Outsourcing Innovation

Getting started with Open Innovation

noreply@blogger.com (Matt Hately) — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 18:10:00 +0000

I'm listening to a a fireside chat (sans the fireplace) on Innovation at the Stanford Summit. Mitchell Baker, Chairwoman for Mozilla Foundation (one of the best open-innovation success stories) just gave some great advice to companies who want to test-drive open innovation. Choose a project or product where you can afford to have innovation. Innovation is messy, and open innovation means you have to be ready give up control. If you pick something that is close to your core, you'll frustrate those participating when you reject ideas for reasons you can't share. Pick a place in your business where you can afford to give up some control.

What do you need to be open to?

noreply@blogger.com (Matt Hately) — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 22:27:00 +0000

From time to time, someone asks me "what makes a good consulting client?"

What I realized recently is that it's up to us (we consulting/outsourcing/services companies) to be able to articulate who is or isn't a good client. Let's face it - not everyone is a fit to work together.

A couple of weeks ago I attended a marketing seminar by Tom Batchelder. He had us work through a messaging exercise called "Pain-Opportunity-Open To" that helps you orient your messaging to what really matters to your customers:

Pain: What pain are your customers in when they hire you?
Opportunity: What are your customers loooking to acheive when they hire you?
Open To: What must they be open to if they are going to be a good fit for doing business with you?

It's that last step that a lot of people don't articulate. Whether they are afraid of losing a sale, or alienating a client, they don't express "here's what I'm expecting from you".

For us, our customers need to be open to:

sharing control of the product development process
new ideas and new ways of doing things
sharing everything they know about the project - the risks, what will make the project a success, what peripheral information we should know, what the priorities are, who the customers are...

Wen talking about outsourcing relationships, I often hear people say "We've solved the confidentiality issue by only giving our development partner just the details they need to complete the module they are working on. They don't need to know what the rest of the system does".

Can anyone tell me - what kind of product does that work on? How can you have a successful product, when some of your team doesn't even know the context in which it will be used, let alone who will be using it?

If you're embarking on hiring an outsourcing or consulting partner, and they haven't articulated who their best customers are, and what they need to be open to, now is a good time to ask. Trust me, now is a much better time to learn that then two weeks before a deadline.

Macadamian wins new project in the financial industry

noreply@blogger.com (Matt Hately) — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 14:00:00 +0000

I'm thrilled about the announcement we made this morning about a new project we're doing in the financial sector. I think it's going to help turn the global economy around:
http://tinyurl.com/co5oma

Moulding young minds

noreply@blogger.com (Matt Hately) — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 18:26:00 +0000

I had a conversation this morning with Sylvain (our Director of Process Improvement) that connected some dots.

A few weeks ago, someone asked me - who are the people in your life that inspired you and shaped your path? Then they said - you are that person now. The things you say, and how you act inspires others around you, and has an impact on the path they take.

One of our missions at Macadamian is to inspire young students to pursue a career in technology. We believe that if we don't get students excited about technology and design, we're going to have a serious shortage of designers, engineers and computer scientists in the next couple of decades, and we're going to lose our innovation edge. So, we're one of the founders of the Ottawa High School Technology Program, and we recently invited in 3 high school students to work with us for a semester, because we think we can make a dent, and help reverse the trend of dwindling engineering enrollment.

Sylvain and I were talking about what we'd like our students to work on, and we decided that it was important to us that what they work on not be grunt work, but be a project that has an impact for Macadamian, and be something challenging. We'll mentor them through it over the course of the semester, so that they come away with the experience of working in a software company - from there they can decide if this is the career they want to pursue. Someone gave me that opportunity when I was in high-school - to do real, impactful work when I was on a high-school co-op term, and that has stayed with me since.

So here's the takaway - for most of the people reading my blog, I'd bet you continue to seek out mentorship, but also have an opportunity to mentor others. Take a chance and invite in some high-school co-op students, give them the chance to do real work, give them guidance, and you might be surprised about what you learn and what kind of impact you can have.

Mockups are the new spec

noreply@blogger.com (Matt Hately) — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 23:48:00 +0000

Last week I had the pleasure of chatting with Matt Miller and Jeff Perkins, co-founders of OfferTap, an exciting new company that is creating a platform that helps online merchants better target buyers and optimize e-commerce revenue.

