We’re running a business, not a technology company (part 2)

I want to continue with the this topic a bit. In the part 1, I made a few points:

• Product management must focus on optimizing for business success not simply technological leadership.
• This must be done by addressing market needs better than other competitors.
• A lot of what we deliver to customers may not be considered truly innovative, but is needed to address the way they need to use the product.
• Technology can change much faster than people’s ability to accept that change.

I want to spend a bit more time exploring this, as it does raise some points of discussion.

Last week when I was in California, I rented a Toyota Prius at the airport. It was my first time driving the Prius, and I will admit that, it took me a couple of minutes to figure out how to actually get the car in gear. First time I drove a car that had a power button in the dash.

Click image to enlarge

Once I figured that out, I drove the car for the duration of my trip and was amazed at how little gas it used. I’m pretty sure it averaged well over 50 mpg.

Now, the hybrid engine in the Prius is truly innovative. Toyota introduced the Prius 10 years ago (initially only in Japan). But the rest of the car is pretty standard: doors, windows, steering wheel, gas tank, mirrors, cup holders, radio etc. It’s not a perfect car, but it’s a pretty good 4 door sedan and it get excellent gas mileage. And given the price of gas these days (over $4 per gallon in California), it will likely have a great future.

Now compare the success of the Prius, with the the complete lack of success of a the Honda Insight. The Insight was actually the first hybrid car introduced in North America (1999). It preceded the Prius by about 6 months. It also had better gas mileage than the Prius, with an EPA rating of 70 mpg. But the Honda Insight sold only about 18,000 units total in the US. The Prius has sold over 1,000,000 units worldwide.

While there is no single reason for the lack of sales of the Insight, the styling of the Insight, the fact that it was only a 2 door hatchback (vs. a 4 door sedan for the Prius) are certainly a big factor. The Insight didn’t look like a “normal” car was something that was said of the vehicle.

The point here is that while one car, the Insight, was first to market and had what appeared to be technical superiority (much better gas mileage), the fact that it didn’t fit well with how people wanted to use the vehicle made it less successful than the Prius, which fit people’s vision of what they wanted in a car. It wasn’t simply the technological innovation of the hybrid engine (or high gas mileage) that was key, but all the other aspects of owning and driving a vehicle that they wanted.

Saeed

Facebook Developer Terms: Is there a lawyer in the house?

If I asked you whether you were concerned about privacy on facebook, what would come into your mind? Many people are thinking about personal information, and how that information will be collected and used. I won’t wade too deeply into personal information privacy, but I would like to examine another aspect of facebook: Intellectual property protection for application developers.

About a year ago, Facebook released F8, which in many ways is a brilliant step forward: an open, easily accesible platform, with access to 75 million users and growing every month. While ad revenue has not met with high expectations (econ, wsj), Facebook has done a good job of the revenue sharing concept, whereby you can essentially keep most if not all of the ad revenue generated by impressions and clicks on a Facebook app that you build and host. If they wanted an ecosystem, they got it. Hats off to them for this.

What’s troubling me though are a few paragraphs in the Developer Terms of Service:

Section 4. Ownership and Licenses
As between you and Facebook: (a) you retain all right, title and interest in and to, and Facebook obtains no rights of any kind (other than the rights and licenses expressly granted in this Agreement) in, Facebook Platform Applications you create and in the Facebook Platform Application Content, and all associated Intellectual Property Rights (subject to Facebook’s underlying rights in Facebook Platform and Facebook Site);

(emphasis is mine)

This all makes sense so far. So if I write an app, I own the app. But then a couple of phrases in the next paragraph are a little harder to interpret:

By accessing Facebook Platform, or submitting any Facebook Platform Application to us to be hosted by us, you are directing us to store copies of that Facebook Platform Application (if applicable) and any and all Facebook Platform Application Content provided through any Facebook Platform Application on our servers. You hereby grant us a worldwide, perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive right and license, with the right to sublicense, to: (a) access, reproduce, display, distribute, perform, and store on our servers your Facebook Platform Application and any Facebook Platform Application Content, and to create derivative works of Facebook Platform Application Content, as may be necessary or desirable to make such Facebook Platform Application and Facebook Platform Application Content available to Facebook Users in accordance with the terms of this Agreement and the Facebook Platform Documentation and the Facebook Platform Application Guidelines; and (b) otherwise access, use and analyze any Facebook Platform Application Content for our internal business purposes (e.g., for the purposes of targeting delivery of advertisements or other content to persons who have viewed particular types of Facebook Platform Application Content). You understand and agree that Facebook Platform Application Content that is displayed on the Facebook Site may continue to appear on the Facebook Site, even after you have terminated access to your Facebook Platform Application or terminated this Agreement, as such Facebook Platform Application Content may have been incorporated into user profiles, news feeds or other features, and that such usage may continue indefinitely.

