Focus on Solutions, Not Problems

It's a disease in many product companies to over-engineer products.
2 stories you might have heard of:

Difference between Focusing on Problems and Focusing on Solutions

Case 1

When NASA began the launch of astronauts into space, they found out that the pens wouldn't work at zero gravity (ink won't flow down to the writing surface). To solve this problem, it took them one decade and $12 million. They developed a pen that worked at zero gravity, upside down, underwater, in practically any surface including crystal and in a temperature range from below freezing to over 300 degrees C.

And what did the Russians do...?? They used a pencil.

Case 2

One of the most memorable case studies on Japanese management was the case of the empty soapbox, which happened in one of Japan 's biggest cosmetics companies. The company received a complaint that a consumer had bought a soapbox that was empty. Immediately the authorities isolated the problem to the assembly line, which transported all the packaged boxes of soap to the delivery department. For some reason, one soapbox went through the assembly line empty.

Management asked its engineers to solve the problem. Post-haste, the engineers worked hard to devise an X-ray machine with high-resolution monitors manned by two people to watch all the soapboxes that passed through the line to make sure they were not empty. No doubt, they worked hard and they worked fast but they spent a whoopee amount to do so.

But when a rank-and-file employee in a small company was posed with the same problem, he did not get into complications of X-rays, etc., but instead came out with another solution. He bought a strong industrial electric fan and pointed it at the assembly line. He switched the fan on, and as each soapbox passed the fan, it simply blew the empty boxes out of the line.

Moral: Always look for simple solutions.

Devise the simplest possible solution that solves the problems

Always Focus on solutions & not on problems.

Article: Avoiding Design By Committee

Copied from http://www.svpg.com/articles.

One of the big advantages that startups have is that there aren’t many people.

As companies get larger (even a little bit larger), one of the very common consequences is that decisions become group activities. Stakeholders pop up from every direction. The notion of ownership gets diluted down to consensus builder. The objective moves from coming up with something great, to coming up with something that doesn’t get you fired.

And the result very often is that product innovation largely grinds to a halt.

There is no question that in larger companies there really are many stakeholders, and they really must be taken into account, as there is much more riding on your decisions than in a startup. But many companies struggle because they don’t know how to manage the stakeholders yet still make progress and innovate.

In this note I want to spell out the technique that I use to overcome this all too common problem.

But first, the key for every product discovery effort is to identify the three key people – the product manager, the user experience lead, and the product development lead. These are the three minds that must collaborate closely to solve problems in new and useful ways.

The product manager plays the lead role and brings to the table the knowledge of the functionality required, and is responsible for making sure the product has value.

The user experience lead represents the user’s behavior and mental model, and works to ensure the result is something that users can figure out.

And the product development lead brings to the table deep knowledge about what is possible, and is responsible for ensuring that the product that is defined is something that can actually be delivered.

Lots of other people are going to want to join your little party. Once in a while you may decide to include a guest or two, but it is absolutely critical that you keep this team small. You simply won’t innovate in a large group setting. This is not just a brainstorming session. You will be working through literally hundreds of small and large decisions, and your progress will slow to a crawl if you don’t have that small group of smart, empowered people.

It also doesn’t mean that your small group doesn’t have help. You have the resources of the company available to you as you need it. The most common resources are from the user experience extended team: especially prototyping, user research, visual designer, and user testing help. But you may need to go talk to legal about a sensitive issue, or the analytics people about how something is used today, or maybe you will talk to someone in site security about something you are nervous about.

The key is that your core team is empowered. Empowered to represent the stakeholders and to make decisions. But this doesn’t mean that you are given a blank check. You will have to review your decisions with the various stakeholders and make adjustments where necessary.

This is where I need to drill down to explain what I mean.

Each of the three members of your core product discovery team represent many different stakeholders:

The product manager as the overall product owner typically represents the business owner, company executives, sales, marketing, product marketing, legal, finance and customer support.

