Product Management meets Lean Startup

I’m participating in a panel at a Brainmates’ Product Talk in Sydney on 14 April. The topic is “The Intersection of Lean Start Up and Product Management"

So, I thought I’d post a few thoughts on the subject in advance. I welcome any comments, and feel free to turn up on the evening - watch the Brainmates events page for details.

The two key things that make Product Management in a corporate environment different from Lean Startup practices are:

1. You can’t fail fast (as much). You can’t fail as freely as a startup, because you can’t take undue risks with your existing customers, brand and experience. You probably can't iterate as rapidly as a startup due to many perfectly valid business and technical constraints.

2. You can’t maintain narrow single-minded focus. You’ve already discovered MVP, and need to scale and diversify. You’re dealing with a myriad of candidate features, maybe even a portfolio of related products.

But

Where the two meet perfectly is the strong emphasis on evidence-based decision-making. That’s what the lean validation board is all about. It’s exactly what happens when Product Managers specify features based on a testable hypothesis.

And

There are plenty of hacks that allow Product Managers to test hypotheses that are as risky as those of a startup, as rapidly as those of a startup. For example, not all tests need to be live in market - you can validate using survey data and tools like those provided by Survey Engine or Qualtrics

Also

Having achieved MVP, established a validated business model, having real customers and the data that comes with them, probably having competitors with some feature overlap, a Product Manager in an established businesses has a fertile field from which to generate hypotheses. You can explore up and down the value chain or supply chain for opportunities to disrupt. You can try to predict where 'the puck is going’ in terms of disruption in the broader customer journey (e.g. 65% of my referred traffic comes from Google now, but I think in 2 years it will be voice search, or wearables, or Pinterest). You can mine the behavioural data of your real, active, paying customers. You can even talk to them.

In short, Lean Startup principles don’t apply perfectly and undigested to Product Management in established business, but there are key areas in which these principles (or a close analog) are extremely worthwhile, and some of the constraints can be easily overcome.

The Near-sighted and the Far-sighted

Here's a post from Booodl's internal blog from last week I thought worth sharing

The biggest news this last week in tech was probably Facebook's acquisition of Oculus. (Fast Company's take. The Economist's)

Somewhat overlooked, but with a far greater likely impact in the short term, was Google's announcement of a strategic alliance with Luxottica. The Luxottica group includes eyewear brands such as Ray Ban and Oakley (these two brands were named as the focus of the strategic alliance).

The two pieces of news are very much related.

Mark Zuckerberg's comments suggest that the Oculus purchase is at least as much about AR as it is VR "Oculus has the chance to create the most social platform ever, and change the way we work, play and communicate" Sounds like much more than just gaming.

In the Game of Eyeballs that is the consumer internet meta-monopoly* the closest to the customer wins, and it's not a stretch to imagine that HUD wearables could usurp smartphones.

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In other news, there's the announcement that Twitter is likely to abandon hashtags and @replies

@replies are rather cranky and anachronistic, I agree 100% with ditching them.

But hashtags?

There are at least three reasons that abandoning hashtags is a really bad idea for Twitter.

1. Users actually like an in-joke, a shared meme, a idiosyncracy. To an extent, learning something new is perceived value. Knowing and using hashtags makes users feel more important.
2. Hashtags encourage users to create more content and express themselves. Said it all in a sentence? Why leave it there? Add a pithy hashtag. Be funny, be clever. A hashtag can be a wink or a punchline. Some users have become adept at using hashtags to comic, droll or dramatic effect.
3. There's brand equity, even cultural equity in hashtags (see Fallon and JT below). Why gift that all to Instagram?
   

_{*(Google has an effective monopoly on connecting us with information, Facebook has an effective monopoly on connecting us with people, either knows they could win the lot if they play their cards right - and lose if they play them wrong or do nothing)}

How To Avoid Social Media Disaster

The biggest mistake a marketer can make in Social Media is failing to recognise that Social Media is fundamentally different from everything that has gone before in digital marketing. It is not ‘the same, only more so’, it is a step in a new direction. 

Maybe the best way to avoid Social Media disasters is to administer a small electric shock to anyone who uses the phrase “one-to-one” in the same sentence as Social Media.  Because it is not a “one-to-one” medium, and to apply the same tactics and metrics which apply to the direct-response model of digital marketing is to invite failure.

In fact, Social Media may mark the end of “one-to-one” marketing. An increasing number of people choose to conduct an increasing amount of their online interactions through the ‘Social Lens’. This means that there are large numbers of potential customers your brand will never get to speak to alone. You’ll always and only find them in them in a social setting, and you’ll have to be comfortable there in order to engage. 

Social Media upends the notion of how campaigns are deployed and measured. For the school of digital marketing evolved from direct-response DNA, a campaign is like a pick-up line. You try it out on a number of customers and achieve a certain rate of success. To extend the analogy to Social Media, imagine approaching someone you’d like to impress at a pleasant gathering of mutual friends and loudly asking: “wanna go back to my place?” It would go over like a… Social Media disaster.

An alternative to using electric shock therapy on your digital marketing staff is to evolve the resources, metrics and tactics that will drive Social Media strategy from your PR/Communications team. Their experience, and their understanding of how opinions are made and managed, is probably a more natural fit for the medium.

HiPPO Grooming

I’ve coined a new phrase which I’m rather chuffed with. It has been submitted it to Urban Dictionary and I’m claiming it here.