So let’s see… if iLike, an app that allows me to share my favorite music and artists with my friends, collects a whole bunch of data about what music is enjoyed by which friends, who owns the data (Facebook Application Content)? By the first paragraph, the iLike publishers should own the data, but later on, Facebook retains the right to use such content for its purposes, including targeted advertisements or other content.

So, dear reader, what is the real incentive to iLike, or Slide and RockYou, to collect this data, only for it to be used by Facebook? I will be investigating this issue more closely, but I would welcome your input! Am I reading this right? What am I missing? How would you feel about Facebook grabbing your data?

And more to the point, are investors concerned? You know, the ones who put up $50M for a company that writes an application that, um, is a better, um, , no, more fun, or super, yes, a more super wall than the um, plain old regular wall in facebook?

Alan (alan AT eigenpartners DOT com) 

GeneTree … are you serious?

A couple of things up front:

• I’m not a privacy bigot. You can find me on facebook, LinkedIn, Plaxo, multiple blogs, flickr, my own personal website, and my corporate bio page. I post fairly liberally about myself online.
• I probably have the best existing genealogical records for my family. I’ve spend HOURS formally interviewing my oldest living relatives, writing down their thoughts, touring grave yards, going to family farm land that my family lost during the great depression. I’m fairly interested in the topic.

So as I’ve started to think more about social networking, I became interested in the possibility of social networks to make genealogy work in the large. It makes intuitive sense to me that social networking is an ideal way to build a genealogical graph. The information is distributed and hard for one person to collect, but not so hard when each person contributes a node and a few branches.

Then I stumbled on Genetree. This company uses genetic testing to automatically build family trees, or at least to connect distant relatives.

OK, sorry, you lost me there. I have to submit my genetic material to a testing lab, have it encoded and stored in your data center, so that you can broker connections between me and my long-lost relatives in Scotland and Alsace-Lorraine?

Yeah, no. No thanks. Let me know how that goes for you. By the way, congratulations on getting funded. Can I speak with your investors?

Who upgrades their software on a Thursday evening?

Steve Johnson posted a link today to a Product Management survey being run by one of his friends at Kent State.

So I clicked the link to participate in the survey. And here’s what I got from the survey site:

(click to enlarge)

So here’s what I don’t get. It’s Thursday night, about 10:15 PM Eastern Time. That’s 7:15 PM Pacific Time (the same time zone in which Zoomerang’s offices are located). Who upgrades their hosted web application on a Thursday evening?

Seems rather braindead to me. Anyone know why they’d do this?

Saeed

Partnering for Strategic Breakthroughs

I thought I’d give this one a dry title - it’s really about the iPhone again. But I thought people would be pretty tired of iPhone posts by now.

So, for those of you who don’t follow the iPhone (both of you perhaps), Apple released the iPhone SDK. But they did something else that will end up driving many more iPhone sales than allowing you to download games - they added ENTERPRISE support. Yes, ENTERPRISE. It’s just that important. (I’m sure you know by now that your products are nothing if they’re not ready for the ENTERPRISE.)

You can now connect your iPhone directly to Exchange and get all your corporate email in one sleek, beautiful Apple-branded package. All the cool of Apple and all the IT-approvability of the Blackberry. And how did Apple do it? Did they hire dozens of developers to copy RIM’s BES gateway technology? Nope. They licensed ActiveSync. The trouble is that, as anyone who has ever owned a Windows Mobile device can attest, ActiveSync stinks. It just doesn’t work reliably. But you know what - no one cares. In one fell swoop Apple just did more damage to RIM then a dozen NTP lawsuits.