I met Matt and Jeff several months ago at a conference on distributed development and global outsourcing. What struck me was that they had been very successful at creating their entire product with an outsourced team by never writing specs. They share our view at Macadamian - that a visual design is a far better spec than a written spec could ever be.

I caught up with Matt and Jeff to find out more about how they made it work with an outsourced team developing a new product in another country.

How did you come to the conclusion that a visual design was a better way to describe the product to your development team than a written spec?

Jeff: Actually, when we first started, we had put a lot of work into creating a spec and spelling out detailed business requirements. We found that despite that, we were spending a lot of time going back and forth to explain the requirements.
Matt: Our partner was impressed with the level of detail we had put together, but we spent a ton of time educating them about how the product would visually fit in with other e-commerce solutions, tie in with existing ads, and explaining overall how it would work.
Jeff: It came from the frustration of not getting to the end result fast enough. Every hour spent writing spec was an hour we were further away, and worse, it didn't seem to matter because it wasn't helping the development team. What our specs were missing was both the big picture and the user flow.

I understand you use hi-fidelity mockups, as opposed to wireframes. Tell me more about that and why you choose to put a lot of detail in your mockups.

Jeff: For us, a wireframe wasn't going to do, because we were also using the mockups to describe what we were doing to investors and customers. A wireframe wouldn't give us the same level of impact. Plus, the designs were going straight to the development team. When you have a design team, wireframes work fine, but in our case we were the designers, and it was just as easy for us to create more detailed designs.

What if you're not a designer by trade? How do you communicate ideas to your team if you don't have the skills to do hi-fi mockups?

Matt: There are a number of tools you can use to get your idea across. When we were experimenting and fleshing out ideas, we used tools like Snag-It to cut ideas from other products, and used PowerPoint to arrange them. The end result was good enough for experimenting on the placement of elements, and showing the flow of the product.

How much time do you think you saved in development by using mockups in place of specs?
Matt: It was significant. Once we started showing the team mockups, they understood exactly what we were doing. Especially in the beginning - it probably saved us a couple of months of spec writing and back-and-forth. At the front-end of the project, it even helped our outsourcing partner understand who they would put on the project.
Jeff: We probably cut the lifecycle in half. When you're outsourcing development, I don't think it's language barriers that are a problem, it's understanding what the product is supposed to do, and the vision for the product - especially when the product is new and breaking new ground.
Matt: Words can be interpreted so many different ways. The clarity was almost instantaneous when we switched to doing mockups. After a month of back and forth, they had a big AHA moment. It also let us switch from a Waterfall approach to Scrum, which we used for the remainder of the development.

What did you write down?
Jeff: We did write down a series of high-level business requirements, some background on the product strategy, and a list of features. That gave everyone the high-level view of what we were trying to accomplish.

Did working with an Agile process like Scrum not make it hard to get quotes from prospective outsourcing partners?

Jeff: A fixed-price contract doesn't guarantee that your partner will deliver what you want.
Matt: That's exactly what happened - we started down the path of describing everything, and we ended up spending so much time trying to cross the T's and dot the I's that we never got around to building it.
Jeff: The opportunity will pass you by working that way.
Matt: We actually found that doing a few mockups made it easier to find the right partner. We could tell by the questions they were asking, who they involved in the process, and how detailed their plan was whether they were grasping the product from the get-go.

How would you sum up what you learned for other product companies?
Matt: Build it first - get as close to building a prototype as you can. We built mockups to describe the features - that gives you a clear vision of what you're doing and helps you describe it to others. Don't spend time creating artifacts no-one will use.
Jeff: Adopt an agile methodology that lets you iterate fast, and solicit feedback early and often. A waterfall approach can lead you to analysis paralysis and keep you from innovating.

Incremental innovation in 2009

noreply@blogger.com (Matt Hately) — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 19:17:00 +0000

I've been thinking a lot about what we can expect in 2009 in new product innovations. Chances are we'll see mostly incremental innovation and very few breakthrough innovations, at least from established product companies.

