Being a big fan of Cookie Monster and a bit of a perfectionist, I took the reins and said I would be “in charge of assembling” the cupcakes… I did not realize there would be a great design lesson in this project!

The Prototype or MVP or Whatever you want to call it - the first batch of cupcakes (which my wife kindly prepared) was too small. I could tell by looking at them but, I decided it was best to build a prototype, so I forged ahead…

Next, I dyed the frosting and coconut blue (for the fur) and low and behold it came out robin egg blue! STOP! Cookie Monster is more of a navy blue. This won’t work. My 4 year old (my customer) with a keen eye for detail will surely catch this and it is not working for me as a Cookie Monster expert. STOP! This is an MVP. See what you can learn… I then frosted the first one (the top of the cupcake crumbled and I now had chocolate in the frosting UGH!) and rolled it in the coconut. Good news, I could not really see the cake crumbs under the frosting (a requirements trade- off. Cupcake does not have to be perfect) and the fur stuck to the frosting well. Aside from being the wrong color it looked good for the MVP.

Now, on to Cookie’s eyes…  This is the key component in “selling Cookie Monster” and the googily eyes have to be just right. Vanilla baking candies for the eye balls.  They look good, not completely white, but OK, wait; there is a small raised area in the middle from the manufacturing process.  Oh no!  Cookie’s pupils don’t go in the middle of his eyes, how will I cover it up?  My wife suggests we could file them down and… STOP!  This is an MVP.  I go ahead and apply some frosting to the back of the candies and attach the eyes at an angle to create just the right 3-D effect.  Good enough!  On to the pupils…

The YouTube lady says to use black frosting.  We bought black gel instead. Seems fine, let’s go with it. I apply the pupils at just the right angles and it looks better than frosting! The gel has a glossy finish and provides a better 3-D effect, but wait, it is running and not setting up on the candy, but it seems like the kind of “feature” I want to test, so I do a couple of more and wait… This is the killer feature that will make them better than the cupcake lady and really sell it to the kids… 20 minutes later and eyeballs that look like Cookie is wearing a lot of mascara and crying bring me back to reality. STOP! This is an MVP. Let them sit a while and worst case scenario, get frosting in the AM and apply the pupils last. A trade-off to complete the MVP within the time constraint.

The final step… Cookies mouth with the mini-cookie inside… Seems simple enough, right? Cut a slit and put the mini-cookie inside it. Well the first attempt provides two important lessons. Number one, the knife needs to be very sharp, as the first one crumbled and came apart while cutting it and number two, the cookie is pretty big, so the mouth needs to be pretty wide. Remember, I am working with cupcakes that I deemed too small from the get go. Ha! My assumption was right, but it was only by following the process for the MVP that I can determine the actual requirement for the size of the cupcake! I make cuts that will work, end up with 70% of my MVP batch in shambles but have some finished products to work with. My daughter is in bed (my beta customer is sleeping) so I show them to my wife. She says “well I already put together a new batch of cupcakes and I increased the amount of batter by about 30% for each one and they came out better, cooked through better and have a better top”. This is great! My team is iterating the next version before I am done with the MVP. Simply by collaborating along the way and asking for some feedback from my team, we have progress that will help meet our go to market timeline.

Albeit a bit risky that she baked the next round without direct feedback from production or our customer, this requirement was noticeably off from the beginning so it would be OK if we ended up with MVP version 2. It just would have created stress because our supply chain was depleted and we would have needed another trip to the store and it was 9pm already. Good risk, the size was perfect (Gladwell – Blink?) She just “knew” how much to add by doing her ethnographic study of me in production and listening to my “feedback” (or “frustration” depending on how you well you know me). On to production and release of the Beta Cookie Monster Cup Cakes (we use Beta internally, but as far as the 4 year olds know, these are ready for prime time General Release). There is always a need for good marketing, right?