When you’re looking to take your product to the next level and add in the “killer” functionality that every single prospect asks for during demos you need to look long and hard at how you can buy or license that technology instead of building it yourself. RIM had nothing to license when the Blackberry first came out - ActiveSync was even worse back then anyway - so they had to do it themselves. But Apple went to the source and did in just a few months what RIM has spent millions of dollars building. So Apple knows what to do. What technology have you licensed for your product lately?

OnProductManagement plagarized!

Hi,

I’m sure this happens all the time on the web, but I just ran across 2 - likely related - blogs on Blogspot that have lifted my iPhone vs. IPod Touch article verbatim.

http://informationfun.blogspot.com/2007/10/iphone-vs-ipod-touch.html

http://hitechtech.blogspot.com/2008/02/iphone-vs-ipod-touch.html

Any suggestions for how to handle this? If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, does plagarism imply something better?

Saeed

Product Managers need time to breathe…

I’m going to make an assertion here, and please correct me if I’m wrong.

I believe that the vast majority of software product managers are running full tilt in their jobs, caught between the short term tactical cross-functional activities (working with Dev, Sales, Marketing etc) that are thrust upon us, and the important long term market research, business and product planning activities that are fundamental to managing successful products.

Do you agree? Disagree?

Companies want Product Managers to innovate, take bold steps, define new products, enter new markets, yet at the same time deal with all the day to day operational issues that arise and need to be dealt with. I’m surprised more product managers don’t burn out after a few years. Or perhaps they do, and like the trees in the forest, we’re not there to witness them fall.

There’s an interesting post on Innovation at IdeaChampions.com. Entitled, INNOVATION is an INSIDE JOB, the article makes several good points, but the key one is:

Organizations do not innovate. People innovate. Inspired people. Fascinated people. Creative people. Committed people. That’s where innovation begins. On the inside. The organization’s role — just like the individual manager’s role — is to get out of the way.

I couldn’t agree more. A lot of companies want to be innovative, but unintentionally put barriers in front of those best suited for the job by never really getting out of the way. It’s difficult to be inspired, fascinated and creative, if you are constantly required to focus on the short term needs of other teams. How can one extricate themselves so they can get out and learn and think and postulate and research and conclude and innovate?

One solution which I wholeheartedly support is to create Product Management teams who are responsible for delivering the goods. The teams can be structured in different ways. You could combine business focussed PMs with technically focussed PMs or you could split the PM responsibilities across functional areas of larger products. There are likely other ways to split up the responsibilities.

But the goal is to get to a level where the teams can work in a pipeline or leapfrog manner. i.e. while one team (team A) is focussed on bringing a release X to market, another team (team B) is out researching release X+1. Once release X is GA, team A can focus on researching release X+2, and team B is working to get release X+1 developed and out the door.

Now, before you start thinking — hold on a minute, how many product managers are we talking about here? — ask yourself a couple of questions:

• What impact does Product Management have on your company?
• Could it have a higher impact on optimizing Development, Marketing and Sales with a small increase in headcount?
• How well could your company execute if you had deep market knowledge, clear understanding of user AND buyer needs, through competitive information and requirements that were complete, accurate and timely?

If you answered, “Significant”, “Yes” and “Much better than we are now” to those questions respectively, then think about defining product management teams in your company. Give them the time and tools they need to do a first-rate job, and then hold them responsible for it.

Challenge the teams to leapfrog each other in functionality, performance, scalability etc. The teams should view each other in a competitive manner. Why? Because your competitors are looking at you this way. They are trying to leapfrog you. They are looking at your weaknesses and trying to exploit them. They are going to try to out market and out sell you. Why not look at yourself the way your competitors look at you and beat them at their own game?

This may sound a bit unconventional but it works. Intel did this for several generations of their microprocessor chips. They had parallel teams working on successive generations of chips. Each new generation of CPUs (e.g. 286, 386 etc.) was to eclipse the previous generation. Not only did Intel make significant performance gains from one generation to the next, they kept upstart competitors like AMD playing a constant game of catch up.

Both AMD and Intel are successful companies, but which would you rather be? Why not take a lesson from an industry giant like Intel and apply it to your company?

Saeed

Goodbye File menu, hello throbbing Orb

We recently upgraded from Microsoft Office 2003 to Microsoft Office 2007 at work. Clearly Microsoft has put a lot of effort into upgrading the UI in the various components of Office 2007. For those who have not seen Office 2007, this is a snippet from MS Word 2007.

