Starbucks CX Point-of-Sale Challenge: Intro

I am not a coffee drinker, but I generally like the Starbucks brand from the business development and the tenant-patron perspectives. As we know, three things matter in legacy retail ecosystems – location, location, and location. Starbucks has done exceptionally well from that standpoint: it has all the right locations to lure you inside. But when it comes to its tenant and customer experience, there may be room for improvement. I was “there” to see Starbucks become an American landmark of the worldwide coffee culture. Even if you are not in love with Starbucks’ coffee, chances are that you go to a Starbucks store every now and then – to use the free internet, to buy a bottle of water, to meet with a colleague, or just because your friends decided to meet there before going to a concert. What can go wrong at a Starbucks in terms of tenant experience and retail customer experience? Or for that matter, how could you improve Starbucks point-of-sale systems to improve its overall CX and its global customer success?

The problem at hand has to do with ordering frozen Starbucks items such as sandwiches, wraps and quiches – not the ones that sit in the public-facing cooler, but the ones shown on the display behind glass and require a barista or a point-of-sale clerk to get one from somewhere behind the counter. When your in-store interaction takes place early in the morning, all is peachy because everything is in stock. But shortly after 10am, this changes, at which point inventories dwindle and the main way to find out if what you want is in stock is to get the clerk to shout across the room to ask someone else or to leave the register, walk over to the refrigerator, open the door, let some warm air inside, dig through several shelves of items to see if your item is physically present and, finally, come back and complete the order. How does this affect Starbucks customer experience? And how does Starbucks need to change this model if it is serious about selling you a great lunch or dinner? And for that matter, is Starbucks really competing with Mickey D’s for your lunch or dinner burger dollars?

And finally, CX aside, can we financially justify making tweaks to Starbucks point-of-sale systems to improve inventory tracking? Let’s talk about these fun things. And for those of you who share my respect for the Starbucks brand, let’s hope that the company is already working on a reliable fix.

Really? Starbucks v. McDonalds: a New Perspective

Let’s get the obvious out of the way: whether Starbucks strategic business executives are willing to admit it or not, Starbucks is slowly but surely moving into the fast-food business – presumably the fancier end of the spectrum thereof, but still – and is competing with the others in this domain. Let’s face it: the introduction of Starbucks food items beyond their traditional pastries was a strategic move intended to get more customers to spend more money at Starbucks – money that they otherwise would spend on a Big Mac or on a Spicy Chicken Sandwich and some Curly Fries from Jack in the Box. This may sound blunt, but in marketing and economics, Starbucks would be called a “substitute good” for McDonalds, for example.

There are good signs that Starbucks wants your daily meal allowances. One is an increase in inventory; check. Another is an increase in variety; check. Another is an increase in freshness and availability of food warming equipment; check. Finally, there should be a trend toward larger portions within any category, such as larger sandwiches and cookies; check – for example, the Starbucks biscotti went from 90 calories to about 200 calories, while their average sandwich size grew from under 400 calories in 2014 to over 550 calories in 2018.

With that in mind, I would want to see Starbucks get better at handling its orders and managing its inventory. But notice what happens when you order a sandwich or a pie that’s not in stock the next time you are at the drive-through intercom or at the counter of a well-established food chain store (e.g., McDonalds): immediately, the point-of-sale clerk will tell you – without a shadow of a doubt – that the product is out of stock. And if they fail, they will certainly tell you at some point before they actually take your money at the pickup window. Logical? You bet it is. It is easy and simple – because the McDonalds point-of-sale user interface, for example, tells the clerk how many sandwiches they have in stock (whoa, you can track that?); and the only time the clerk needs to physically go back to the kitchen to check stock is when the stock quantity on the screen is 3 units or less. That’s how Starbucks competition does it. Enough said. Now, back to the topic.

Starbucks Customer Experience: Worst Case Scenario

From the customer experience perspective, there is only one thing worse inside a Starbucks store than having an item on the menu but not having it in stock: that “thing” is having the item on the menu, processing the customer’s order, taking the money from the customer, making him or her wait for a minute or two, and then telling that customer that the item is out of stock and having to issue a refund or to get the customer to change his/her order to another item (which, by the way, is technically known as ‘Bait and Switch’ and is – well, sorry Starbucks! – technically illegal in every state and in many countries across the world. This is how we did it in the 20th century, and I can’t think of any logistical or strategic reason to keep doing it in today’s age of technology.

Starbucks Customer Experience (CX) Problem Defined

Clearly, this discussion is not about basic issues that can affect just-about any coffee shop – e.g., a broken espresso machine, a clerk who forgets to write ‘decaf’ on your cup or to wash hands after using the bathroom. We are talking about a Starbucks point-of-sale clerk who takes your money for a refrigerated item that is stored away from the clerk’s counter, gives you a receipt, tells you to have a nice day, and then (or I should say “and only then”), a minute or two later, another person from behind the counter proclaims that the item you ordered is not in stock and offers you a refund or a substitute item. Apart from all practical inferences, you feel awkward; the people standing in line and observing this also feel awkward; likely (and hopefully), at least one person behind the counter also feels awkward. Are you OK with this customer experience? But wait – let’s be reasonable and give them some slack: Starbucks has just started selling sandwiches and wraps, and it must be OK that they still haven’t polished their act. Or is it? Are you aware that Starbucks started selling sandwiches over 10 years ago?

Let’s rephrase: Starbucks employs hundreds of business analysts, engineers, as well as customer experience and user experience specialists working day and night to make sure that its retail point-of-sale systems are usable and to make sure that your next Starbucks visit is nothing short of awesome, but none of these people understands the devastating effects of poor customer experience on the company’s performance. Already then. Am I missing something?

Starbucks CX, Man-hours… and My Own Story

I have been buying the Starbucks Artisan Sandwiches since their debut circa 2008 until current time. They used to be small 300-to-400-calorie sandwiches but are now becoming exceedingly bigger (450-600 calories), as Starbucks is taking strides toward competing in the fast-food market (more about that below); to me these sandwiches represent a quick, light lunch, which is what you need when you travel a lot. So, during nine consecutive months in 2017, I tracked my Starbucks visits, with an average of 7.5 Starbucks visits per month. My statistics show that, on average, 32% of the time the sandwich I ordered was out of stock, which is OK, technically, since my favorite sandwich is a popular one and since I always order it after 11am. But the process of finding out that my sandwich is out of stock is often more painful that it should be.

Namely, there are three types of behaviors that I have experienced from Starbucks staff when ordering my refrigerated sandwiches after 11am (the “beyond-breakfast” time). First, about 26% of the time, the point-of-sale clerk didn’t check the inventory before taking my money, but I got lucky because my sandwich was in stock; so far so good. Second, about 62% of the time, the clerk personally walked to the fridge to check the sandwich inventory or shouted across the bar to ask someone else to check inventory prior to taking payment (which obviously had a negative impact on my experience as well as on the experience of people in line behind me, even when the sandwich I ordered turned out to be in stock, let alone when it was not). Finally, the remaining 12% of the time I paid for my sandwich just to find out a minute or two later that it was out of stock.

