unto the breach

This blog has moved.

2010-12-28T07:29:00.000-08:00

I'm no longer posting on blogger; you can now find me at http://josephby.posterous.com .

The Economist - Redux

2010-08-16T12:01:00.000-07:00

Hot on the heels of my earlier post, the New York Times talks about the Economist, and how it's been one of the only news magazines to grow in the past few years.

The Economist Tends Its Sophisticate Garden
By JEREMY W. PETERS
Published: August 8, 2010
The Economist, a bible of world news with a heavy dose of business, seeks readers who see themselves moving up in the world. More...

But will they keep playing Gershwin?

2010-08-12T05:06:00.000-07:00

From my perspective, United Airlines had two things going for it: membership in Star Alliance, and that lovely arrangement of Rhapsody in Blue that they play as you board. Things got better when they aligned themselves with US Airways (America West, re-branded). I had received consistently good service from America West, and that seems to have carried over through the various mergers and bankruptcies. Plus, it's nice to be able to add a long connection in Vegas, so you can play a few hands on the way out of California.

So when United merged with Continental - another airline that I've had limited, but positive experiences with - I had hoped that the good guys were winning, and that I would finally be able to fly to all fifty states with a crew that had showered in the past 24 hours, on airplanes that had been built after the Reagan administration, and with lounges and cabins that didn't look like a south Florida day care after a Hurricane.

My faint hope began to fade this morning when I saw the new (yes, again!) United Airlines livery.

Armin, in his fun post on Brand New, sums it up this way:

To be fair, there is nothing inherently wrong with the dull extended, bold sans serif that has been introduced but it represents a kind of corporate stubbornness to not admit that a perfectly decent extended, bold sans serif already exists that works perfectly with the word UNITED. Why create a poor man’s version of that is somewhat incomprehensible and then to tout it as “Ooh la la, it’s custom, baby” is gratuitously sans merit.

Yep. Someone at the client got what they paid for. It'll look even worse on a plane.

Oh well, there's always next time.

Updated --

Shanan reminded me of the old Saul Bass United logo ca. 1973. It looks so much better - even with the purple and orange. Put the white-on-black version on a 777 and you'd expect it to blast off and take you to the moon. (Image removed but still available here).

economist.com redesign

2010-07-25T14:44:00.000-07:00

The Economist launched a new version of their homepage a couple weeks ago. Their designers had an interesting challenge – taking a premium, text heavy weekly and making it work on a web obsessed with the visual, social, and real-time.

They loosened the paywall, added more daily content updates, and moved the site away from being simply an online reflection of their print publication. You can read a description of the new design on their site. Here's my view.

What Works
Navigation

The top menu bar is clear, logical, and maps to the magazine sections with which I am familiar. The old design had a redundant left rail which has been removed, leaving room to showcase charts, breaking news, and video.

Organization

The centre column contains bundles of stories, each relevant to an important topic in the current week’s issue. This makes is very simple for me to scan the page, identify topics or sections of interest, and click through. This layout is maintained on the sub pages underneath (although the left most column disappears).

Fresher Content

The old website felt like a nearly static snapshot of the current print issue. The new design feels grounded in the print issue, but also feels more up to the minute. The content does evolve throughout the week. The current week’s issue identifies what’s important – the European banking system, for example – and then the website tracks new developments on each topic throughout the week.

What Doesn't
Top Stories

The image and three headlines near the top left of the page gives the Economist a large space to showcase it’s most current or important stories in a very visual way. It could benefit from some visual refinement; for example, the odd size of the image, and relatively large headline typeface, means that the space is often programmed with images that are badly cropped and headlines that seem too short.

Blogs

The content of these blogs is good and getting better. Lexington, Banyan, Charlemagne et. al. are incredibly smart and well informed, and it's fascinating to read their views as the week progresses. The site would benefit by better promoting the most relevant posts, and adding the links to the center column as individual articles. Their current position – in the narrow left rail, well below the fold – makes them feel like an afterthought. I can understand why they didn’t do this, since it would make the site feel less connected to the weekly issue – but they need to find a way to better integrate this

Typography and Clutter
The Economist websites have always made odd use of typeface and borders. The end result is a lot of odd whitespace shapes, and a general feeling that the repeated bits of the page – the header, promotional areas in the top right, and charts on the left rail – are just a collection of boxes. The home page needs “a day at the spa” to smooth out some of these wrinkles, and make these recurring elements feel more like part of a continuous whole.

All in all...