What did we learn?
1) MVP fast – finished, not perfect
2) don’t get bogged down on killer features in the MVP
3) the customer doesn’t know what they don’t know
4) don’t work in a silo, collaborate with others. There are smart people out there.
5) take some risks. You might win!
6) trust your gut. Your experience matters

The Beta- So with everything ready to go because this is a very quick iteration right on the heels of the MVP/Prototype, I quickly get the cupcakes frosted and fur applied (I stay with the “wrong blue” because I am able to find an officially licensed, by Sesame Street, Cookie Monster toy in my other daughters toy bin that seems to match the color. If it is OK for Sesame Street to put their name on it, then it is OK for me) and am ready for the eyes. The candies go on great and it appears that the gel will just not work or I do not know how to make it work, so I make the Executive decision to abandon the pupils for now and get black frosting in the morning. (Somebody always needs to be in charge to make tough decisions!  Executive Sponsor?)

The mouth is the last piece. With razor sharp knife in hand I am able to quickly cut a mouth in the now “right-sized” cupcakes and insert the mini-cookie without causing harm to the cupcake. It is now time for a beer and bed. It will be a long day tomorrow with a 4 year old birthday party. OK, maybe 2 beers…

The Next Morning!

Show the customer the Beta - My daughter wakes up early and I tell her I have something to show her. I lead her to where the cupcakes rested in a covered container overnight… “Wow Daddy, you made the Cookie Monster cupcakes, but… His eyes… That’s not how Cookie’s eyes are. There is no black. Cookie has googily eyes!” I quickly explain that we had a supplier problem and that the supply chain folks are working with production to get it solved first thing this morning (i.e. Dad is going to the store to get black frosting this morning and will finish the eyes well before the 3pm party) and we will be just fine. More importantly however, my obsession with the color of his fur seemed to be a non-issue. She did not say one thing about the color. Interesting, is this because my assumption about the eyes being the killer feature was correct? Or, is it that I had such a glaring issue on an important feature that it makes it easy to look past and accept other imperfections? This is an important lesson. I might even design this into a project in the real world to test it. (Very interesting concept, intentional flaws to test the importance of a feature?)

I finish the eyes after getting the black frosting and actually develop a technique for application that works well to create the right 3-D effect. Is this because I have focused only on pupils in the morning? Is my focus on this singular task creating extra value for the project (Interesting thought)?  I stepped away from the project for a while, broke down the work to a very small component and focused on it. It resulted in a superior result to what happened when I was managing multiple pieces of the project at the same time.

And we are done! Ready to go! I bring the customer back for a final review. “Daddy these cupcakes are great. The eyes are like they are supposed to be. But the mouth is closed. Cookie has a black mouth when he eats a cookie”. Uh Oh, an unknown requirement! Not a lot of time to execute something. But wait. The cupcakes are chocolate for a reason. It must be for the mouth. What do I already know from the process? 3-D effects help a lot, if you want to cut the cupcake, you need a sharp knife and remember, they are pretty fragile.

Bring in the Risk management team!!! (My wife)

They are good enough to go to market as is. As the designer I think the mouth needs work, the customer has said there is a problem but, risk management says, “We have no time if these get screwed up and you will be buying a cake at the bakery which will not make your customer happy”. Nobody likes the bait and switch but it just seems like a risk I am willing to take for the “customer experience”.

Risk management says “I am leaving the room, I am not going to watch, makes me too nervous”. And with my customer by my side, I take a very sharp knife and begin to dig out Cookies Mouth creating a 3-D effect around the mini-cookie and exposing the chocolate within the mouth. It is perfect and adds to the affect. The customer says “Daddy these look perfect! Just like on YouTube”. That was all I needed to hear. Project finished! Package them up for the party.

So this was a lot of fun and ended up being a great business and design lesson.  Maybe the most interesting part is what happened when I rolled them out to the greater market (The 15 kids at the birthday party), but I will save that for the next post.

The finished Beta below!

The Beta!

How about scrap that plan all together and think about DESIGN!