During the same nine months, the same thing happened across over 20 thousand USA Starbucks stores, each of which sells an average of well over 50 different frozen or refrigerated sandwiches items per day (and we are not counting other refrigerated perishable items – just sandwiches). Every time a sandwich like mine is ordered after the morning rush, the clerk knows that inventory may be zero or close to zero and is supposed to shout across the store and/or walk over to the fridge to let some warm air inside and to check stock. That should be 270 MILLION screams across the bar and/or 270 MILLION walks to the fridge prior to taking sandwich orders in nine months… plus, in roughly one out of every eight and a half orders – the clerk who took the order without checking stock had to apologize to the customer, explain that the sandwich is not in stock, and then issue a refund and/or offer a different sandwich to the frustrated customer.

Let’s put this in perspective: if every scream and every walk to the fridge costs Starbucks just five pennies, we are talking about $13.5 million dollars in nine months. Now, combine that with the bad experience for the aggravated customers at least 12% of the time (which is really much more than that – because let’s face it: standing in front of the register while the point-of-sale clerk is dancing behind the bar for 10-15 seconds to find out if your sandwich is in stock isn’t necessarily a great experience, which also translates into an indirect cost to the company). And finally, how about the credit card transaction fees, the time it takes to talk with the customer, to process the refund, and in some cases to give the customer a pricier sandwich in exchange for the one he/she ordered? Should Starbucks care? Should Starbucks shareholders care? Should Starbucks fans care?

Customer Experience: a Function of the Critical Path

The Critical Path in any business process is the shortest possible path for completing a process, operation or a transaction. For instance, the length of the Critical Path for processing an order for a sandwich can be represented by a timeline, where over 80% of all single-item sandwich orders take from 40-55 seconds. From the standpoint of Business Process Management, Retail Customer Experience, and Point-of-Sale System Usability, an important question to ask would be this: “How can we increase the percentage and/or reduce the time?”

So, the Critical Path is clearly not a constant: depending on how intelligent and how adaptable the business process is, the critical path can improve or get worse multiple times during a single day. For example, what should happen when it is the peak hour of 8am on a Tuesday, the store is full of people, the line to the counter is long, and one of the three baristas didn’t show up for work and another one of the remaining two went to the bathroom? Will the point-of-sale clerk be more likely or less likely to do the let-me-go-to-the-refrigerator-and-check-if-we-have-your-sadwitch routine to complete the order? Or will he/she follow the path of least resistance, disclaim any liability for checking inventory, take your order in sincerest hopes that your item is in stock and assume that his/her job is done? The answer is obvious: in critical situations, human beings always follow the path of least resistance – the path that should never be mistaken for the critical path; and the company that fails to recognize this tends to cause customers pain, simply put. But there is light at the end of the tunnel!

Why People Go to Starbucks: More on CX

Statistics show that a whopping 90% of all people in the USA visit a Starbucks at least once a month. Why do people go to Starbucks? Quality of their coffee can be debated endlessly, but their service level and their product variety and quality are all extraordinarily consistent, and they are just-about everywhere. Plus there is some hip factor in the name and the atmosphere, and there is the free internet. In turn, chances are that even if you don’t regularly consume the products Starbucks sells, you probably go there quite a bit – if not to use the free internet, then to meet a business associate on a neutral ground, or simply to hook up with a friend for a quick handshake – just because their big sign out front serves as an easy street landmark, and because many of their stores have free bathrooms. Every time you visit, you are more likely to spend money there – yes, even if you don’t drink their coffee. In fact, a 2015 survey shows that over 70% of those who never buy food or drink at Starbucks still go there at least once a year to buy a gift card or a trinket for someone they care about. In other words, Starbucks is more than a retail store: it is a fully integrated social hub. This brings me to my next point: it is no accident that Starbucks is selling more and more food items.

Starbucks Customer Experience Wake-Up Call

The levels of business analysis and user research needed to define the requirements for a retail point-of-sale system that will track inventory of the items you sell every day are minimal. The level of secondary customer experience research and/or marketing research needed to understand how others in the retail industry track inventories is rudimentary. Also rudimentary is the level of competitor research required to understand how other people selling pre-heated sandwiches track their inventories. So then, what are those hundreds of business analysts, engineers, customer experience specialists and point-of-sale user experience analysts and UI designers at Starbucks working on day and night? Beats me. My hope is that they read this post – because I dig Starbucks and believe they can do much better.

Customer Experience and Tenant Experience are certainly a science, but their goal, in any context, is quite common-sense and straightforward – i.e., provide a usable point-of-sale system and a practical customer-employee or tenant-patron interaction protocol so as to maximize process efficiency and customer satisfaction. From the standpoint of selling sandwiches, this means one simple thing that Starbucks for some reason doesn’t do as of the date this article is published – tracking your inventory and establishing a policy that would not require a point-of-sale clerk to yell, dance, jump, roll, crawl, run or open the fridge door to check inventory before taking money from a customer for a sandwich that has a relatively high probability of being out of stock.
 

The post Zoomout: Starbucks to Sell Burgers? A Retail CX View appeared first on HyperAbsolute: Business Ecosystem Blog by Sander Nizni.

Simple products break less

In working with engineers of all kinds, whenever my modest inputs are required to help ship better products, I like to say this: “Let’s make this feature work like a drum!” This expression is not my own – I “inherited” it from a good front-end developer friend, but it represents a principle in product design that I follow (more on that later). And believe it or not, it all started with cars and drums and LSD… as in Lean Software Development. Since we happen to be humans (even the geekiest of us), it often helps to remember why simplicity is the mother of genius – because simple things break less. This notion is at the core of great products and customer experiences.

A Little history: Hardware vs. Software

I take interest in precision engineering and love to study complex devices, including telescopes, watches, and other mechanisms. Naturally, I also have worked in digital design and industrial design. Many will argue that physical objects and devices are more difficult and expensive to develop, and so it may be unfair to compare those to software in terms of approaches to measuring usability and customer satisfaction. But I say that software and hardware are identical from the product development, usability, and customer experience perspectives. This is because

• both are designed for humans;
• both are designed to serve a specific need or to solve a specific problem;
• both can be expensive to develop and expensive to market;
• both can break;
• both are less likely to break when they have fewer moving parts.

From Toyota to LSD, to Agile

Did you know that the hip word “lean” goes all the way back to Korea over 60 years ago? To be exact, in 1947, Chung Ju-Yung founded Hyundai Group Companies and then dedicated the next 50 years of his life to turning Hyundai into a global conglomerate with over 150 thousand employees. Ju-Yung, whom I once had the pleasure of meeting in Seoul, survived and prospered not because he had a rich grandfather but because Hyundai was the first to use the so-called “lean manufacturing practices,” which helped the company develop amazing economies of scope and scale, starting with the manufacturing construction (its core industrial business) and about 40 years later leading to cool things like my Hyundai Genesis Coupe or your Hyundai widescreen display.