HiPPO Grooming is the delicate art of defusing a truly awful concept put forward by someone very senior and very stupid in a brainstorming or 'visioning' session.

The trick is to completely transform the suggestion into something worthwhile (or at least harmless), while at the same time convincing the clueless senior exec that it retains their intent and ownership, and full credit is due to their brilliance.

This is as difficult and dangerous as it sounds.

The HiPPO bit comes from [HiPPO] = Highest Paid Person's Opinion (previously defined on Urban Dictionary, see definition 23 under[hippo]. The saying goes that the HiPPO is the opinion that prevails in a decision making session, even when it’s not the best outcome.

Example

CEO - "Let's make our online registration form just like a video game."

HiPPO Groomer - "Brilliant idea, Sir. We could introduce some elements that provide a playful game-like experience of progress and reward as customers complete the form."

Colleagues (aside) - "dude, that was some nice HiPPO Grooming"

Not the Messiah, just a Very Nifty Toy

banksimple - (not) The Future of Banking (yet)

I wish I had a dollar for every time someone asked me what I think of banksimple.

I’d have about twenty bucks. But I digress. Here’s what I tell them:

I think banksimple solves a bunch of problems that don’t *really* exist. All the features in their demo videos look like nice-to-haves. Extremely nice nice-to-haves I’ll grant you, but nothing that would make me want to jump a fence.

See, at the heart of exemplary product design is a *real* problem solved. Dyson vacuum cleaners, iPods and Polaroid cameras all look slick and sexy. But that’s not all. Dyson got rid of the bag. Edwin Land gave you developed photos of your cherished moments in seconds - where before it would take days (and maybe allowed you to capture ‘cherished moments’ that mightn’t have gone down so well at the local photo stall – nudge, nudge). Steve Jobs made ripping, organising and playing digital music about a million times easier than any solution which existed before the iPod.

My point here is not to disparage banksimple (or ‘Simple’ as they are now simply known, having changed their name late 2011). No, my point is that banking is clearly a ‘target rich environment’ when it comes to problems that need to be solved. You don’t need to talk to customers of any bank for long to realise the wealth of opportunity in the form of real, pressing pain-in-the-neck problems.

It can only be a matter of time before someone solves some of these and seizes The Future of Banking. Will it be Simple, Paypal, Google, a dinosaur bank, a startup in a garage?

By the way, in my own humble opinion the place to start is with small business customers. They probably have the highest, most frequent involvement with their banks, and plenty that keeps them up at night.

The next frontier of devices and interaction.

One way to look at the Post-PC future is that it's really all about input modality and interface - rather than device or content.

In this view of the world, Apple’s particular achievement in the last five years is that it *nailed* multi-touch input and the corresponding touch interface – the iPhone, the iPad, the App Store all flowed on from this breakthrough. Others were trying to make their existing phone UI more usable, better looking form factors, phones that incorporated music players, and Swiss-Army-knife arrays of peripheral features. Smartphones, PDAs and tablet PCs were all coming out with styluses. Jobs and Apple changed the game with a revolutionary step up in input and interface.  (How many Post-PC computing devices do you see coming out with a stylus or hard keyboard today?)

This not just my idiosyncratic point of view, by the way. The iPhone Wikipedia entry contends “Development of the iPhone began in 2005 with Apple CEO Steve Jobs' direction that Apple engineers investigate touchscreens” providing multiple citations.

The next frontiers are gesture and voice.

Kinect and Siri are streets ahead in these respective areas. No matter what you think of their current state of either, the bucket loads of real-world data they are collecting is invaluable for improving the underlying algorithms; and hence the navigation/interaction experience. These datasets are something a would-be competitor can’t get by any other means.

Both Kinect and Siri are out there in a big way. Kinect holds the 2011 Guinness World Record as the fastest-selling consumer electronic device in history, while the quarter following the release of Siri on the iPhone 4S saw unprecedented iPhone sales of over 37 million units.

The question, then, is - What lucrative new devices, markets and business models will gesture and voice unlock for their successful pioneers?

In my opinion, if you *nail* voice (not just word recognition but the syntactic problems), you win mobile search. Siri is Apple seriously cutting Google's grass, at least as much as Android does vice versa.

 And if you want to win internet TV (and who wouldn’t want to own an App Store on the baby boomers’ favourite device), you need to *nail* gesture. Actually, it will be probably a combination of gesture AND facial recognition AND voice that proves the killer breakthrough for TVs and public screens as computing devices.

Apple rumours hint at some combination of inputs for the mooted Apple TV. And besides, 30 Rock’s Jack Donaghy has already hilariously illustrated why voice alone mightn’t quite cut it.

LinkedIn’s short URL fail

Here’s a tip for anyone developing a URL shortener – blacklist ‘naughty’ words.

I’m talking to YOU LinkedIn. Check out the short URL you generated for an event I created recently.

Now you’d have to say, as far as words that might be filtered as inappropriate, it’s a pretty obvious one. If you missed that, you probably don’t have any kind of exception mechanism at all. You might want to fix that.

By the way, I didn’t notice this until after I had pasted the short URL into an email and widely distributed it. A mate of mine, Vaughan, messaged me saying the link was busted - Erin (his girlfriend) was redirected to a ‘scary bunny’ website. No doubt I was being blocked, warned about and denounced as a pornographer and spammer by institutional firewalls all over town.