Design is the new competitive advantage! Markets move fast and companies and industries can go away in the blink of an eye! Anyone have an iPhone 4S and decide to put the digital camera, iPod, Franklin Planner, digital video recorder and the Garmin GPS, just to name a few, in the “yard sale” box?

I like the idea of starting with the experience first. Next time you are trying to re-package your product or service or develop a new one, start with what would provide the most value and do the “job” the customer needs to get done. Forget about whether or not it can scale or will bring x% of market share. That can all be figured out if you can create value for the customer.

If you are building an iPhone app as an example, pick out the single “job” that you want to target for the customer. Give it to 20 people that you “think” are your customer (the MBA’s can probably tell you) and watch what they do in a real situation. Simple is best. (Remember we are in a $1.99 economy here where that purchase is scrutinized like it is a $1999.99 purchase. When is the last time you spent $1.99 without getting a referral or reading 20 reviews?). Then ask them if it did the “job” and what was missing. If 40% of them identify the same thing, then add it and repeat the process a couple of more times. After you cycle through a couple of iterations you will have a beta v1.1!

Take the beta and ask the folks that did your trial if they would ask others to try it (if they won’t something is wrong) and have the MBA’s give you another 500 people to add to the list. Focus on building the capabilities and user experience that get all 20 to recommend it to others. Make sure you nail the “job” first and design the experience around it. Even if it means your back-end systems and processes can only handle 100 customers. You can fix that if you have a product that people want. It is really hard to go back to potential customers and tell them later that “you have fixed it and made it so much better”. It is also really hard to get business leaders, executives, investors and your team to buy in if you are struggling to have success. It won’t help to tell them you can handle 1000 new customers a day if you had something to sell them!

I have been involved with a few of these projects over the last couple of years and each time, getting into the market fast and quick iteration have been keys to learning and measuring success factors. Remember this exercise can help you kill a bad project just as fast as you reinvest in a perceived “winner”. I would rather know sooner than later if we are working on a “loser” and how to adjust or put it out to pasture.

So start with design first and it will guide you to the right stuff faster and give you a clear picture of your likelihood of success. Then call in the engineers, et al and ramp up!

Try it… It actually works!

Come out and join us, as this is a fantastic event that supports a great and very important organization here in Chicago.

Here is some info on the event below and some links:

The annual i.c. stars iOpener conference brings together CIO’s, entrepreneurs, students, alumni of i.c.stars and vendors to explore a technology-development topic of mutual interest.

The Chicagoland Chamber of Commerce leads this conference with a presentation on the role of innovation in driving regional GDP. CIOs and Entrepreneurs participate as table facilitators to discuss how to nurture “cultures of innovation”. The discussions seek to answer how IT organizations will invest in innovation in the coming year.

This year’s iOpener considers what it takes to foster a “Culture of Innovation” within an IT organization specifically around mobility, cloud and social media. Participate in facilitated roundtable discussions where insights on these critical areas will be shared.

Learn what a wide range of companies are doing that’s innovative, what jobs are being created that didn’t exist before and how other companies of all sizes are recruiting staff with innovative DNA. Hear how the workforce is evolving and see how companies are training and, in some cases, retraining their employees to stay on the leading edge of their industries.

Don’t miss the opportunity to network with CIOs and entrepreneurs, to gather new ideas for your business and to learn about the emerging trends in workforce development.

Event Page - http://bit.ly/mYtFZ4

Registration Page - http://bit.ly/onO6cH

Link: http://bit.ly/p8l4QJ

Session VII

Keynote Panel: What’s Working Now?

Interviews with Sales and Marketing Pros who have learned how to grow their pipelines and HOW THEY DO IT! 

Join Senior Technology Field Marketing and Sales professionals who are constantly making their numbers. Learn what it really takes to succeed in today’s market.