More specifically, lean manufacturing practices have their origins in the so-called Just-in-Time (or JIT) inventory control system – a production strategy that strives to improve returns on investment by reducing in-process inventories and the associated carrying costs. By mid 1950′s, Toyota went on to “adopt” the JIT system, when Taiichi Ohno and Eiji Toyoda developed what was then called the Toyota Production System, or TPS. In turn, because Toyota officially adopted and publicized the approach, it is also historically credited for the lean practices in manufacturing, albeit incorrectly.

A few decades later, in 2001, Kent Beck studied TPS inside-out and wrote what is known as the awesome Agile Manifesto, which Mary and Tom Poppendieck dutifully and wonderfully transposed into what most people in the world of manufacturing (and software) know today as Lean Software Development – a concept that was popularized by the book with the same title, which the Poppendiecks published in 2003.

More about Lean

The textbook – and the Wikipedia – definition of Lean Software Development is this: LSD is a translation of lean manufacturing and lean IT principles and practices to the software development domain. Again, the translation started with the original (be it the chicken or the egg), and the original had little to do with software as we know it. In other words, the supposed “break” between software and hardware in the context of usability and customer experience – whether it be in the context of software development or car manufacturing or anything in-between – is superficial and purely historical. Now, for the record, lean development – or LSD specifically – can be summarized by seven principles that, according to Wikipedia, are “very close in concept” to their manufacturing counterparts (listed here in the order of importance):

• Eliminate waste
• Build integrity in
• Amplify learning
• Decide as late as possible
• Deliver as fast as possible
• Empower the team
• See the whole

How does a drum play into this? (pun intended)

The lean approach to product development, which – as we now know – started with new industrial manufacturing trends decades ago, is about simplicity. Not the kind of simplicity that differentiates a plain-text editor from Microsoft Word, but the kind that separates a drum from, say, a violin or an electronic piano or keyboard in terms of complexity.

A typical piano keyboard is a nightmare from the standpoint of lean manufacturing. It has hundreds of microchips and dozens of hardware buttons and contains a vast amount of computing capacity that translates human inputs into music, which – mind you – can only happen with speakers and only when electrical current is present. A common drum, on the other hand, has only a couple of parts and will play sounds anytime and anywhere. You get the idea: a drum is simple, while an electronic piano is not.

Back to Software

To transpose an electronic piano into the product development domain, it has many complex parts that come at a great cost. Although these parts provide a great utility, they make the underlying product less dependable, more prone to breakage and malfunctions, and more difficult to learn. The same naturally applies to software products: beyond a certain point in development, many products become uncontrollably complex and result in a slew of features that a vast number of users – including many power users – can’t appreciate, which in turn increases costs, increases break points, and potentially lowers product usability and customer satisfaction. Practically speaking, there is something known as the Law of Diminishing Marginal Returns – a fundamental economic principle, which is defined as the decrease in the marginal (incremental) output of a production process as the amount of a single factor of production is incrementally increased, while the amounts of all other factors of production stay constant.

A classic example is adding more workers to a job, such as assembling a car on a factory floor: at some point, adding more workers causes problems such as workers getting in each other’s way or frequently finding themselves waiting for access to a part. In all of these processes, producing one more unit of output per unit of time will eventually cost increasingly more, due to inputs being used less and less effectively. Eventually, by increasing the product’s function you may actually be increasing its cost to a point of incurring an operating loss, directly or indirectly.

The same applies to software. In my mind, a good practical example is Skype, which I find to be a rather invasive application that I’d love to run on my MacBook Pro all the time… but choose not to because it consumes more system resources than I am willing to give up in exchange for the privilege of being easily accessible to my international colleagues.

With that in mind, I like to say – as one of my good colleagues taught me in 2006 – that all good products must start out as drum and not as a keyboard, while most products don’t ever need to turn into a keyboard. So, don’t let my odd metaphor confuse you when you hear these words from me while discussing an app, a website or a software project. For at the root of every successful digital product there lies a simple principle: if you are going to make an electronic piano, be sure that you have the advertising budget and the positioning strategy to market this baby to the people who will appreciate it. Otherwise, keep your product simple and don’t add things to it just because they are “nice to have.” The thought that “premature optimization is the root of all evil” (courtesy of Donald Knuth) also comes to mind here.

And every time you feel like questioning this logic, play with an Apple device to remind yourself that successful products don’t have to be complex, nor do they have to please everyone. Speaking of successful products that can be improved, I have written a related post about sealed batteries in Apple devices – check it out.

Do you want to continue this discussion? Message me on Twitter to start a conversation.
 

The post Business and Beyond: Toyota, Drums, and Customer Experience (a Product Development Lifecycle Whitepaper) appeared first on HyperAbsolute: Business Ecosystem Blog by Sander Nizni.

Introduction: Permanent vs. Removable Batteries

Is usability of portable devices better when their batteries can be removed on the fly? Definitely. As a business developer who has spent countless months on the road in my career, I am yet to find a way to justify preferring a portable power bank over a simple, removable battery. Still, there are many schools of thought on this topic – both regarding Apple’s products specifically and regarding product strategy in general. There are five reasons device manufacturers do this, and there are three why they shouldn’t. This is not a numbers game, but I feel in this case 3>5. Let’s explore the pros and the cons of device usability in the context of fixed – or permanent – batteries in portable devices.

Background

I walked into a cafe in Los Angeles this morning and needed to urgently get online for a Skype call with an associate in Canada: I was lucky enough to sport a tiny table in the corner, but the nearest power outlet was “half a wall” away. I like my Apple MacBook Pro, but because my fixed battery in it was at 8 percent, I had no choice but to use my Asus PC – because that one comes with a removable clip-on battery, and I always carry a spare – and sometimes two – with me. What’s the logic behind disallowing a user to take out a dead battery and replace it with a charged one on the spot instead of forcing him/her to frantically search for the nearest power outlet to recharge the device? Better yet, why am I required to make two trips to the Apple store just to change a dead battery?

Pros (1/5): User-to-Brand Marriage | “The Big One”

I could not find better words to describe the phenomenon: by permanently sealing your device, Apple can virtually guarantee that you will go to an Apple store when your battery dies. And on that special day, something magical happens: you talk to a Genius at the Genius Bar. And one of the first things that any respectable Genius will tell you is that – hey – your device is about 3 years old, and perhaps it’s time for you to look around and to see if you should pick another one! You may or may not buy anything on that day, but you will certainly spend at least 10 minutes talking to someone who knows a lot more about Apple’s product line, and in turn you will learn a thing or two.