The redesign is a big step in the right direction. The execution is a bit rough in spots, but you can see that the team understands that they need to build on the excellent analytical writing to create a site that is a rational, well-thought out (if opinionated) intrepretation of current events. evolve over time. It's nice to see a publication that you love get so many things right.

Pivot. Communicate.

2010-06-18T06:36:00.000-07:00

It's been a long week. Starbucks finally announced my main project. I've been juggling calls with both India and California, taking care of the dog-in-law, and not sleeping much.

We're building a new kind of web UI on top of a lot of complicated technology platforms (location detection, a content management system, etc.). It's a fun change from my last two prducts (Yahoo! Toolbar and My Yahoo!), which both required engineering rebuilds of existing products with big audiences. We're working with great design teams - both external and in house - and are building something very, very pretty. Given where we are in the project, a few posts seemed really relevant.

On Tuesday Chris Dixon wrote a great post on Pivoting. He talks about the "Bridge over the River Kwai" problem, where entrepreneurs fall so in love with their engineering project that they lose site of the bigger mission. I've seen the same thing with engineering managers, product managers, and designers. Frequently. The only solution is to keep asking why and to listen to the answers. When you inevitably screw up because the product guys misheard the engineering manager, or the engineers misunderstood the designers, remember to solve the problem with better communication – not longer specifications! Overly-detailed specifications are usually a sign that something is very, very wrong with your approach to building software.

That's all. Time to crank through the rest of Friday before retiring to my deck with a book and a pillow.

Location 2012

2010-06-04T07:15:00.000-07:00

Robert Scoble had a great post yesterday about how location-based services will integrate to automatically provide you with help and useful information as you move around. He got a lot of it right, but my main concerns are with his beliefs that:

users are smart and motivated enough to figure this out, and don't mind sharing all of their location data, all the time, with everyone -- this is consistent with Scoble's belief in the end of privacy
carriers will sit back and just let this happen; carriers have been screwing up location based services since the dawn of the mobile web -- they could easily interfere and botch this, too, by pushing their own solutions and making it difficult for users to use alternatives
device manufacturers and users will continue to let all of the logic move to the cloud; phones are incredibly powerful computers, and will get even more so -- why not have my handset decide when to disclose my location, for whom and why?

Nevertheless, this is the most complete description of the future that I've seen to date, and is worth a read.

Mendoza Line

2010-05-05T13:49:00.000-07:00

Mendoza line.

The figurative boundary in the batting averages between those batters hitting above and below .215. It is named for shortstop Mario Mendoza whose career (1974-1982) batting average for the Pirates, Mariners and Rangers was .215.
The figurative boundary in the batting averages between those batters hitting above and below .200. "When a struggling hitter pulls his average above .200, he has crossed the Mendoza Line." (Sports Illustrated, Sept. 13, 1982.) Jim Henneman (Baltimore Sun, June 7, 1994) wrote of Brady Anderson: "A few years ago, when he was struggling to stay above the Mendoza (.200) line, Anderson commanded the same strategy."

- The New Dickson Baseball Dictionary (via Al Pepper)

My Parents' New York City

2010-05-05T05:34:00.000-07:00

To my parents, New York is - or at least was - a dirty, crowded, and dangerous place. They like to tell stories about their trip there as newlyweds in the early 70's. We returned there twice as a family, although I never quite understood why. It was a tough place to take a suburban family for a road trip, especially one from Toronto. The New York that I know is completely different from that of my parents. It as clean and as safe as an American city can be. It is vast, dense, and open for exploration. It also has a long history as a dense urban center - one that San Francisco still lacks, and Toronto may never have.

Here is a great set of photos of New York in the 1970's from Allan Tannenbaum. Enjoy.

Shame

2010-04-22T15:22:00.000-07:00

Dear Facebook: You are either evil or dumb. You broke our deal.

I could accept you pushing me to make things public, and share my information with developers. Why? Because I could control what you said to whom. My Facebook profile was still my own. I could pick my friends, group them, and determine who saw what.

It was a decent bargain: you gave me a friction-free way to keep in touch with my friends and I gave you some data that you could use to target me discreetly.

You just broke that bargain. And not only with me, but with my parents and friends who won't even know it. They won't understand that when they convert their Likes, Interests, Education and Work information it will all become public. And they will get burned. This is the new malware.

Sic transit, baby.

How to Delete Facebook Applications - and Why you Should - from ReadWriteWeb.

Check-ins are a hack.

