I’ve done some recent advising for someone working on a site that’s of a social nature. The site is intended in some form to motivate users, the initial thought on this was to define a lot of rules, and send automated messages to users. To me this approach felt very 1990′s. So assuming that were true, then comes the question of how do you motivate users? Read the rest of this entry »
Three times in recent years I’ve had to micromanage others. Though probably in the contrary form to what you would expect. Most people think of micromanagement as their manager wanting to know every detail about their day, and be involved in every minute task. In most cases this form of micromanagement is never received well. Generally my feelings are that if I have to micromanage you, you don’t belong in the role you’re in, though I suppose exception cases may exist.
Most of my working career has been in what many would call an enterprise environment. Corporate structure well in place at most of them and in those cases any development followed closely to a waterfall methodology. You laid out requirements strictly and then built to those requirements. You essentially had nothing to show until you got to the end product.
Having been in the valley for several years and interacting with some startups and in other settings, I’ve seen a very opposite mindset. The “release early, release often” concept. First you never have clear requirements when dealing with anything a startup should be tackling, if it’s a very clear easy to solve problem, then someone else will have already tackled it. If you’re doing something new, which you should be you can’t gauge how users react, until you actually have something in front of them.
Something I learned very early on in my working career, not so much from my experiences but from observing the results of others, was to engage at a social level as early possible. This doesn’t mean you have to take time after 5:00 to get to know someone, the best opportunity exists every single day during what you would already do, lunch! Everyone usually takes a break and eats lunch during the day, usually there’s two groups in an office. Those that always go out, and those that bring their lunch or meet others for lunch or maybe even work through it. If you notice those in the first group in your office my guess it’s usually easier for them to get things done, they’re normally a little more in touch with things that are going on. Especially if you can manage to branch out a little and go outside of the people you work with every moment of the day.
A few days ago myself and another were providing our thoughts and insight into a mockup that someone had created for a product they’re working on. At my first glance I noticed it and said wow, that looks pretty awesome. It wasn’t until a few minutes in that someone else said, if we all like this, you’re probably doing something wrong. Meaning that, we’re tech geeks, we’re silicon valley to a T, we like control and power, we like having the ability to set notification levels for every friend we have, for every minute of the day. But middle-america doesn’t use those features, much less they don’t use any products that have those features.
This quickly got us back to the question, who are you targetting, is it middle-america house wives, silicon valley geeks, busy executives. In any application that should always be your starting point. I’ll likely have much more on this piece later, but jumping back to the echo chamber users.
Probably the easiest way to illustrate this is twitter vs. friendfeed. Robert Scoble has said many many times FriendFeed is so much better, so much more than twitter. The biggest problem is that I can’t explain friend feed to my mom. I can explain twitter and she gets it. She can log in to twitter and understand it. Friendfeed there’s far to much a user has to do to get comfortable with it.
Any new mainstream application that launches should do everything transparent to the user. In that the application should seem like it’s almost doing nothing, it should be magic under the covers. A user should have to search to find the ability to configure it, you should gather information on your user, and make assumptions on what they want. If you get it even 50% right you’re likely to retain and engage more users than allowing them the ability to configure exactly what they want.
For some time I’ve planned to found my own company some day. It’s one thing to work your way up through other companies and potentially lead a company, but my strong suspicion is it’s an entirely different and rewarding experience to build something from the ground up. Two key things I’ve decided (as it will likely be a somewhat technical company i’ll found):
I want leadership that understands the technology
I want developers that understand the business
Let me explain each of these further…
For some time I’ve always felt there was value in having a mentor. Though over the course of my life I’ve seldom setup a formal mentor, though looking back I supposed I could nearly consider many people such a person. Rather than just stress the value of having a mentor I’d like to look at the value such a relationship can provide. Whether you get those pieces of value in a formal mentor situation or just through dinner with people the key is to grow.
1. Find someone to learn from
The obvious first step you should take is to get face time with those that are more experienced and have done it before. This is usually something that younger people that have not been out of school long steer away from approaching those with experience. Perhaps its intimidation, perhaps its that you feel they don’t think it would be worth their time. But from my personal experience I’m normally more than happy to help anyone that asks, and likewise anytime I’ve asked someone I’ve gotten positive results. This is usually as simple as can we get dinner/lunch/coffee sometime?