As a result, you will feel connected to your technology. While at it, you may buy an extra charger or a software upgrade, play with (and appreciate) a new iPad, or simply look around and see some happy faces of other Apple shoppers and users. Whatever you do, this battery replacement “adventure” will be associated with at least two physical trips to your local Apple store – usually 24 hours apart – and will result in keeping you emotionally “married” to your growing arsenal of Apple products and the culture behind it. Amen.

Can you argue against this? Not really, unless you are an educated consumer who is always researching and following trends and technology news. If you are this kind of a guy or a gal – i.e., if you know exactly what technology you need and what you will buy next without talking to a so-called genius, then this process feels like nothing more than a marketing gimmick. But one thing is clear if you are this type of person: you are the narrow minority, and you are probably a computer geek. Now, isn’t it sad that the people who can help Apple’s product strategy the most are the same people whom Apple chooses to ignore in their Market Segmentation strategy? I think it is.

Pros (2/5): Size and Weight Factors

Devices with fixed batteries tend to be smaller and lighter. A removable rugged-shell laptop battery equipped with metal-to-metal terminals weights 2-3 ounces more, while the internal battery bay and the removable door on the back cover can also add 2-4 ounces. Further, the internal space required to accommodate the replaceable battery inside a laptop can add some overall girth to the device.

Still, considering today’s sophisticated plastics and precision molds available to every serious manufacturer, the overall effect of having a replaceable battery bay on the device’s size and weight is negligible.

Pros (3/5): Product integrity

It is easily argued that if a device is permanently sealed, the user is less likely to damage it accidentally while replacing the battery – either due to improper mechanical manipulation or due to using a wrong battery. Similarly, if the device cannot be easily opened, the user is simply less likely to tamper or “experiment” with its internal components, thereby making it less likely that the device will be broken.

From this perspective, it is rather practical for all manufacturers to use permanent batteries. However, it is not difficult to seal the internal components with a sub-cover to ensure that the “guts” of the device are inaccessible when the main back cover is removed for battery replacement.

Pros (4/5): Service Income

When the time comes to replace the permanent battery in a sealed device, the user generally has no choice but to resort to the manufacturer’s recommended service channel to install the new battery, which in turn ensures that the manufacturer will enjoy the income from the sale of a new battery, as well as from the fees charged for installation and in many cases for handling and shipping. Although some users will venture to buy OEM units and to replace the battery by following instructional YouTube videos, most users will follow the path of least resistance and will turn to an authorized service provider to get the job done, as I did when my MacBook Pro battery weathered away after 2.5 years: I went to the nearest Apple store, paid $130 plus tax, and relinquished my MacBook for 24 hours into the hands of people who took about three minutes to remove the eight screws on the back cover, to replace the battery, and to screw the back cover onto its place.

The argument against this is obvious. The same logic does not apply to all manufacturers in the same way, but Apple’s example is a classic. Namely, Apple enjoys about $50 in net profit from replacing your MacBook battery. The average useful life of a MacBook is under 6 years, while an average battery works for 3 years. This means that Apple gets to enjoy this “benefit” only once in the lifetime of a typical device. The same applies to iPhones. The question comes naturally: Is Apple really preoccupied with making an extra $50 from your device? Of course not: Apple notebooks are already 30%+ more expensive than PC-based systems of similar configuration, and it can easily price every one of them about $50 higher and is unlikely to suffer a notable reduction in demand – that’s Elasticity of Demand 101. Further, the marginal cost of adding a removable back cover onto MacBooks is miniscule – we are talking $10-15 dollar difference in cost of manufacturing per notebook. This cost is lower for iPhones – under $10 per device.

Pros (5/5): Cost Savings

It is clear that a device with non-removable back cover and a permanent battery is cheaper to manufacture. The argument against this is in plain sight: the savings are marginal, as referenced earlier, especially when these savings come at the expense of seriously hurting the device’s usability.

Cons (1/3): Users in Pain are Unhappy Users

As with my Skype call this morning, I often catch myself giving the manufacturers of devices with permanent batteries unspeakable names. On a plane, at a picnic, in a hotel or a coffee shop, and elsewhere away from my home and office, I don’t like having to look for a power outlet when my battery is near the zero mark. And even when there is an outlet nearby, no device can be charged instantly, and we often don’t have the time to sit and wait until the indicator reaches at least 25 percent, let alone 100. For another example, last week I had to beg someone to change seats with me on a flight to London because the power outlet near me was broken and I needed to use my MacBook Pro during the flight. What a kluster! For this reason, I – being a geek – dislike my MacBook Pro and my Google phone. And if you are a geek too, you know exactly how I feel. We hate worrying about our battery life, and people like us would rather carry an extra battery around. And when we can’t, we don’t exactly feel “emotionally connected” to the manufacturer, do we? …because we know that the manufacturer’s priorities are not in line with our needs.

I feel a similar issue is holding back electric car manufacturers from selling more cars, albeit for a different reason. Namely, the fact that batteries in electric cars take a long time to recharge prevents many car owners from switching to 100% electric vehicles. As a Tesla owner, I would much rather prefer to drive up to the power station and replace my battery with a charged one instead of sitting there for half an hour while my fixed battery is recharged. Naturally, there is simply no technical infrastructure to make this business model feasible at this time, but it clearly represents a better long-run solution in terms of usability.

Cons (2/3): Quick Disconnect

Like it or not, there are times when you just need to pull your battery out to save the notebook. The same applies to mobile phones and other portable devices. Let’s say your notebook is frozen (figuratively speaking) and started overheating (literally). There is a quick fix: you press and hold the power button to turn it off. But if that doesn’t work, your only recourse is to immediately remove the battery. But if your battery is sealed behind 8 screws on the back cover, you are… screwed.

The photo here shows exactly what happened to me: if I had been able to remove the battery, I possibly would not have ruined the laptop, or at least the damage would have been less severe. Is it fair to say that this happens so seldom that this use case doesn’t need to be addressed? Good question. Apple will argue that it’s very fair. But I will kick it up another notch and ask this: what if this battery incident also triggered an office fire that killed half a dozen people and destroyed, say, nineteen million dollars worth of equipment and other property? I think this is a no-brainer: this is a safety issue that must be addressed.

Cons (3/3): Battery not required

Did it occur to anyone that you don’t need to use a battery to work on your laptop? That’s right, you can plug it into a UPS and work just fine, while your battery rests, awaiting the time when you actually need to work without a power outlet. But when the battery is fixed, it is constantly charging… and slowly weathering away, even though you are not really using it. Isn’t it sad? You can be using your notebook strictly within the limits of your desk and be constantly plugged in, but about 3 years later, your battery will still be dead or near-dead. Thoughts to share? For starters, try thinking about the effects of this on the environment of Planet Earth.