2010-04-22T06:01:00.000-07:00

Now that the f8 keynote has passed, everyone is wondering why Facebook didn't launch a check-in feature. The reality is that check-ins are just a hack -- a workaround for the fact that smart phones are still pretty dumb when it comes to location -- at least in terms of the features that App developers can freely use. Smarter devices, near-field communication (NFC), better applications and more savvy advertisers are going to revolutionize how we go about our daily business. Mike Melanson at ReadWriteWeb just nailed it:

This sort of technology would be a different take on location-based checkin systems, wherein the user has the onus of owning the proper technology. Giving users RFID chips and having the venues bear the burden of expensive technology (in the form of RFID readers in this case) - as long as the incentive to purchase this technology is there - approaches location-based services from the opposite direction and could potentially bring location to a large number of users.

Steve Chaney also runs through the limitations of current devices, and what it will take for products to succeed in this space.

Facebook realizes that they don't need a check-in feature - what they need is reliable, in-store location detection. And they now have the heft to push device vendors, carriers, app developers and retailers into rolling this out.

Health Care Reform Passed. Now What?

2010-03-29T05:17:00.000-07:00

The bill just signed into law, is, at best a first step in solving the U.S. health care crisis. Rather than solving the problem of rising health care costs, it seems to commit the U.S. government to having to solve the problem without actually laying out how costs will be cut. Larry Smith does a great job of summing up why this is the case.

take us to your personalized home page

2010-02-26T16:21:00.001-08:00

take us to your personalized home page
Originally uploaded by shanan

It's been a long time.

Background Reading

2010-02-26T07:34:00.001-08:00

Background Reading
Originally uploaded by Joseph Bou-Younes

Light 'em up, girls.

2010-02-26T07:29:00.000-08:00

So the Canadian Women's hockey team was caught smoking cigars and drinking beer on the ice after their gold medal win. But when you read beyond the headline you discover that they did this 70 minutes after the game had ended. The only people left in the building were event staff and ~~a few killjoys~~ some members of the media. So let's punish them, for sure, but let the punishment fit the crime. Helping with the Olympic cleanup for a few hours would be more than enough. In the meantime, someone should send them another box of Cohibas.

When Location Matters

2010-02-14T18:20:00.000-08:00

Wow, what a few months. A wedding, a trip to Africa, and a tumultuous return to work that included a last-minute invitation to sit on a panel at the semantic web conference.

Unrelated to all of this I've been spending a lot of time thinking about location-specific mobile applications. Foursquare, Gowalla, MyTown, Yelp! and other apps have people checking in, buying places, and generating a lot of structured data tied to location and community. Having this data - and the basic services, like check-in, that you need to collect it - is only the first step. Owning a collection of users with locations, friends, and interests gives you the foundation of a useful, location-based mobile service. The exciting question is what gets built on that foundation. (Chris Dixon dubbed all of this the geo stack.)

To make a real business you've got to build something on top that someone - a consumer, advertiser, or both - will actually pay for. There are a few different approaches already in use:

The Listings Business (Yelp and others)
The Local Coupon Business (foursquare, Yelp, Aloqa...)
The Search Ads Business (Google Local Search, Yahoo!...)
Virtual Currency / In-Game Items (myTown)
Premium Services (Skout)
Subscription Services (Traffic.com, Inrix, and others)

What's interesting is that we're seeing innovation in both the free to consumer and pay-per-use models. Unlike the wired web, mobile web is taking off after users are already used to paying for services used on their phones - even if they're just buying ringtones. Apple and Google (and, arguably, Microsoft with Zune) have removed a lot of the friction by setting up online payment platforms and providing strong incentives to get users connected. So all you have to do is tap buy.

That said, relatively few of these applications are really enabled by the mobile context. Local search, most mobile games, and traffic information is almost as useful on a PC as it is on a phone. The most interesting apps - like Skout - make immediate use of your location to provide something of value. They're still limited by hardware - for example, you can't do location-based notification on an iPhone - but you can see where things are going.

Toolbars and sidebars and widgets, oh my!

2009-12-08T16:34:00.001-08:00

Turning to my day job -- I'm going to be moderating a panel at Add-on-Con this Friday with Patrick Murphy from Brand Thunder and Adam Boyden from Conduit. We're going to be talking about how publishers, OEMs, hardware vendors, and others can use browser Add-ons to generate revenue, or otherwise add value to their products.