The user experience lead is very often an interaction designer but depending on the project may come from one of the other design areas, but in any case must represent interaction design, visual design, user research, usability engineering and often content/editorial.

The product development lead is very often from the architecture team or a lead engineer, but again, depending on the project may come from one of the other areas of product development, and must represent architecture, engineering, test automation, site operations, and site security.

For this model to work, the three members of the product discovery team really do need to be entrusted to give their best efforts while keeping in mind the needs of their stakeholders. But in truth it’s not that long of a leash. Your product discovery team still need to be able to show what you have come up with and are proposing before the product is actually built. This is one of the benefits of creating a prototype. You can show this prototype to any or all of their stakeholders so that they can see the reason for the decisions and what exactly is being proposed.

Often there is still some back and forth as stakeholders balance their issues against the potential of the product, but I can only tell you that the nature of the discussion is completely different when stakeholders can see the vision in a clickable prototype versus just talked about in the abstract or in some form of paper spec.

Moving to this model does require a little bit of a leap of faith. Management and stakeholders have to be willing to entrust you to represent their interests instead of being personally involved at the level they may be used to.

But the notion of a small group of talented and motivated people has always been key to coming up with great products. It is the basic ingredients of a startup, and you need to make sure you continue this as your company grows if you want to continue to create products that matter.

How to innovate faster

I came across this article on Harvard Business Online by Ravi Chhatpar

If they’re to do their job most effectively, designers should be brought into the innovation process at the very earliest stages. Too many companies still make the mistake of keeping business strategy and design activities separate. Typically, marketers conceptualize a new product based on company strategy; the project team gets input from various areas of the company and creates a business case; and senior executives make a final choice from among the possibilities they’re given. Only then does the idea go to the designers.

That sequential method ensures that the product is aligned with strategy, allows the team to create buy-in and build consensus, and gives senior executives an array of options. But it takes a long time, so even if the original concept drew on real-world data about users, the company is inevitably unable to adapt to rapid, unforeseen changes in markets and user preferences.

The solution is to bring in designers at the very beginning of the process, because designers (if they do what they’re supposed to) will put prototypes into circulation and share users’ responses and attitudes with the project team, even as the business case is being developed. That enables the company to nimbly adjust to changes in market opportunities long before the product concept is set in stone.

From concept through development, designers should function in parallel with corporate decision makers, creating prototypes for a number of variations on a product and then testing them with users and, if appropriate, partners. Tracking how customers’ ways of using a product evolve over time also makes it possible for designers to identify desirable new features and, in some cases, create new functionality in conjunction with users.

Planners should concurrently be considering the business implications, asking questions such as “How much would it cost to incorporate this new feature?” and “How should we respond to users’ changing needs?” The team should continually feed new information from user research and prototype analysis into the evolving business strategy. Constraints that emerge, such as price or a decision to offer standard versus premium features, may be used to inform the next prototype, which can then be evaluated through more formal testing. And the cycle repeats.
... You can read the rest of the article here.

Shared this article with my CEO and here's his advice:
It is a good idea to get as many people involved as possible.
However, to do that we first need..
1) A strategic direction and a blue plan so that everyone know where is the direction. Do we have that?
2) We need to hire smart designer who understand the business and can contribute their ideas. No point just get more people in the meeting if their contribution is minimum. How many of such designer we have. Can we get more?
3) We need capable managers who can handle the discussion and involvement of more people. Do we have such capable managers?

I won't tell you my answers...But it is the sort of questions you should be asking yourselves :)

Evolution

Evolution has served mankind well, if you follow Darwin's theory.
It can be applied to organizations as well.

The 3+1 success factors of evolution are:

1. Variation - We need to allow variation to happen, aside from just appreciating differences. It is the variation in genes that have made mankind adapt to the changing world.

2. Inheritance - While we need to embrace variation, it is inheritance that made us who we are today and the reason why mankind is different from other species.

3. Selection - The process that ensures the strong survive and the weak eliminated. Like it or not - the environment, or the customers will enforce this process on businesses. In order to survive, organizations need to have the selection process within itself as well - keeping the strong people, process, product and weeding out the weak ones.