Conclusions and Solutions

Manufacturers can find practical ways to stay in touch with their clients for marketing purposes, besides crippling their devices and limiting their practical applications just to lure the users back into the store down the road for insuring the brand’s uninterrupted relationship with its patrons and for maximizing the chances that the user will continue using the same brand. I feel this is exactly what Apple is doing. This technique only works effectively for uneducated, “sheepish” users, or otherwise for non-power users. Most mobile device manufacturers are making sealed devices for the other reasons, which were discussed above. But clearly, with only a little bit of bona fide effort, every manufacturer can comfortably afford to reward its users with the pleasure of not being dependent on free electricity in Starbucks shops around the city to keep their devices running on the go.

To be constructive, I propose this elegant solution, which should work wonderfully for Apple:

1. Equip all notebook computers with replaceable battery modules, which will cost Apple under $15 per unit.
2. Sell all notebooks for $100 more ($15 to offset the cost of manufacturing, plus $60 for the cost of the battery plus a $25 premium for Apple’s margin) and offer all users one free in-store battery exchange when the original battery dies.

This simple approach

• will keep power users happy;
• will impress non-power users;
• will reduce battery utilization in desktop mode;
• will ensure that non-power users return to the store in 2-3 years; and
• will indirectly reduce Apple’s costs in connection with older batteries – because a user whose battery is only year old, for example, will be less likely to complain about the battery’s short service life if he/she receives a new one on demand – without having to pay for it and with no questions asked.

Do you want to talk about this? Do you know of a more elegant solution? Please message me to start a conversation.
 

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Introduction: Wireframing and Prototyping

Wireframes and prototypes – as well as software used for wireframing and prototyping – make the process of creating an app, a website or any software or hardware product notably easier – by simplifying the product and allowing all involved in its development to focus on the product’s functions and user interactivity. Everyone in the production team – from stakeholders and information architects to project managers and quality assurance personnel – needs to understand how an application or website will work and what it is intended to do. For that purpose, wireframing and prototyping are not synonyms, technically speaking. Let’s look at their differences and similarities.

Wireframes Talk. Prototypes Work.

If you don’t have the time to do five more minutes of dense reading, read this paragraph… and you will know how wireframes are different from prototypes. Simply put, wireframes make a useful (and usually purely visual) representation of what the intended product is designed to do and enable everyone in the team to collaborate in the early stages of product development. Prototypes, on the other hand, take the process further by deploying a simplified “bare-bone model” of the product that often has some simplified functionality attributable to the desired final product (and can be held or manipulated if it is a scaled or unscaled hardware model). Using the words of a wise man (Can I be a wise man today please, mom?), a wireframe talks, while a prototype works. A prototype may work poorly and may have many unsolved corner cases in its look, feel and performance, but it does work! A wireframe doesn’t do that – it simply communicates.

A Semi-Objective Comparison

I feel it is not entirely fair to “compare” prototyping and wireframing: although they overlap quite a bit and are often used as interchangeable terms, they are different in intent. I don’t blame you if you believe that wireframing and prototyping are synonyms. But historically, wireframing has been defined as a very specific and narrow (not meant to sound negatively) spectrum of activities intended to represent the desired product – usually software or a web page; result of wireframing is exactly that – a wireframe, which typically has no testable functions and lacks the features to establish the product’s look-and-feel baseline.

Prototyping, on the other hand, is a deeper representation of the product and often includes a working product model (commonly with use of color and other “feel elements”). Alternatively, with regards to hardware, a prototype means a tangible three-dimensional form that has some functional characteristics of the intended final product. In other words, wireframing – in most working contexts – should be viewed as a simplified subset of the prototyping discipline, or perhaps a blueprint for the prototype.

Lo-Fi vs. Hi-Fi and the Associated Costs

It should be further noted that there is low-fidelity and high-fidelity prototyping. Low-fidelity (lo-fi) prototyping is characterized by a quick and easy translation of high-level design concepts into tangible and testable artefacts. Lo-fi is also known as low-tech, as the means required for such an implementation consist – most of the time – of a mixture of paper, cardboard and post-it notes In the Software Development Life Cycle context, many designers, developers and product managers will agree that wareframes vs. prototypes are like PNG files exported from Balsamiq or Illustrator vs. testable page mockups from Axure.

Whatever the context, a clear advantage of lo-fi prototyping is its relatively low cost and the fact that non-programmers can actively be part of the idea generation process. In contrast, the high-fidelity (hi-fi) prototypes, which are characterized by detailed representation of the design concepts, result in partial or sometimes “complete-but-limited” functionality. The latter, naturally, implies higher costs, both temporal and financial, and necessitates good programming skills to implement. The main advantage of hi-fi, high-tech prototyping is that users can truly interact with the system, as opposed to the sometimes awkward facilitator-driven simulations found in lo-fi prototyping. Obviously, there is a continuum from low to high-fidelity prototyping that usually stretches out from early to late design. This comparison on Wikipedia is an effective attempt to identify the differences between the key prototyping software on the market today.

Does Pixel-Perfect Mean Successful?

Successful products are clearly not just about wireframing and prototyping (if they were, applications would be developed by graphics artists and visual designers). Instead, they include a broad spectrum of tools and approaches to assist teams of designers, strategists, developers, managers and stakeholders in executing projects effectively, including diagramming, modeling, visualization and other processes. Clearly, good wireframes become good prototypes, and then good prototypes become good products. So, you could say that wireframes often precede prototypes, although in the hands of some of the most exceptional designers and engineers wireframing and prototyping are often part of a single unified process – process that is supposed to help the development team define the product’s most efficient roadmap.

At the end of the day, however, one thing is true: over 90 of all new products and services – in all industries, at all times, and on all continents – fail within 2 years. That’s an undisputed statistic that applies to all digital and tangible products as well as to ideas, methods and processes – in all business models… including an equal proportion of products that had pixel-perfect prototypes to begin with (Mom, why doesn’t it make money if it looks so nice?). That said, let’s not forget that sleek-looking wireframes (or prototypes) don’t compensate for lack of proper business analysis. In turn, this is why so many successful products are so ugly-looking, while so few good-looking products are successful. Think about it: does pixel-perfect mean useful or functional or valuable? Not really, unless your goal is to create a work of purely visual art.
 

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Overlooked in usability: aspect ratio conversion

In my years of interacting with screens – computer displays, television sets and proprietary video hardware – of varying sizes and intended uses, I find one factor to have a much bigger role in retail customer experience and in general usability than the title of this post may suggest – aspect ratios. Over 20% of the world is using electronic displays or TV’s with wrong aspect ratio settings, and it turns out that this has deep physiological and psychological effects that affect the users, the patrons (in the landlord-retail context), the product manufacturers, and everyone in the marketing and IT sectors. Should anyone care about this problem? I have done some research to find a few interesting answers.

