feature (either as a feature or a problem). All key features are specifically requested by a customer. Not that they come up with every idea, but they validate and set the priority.

Postulate 2: Delay decisions as long as possible

This, to me, is what defines agile. I'll even take it further than what you might think. Take this to the extreme, and it becomes push decisions onto your customers. Often I hear engineers ask "should we do x or y." My answer is usually "both!" Give the customer the choice.

Clearly, there are times that choices overwhelm, and choices need to be bundled into packages, or presented in wizard-like functionality, or defaulted. Nonetheless, a tenet of XPM is pushing decisions to customers.

Not everything is left up to the customer: pricing, go-to-market strategies, etc are all decisions that need to be made. Delay them to the last possible point in time.

Postulate 3: Begin with the end in mind.

A core tenet of The 7 Habits, taking this to the extreme would be writing your obit, or perhaps a history book. Maybe you want to go that far. At a minimum start with a Press Release, articles about the product release, and FAQs. I actually take it a step further and look at the career growth and write articles a year after the launch, how the product grew.

Postulate 4: Solicit ideas from everyone.

And I mean everyone. Your boss. Your peers. The CEO. Those at the "lowest levels." Customers. Non customers.

I've formed a nice little network in Seattle, and one thing I notice we do is talk about what we are doing, who we are targeting, what our business models are, etc. And what happens? Invariably, those discussions lead to fresh ideas and new contacts that can help.

Postulate 5: Let your development team define the product

As a product manager, you can define the constraints (a different perspective on requirements), but let the dev team define the product. Egads! you say. Hogwash. Developers that have the creativity and insight will emerge, and you will gain the benefit of a better product.. Plus, you still hold veto power :)

Postulate 6: Rethink Marketing

What does marketing mean in the extreme case?

1. Aligned with postulate 1, it means knowing the market intimately. The marketing function brings market requirements to the product management function.
2. Your product is your marketing. Period.

Postulate 7: Fail Faster

Get a product out the door, observe, react, innovate, release, observe, react, innovate. Fast! And then figure out ways to do it faster. While some learnings take a while to materialize, many things can be learned in the first 30 seconds a product is in someone's hands. "How do you...?", "What does this do...?", "Where is the...?" are all key insights to capture and ensure are in the product and intuitive to find.

Ok, that's all the insight I have. I'm off to check out what I found on Google earlier and see what the world says. Tomorrow I will update with what I find.

Reinforcing the brand promise

2006-09-01T07:38:00.000-07:00

I've accessed public access wifi spots for almost five years now. Airports, hotels, coffee shops, restaurants, etc. I saw something today that I hadn't seen in those five years: a layman's, clearly written, self-describing SSID. It was at the Tully's coffee shop near Union Station (Seattle), where the SSID is "Tullys Free Wifi." Not earth shattering, not going to change the world, but it gave me pause: why is it that this is the first time in five years I've seen something like this? You'd think someone by now would have wanted to reinforce their brand.

But that's Tully's. I think they are local to Seattle, but probably have as many branches as Starbucks. Locals who know coffee and coffee shops generally prefer Tullys to Starbucks - better coffee, better service, nicer area to lounge, and now free wifi (finally). They are truly customer-oriented, and that's reinforced even at the level of detail of their SSID.

But, back to the point of my post: why don't companies take advantage of every customer touchpoint to reinforce their brand?

Perhaps one of the hardest things in product management is to understand what exactly to do at touchpoints. Let's use product documentation as an example. Most of the time, product documentation is use based - what are you trying to accomplish? In my last product, I took a different track - find out who the customer is, and present content tailored for them. Not to the level of personalization, but profiling. Ask a couple quick questions about them: how big is their business? Do they have an existing e-commerce site? Voila, based on answers, I now know whether to give three bullets as an answer or to explain the terms I am talking about. Quite effective, and feedback from users was that this was better than hybrid models with mouseovers and "click here."

How True

2006-09-01T01:50:00.000-07:00

Strategy+Business has a new article on the value of engaging customers as part of your innovation process.

It simply amazes me how every time I sit down with a customer, a new idea or need emerges that I hadn't considered before. It's obvious that customers offer a perspective product managers don't have, but the real learning is how helpful customers are with helping companies innovate. And why wouldn't they? They have the most to gain from getting companies to build things catered to their needs!