People, and companies, are risk averse in a down economy. Few are ready to place a big bet on a product they aren't sure is going to generate immediate revenue. Incremental innovations, like small product improvements, should yield incremental revenue from existing customers. Apple, the company most people look to as one of the world's best innovators, released a series of incremental innovations this year at MacWorld - no breakthroughs for the Mac faithful this year.

Despite a lack of disruptive innovation, I'm hopeful that 2009 is a breakthrough year for design-thinking, driven by product companies wanting to reduce the risk of creating the wrong product or wrong innovation. I'm predicting that more product teams will invest in user research and prototyping, so that they can be more sure that they are focusing on creating the products and features that will provide the most value to their customers, and hence provide the biggest return.

Why Design-Thinking hasn't caught on in software

noreply@blogger.com (Matt Hately) — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 22:56:00 +0000

One of my colleagues, Francis Beaudet, just wrote a great article for our Critical Path newsletter called Why is Design Thinking Failing to Penetrate Software Companies? I love his point about how software teams think "Waterfall" when they hear "design up front" and run away screaming.

I'll add another reason why UX and usability isn't catching on at all software companies (or why some are simply paying it lip service) - with most enterprise software, the Buyer is not the User. Large enterprise systems are sold at a C-level or to the IT department, and often the people that have to actually use it, and whose productivity is supposed to go up tenfold for using it, aren't consulted.

On the other hand, in e-commerce, and to some degree SaaS, usability and user experience design is taken very seriously, because even small improvements in usability result in more conversions and more purchases. Salesforce.com is a good example - compared to traditional monolithic CRM systems, Salesforce.com is infinitely more usable. Why? Because it's sales-people who are buying it, not IT, and if Salesforce.com was difficult to use, they wouldn't buy it.

I once visited a large enterprise software company, and they asked me - how do you work? When I explained how we approach a project - observing users, rapid prototyping, testing and validating with users, and so on, their reply was, "that's nice, but we don't have that luxury here. We just hire good designers and make our best guesses".

Enterprise software companies could take a few lessons from .coms and SaaS companies, before their lunch is completely eaten.

Alltop

noreply@blogger.com (Matt Hately) — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 22:18:00 +0000

Back from vacation and almost through my email backlog. I was happy to see an email from the folks at Alltop, saying my blog has been added to the innovation section of Alltop. If you're interested in Innovation, there are a number of great blogs there to check out.

Back later this week with a more insightful post. These days, everyone is recycling their old content and adding "in tough times" to the title. Heck, I recently received "Storage strategies in tough times", so in keeping with the times, I was thinking of posting something about "innovating in a downturn" :) Stay tuned for that bombshell...

Livescribe's Smartpen

noreply@blogger.com (Matt Hately) — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 22:56:00 +0000

I had the opportunity last week to have a live demo of Livescribe's Pulse SmartPen from Peter Hewitt, who is an advisor to Livescribe. What a great technology! The Pulse has a form factor of a large fountain pen, yet it contains a camera, a microphone, memory, and a USB interface. Think of it as a pen that can also record a conversation, seminar, or lecture. It syncs your notes with the audio, so once you're finished taking notes, you can point to a line in your notes, and it will play back the audio from that

Peter and I recorded an interview, where we talk about Macadamian's business model and the kind of work we do. He uploaded the notes to Livescribe's web app, where you can listen to the whole interview and see Peter's notes. You can even search on the text. Remarkable!

I ordered a Pulse immediately after our meeting. I could see it being incredibly useful in transferring knowledge throughout a project. How many times have you passed on your notes from a meeting to a colleague, only to realize you have no idea what one particular point meant, even though you're the one that wrote it? With Livescribe you can go back and listen to the audio at the exact moment you wrote the note. I'm starting to sound like an infomercial for the Pulse, so I'll leave it at that. Go check one out!

HTC Bets On Design

noreply@blogger.com (Matt Hately) — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 20:50:00 +0000

Interesting piece of news this week - HTC bought One and Co, a San Francisco-based design company. The iPhone has changed the game, and the cell phone has evolved to where features no longer differentiate. HTC, traditionally a very engineering-driven company. In fact, they have traditonally been a white-label design and manufacturing company for the OEMs - you wouldn't even see their logo on the phone. They sensed that they had a weakness, and didn't have the design culture to compete against Apple, so they bought a consumer-design company. This is one more datapoint showing that the technology industry is getting serious about design as a differentiator. I think it will help HTC leapfrog from supplier to a leading contender in the next couple of years.