Background in a Nutshell

It’s paradoxical: a retail store or a sports bar may easily invest over $20,000 into a collection of large high-resolution displays to showcase their products or to entertain patrons, but the screen is often fitted incorrectly into the viewable area of the device, and the images appear distorted, or stretched, resulting in a variety of complex cognitive responses, many of which are subconscious and all of which have a negative effect on the overall experience. What can we do to address these problems? And why is this important for the consumers and retail patrons?

The Problem is Bigger than Meets the Eye

Every time any picture – whether static or dynamic – fails to conform to the conventional model of our everyday dimensional space, our brain is confused, whether we notice it or not. Those of us who sense that the aspect ratio of an image or video is off (this includes virtually all techies and a significant cross-section of regular Bobs and Thelmas) are “officially” annoyed – e.g., when the baseball doesn’t look perfectly round or when Cindy Crawford appears to have put on 20 or so pounds to showcase the new pair of jeans in a short video inside a Levi’s store. Alternatively, those who lack the “visual sensitivity” just keep watching and assume that all is well and seem to experience no immediate discomfort. But all of us are inadvertently forcing our brain into overdrive, and it’s doing us no good.

I have looked into the metrics of user perceptions of static and dynamic picture distortion, as well as their conscious and subconscious responses. One fascinating discovery I have made is that roughly a third of all viewers cannot detect the distortion in the image when the aspect ratio is violated slightly – e.g., when we stretch a widescreen movie vertically by less than 15%. Most amazingly, 97% of all people – the annoyed techies, the unsuspecting ignoramuses with high standards for gadget quality, and everyone else in-between – watching videos with wrong aspect ratio for 30 minutes or longer are about 160% more likely to experience fatigue, headaches, or emotional imbalances.

Research: Physiology of Cognitive Image Conversion

When the image – whether static or dynamic – is slightly distorted (under 15%, in this context), we always perceive and understand 100% of the video content, but our brain must subconsciously work in overdrive to continuously make dimensional adjustments in order to “fit” the edges of the misplaced (or skewed) objects into their intended locations – e.g., when a baseball looks like an egg, the brain has to constantly work to convert your perceived image (an egg-shaped object on the screen) into the contextually intended object (a baseball). In fact, in 2012, a team of geeks somewhere in Sydney conducted a rather cool experiment to learn more about this Cognitive Image Conversion:

1. They picked three unrelated 30-second fragments from three music videos.
2. They made a distorted version of each fragment with a vertical or a horizontal stretch by 25%.
3. They then found 30 subjects – of them all were 25-35 years old, all had IQ scores of 90 to 120, all had college degrees, and all had normal vision (6 of them wore corrective glasses or contact lenses).
4. They then split the 30 people in two groups of 15 subjects and played the same three videos to each subject at 10 times the normal video speed (10x faster), asking each user to describe the videos. The first group watched the videos with the correct aspect ratio (the Control Group), while the second group watched the videos with the distorted aspect ratios (the Test Group). Naturally, members of neither group were warned as to whether their videos would be distorted or not.
5. The results were stunning, but not surprising: 13 of the 15 people in the Control Group (the group that watched the properly sized videos) were able to register a notably greater level of detail (objects and people present, colors, and shapes) in all three videos they watched than their counterparts in the Test Group.
6. The experiment was conducted with relatively small 22-inch (59mm) screens and with large HD TV’s, and the findings were essentially identical.

With that said, imagine how attention spans and the decision making abilities of airline pilots or surgeons, for example, can be affected by using computer or TV displays that fail to show the correct aspect ratios. Enough said.

Implications for Users and for Display Manufacturers

Interestingly, when a static image (i.e., a photo or motionless artwork) is off-aspect, we tend to experience minimal aftereffects – regardless of whether we have noticed the distortion or not. This is because the amount of processing required for the Cognitive Image Conversion is low when there is only one frame in front of you (and thus one frame for the brain to process and convert). But the story is different with motion: at the conventional 32 frames per second in a video, our brains tend to distinctly perceive at least every 5th frame, and when a video feed is distorted, the brain must in turn “continuously loop” – about 6 times per second, to be exact – to convert distorted frames into valid frames. It is no wonder, therefore, that 97% of us are more likely to experience headaches or irritation or other forms of psychological and physiological distress when watching videos with incorrect aspect ratio settings for over 30 minutes.

Now, if you are a TV manufacturer, imagine what happens with people who spend 1-3 hours per day – as many Americans and Europeans do – in front of a TV set: their personalities and their health can be affected by this level of distress quite dramatically. Similarly, if you are a retail tenant or owner who aims for great patron experiences, you are subjecting your customers to pure pain if your screen visualizations are shown with imperfect aspect ratios. Moreover, many people actually recognize that their irritability or headaches or other forms of discomfort ensue after watching the “twisted” TV screen for a while, and then the inevitable happens; they erroneously attribute the effects to the equipment and tell their friends and family this, more or less: there is something wrong with my So-And-So-Brand TV because it gives me headaches; I should have bought the TV made by So-And-So-Brand instead. For the cherry on top, think about your kids playing their games on “the wrong screen” and suffering from the resulting cognitive effects.

Whether it’s 4:3 or 16:9 or anything else, most users don’t know left from right (nor can they do the math) when it comes to setting up their monitors or TV sets correctly. Shouldn’t we try to help them? It’s been over 20 years since the appearance of wide screens, and we are still often confusing the hell out of our valued audiences by failing to give them the tools that would enable them to watch an average of 25 minutes of TV commercials per hour correctly between their silly-little six-minute movie clips!

The solution

Conventional stand-alone computer monitors are a “fair game” as they are configurable by the user from the connected computer. But the manufacturers of television sets have no excuse: they must identify the original broadcast’s aspect ratio (this goes for transmitted signals and for locally wired feeds) and optimize the display in only one of these two equally meaningful ways:

1. Option 1: maximize the viewable screen area (e.g., clip sides of a widescreen image to eliminate black background at the top and the bottom of the screen), or
2. Option 2: preserve the original content to ensure that the entire area of the original video is visible on the screen (e.g., leave the black background on the sides when you are watching an old movie on a wide-screen TV).

Any other options beyond these two should be buried deeply into the menu and must be relatively difficult to change.

Do you want to talk about this? Do you know of a more elegant solution? Message me on Twitter to start a conversation.
 

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Why Product Management

At a recent technology Meetup in San Francisco (which I attended with a friend exclusively for the free doughnuts, but of course), I learned that many aspiring product designers (people in software, in fashion, in real estate, and everyone in-between) would love to explore careers in Product Management but don’t know where to start. This is a natural trend of thought among progressive thinkers in many disciplines, including the IT specifically: those who have mastered a singe technical domain often want to broaden their career horizons by applying their talents and experience in a strategic context, which is in fact how many good product managers are born. In this discussion, I offer my personal insight into the science of Product Management, as well as an extensive list of resources for those who aspire to become product managers.