A lot of the buzz will be about Google finally adding extensions to the Beta of Chrome. I love Firefox, but I also love what Google has done with Chrome. Google took a minimalist, performance first approach to what a browser should be and the result is pretty fantastic. Looking forward to playing with it over the next few days. Happy Tuesday!

foursquare - Like twitter, but Useful :)

2009-11-17T11:23:00.000-08:00

foursquare launched their API yesterday (Mashable, Techcrunch). With it, developers can:

identify what city the user is in
read/write user and friends' check-in data
look up information for a particular location
make/send friend requests
retrieve venue data
perform a local search that includes information from your friends' check-ins
add venues, tips, and to-dos

This enables some pretty cool applications. For example, what about an AR app that shows me where all of my friends are? Or a navigation app that automatically checks in when I arrive at a location? It also opens up some interesting possibilities for advertisers. Want to create a location-aware application that can target relevant local offers - build a foursquare-aware version of Urbanspoon.

You could also use it to push foursquare data out of their own user base and to the public at large. For example, I could build an uber-app that would allow me to tell my family that I'm running late for Thanksgiving dinner, bundle in some traffic data to estimate an ETA, and push notifications out to foursquare, twitter, or even plain old SMS.

The comparisons to twitter are obvious but understated. Unlike twitter, foursquare has a historical record of high-value, targetable, structured data. It's hard to make sense of a single twitter stream, let alone millions of them. But location data has structure - it can easily be parsed and sorted; relationships can be identified between people, locations, times - and that can be used to target advertising, tailor mobile services or even implement discretionary pricing.

Unlike twitter, an open foursquare solves a user, carrier, and advertiser problem with ready, revenue generating implications. As much as I hate to admit it, maybe Scoble was right - foursquare will be bigger than twitter.

Hands off our Hummus!

2009-11-14T18:48:00.000-08:00

Culinary hegemony in the Middle East.

In Lebanon and Israel even chick peas have politics.

Eureka!

2009-11-12T09:56:00.001-08:00

Nicholas Carson explains the Social Gaming Industry in 13 words. Brilliant.

Location, location, location

2009-11-01T08:39:00.000-08:00

I've been spending a lot of time looking at local, mobile applications and how they fit into gaming and local commerce. Michael Arrington biopsied the social gaming economy and found it to be quite ill. Marginal advertisers (and I use even that term loosely) are filling these companies' coffers with cash from shady lead-gen deals.

In other news Facebook announced an updated advertising policy which, amongst other things, will allow them to target users based on the geotags of content that they post.

Facebook also announced plans for their Open Graph API which would allow any web page to behave like a Facebook "Page." This is a big deal. What if I could "friend," "favorite," or "fan" every page or story on the internet instead of "sharing" it. What would that mean? Would it have the same semantic meaning as "follow?" Would it be easier for consumers to grasp? People have great difficulty understanding the difference between saving a single item versus saving a stream of items. That's why more users use bookmarks than RSS readers - or even twitter. If Facebook could somehow use the social graph to help users cross that bridge - or to make it irrelevant - then this could be huge.

Creating value through scarcity.

2009-09-24T17:49:00.000-07:00

It's been a crazy month for me and mine as we try to plan a wedding across the continent. Now that summer is officially over it's time to hunker down and relieve everyone's curiosity. and catch up. So, to make for a post-free month here are two short posts sandwiched into one.

The newspaper business is demonstrating that you can't cut your way to growth. Newspapers and media companies spent most of the 1990's cutting costs as a way to grow margins and revenues. As a result, most local newspapers now just reprint wire stories, attach them to local ads, and distribute them to local merchants and subscribers.

Online, publishers are taking this "hollowing-out" a step further. Rather than selling their own ads to their audience they're using ad networks to move "remnant" inventory, often with disastrous results.

If you believe that tomorrow will be like yesterday - and that publishers will continue to cut down on original content as well as their sales force - then the web of the future will be a bleak landscape of AP, Reuters, or (God help us) UPI articles sandwiched between Google AdSense ads.

But then, what about the bloggers. A couple weeks ago, Nic Brisbourne made the point that the Future of News is Scarcity. Specifically, he claimed that the way to make money as a content creator is to pick a niche, create (or source) high-quality, original content or opinion, and then generate multiple revenue streams from it. He goes on to discuss how "news" today is ubiquitous and free, but analysis and intelligence is - or can be - highly valuable.

And finally, the FCC held several workshops on online privacy, security, and openness. My boss was invited to a few of the sessions. In typical DC fashion, the discussion centered around whether or not the government should restrict behavioral targeting, or at least allow users to opt out (like the national do-not-call registry). But Chris Kincade offered a different idea -- what if BT providers were forced to describe the data that they collected, and how they planned on using it? And what if they did this in a scalable way, using a standard protocol, so that browsers could allow users to intelligently manage the data being collected about them. It's kind of like the FCC Broadcast flag, but, you know, not stupid.