	Kathie Topel, author of POWERSHIP and Vice President of Impact Insight, a part of SPR Companies, has worked with companies like Kraft Foods, Oscar Meyer and Entenmanns Bakery to achieve maximum operational efficiency. Her expertise in corporate organizational change allows her to develop strategies that provide financial balance, strategic growth and company-wide motivation within the IT, consulting, manufacturing, logistics and supply chain industries. Topel regularly speaks to industry groups on employee growth, leadership and motivation.
	Kim Geater, Field Marketing Manager at Motorola Solutions, marketing efforts for the Central and Canadian areas and works closely with the partner ecosystem, regional sales teams, alliances and distributors to develop and execute effective sales and marketing programs. She has over 20 years experience in marketing and sales in the technology industry, including management positions with IBM and Software Spectrum. Her expertise includes On-line Marketing, SEO, Consultative Sales, and Integrated Marketing.
	Coley Perry, Co-Founder and Vice President, Get Me The Right Job!  Coley is responsible for Product/Service Development, Sales and Marketing Strategy and overall execution of the strategy including people, process and technology. He is a 15 year sales and marketing veteran with experience in and around the intersection of sales, marketing, change management, technology and business process. He has built sales teams, go-to-market strategies, demand generation engines and sustainable revenue streams. Currently his passion is focused on the convergence of sales, marketing and technology. He holds a masters degree from Northwestern University but learned the most from The “Second City” Training Center in Chicago where he studied the Art of Improv.

Through this discussion Paul suggested that I was a “Panning for Gold”.  That is when the light bulb went off.  That is exactly what we do.  We do not build a town, set-up a giant mine and call in the big Caterpillar mining equipment.  We pound some wood handles together, get some wire mesh, grab a tin pan and start testing the creek!

We do this in our sales and marketing process for example.  As a company with less than $5m in revenue we enter new markets, test marketing messages and ACTUALLY ADD NEW CUSTOMERS by using this approach.

What we do…

1.  Define our data – Who is the customer profile?  Where can we get it?  How fast can we load it…

2.  Create our content – What do we want to communicate?  How will we support that communication?  e-mail, website, video, etc…

3.  EXECUTE – send an e-mail campaign and measure the response

4.  Manage – Clean the data, add new data that comes from the process, address exceptions, elevate required response, etc…

5.  Learn – Decide if we have found a place to build a mine!  Is this market segment responding well?  Did we convert customers?  Is there an opportunity here?

This is a process that many companies struggle with due to size, culture, broken sales and marketing process, poor leadership, lack of the right people, process or technology, etc, etc…

It looks like we may be “prospecting” for real.  Miner 49′er!

Are you thinking about changing your job?

Are you an employer getting ready to hire in this market?

If the answer is YES to any of these questions you should keep reading.  If not, press the Google “I’m Feeling Lucky” button and move on to the next dazzling piece of content in the blogosphere.  As a job seeker, you need to understand how good employers will adjust the way they hire.  If you are an employer you better start thinking about adjusting the way you hire.

It all became clear over the last couple of years after completing Grad School at Northwestern, starting my own business and getting paid by other people to help them build their business…  This is a quick tidbit of what I have seen in the real world!

Most people have no idea “who” to hire for “what”!

Take some simple steps to insure you begin to understand how to hire and how develop a profile and a job description.

1.  Do you REALLY understand the output of the work that is being done and the responsibility of the role? (You may have to hire and fire a couple of times to figure it out)

2.  Do you understand the characteristics of the person that will indicate the highest likelihood of success in your organization? (Caliper, DISC, Briggs, etc…)

3.  Can you narrow a job description down to the top 5 of each of these things?  Key Responsibilities, Competencies, Skills, Other (Certs, Degree, etc…)

4.  How will you measure success of the person in this job?  (Not subjective!  Find objective measures)

5.  Do you have any idea how to translate this into a meaningful job description, let alone an interviewing process that will actually evaluate against this?