One other tidbit in the article I found personally interesting - HTC is hoping that insights and ideas from other non-competing One and Co projects will make their way into HTC designs. For instance, One and Co's work with K2 may lead to new materials for HTC phones. I'm glad that they think that way, and I hope that thinking becomes pervasive in software. I always thought that this was a core strength of Macadamian - the lessons, insights, and ideas we gain in one vertical are applied to another, creating new opportunities, or simply better ways of doing things.

Macadamian named to the InfoWorld 100

noreply@blogger.com (Matt Hately) — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 18:55:00 +0000

A happy start to the week - we were awarded an Infoworld 100 award for innovative use of technology in our business.

To give a bit of context to new readers, at Macadamian we design and build products for other technology companies. We're a software consultancy whose mission in life is to help other technology companies create great software products. We want our customer's customers to be as passionate about our customer's software as they are about their iPod.

We've grown to over 150 staff, in 4 countries, and we're delivering over 100 projects a year - most of them on tight deadlines. Our methodology blends user-centered design and agile project management. Predictability is key - we need to deliver what we said we would deliver on the day we said we'd deliver it. Or else.

So to tie together a project team distributed around the world, with customers distributed around the world, our Process Improvement team, led by Sylvain St-Germain, developed ProjectTools. ProjectTools is both the glue between our configuration management (namely Subversion and Jira) and collaboration tools (Confluence and secure newsgroups), and a dashboard that collects data from all those systems and presents them visually. It manages tasks, tracks defects, and provides Wiki functionality so that team members and our customers can collaborate and share information 24/7. What's really killer though, is it gives both our teams and customers a simple, visual view of the health of a project. It provides complete transparency - everyone sees how the project is progressing versus the planned schedule, and the full status (defects, planned vs. unplanned work, and a host of other metrics), in real-time.

Sylvain and his team live the Macadamian values - Transparency, Responsiveness, Agility, Collaboration, and Constant Improvement. Customers love ProjectTools, so I'm thrilled that the industry has recognized his team's work. Congratulations guys!

Voice of the customer

noreply@blogger.com (Matt Hately) — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 22:53:00 +0000

If you're in Ottawa on Nov 13, check out this event on Voice of the Customer.

Figuring out what users really want is probably the biggest challenge product managers and designers face today. It's easy to fall into the trap of simply gathering user feedback and turning into product requirements. How do you create the game-changing breakthrough products that users can't even imagine? You've heard it said that if Henry Ford asked for user feedback, he'd have built a faster horse carriage.

We partnered with OCRI to set up a panel of three user experience experts to find out how they go beyond user feedback and discover the true needs of their customers, and translate that into products that will sell. If you're a product manager, software executive, or UX designer, you won't want to miss this event.

Business models to learn from

noreply@blogger.com (Matt Hately) — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 17:40:00 +0000

I was flattered when I read this post by Andrew Waitman about business models to watch. Andrew is a respected VC in the Ottawa tech community, and he cites Macadamian as one of the business models to learn from, particularly in a tight investment climate. Also nice to be mentioned along with some companies I really admire: Fidus, Pythian, MXI and Fuel Industries

Social media and user feedback

noreply@blogger.com (Matt Hately) — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 16:42:00 +0000

Here's something you would have never seen prior to social media - users banding together to critique your product, using your product.

This month Facebook redesigned their interface, with the aim of reducing the clutter, and a number of users joined in protest by forming Facebook Redesign Protest groups.

The redesign was well executed, but what really impressed me was the response to the protest by Facebook execs. They are very confident that users will love the new redesign, and they find it humerous that people are using their product to protest their product.