And that brings me to my final, random point -- way back in June the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Cablevisions "virtual DVR product," which allowed subscribers to record video in the cloud -- was, in fact, legal. This is pretty mindblowing. A colleague of my described this as nothing less than the supreme court extending eminent domain into the cloud. "I pay for cable, I 'own' that episode of Heroes, so I should be able to record it into the cloud and retrieve it on demand." This poses an interesting question on the legality of p2p file distribution. For example, if I subscribe to basic cable, and choose to download House instead of DVR'ing it, or watching it on Hulu, is that also now legal? What about Mad Men? Or any HBO content? And if this is legal, what is it going to do to the cable company's own on-demand businesses? Or iTunes?

It's an interesting world we live in. Enjoy it.

Youtube gets down to business.

2009-08-20T07:35:00.000-07:00

It's incredibly difficult to create a product that both delights customers and generates revenue. As a result, the usual way to build a digital media business is to first create something that users love and then, months or years later, find a way to really monetize it. Youtube followed this model for years. It now looks like Google is serious about making money from Youtube. And just in time.

As audience and time spent continues to shift from TV to the web advertisers are looking for scalable but innovative channels through which to reach consumers. Youtube is best positioned to do this. It will be interesting to watch and see what happens.

Management and Practice

2009-08-17T08:47:00.000-07:00

The dog days of summer continue. I'd like to say that this gives me lots of time for careful reflection and reading but that hasn't been the case. Fortunately, there's no shortage of good material this week.

First, the Wall Street Journal talked to Henry "Managers not MBAs" Mintzberg to find out What Managers Really Do. Mintzberg looks at how managers handle interruptions, and discusses three ways that managers can create results.

In a similar vein, Michael Loop has an old-but-good article on how to move a software project from crisis to cruise. Read how he runs his staff meeting - I'm going to give this a try this week.

Finally, I just finished reading "Talent is Overrated" by Geoff Colvin. Excellent book, despite being blurbed by Noel Tichy. (Note to author: don't get blurbs from narcissists. Especially those who you interviewed in the book. Looks desperate.). Colvin's description of deliberate practice reminded me of something I read last year that explained what business leaders can learn from how elite athletes train and improve.

And so what, according to Colvin and Graham Jones, was the secret to exceptional performance? Here's a hint:

Apple, The Attention Economy

2009-08-04T12:50:00.000-07:00

I've been traveling, attending weddings, and working my tail off for the past few days. So, in lieu of a post, here are two links worth a read:

1) From the WSJ: Internet Start-Ups Diversify Their Business Models . The article discusses how the once white-hot widget developers are moving away from traditional, ad-based business models towards selling virtual goods or providing tailored, "immersive brand experiences" for advertisers.

2) From bookardo: Steve Jobs on why Apple doesn’t do market research . This post rolls up a bunch of interviews and articles and summarizes Apple's approach to market research. It includes a great quote from Jonathan Ive:

“Apple’s goal isn’t to make money. Our goal is to design and develop and bring to market good products…We trust as a consequence of that, people will like them, and as another consequence we’ll make some money. But we’re really clear about what our goals are.”

Testify.

Nortel isn't the Arrow

2009-07-23T19:55:00.000-07:00

Months after Nortel declared bankruptcy, the company was returned to the spotlight after a last-minute attempt by RIM to acquire Nortel’s wireless division. The Star is comparing this to the demise of another Canadian legend, the Avro Arrow.

A quick Canadian history lesson: soon after the Second World War Canada set out to build a long-range, supersonic fighter to defend the northern frontier from Soviet bombers. This was thought to be impossible: jet engines were too primitive, materials were too heavy, and too little was known about supersonic flight. Defying the odds, Fred Smye led a team at Avro Canada to build and test a beautiful plane that would have achieved all this and more - the Arrow ( video ).

Soon after, Prime Minister John Diefenbaker canceled the program putting 50,000 Canadians out of work. The received history is that Diefenbaker canceled the program under pressure from the United States. At the time, he simply claimed that it was a waste of money. Whatever his reasons, this decision put Diefenbaker into the pantheon of hated Canadian leaders. The program remains a sad reminder to many Canadians of what might have been had Canada pushed on and maintained a more independent defense policy.