Stop and think before the next time you hire.   Just because the HR department says it is so, does not mean it is.  In the next 5-10 years the competition for the best talent will be more fierce than ever before.  By the way the talent pool knows how to evaluate a potential employer in this way.  At least the good ones do.  ;-)

You better “Stay Ready” as an Employer or the world will pass you buy.

No excuse.  Bad excuse.  Unacceptable…  All good responses.  This is a case of me not eating my own dog food.

When I work with my clients, customers and business partners, I preach “Consistent Execution”, “Agile Approach”, “Shampoo, Rinse, Repeat”, etc…

The reason I do this is because it is critical in today’s rapidly changing business environment if you want to stay on top, let alone stay in business.

I am going to make a public commitment to being consistent in my writing.  There I said it.

“It’s been a long, lonely, lonely, lonely, lonely……. Time”

i.c.stars is a Chicago-based, non-profit organization that helps adults with a high school diploma or GED become future business and technology leaders. i.c.stars’ iOpener event will examine what jobs are being created that didn’t exist three years ago and how companies are using innovation to recruit.

The iOpener event is facilitated by IDEA BLENDER™ – a social solution development company that connects companies, academic institutions, public sector and non-profit organizations with a global network of some of the brightest thinkers solving some of the toughest business challenges.

Perry, a human capital innovation expert, will explore the concept of “innovative DNA” and what it means for organizations seeking to attract and retain employees for the future workforce.

“The workforce of tomorrow is rapidly changing. That means how we create job descriptions, define roles and hire folks is also changing,” said Perry. “Those who understand this and adopt new approaches and processes will have a distinct, competitive advantage.  i.c.stars’ iOpener event is a great example of the kind of dialogue that needs to happen across business, education, non-profit and government.”

Other participants in the iOpener event include:

• Anthony Abbattista, VP, Technology Solutions, Allstate
• Ellen Barry, Former CIO, MPEA
• David Baruch, CIO, Hewitt
• Hardik Bhatt, CIO, City of Chicago
• Marcus Cobb, President, Mark Wayne Intimates
• Timothy Deane Mather, CIO, PMA Consultants LLC,
• Kevin Denney, BettrAt
• Ed Earl, CIO, LittelFuse
• Steven Elliot, Principal, Technology & Operations, Bank of America
• Dan Fallon, CTO, Navistar
• Jim Fehr, Vice President, StartSampling Inc
• Jolanta Gal, CIO, Feeding America
• Stephen Galvan, Principle, Galvan & Associates
• Mark Griesbaum, President, TCS Online System
• Beth Hall, CAO, Abelson Taylor
• Richard Komakio, Co-Founder, The Lawyer Market
• Robert E. Kress , Sr. Director of IT Business Operations,Accenture
• Michael Kritzman, School Town
• Ron Markham, CIO, SPSS
• Patrick Moroney, President, The Barnier Group
• Peter Nagle, CIO, Information Technology, Mesirow Financial
• Tiger Nigamatzyanov, Siegel Construction Inc.
• Mike O’Connell, Manager, IT Business Planning, Integrys
• Michael Ouska, CIO, Lutheran Social Services of Illinois
• Dan Paganelis, Sr. Manager, Technical Strategy & Analysis,Redbox
• Coley Perry, VP, Get Me the Right Job!
• Lance Pressl, Foundation President, Chicagoland Chamber of Commerce
• Allison Radecki, SVP & CIO, GS1 US
• Girish Rao, VP of IT, Career Education Corporation
• Dan Roberts, Sidetax
• Kevin Rooney , CIO/CSO, American Access Casualty
• Avelo Roy, Co-Founder, eMotion
• Victor Sanchez, Urki.me
• Kevin Sapp, Senior Vice President, Mesirow
• Bruce Schinelli, VP IT and CIO, TTX
• Stephen Speidel Global CIO, Insight
• James Stoynoff, President, Synthesis Solutions, LLC
• Ed Suda, Co-Founder, eMotion
• Guy Thier, CIO, Bally Total Fitness
• Patricia Todus, Associate VP & Deputy CIO, Northwestern University
• Kathie Topel, VP, IMPACTinsights, Part of SPR Companies
• Lac Van Tran, CIO, Rush University Medical Center
• James Vanek, CTO, Alternative and Quantitative Investments, UBS Global Asset Management
• Barbara Zeller, Assistant VP, IT, Nicor Inc
• Jason Zielke, Associate, Invention Bridge