The immediate feedback loop of Web 2.0 can be your downfall if you're not careful. Some Web 2.0 companies only look at feedback, and things like split-testing (creating two pages with two different designs, and serving each to half of your users to see which gets a better response rate or better feedback). In chatting with one of our Sr. Usability Architects, Scott Plewes, last night, he related that any time you don't use direct observation as part of the user-feedback mix, you risk missing the context and misinterpreting the data. Bottom line - you need to understand the motivation behind a user's decisions or you are flying blind.

I don't have the inside line on the Facebook redesign, but I'm sure Facebook employed a number of testing methods to gather feedback on the design - things like focus groups, ethnographic research (observing users using Facebook in their natural habitat), and usability testing. Where a number of Web 2.0 companies would have hit the panic button and rolled back the changes when they saw the protest, Facebook execs were calm and confident that they did the right thing, no doubt because they did their homework.

How do you structure a team for innovation?

noreply@blogger.com (Matt Hately) — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 19:06:00 +0000

I had the privilege of attending the Forbes Leadership conference yesterday. If you ever have the chance to attend, it's a must.

The topic was innovation, and one panel was on innovation and teams. One panelist mentioned that he believed innovation was a team sport, an idea that I subscribe to.

We talked a bit about how to structure a team for innovation - what individual backgrounds, personalities, and roles make a great team that comes up with breakthrough innovations? Judy Estrin had a great answer - what's most important is not the specific backgrounds, but that the team has cognitive diversity. If you're trying to come up with a disruptive product, you need a team of people who each approach problems from different angles - who will challenge one another and help spark creative ideas by following brainstorming paths they might not have otherwise followed.

Visual Misinformation (and a bit about offshoring)

noreply@blogger.com (Matt Hately) — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 16:21:00 +0000

I tripped across an article by McKinsey about the changing offshore landscape (short registration required). The low dollar and rising wages in BRIC countries are eroding some of the cost savings of offshoring - something most of us already know, and further proof that you shouldn't hinge your entire offshoring and outsourcing strategy on costs savings.

I read the article expecting to come away with several interesting insights, however I got sidetracked by one of my biggest pet peeves - blatent misrepresentation of the facts by skewing the scale on a graph.

Check out Exhibit 1 in the article (graph: A changing environment for offshoring)

The graph shows trends in world wages. The Y axis - wages - goes from 1000 to 8000, then suddenly jumps to 40,000. The graph makes it look like the wages in emerging countries are about to overtake US wages at any moment.

People put a lot of stock in visuals, especially graphs, which are meant to convey the hard facts - the unbiased data from which you can draw your own conclusions. However journalists (or editors?) frequently skew graphs to make their point. A more common trick is to start an axis at 100,000 rather then 0 to make a trend seem more dramatic. This however, is one of the worst I've seen. A real disappointment coming from McKinsey.

Reader beware.

Living with a MacBook Air

noreply@blogger.com (Matt Hately) — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 16:46:00 +0000

I finally did it. After years of making fun of Macs, I am now a Mac owner and a member of the fully converted.

Not only that, but I went whole-hog and bought a MacBook Air, against the recommendations of my colleagues, and virtually every reviewer on the Web.

I LOVE this machine.

One of the things I admire about Apple is they don't succumb to design by wish-list, a very common antipattern. In many companies, the product manager is a requirements secretarys - they gather lists of requirements emailed by users (who are typically power-users), prioritize them, and mold them into a spec. What you get is a product stuffed with features that aims to please everyone and please no-one.

Apple got it right. Not that the reviewers are wrong, but what they fail to realize is that they are not the target market for this machine. Reviewers are power users. Reviewers are geeks. I simply need to get s**t done. Reviewers complain about the lack of DVD drive. I haven't used a DVD drive in 3 years. They blast apple for not including an Ethernet port. I have Wi-Fi at home. I spend an unhealthy amount of time working from cafes and airports with Wi-Fi. Most of the hotels I stay at have Wi-Fi, and for the few times I need Ethernet, I bought a little USB-Ethernet dongle. I travel once a week. It's light (nothing worse then carrying a 10 pound laptop around an airport), fits perfectly on an airplane tray, has a backlit keyboard for working on late-night flights, and darn it - this is one sexy looking laptop!

What can we learn from Apple? As a product manager, your job is to know your market and your target audience, and devise products that will fill their need - tools to help them get jobs done. Avoid the temptation to try to fit in every incoming request for features from customers who may or may not represent your target market.