Avro was a national project that developed world-leading technologies against impossible odds. Nortel, at the end was a mediocre hardware company destroyed by bad technology bets (CDMA) and terrible accounting. Avro employed engineers with highly specialized skills that weren’t readily used outside of cutting edge aerospace. Many of them went on to work on the Apollo program. Nortel employs software, hardware, and product professionals whose skills can be used all across the economy. Funding Avro would have pushed the frontier of science. Rescuing Nortel would have just thrown good money after bad. We've done enough of that already.

Deterrence

2009-07-22T07:27:00.000-07:00

Today's Wall Street Journal includes a great article on the cold war between Google and Microsoft (subscription required). The author looks at why Microsoft is launching a free, online-only version of Office, and why Google is responding in part by launching its own OS. He believes that "neither Google nor Microsoft really have an interest in challenging each other’s core franchises if it means risk to their own. Their posturing is primarily defensive—fear of loss is greater than hope of gain."

A good read for a Wednesday morning.

What the Underpants Gnomes can teach you about business on the web.

2009-07-14T08:40:00.000-07:00

I've been thinking a lot about the kinds of businesses that will start and thrive in this economy. The bulk of web 2.0 companies were built (and bought) based on the thought that they would aggregate and re-sell people's attention. As we moved through the business cycle, some companies developed exotic ways of targeting their users (Facebook), others used AdSense to generate a trickle of revenue, others based their businesses on driving search revenue (AVG, w3i, Conduit, Dynamic Toolbar, Freecause) and still others just left the problem for their future owners to solve.

As the economy slowed, AdSense yields plummeted and publishers became frustrated with the quality of the ads. Advertisers became more conservative, cut their “experimental” budgets, and avoided new targeting techniques. Folks like AVG became more aggressive and successful, and have spent the last few years creating new toolbars, virus scanners, and other tools to drive search distribution. But outside of search distribution, the "attention" businesses have been getting creamed.

On the supply side, you've got dozens of new channels (mobile ad platforms, dozens of new ad networks, Facebook, and so on) generating record levels of ad inventory. On the demand side, all of the major brand advertisers have pulled back, and two of the biggest categories - autos and financials - have slashed or eliminated budgets. I shudder to think of what will happen if the U.S. pharmaceutical industry is finally subjected to price controls.

Dharmesh Shah wrote a great post a couple months back about the challenges of building a business for the attention economy. The crux of the problem is that people only have a finite amount of time - and attention. On the other hand, people can always - at least in theory - make more money. Shah goes on to list out three major difficulties with building a business for the attention economy:

"1. Attention Is A Scarce Resource: Attention is a bit limited and fragmented. I’d argue that it’s getting increasingly harder to get people’s attention...

2. Battle of User and Advertiser: There’s a conflict between getting monetizable attention and solving the user’s problem...

3. Advertisers Make Lousy Customers: Even with all the fancy content-matching algorithms that pair up a given ad to a given context, I still don’t like advertising. I really don’t. I can see why it’s important in a lot of industries — but I don’t know that software is one of them. Given the choice between solving a user’s problem (which I understand, and hopefully care about) and an advertiser’s problem — I’d choose solving the user’s problem..."

Selling attention is hard - but everyone accepts that it's hard. So they just include it in their business plan as the second step of the "Underpants Gnome Business Model." For those who haven't heard, the model is:

Step 1: Steal Underpants
Step 2: ???
Step 3: Profit

Unless you have some very deep pockets, and have a multi-year technology or science problem to solve, this just shouldn't fly. That's one of the reasons I'm spending more time looking at wallet-based (as opposed to attention-based) business models over the next few months. Amazon and ebay are big, but they're not everywhere - yet.

Getting a New Team to do Cool Stuff

2009-07-05T18:40:00.000-07:00

When I took on my current job I was given an established product team and a mostly-new engineering team. We also had a brand new engineering manager, QA manager, and program manager working with us.

Our job was to launch an all-new version of Toolbar while we maintained our existing versions and continued to support new corporate partners. Engineering and QA had just been moved overseas. We didn't have any well-defined processes in place to build and maintain software. Without a clear process, or "rules of working" that described how individuals would be accountable within that process - the first few months were difficult. We struggled to prioritize current bugs against future features, and to support our existing partners while we tried to create a foundation for a new kind of partner business.