And the last one:
Be there.
What do I mean? Read this article on Forbes to understand more.

Innovation and Risk Taking

I have attended a few symposium on entrepreneurship, when the topic of entrepreneur character or personality is discussed - there are lots of different opinion but one of the popular and common one is the "propensity for risk taking".

Here's what Peter Drucker says:
"I know a good many successful entrepreneurs. Not one of them has a propensity for risk taking. Most successful innovators in real life are colorless figures, and much more likely to spend hours on cash-flow projections than to dash off looking for risks. They are not risk-focused, they are opportunity-focused."

Phil McKinney's Podcast on Killer Innovations

If you are into product management and innovation you will want to check out Phil McKinney's podcasts (you can also subscribe from iTunes). Phil is the VP/CTO for Personal Systems Group in HP and well known speaker in the field of innovation and creativity.

SCAMMPER technique

Used for idea generation, take any words, attributes, features, problems or ideas and:
S - substitute, simplify
C - change, combine
A - adapt, adopt
M - magnify, minify
M - modify, multiply
P - package, purloin
E - elevate, eliminate
R - reverse, rearrange

The 16 Hot Buttons of Marketing and Sales

Today I learned about the 16 hot buttons that drive all purchase behavior from Mr. Barry Feig.
Here's the list

1. The desire to control - over one's destiny, finances, health, relationship and even food and shelter.
2. I'm better than you - the need to have status and feel significant.
3. Joy of discovery - joy of discovering is uncovering the unexpected joy.
4. Revaluing - as baby boomers enjoy a new phase in life, they are going back to the things they loved as kids.. but with a new twist.
5. Family values - quality time with families are still of utmost importance to many societies.
6. The desire to belong - people want to be associated with people like themselves, they show products like badges.
7. Fun is its own rewards - people want to have fun.
8. Poverty of time - nobody has enough time (but you can't substitute convenience for quality).
9. The desire to get the best that can be got - assert your product leadership position.
10. Self achievement - "be the best that you can be" is a strong motivating factor; intrinsic rewards are as important as extrinsic rewards.
11. Love of cosmo - sex sells, so does love and romance.
12. The Nurturing response - people like to nurture even more than being nurtured, make your customers the hero with your product.
13. Reinventing oneself - give them a chance to start over.
14. Make me smarter - people want to FEEL that they are smart for buying your product.
15. Power and dominance - aspiration to be more than in control of your environment.
16. Wish fulfillment - give the consumer to power to fly, market to aspirations.

Isolate and combine them, Push them!
You can read Barry's own description here.

Other wisdoms I've learned today:
"Perception is reality."
"There are no features - there are only benefits. Customer buy benefits, not features."
"Focus on delivering outcomes, not products."

And a note on measuring success (and all the talk about KPIs):
"Simplicity applies to measurement also. Too often we measure everything and understand nothing." ~ Jack Welch.

Valuable day indeed.

Crossing the Chasm

I was hoping to get my hands on the book Crossing the Chasm by Geoffrey A Moore. Then I saw this piece of review in Amazon:
Here is Moore's important insight in one sentence: "Don't celebrate your victory in a market after becoming the market leader with pioneer consumers; as the mass market develops and all the competitive offerings have adequate performance, the new consumers won't care about the advanced features that your organization is exquisitely tuned to produce but rather ease of setup, ease of use, and low cost."

Should I still read the book? What do you think?

10 Types of Innovation

Had a team of associates who came and give the team a talk about innovation today. One of the new ideas (for me) shared is about the 10 types of innovation - created by Doblin Inc.
When people think about innovation - they often think about product and services only. There are actually many areas where innovation can be created and it's clearly illustrated in this model.
Fair to say that innovation is everyone's responsibility in an organization - although the leader do have to chose a particular focus area.

To know more about the folks who conducted the innovation dialogue, you can find them on http://www.kwerkus6.com.