Software companies becoming more concious of feature bloat

noreply@blogger.com (Matt Hately) — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 17:01:00 +0000

Interesting article about Symantec's Norton suite in the Aug 18 issue of Business Week. The article quotes Rowan Trollope, who runs (or ran) the consumer products group at Symantec - he discovered that his friends turned off most of the features in the Norton suite rather than deal with all the problems it causes. It was a wake-up call, and he set out on a mission to get the bloat out of Norton.

I've had the same experience. Friends and family ask me "Can you look at my computer? It's really slow accessing the web." Inevitably I find out they recently installed Norton and between the anti-fraud, anti-identity-theft, anti-virus, anti-adware, and anti-spyware it's grinding their system to a halt.

Kudos to Rowan to listening directly to customers, but I have to wonder - why did it take a directive from a top executive to embark on trim the fat in Norton, which for the record, is still as bad as it was two years ago? It's painfully obvious to customers, and should be painfully obvious to the support team, the product management team, and the QA team.

Thankfully, we're just at the cusp of getting beyond the GeeWhiz phase in the software industry, where everything is so revolutionary that people will buy it regardless of how painful it is to use. The software industry today is a bit like the car industry of 1920 - the sheer novelty of horseless transportation outweighed the fact that driving most cars was more complicated than brain surgery. Now that there's a computer in most homes, and "Photoshopping" is in the mainstream vernacular, we're very nearly at the point where ease of use, design, and simplicity will win over feature bloat. It can't come soon enough.

Unified Communications goes mainstream

noreply@blogger.com (Matt Hately) — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 17:06:00 +0000

I remember Fred once told me we dramatically overestimate the success of a given technology in the short term, and then dramatically underestimate it's impact in the long term. It's definitely been true for VoIP and Unified Communications - they hype was unbelievable, and VoIP pundits predicted the rapid death of traditional telephony, then as the promise failed to materialize overnight, and people suffered through the unreliability of early systems, they lost interest.

I remember having conversations a few years back with colleagues about how cost-reduction will drive VoIP adoption, but the true benefit of VoIP and UC will be business productivity and integration with other enterprise systems. I was happy to see an article today titled "Vertical Apps Drive UC Interest" in FierceVoIP . The article cites a report from Light Reading that finds that vertical market applications in finance and healthcare, as well as Fixed Mobile Convergence and Collaboration are driving adoption of Unified Communications.

In the next few years we'll finally start to see the true promise of VoIP - softphones for your mobile device that completely integrate with your office PBX, archiving and searching customer calls in your CRM system, and many things we can't even begin to imagine. The future is here.

Want to create software your users love?

noreply@blogger.com (Matt Hately) — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 23:23:00 +0000

Last week Lorraine Chapman, Macadamian's UX Project Manager, delivered a webinar on the right and wrong ways to get user input on design. Many software companies still go on "gut feel" and market research when designing new features, citing time constraints, budgets, or simply "we know our product-space best" as excuses not to get user feedback . Lorraine dispels some of the common myths about involving users in design and covers some of the techniques and best practices we use in design.

Click here to view the archived webcast.

At the Stanford Summit - What is Green?

noreply@blogger.com (Matt Hately) — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 00:25:00 +0000

Many of us at Macadamian are very passionate about green tech and the environment. A question we've been bouncing around Macadamian is what role does the software industry have in green tech?

I'm listening to an amazing panel on green tech. On the panel is the Chairman and CEO of Southern California Edison, and the CEO of New Energy Finance to name a couple.

The panel acknowledged that while most of the buzz is about solar and wind power, one of the biggest opportunities in the next decade is the digitization of the grid. The power grid will go through the same revolution as the communication grid. Look at your cell phone bill - every text message is itemized, categorized, and quantitized. Look at your utility bill - it shows you how much energy you used in a month, and if your utility is really sophisticated, it shows you how much was onpeak and how much was offpeak.

As we come online with Smart Meters, it opens the door for new ways of conserving energy. Imagine that your meter can negotiate with your washing machine, to tell it the best offpeak time to start the cycle.

It may not be as sexy as solar, but the impact is huge.