The team leads and I spent a lot of time trying to setup, execute, and debug a product development process that worked for us. In the first few weeks I spent most of my time figuring out where our strengths and weaknesses were. Being a product guy with an engineering background I focused on finding the holes in our product and technology: features we were missing, things that didn't quite work, where our technology worked well and where it was a smelly mess, and so on.Over a period of weeks we began to tighten up our product definition, and to understand, prioritize, and fix some of our deep rooted engineering and process problems.

We were pretty effective, and shipped a version that was mostly well received. But I felt that the "re-launch" of the new team didn't go as smoothly as it could have. Our team and process hadn't been fully formed, and I didn't have a good model to determine what to fix first. The other managers and I used our experience and intuition to decide what to look at first; we then gathered some data and made some decisions. But I, at least, never had a complete framework in mind. I've since done a bit of reading on the topic and mean to sum it up here.

Forming Storming Norming and Performing: Back in 1965 Bruce Tuckman created the Forming – Storming – Norming – Performing model of group development. In a nutshell, the stages are (borrowing from the wikipedia article):

forming: the team meets, learns about opportunity and challenges, and begins to tackle goals as a group

storming: "team addresses issues such as what problems they are really supposed to solve, how they will function independently and together and what leadership model they will accept"

norming: "Team members adjust their behavior to each other as they develop work habits that make teamwork seem more natural and fluid."

performing: "Some teams will reach the performing stage. These high-performing teams are able to function as a unit as they find ways to get the job done smoothly and effectively without inappropriate conflict or the need for external supervision."

Tuckman's model goes on to describe why each stage is necessary, and how leaders should act in order to be most effective at each stage. Much of this is common sense, but the article is still a good read, and most "team building" training in place today seems to build on Tuckman's work.

The Agile Maturity Model: In his post last week Tyner Blain details an Agile Maturity Model. He outlines a "hierarchy of needs" that somewhat follows Tuckman's example. Read it for yourself, but Blain's six levels were:

Staffing the engineering team correctly - And I would replace "engineering" with "entire team" correctly. This takes the form of managing for performance as well as re-shuffling roles and responsibilities to match skills with needs.
Assuring Quality is in your team’s DNA - This was huge with us. Individually, every person on the team was committed to quality, but we had no shared understanding of what level we should be shooting for. What makes a "P3" bug a "P3?" What kind of architectural limitations can we live with, and when should we refactor? We needed to come together to answer these and other quality questions, and get us to the point where we could ship a product that we were all proud of.
Reducing overhead in the release process. - Oh GOD yes. You can't have a fast, agile team, productive team that has fun unless you've taken most of the drudgery and variability out of the release process.
Feeding the beast. - This is what I'm currently struggling with. Once you address the first three points and begin to move faster, you find yourself constantly running out of requirements for the team to work through. One way to solve this problem is to set clear, higher-level objectives and empower the engineering team to work directly with the QA, design, and product teams to build stuff. I'm a bit of a control freak, but I think that there are big gains to be made if you can empower your team in this respect.
Managing stakeholder expectations - 'nuff said
Continuously learning from your markets - this is a topic that deserves a post unto itself - it is the foundation of creating wonderful products.

Evolve.

2009-06-27T12:39:00.001-07:00

This month's Fast Company features a cover story about Amazon's Kindle. It describes how Amazon could use the Kindle to squeeze publishers out of the book value chain. It also talks about how Apple might respond, and what the ensuing battle might look like.

Over the past few years I've been impressed by Amazon's willingness to create products and services in markets where there still is really no business - like Kindle. They constantly look for opportunities to leverage their distribution, retail expertise, and infrastructure to grow their business and increase their relevance to consumers and merchants. On the other hand, ebay stuck to its knitting, failed to grow out of the U.S. auctions business, and had its lunch eaten by craigslist.

Design by Objective

2009-06-19T15:07:00.001-07:00

I'm a big fan of managing by objective. Wherever possible, I believe that PMs, engineers, testers and designers should begin their work by first agreeing to (or at least accepting) a list of user and business objectives that a feature or product should fulfill. This will be useful in framing the many discussions that will follow.

This week in Why Microsoft Had to Destroy Word Peter Merholz discusses how Microsoft made some tough decisions in the design of Word 2007. He specifically talks about how Microsoft and Tivo set out "design tenets" or "design mantras" which then governed the design and implementation of key features. Worth a read.

Rule 2: Don't be a victim.

2009-06-15T08:01:00.000-07:00

As a product manager it is tempting to blame failures on the action - or inaction - of others. This is dangerous because it allows one to avoid responsibility for the commtiments they make.