Background

As a business analyst at heart, but also as someone with experience in managing a wide range of physical and intellectual assets (including SaaS/PaaS products, investment portfolios, inventories, and retail product lines, among others), I have been actively engaged with product managers throughout my career. My personal experience is that the best of the product management folk are people who are good at finding synergies between product design (engineering, usability, data analysis, etc) and product marketing. In the course of my career, I have lived through a good number of business scenarios and have come across a great number of resources that in part shaped me into who I am today.

Product Management in Three Bullet Points

Product Managers aren’t born and aren’t simply trained to become such. Some of the best product managers I have met evolved from engineering or marketing specialists and as a result tend to have blended backgrounds that offer a balance of at least two of the following (in no specific order): (1) marketing skills, (2) data analysis skills, (3) engineering skills, and (4) product design skills. But let’s crystallize Product Management in three manageable bullet points (again, INPO):

1. Product Management Starts with Marketing

Whether you like it or not, product management is “married” to product marketing. So, if you want to be a product manager, you need to understand the principles of marketing. Start with learning about the “4 Ps of Marketing” – Product, Pricing, Promotion and Placement.

To start, accept one fact: nine out of ten good-looking and perfectly functional products fail – usually within a couple of months after deployment… because they are not marketed properly; this applies to shoelaces and to space rockets and to everything in-between. Moreover, two out of three marketable, successful products happen to be not-so-good-looking and don’t do “everything” – because successful products are good at reaching and connecting with (targeting) their audience and addressing that audience’s needs. A product can target more than one audience (e.g., college students vs. veterans vs. divorced females with two or more children), but it doesn’t have to target more than one audience in order to be successful! To identify your target audience (also known as “target market”), you perform a market segmentation analysis and a competitor analysis, and you define a positioning strategy, among other things.

As a result, in managing a product, you don’t only develop and iterate it – as that way you would be either a project manager or a product developer or designer. Instead, you look for (and hopefully find) ways to market the product effectively to your target audience. Long story short, if you want to be a successful product manager, you absolutely have to understand marketing: know your audience, know your competition, and know how to connect your product’s value offering to your audience’s needs without over-developing or prematurely optimizing the product, as – love it or hate it – “premature optimization is the root of all evil” (Donald Knuth).

2. Evangelize the Product

This one is obvious: you must know what your product or service does, and you must know its strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats (SWOT analysis), as well as its competitive advantages (that is/are sustainable, hopefully); this applies whether you are making and selling floor tiles or a software platform to manage real estate rental properties. And finally, you must understand how your product fits in your overall marketing strategy. But how do you “really” evangelize it? You take responsibility: you become the voice of the customer/user and you take pride in ensuring that your product does what it is supposed to; and you make solid, systemic effort to grow your user base and to understand (and correct) the pain points of your existing user/customer base, thereby reducing churn and contributing to your brand’s customer success and loyalty.

You need to know the product inside out, like the back of your hand. And you need to be prepared to defend it with arguments and examples that can effectively dissolve any doubt in your target audience’s mind that your product is the best.

In other words, you must “own” your product and you must (really) believe in it – evangelize it inside your head, on paper, at trade shows, in your promotional materials, in face-to-face interaction with prospects and clients, as well as when working with engineers, designers, business developers, and stakeholders in your company to deploy and iterate the product.

3. Be a specialist in at least two fields

That’s right. No one likes product managers that have minimal or no technical skills. If you have zero technical skills but want to be in charge and have a classic Type A personality, become a salesperson. But if you want the responsibility of managing the product’s strategy, you need to be technical.

My personal background includes business development, product design and marketing, investment analysis, software development, and real estate brokerage skills, plus a college degree in marketing, extensive experience in project management (including agile/scrum), and training in process design and BPM (business process management). It also helps that I know quality assurance and testing routines, data analysis, and economic analysis. For me, managing a product is a natural way of applying my diverse skills to contribute to my team’s performance and to customer success.

If you have at least two technical skills (for instance, data analysis and interaction design, or finance and visual design) and understand marketing, you can be an effective cross-functional player – capable of leading products to success by productively collaborating with other team members in your organization – i.e., you will “speak” their language, understand their needs, and communicate your needs to them in order to successfully design, deploy, improve and promote your product(s) together.

Learning About Product Management

Few accredited colleges offer degree programs in product management. Further, self-study materials are rather limited due to the young age of the product management discipline – particularly in the digital domain. Where does this leave you if you are eager to become a hot product manager but have never managed a product? This is the easy part. If you are in fact passionate about product management, I can offer you these educational resources to help you become an ace of product leadership.

The list is organized in sections sorted in ascending order by complexity. Enjoy.

Product Management 101: What is Product Management?

• Product Manager You Are… – Mat Balez
• What Product Management is Not – Marty Cagan
• PM at Microsoft – Steven Sinofsky
• What exactly is a Product Manager? – Martin Eriksonn
• What is Product Management? / Slideshare version – Sachin Rekhi
• Product Management vs. Product Marketing – Marty Cagan
• Use your Product Powers for Good – Bruce McCarthy
• A Product Manager’s Job – Josh Elman
• Product Managers: Who are these ‘mini-CEOs’ and what do they do? – Ken Yeung

Product Management 102: The Philosophy of Product Managers

• The DNA of Product Management – Hunter Walk
• 3 Skillsets for PM Success – Kenton Kivetsu
• How to hire a Product Manager – Kenneth Norton
• Ode to a Non Technical Product Manager – Hunter Walk
• Should nice people be Product Managers – Alex Pukinskis

Product Management 103: Product Management as a Career Path

• How do I become a Product Manager? – Multiple authors
• So You Want to Manage a Product – Rohini Viba
• The 4 ways to break into Product Management – Jackie Bavaro
• 12 things Product Managers should do in their first 30 Days – Kenneth Norton
• 4 mistakes new Product Managers make – Matt Schnitt
• Do Product Managers really need a background in CS – Jackie Bavaro
• Starting and maintaining a career in Product Management
• Cracking the PM Interview
• PM Interview Questions

Product Management 104: Product Development

• How to build great products – Slava Akhmechet
• Make things as simple as possible but not simpler – Adam Nash
• 10 essential steps to create products that customer love – Laurence McCahill
• The power of the perfect slice – Alastair Lee
• How to build products users love – Kevin Hale
• Ten principles on the journey to building great products – Avid Larizadeh
• Quality is not a tradeoff – Julie Zhuo

Product Management 105: Advanced Practices

• Listen to customers – Kenneth Norton
• The customer is always right. Except when they aren’t – Wade Foster
• Your MVP is about discovery not product – Kevin Dewalt
• Beginning Customer Development – Kevin Dewalt
• How do Customer Development and Product Management fit together – Cindy Alvarez
• The 4 steps to the Epiphany – Steve Blank
• How to structure and get the most out of customer development interviews – Jason Evanish