It should be pretty obvious who you may want to spend this time with. If it’s not then start simply take a boss, teacher, or some manager/supervisor in a lateral department.
Having spent most of my early career in consulting and now being at a software company I’m realizing there were a lot of principles I picked up that I now readily apply in my daily happenings. As I find myself interacting with most of my colleagues, many of whom have only been in software companies, these principles are as evident.
1. Listen to the problems not the solutions
Often times in early interacting with a customer people will ask what do you need. As a consultant I would never ask what they needed, if they knew this I wouldn’t be there. Instead, I ask about their problems. It’s then my job to take what they tell me about their problems, their environment, and then steer them in the direction of an appropriate solution. While very basic this is the key to consulting, asking the right questions to steer your customer so you can provide value.
Google doesn’t understand social or collaboration. There’s not much more to it than that, though for the sake of making this a an actual blog post I’ll explain a bit more.
Blogger was huge, it was the place to go if you were creating a blog. There weren’t many www.mybloghere.com, many of the largest most popular blogs on the internet were on blogger. People had accounts, people registered to post comments, people had full fledged profiles that could have easily preceded a facebook profile page. Google bought blogger and had more than enough resources to grow blogger into a sizable social community. But if you visit it looks much the same as it did 5 and almost 10 years ago.
Google spreadsheets is one of the best online spreadsheet programs, and you can even collectively work on a spreadsheet with others at the same time thousands of miles away. Who do you know that uses google spreadsheets that isn’t some form of a techie? It likely has a user base of under 1% of users of spreadsheets, and its not because it’s missing the power features of pivot tables and such. If you re-brand it as a collaboration tool when working and throw chat/video/whiteboarding in the same application google would have an instant growth 10 fold of users, but they don’t understand that a user seeing the same thing on a spreadsheet and seeing what the other types in a single document isn’t collaboration!
To jump ahead of the curve, counter arguments I’ve already heard are around ads and gmail. Gmail, google didn’t improve email, they simply give you lots of space for free, if gmail were to cease to exist tomorrow users would simply jump over to yahoo or microsoft. Ads, google changed the ad industry by making search effective, they’re good at algorithms and such, but they don’t get users and collaboration, and at their current rate they never will.
Wave isn’t meant to just improve email, it’s meant to be a tool for collaboration, to view a conversation as an entity, and google just doesn’t get the conversation part.
Due to many recent events, which I’m sure I’ll disclose later, I’ve been in an interesting situation of a good bit of leverage. While leverage can of course be taken advantage of and misused, it also plays a very fair role in business. When hiring a new college graduate in most cases you take the offer you are given, some are able to negotiate for a higher salary, but most are quite unsuccessful. This is because they don’t have any leverage. If you ended up walking away from the job offer they would simply hire another college graduate. While yes you may have a lot of potential, it’s only that potential and not proven.
Additionally within a corporation, the company will often do just enough to keep an employee there. If a company does a great job, an employee gets a pat on the back. If an employee is indispensable (though no company will ever admit to this), they may get a noticeable reward, but it still doesn’t usually cover the value the individual is actually providing.
This responsibility to get what you are truly worth usually lies with the employee. The hard part of this, is knowing when and how to use your leverage. First you must actually have leverage, this commonly in potential revenue you would bring in, or internal knowledge that you may have. Though I’m sure others have varying experiences, mine have been to make your dissatisfaction with a situation known, but in a light manner. Meanwhile make it visible that you’re open to other opportunities as they may come along, this can be via twitter, blog post, or water cooler talk. The final thing, and hopefully this is an easier one, is make it clear that you have the leverage, the sale should be a big one, or the internal knowledge should be costly should they lose it.
The most unfortunate part of all of this is that, in my experiences the leverage is typically needed to get a fair deal. And the single point of requiring leverage no longer makes it fair, but at least knowing this ensures you’re not left out in the cold.
I'm a 23 year living and working in silicon valley. I hold a bachelors in Management Information Systems from The University of Alabama (Roll Tide). Currently I work at Truviso, which is a startup in the area of streaming databases, or real-time analytics. In addition I'm addition some of the recent companies I've had the pleasure of working with include Mobclix, which focuses on monetization and application improvement for mobile applications, FotoViewer, an rich interactive application for viewing your photos, and Accenture's Technology Labs, a cutting edge research group focused on addressing the large scale problems of Accenture's customers.