To be a great product manager you have to be a good leader. That means holding yourself accountable. The best definition of accountability I've seen describes accountability as "a personal choice to rise above one’s circumstances and demonstrate the ownership necessary for achieving desired results (Connors, Smith and Hickman, 'The Oz Principle')."

When I worked on the Yahoo! home page a colleague approached me with an idea that would generate significant new revenue. So the two of us sat down to check his math and figure out how to implement it.

It turned out that he was right, but that to implement his idea we'd need to rely on a dysfunctional team in a distant office. As a result, completing the project would require both of us to spend a lot of time doing other peoples' jobs.

So we started the project and began to muddle through. Soon enough, the predicted problems arose and began to slow our progress. Frustrated, I took the issue to my boss and asked for his advice. I described the problem to him and he gave me some detailed guidance. Then, we wrapped up the conversation something like this:

"Will this make money for Yahoo!?"

"Yes."

"Is it good for the user?"

"Yes."

"Do you still want to do this?"

"Yes, but it will be a huge pain in the ass to implement."

"Then don't be a victim. If you really want to do this, you can - and I'll give you all the help you need. It's up to you."

And so I had my revelation.

This project would require me to get my hands very dirty - but the business benefit was huge, and if the project succeeded I would get a lot of the credit. So I decided to commit and push it through.

It turns out that the problems weren't nearly as big as I originally thought. After a week or two of messy work - which consisted mostly of managing people who didn't work for me - we got things on track and launched the feature. And it actually performed as expected, and drove a significant amount of new revenue into our business.

Too many people fall victims to their dependencies. Victims blame others for their failures rather than taking accountablity for things that happen and trying to correct for them. Leaders take accountability for what they commit to do.

That said, smart leaders are very careful what they commit to. You can only take on a few of these "special missions" at once and so you need to save them for the most important things. You also have to accept the fact that sometimes, the most important things will be things that you are ordered to do, not necessarily the things that you feel the need to do. When this happens, argue vigorously, accept the orders of your superious, and plan for the "I told you so" contingency. That way, if it turns out that you were right all along, you're still in a position to fix the underlying problem.

Rule 1: Remember, "No, you are not the user."

2009-06-04T10:35:00.000-07:00

For all my time at Yahoo I've had the good fortune of working under Tapan Bhat. I worked for him directly for the first year as we tried to sort out My Yahoo!.

"My" was and is a pretty geeky product, with a lot of power user features. Our job was to figure out how to turn it into a mass market product. Having it for several years before abandoning it I felt that I had a great sense of what users wanted in a "personalized home page," and what we needed to do to make the product grow again. I spent endless hours working with our engineering team to spec out what I thought were killer features, only to see them blow up in the lab. (Fortunately, Tapan and the designers kept most of the really dumb ideas from ever leaving paper). It turns out that I had a great idea of what I wanted on a personal home page, but no clue as to what our users actually needed.

At the time our strategy was to upsell front page (yahoo.com) users to My Yahoo! I realized that I was nothing like a typical front page user, and so everything I came up with fell flat. To make matters worse, I had a hard time identifying and empathizing with those users, and reading the research didn't help.

What finally worked was to use people I knew, who used the home page, as personas. I had classmates, parents, and siblings who all used the front page, and like to personalize things. So what worked for me was to put myself in their shoes and reconceive each potential feature in terms of how - or if - they might understand it.

Eventually, putting myself in their shoes became second nature. But from time to time I still get worked up about a product I own not working exactly as I might want it to, or a feature I really need getting deprioritized by someone on my team. If they're wrong, they're wrong. But often times I just take a deep breath and then slowly say "No, Joseph, you are not the user."

Update...

Marty has his own, similar rule in his "Top 12 Product Management Mistakes."

Joe's Rules of Product Management

2009-06-03T13:48:00.000-07:00

Something to blog about

After nearly four years at Yahoo! I finally feel like I have something to blog about.

One of the best things about my job is that I get to learn from some of the best minds on the internet. Periodically, something that I learn resonates so deeply, or describes my situation so precisely that I can't help but print it in 30 point font and hang it on the wall of my cube. This happens very rarely - about once a year. But these rules inevitably make me a better product manager, and - more importantly - make my job more fun. So I thought I'd blog about them over the next few weeks as the mood strikes me. Some of these may seem simple, or pedantic - and that's by design. It's meant to make sense to the casual observer. I'll try and include links to more detailed resources in each of my posts.

Before I begin...

A great primer on technology product management is Marty Cagan's book Inspired: How To Create Products Customers Love. Marty also blogs on the silicon valley product group website.