So, gone are the various formatting, editing etc. toolbars that have been a mainstay in the UI for several releases. They have been replaced by “The Ribbon“, which in reality is just one big honkin’ set of toolbars accessed using the Home, Insert, Page Layout etc. menu titles.

Gone too is what has been probably the single most consistent interface element of GUIs, traceable back to the original Macintosh:

Original Macintosh interface

and the Apple Lisa:

Apple Lisa interface

So what was that interface element? It was the File/Edit menu structure. You can see it’s origins in the Lisa interface. Pretty much every general purpose GUI application since the advent of the Macintosh, and certainly from the time that Windows 1.0 came out, had that. That was over 20 years of UI consistency.

Windows 1.0 screenshot

In Office 2007, Microsoft decided to remove it. I have no issue with changing something like the File/Edit menu structure, IF they found a better paradigm or mechanism to replace it with. But the reality is that they’ve simply replaced the File Menu with the “Throbbing Orb”, or should I say the “Microsoft Office Button“.

I refer to it as throbbing, or perhaps pulsating may be a more appropriate adjective, because when I first launched Word 2007, that button was pulsating. I actually ignored it for several minutes, looking for the “File” menu. I wanted to open a document. How difficult should that be? I clicked on all the headers of the Ribbon — Home, Insert, Page Layout etc. — but couldn’t find the thing I needed most — File->Open.

Now I’ve been using software for a very long time. The first Word Processor I ever used was on a Wang 2200 computer. I’ve used WordStar (on CP/M and DOS), Multimate (I’m embarrassed to admit), Wordperfect on DOS (and unfortunately also on Windows — what a horrible product that was), as well as many versions of Word. So, when I sat there dumbfounded unable to find the equivalent of File->Open, I asked one of my coworkers for help. He came over and said, “Click that thing”, pointing at the Office button in the top left of the screen. This is what happens in Word when you click that button:

I immediately thought “What the *&@#?” Why would they do that?

It actually makes no sense to me to design something like this. Why not simply create a File title as part of the Ribbon and put the icons for all these things there? I have to guess there was some internal push by the marketing team to create the Office button for some sort of branding purposes, or perhaps there is some particular IP issue being addressed.

I don’t know, but I really wonder who made such a design decision and why? It’s completely inconsistent with the rest of the interface, confusing for new users, and yet so deliberate in it’s implementation that I’m sure there must have been heavy debates in the Office UI team when deciding to implement it.

There is evidence in the Word (and other Office tools) GUI that the toolbar/no toolbar debate happened within the UI team. After using the Office button, I noticed the little toolbar right at the top of Window with several of the “old” icons such as Save, Undo, Redo etc. Seems like a clear “hack” to appease the more traditionalist camp that insisted on toolbars, or perhaps a clear realization that users needed an easy way to perform basic tasks. I think the folks at Microsoft should remember one of the key axioms of Product Management:

Change is a process, not an event.

Anyone have any insights into the Office 2007 design process at Microsoft ? If so, please share.

Saeed

P.S. Apparently there is enough of a market opportunity for the “old” Office interface, that a 3rd party company has created a product to give that to users.

Forrester on Product Management

I’m quite happy to report that Forrester Research has started a blog covering Product Management:

http://blogs.forrester.com/product_management/

Here’s link to the bio of the analyst writing the blog: http://www.forrester.com/rb/analyst/tom_grant

IMHO, this is a very positive development. Research firms like Forrester, Gartner etc. are typically descriptive vs. prescriptive. i.e. when they start covering a space or a market, it is because it exists and is growing and deserves focus, vs. spending time covering something that has not yet reached a minimum critical mass and may grow in the future.

As an example, I worked for a number of years at Informatica in California. We were a recognized leader in the “ETL” (Extract-Transform-Load) market. But we really saw the market as having moved to what many called “Data Integration“. It wasn’t until several years later that the analyst firms created specific research practices related to Data Integration.

So with Forrester looking at Product Management, this probably means that firms selling products such as Requirements Management tools will be getting more analyst coverage, and perhaps Forrester will host events or conferences related to technology product management. It will be interesting to watch.

So,welcome Forrester, and let’s hope the other research firms see the light.

Saeed

Would you blog about this song?

I wouldn’t normally post videos in the blog unless they were part of the context of a larger article, but this one was too good to pass by without sharing. Enjoy!

Saeed