Product Management 106: Working for Requirements

• The end of requirements – Marty Cagan
• Requirements are not – Marty Cagan
• Feed the beast – Marty Cagan
• Painless functional specifications – Joel Spolsky

Product Management 107: Planning, Strategy and Roadmapping

• You don’t need a product roadmap – David Heinemeier Hansson
• The opportunity backlog – Marty Cagan
• The dirty dozen roadmap roadblocks – Bruce McCarthy
• The pyramid model & what it means for PM focus – Kenton Kivetsu
• How am I going to move my product forward today – Sachin Rekhi
• The seven deadly sins of product planning – Marty Cagan
• Magical thinking and the zero-sum roadmap – Rich Mironov
• Drop feature-based product roadmaps – Teresa Torres
• The inconvenient truth about product – Marty Cagan
• Product strategy means saying no – Des Traynor
• Product priorities start with strategic goals – Bruce McCarthy
• Software Inventory – Joel Spolsky
• What are the best ways to prioritize a list of product features – Ian McAllister
• Before you plan your product roadmap – Des Traynor
• Rodmaps focus on vision benefits, not features – Bruce McCarthy
• The one cost engineers and Product Managers don’t consider – Kris Gale
• Guide to Product Planning: Three Feature Buckets – Adam Nash
• Product Management Hierarchy of Needs – Joe Dempsey

Product Management 108: Collaborating with Developers, Engineers and Designers

• 5 things Product Managers wish they could tell developers – Brandon Satrom
• How to work with PMs – Julie Zhuo
• Peopleware – Tom DeMarco
• Team Geek – Brian Fitzpatrick
• How to work with designers – Julie Zhuo
• How to work with engineers – Julie Zhuo
• How to work with software engineers – Kenneth Norton
• The Iceberg Secret, revealed – Joel Spolsky
• Leading cross-functional teams – Kenneth Norton
• The care and feeding of software engineers – Nicholas C. Zakas
• The ten project management commandments – Slava Akhmechet
• Nerds, get the Product Management you deserve – Jeff Enderwick
• Joel on Software – Joel Spolsky

Product Management 109: Living for Feedback

• Thirty percent feedback – Jason Freedman
• How to run a design critique – Scott Berkun
• You won’t regret positive feedback – Zack Holman

Product Management 110: Shipping Win-Win Deliverables

• Always be defining success – Jackie Bavaro
• The only metric that matters – Josh Elman
• The lost art of the soft launch – Wade Foster
• The Mythical Man-Month – Frederick Brooks
• The blind Product Manager – Paul Adams
• Great product leaders win games – Adam Nash
• How to deliver more software projects on time – Mark Suster
• Shipping beats perfection explained – Ben Kamens
• Measure twice, cut once – Rick Klau

Product Management 111: Building Solid Product Management Teams

• Product organizational structure – Marty Cagan
• Enter the Matrix – Organizing Product Management – Mark Tattersall
• Good product team, bad product team – Marty Cagan

Product Management 112: Becoming a Guru

• Stakeholder Management – Marty Cagan
• Managing Up – Marty Cagan
• Top hacks from a PM behind two of tech’s hottest products – Todd Jackson
• Bad Managers Talk, Good Managers Write – Walter Chen
• Court scribe or Hand of the King – Bruce McCarthy
• Influence without authority – Sachin Rekhi
• Management clichés that work – Steven Sinofsky

Product Management 113: Becoming a Monster

• Be a great product leader – Adam Nash
• How a football coach taught me to product manage like a boss – Mike Su
• How to hire a Product Manager – Kenneth Norton
• Top 10 product leadership lessons – Adam Nash
• What distinguishes the top 1% of Product Managers from the top 10%? – MacAllister Ian
  
• Good Product Manager, Bad Product Manager – Ben Horowitz
• What innate traits do great internet product leaders share? – Chris Wetherelle
• Musings on Product Management – Mike Sukmanovsky
• Hiring a great product leader – Sutha Kamal

Do you want to talk about this topic? Message me on Twitter to start a conversation.
 
Service Sponsor of this Article: Master Mobile Notary (LA)
 

The post Selling Rocket Engines? Houses? Twinkies? Do better as a Product Manager! appeared first on HyperAbsolute: Business Ecosystem Blog by Sander Nizni.

Is Afghanistan at the top of your country list?

Are your users annoyed because the dropdown country list on your registration page starts with Afghanistan? They may be… do your research! And if they are, is this problem worth solving? The answer is far from obvious. And it has nothing to do with the stigma of “George Bush vs. Osama bin Laden.” Let’s start with Usability 101: about 6% of the 31-million Afghanistan population use the internet: that’s under 2 million… most of whom don’t speak English and/or don’t care about your site. Sorry for bluntness, but this is a business discussion. So, should a typical social networking hub or a retail site place Afghanistan at the top of the list? Or should it force its primary target markets (e.g, USA) to the top of the list?

Indeed, Afghanistan happens to be the first country in the world, alphabetically speaking. Still, many sites – especially those whose primary market segment is defined as either “USA audience” or “English speakers” – force the United States and/or United Kingdom to the top of the list. Problem solved? Not really. Because this may imply that any country or countries that appear above Afghanistan is/are “cool and important,” while other civilized nations (e.g., Australia, Brazil, France, Spain, Zimbabwe, etc.) are not. Not a politically correct solution then, is it?

In other words, if you are a Canadian, for instance, and your country dropdown on the registration page starts with United States, followed by Afghanistan, you are left wondering: “Am I welcome here?” Due to this concern, most global sites just leave Afghanistan at the top. What is the problem with that? Apart from the many sentimental implications, many users simply don’t have the patience to scroll down to choose their country and instead choose a random country near the top of the list (e.g., Afghanistan). In fact, I conducted my own research on this topic that involved analyzing a statistical sample of over 10 million web registrations across 11 retail and social sites, and the number of these “phantom” users is staggering – over 22%. Do you want your users doing that?

So, is there an elegant solution? Of course! The most intuitive one is – grow up! Don’t ask the user living in the United Kingdom or in Zimbabwe to click on the dropdown field and then scroll all the way down – that could involve 4-5 clicks and is inefficient. One may argue: “Even children know that you can type the first letter of your country, and then the selection will jump to the respective section in the country list down below, where you can further navigate using the arrow down key.” And I say, “Exactly, Ringo!” If your visitors are expected to use a letter key just to get closer to their country in the dropdown list, why not give them a chance to just type their country name in that field in the first place? This is why we have Ajax: when the user types the first letter or two of the country name, a list appears giving him/her all the countries that match. And, if you want to kick it up another notch, look up the visitor’s IP address and pre-populate the country field accordingly (but leave it modifiable so that users can override the value if they are registering while traveling in another country). Problem solved.

Do you want to talk about this? Do you know of a more elegant solution? Message me on Twitter or using the contact form on this site.
 

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