ABOUT ICSTARS

Formed in 1999, i.c.stars is a non-profit organization in Chicago for adults with a high school diploma or GED. Using project-based learning and full-immersion teaching, i.c.stars provides opportunities to develop skills in business and technology. i.c.stars’ goal is to develop 1,000 Community Leaders by 2020. i.c.stars places 100 percent of its qualified graduates in jobs with average annual earnings of $35,700. Before completing the program, participants typically earn around $16,600. In 2006, i.c.stars partnered with DePaul University to ensure that i.c.stars alumni are admitted to the CDM and SNL Bachelors of Science program. Learn more on the web at i.c.stars.org.

ABOUT GETMETHERIGHTJOB

Getmetherightjob.com offers employers an inexpensive and revolutionary way to reduce the cost and the pain of finding, qualifying, interviewing and hiring great IT talent and contractors. As an employee advocate, the Company helps candidates successfully interview employer profiles, in depth information about the hiring manager, competency testing, links to the employer’s blog/news and a complete background on the hiring organization. GetMeTheRightJob also guarantees candidate satisfaction with an industry leading SLA http://getmetherightjob.com/docs/sla/.

At this client we are working very hard in an entrepreneurial environment.  We are creating a new business model, we are aggressively in the marketplace, we are on-boarding customers, having success & failure and everyone is working very hard to meet our targets and goals.   We have thrown a global team of people together with loosely defined roles and asked them to do things that they might not be able to do, don’t want to do or simply can’t do, but everyone is giving it  their best shot.

This brings me to the point…  It is my responsibility to build the organization out as one of the founders and a key contributor to strategy and the overall business model.   Everyone involved has great passion for the company, the industry and making an impact.   So the other day as I listened in on our team trying to solve a very complex challenge around how to figure out what to do when and who should do what, I got my normal urge to walk in and try to start persuading them to do it “my way”.  I stopped myself and sat back down in my chair.

Even though we are at a critical stage in the business and we are building toward specific revenue goals and solving this problem will help us accelerate progress quickly,  I chose to do nothing!  Why?  Because we can not build a scalable business on the backs of a couple of people dictating what everyone should be doing and when.  If  we have the right people doing the right things they should be able to figure it out or get pretty close on their own.

The meetings got heated, the tension was building as I listened and the urge to jump in and provide a “solution” was insatiable.  I let it go and spoke to some team members afterward and they looked like they had just completed the climb to the summit of Mt. Everest.  I advised and mentored them and suggested that they re-group the next day and that we meet to discuss their solution the following day in detail.

The solution that was proposed was very close to what I was thinking might be the best approach to try.  The difference is they came up with it on their own in the heat of battle.  They are bought-in to the solution and dedicated to making sure that the execution of the solution is on target.  It cost us one day of time in progress but we gained an invaluable amount of learning in the area of Teamwork and Communication.

It remains to be seen if the solution will work but I know that this team will continue to fight, think, create and execute with passion because they are empowered to do so in our environment and the rewards come back in customer satisfaction and progress toward our goals.  This was a great light bulb moment for me.

The next time you think you have the answer… Stop! and do nothing.

If you have a bad sales process you better call poison control.

Excerpt -

“According to the 2010 Miller Heiman Sales Best Practices Study, less than 20% of respondents said they use a prospecting plan. Yet, roughly 75% of top-performing sales organizations said they are consistent in this activity. Where’s the disconnect?”…

Read the post here – http://bit.ly/9Hyrcj