At the Stanford Summit - on usability of IPTV

noreply@blogger.com (Matt Hately) — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 17:44:00 +0000

I'm at the Stanford Summit this week, and last night was a great opening panel of media executives. While most of the Summit is panels of startups, it was great to hear from the established broadcast and media companies like ABC and Paramount about the future.

One remark really stood out, and the panel agreed - part of the success of VOD and IPTV hinges on usability. Tivo, for example, has great usability, and it's the only "independent" PVR that survived and thrived. On the other hand, the usability of most set-top boxes from mainstream cable companies is rotten. I can relate - the box I received from Time Warner is virtually unusable. Searching for a show is a pain-staking experience.

The panel was clear an unambiguous. What they are seeing is usability drives adoption. When you give consumers an easy way to find and consume video content, they adopt.

The Ten Faces of Innovation

noreply@blogger.com (Matt Hately) — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 17:16:00 +0000

I just finished reading The Ten Faces of Innovation by Tom Kelley. Highly recommended reading for anyone running a product development team or in a product development role.

What I like about IDEO's approach to innovation is that they don't subscribe to the Lone Designer in a Dark Room mentality. They beleive innovation can be a repeatable team process. Ten Faces talks about the ten personas you need in an innovating team:

The Anthropologist: Observes human behavior and develops a deep understanding of how humans interact with products on a physical and emotional level.
Th Experimenter: Prototypes continuously
The Cross-Pollinator: Explores other industries and cultures, and brings revelations back to the team
The Hurdler: Knows how to overcome (or outsmart) the roadblocks in innovating, like finding internal budgets for the project
The Collaborator: Brings this eclectic group together and leads from the middle of the pack
The Director: Gathers the talented crew and helps spark their creative talents.
The Experience Architect: Designs compelling experiences, beyond mere features and functionality.
The Set Designer: Creates the environment in which the team is going to do their best work.
The Caregiver: Anticipates customer needs and is ready to look after them.
The Storyteller: builds awareness and morale through compelling stories.

I love the way that Kelley starts the book - he proposes that we have too many Devil's Advocates in our organizations. You know how it goes: when someone proposes an idea that's outside the box, there are several people willing to jump in with "Well, that's fine, but let me play Devil's Advocate for a second".

What if instead of saying "let me play Devil's Advocate, and shoot down your idea, but mask it in my Devil's Advocate persona", we said "let me play the Experimenter for a minute, and go put together a quick prototype", or "let me play The Cross-Pollinator" for a sec - I saw something similar work in another industry - I wonder if we could apply it here?" Do you think that would make you a more innovative company?

Kelley's not proposing that your team have each of these functions, but that people on the team adopt these personas. In a small team, one person might be the Director, the Set Designer, and the Storyteller wrapped up in one. He's proposing that a high-performing innovating team has each of these personas somewhere in the team. If you see these behaviors, nurture them. Innovation is a state of mind.

Habits of top innovators - getting unstuck

noreply@blogger.com (Matt Hately) — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 17:55:00 +0000

I'm looking for a coach (a business coach that is), and so I reached out to a colleague who is at the top of his game, and he expressed that he too is looking for a mentor. I found this interesting - where do you go for mentoring when you mentor for a living?

Recently I had the pleasure of studying with one of the top bass players in the nation, and I asked him "who do you study with?" It turns out he doesn't study with other bass players - he's learned about all he can from other bassists. Instead he goes to the best sax players, and the best trumpet players, to learn how they approach solos and phrasing, and he interprets and applies that to his bass playing.

What does this have to do with innovation? Bear with me - I'm almost there.

When you think you've plateaued with your product or business, or you're fresh out of new ideas, one of the best ways to break through is to study a different industry. How did a completely different industry tackle similar problems? What can you learn from the trade journals of a different vertical? Let's say you're in software - instead of attending a software event, go sit in on a manufacturers luncheon. Can talking with a product manager at another non-competitive company help you approach things differently? People are usually more than happy to chat with you, or even give you a tour of their facilities if you just ask. Who knows what it can do for your business.

Good design and the top line

noreply@blogger.com (Matt Hately) — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 00:11:00 +0000

Typically, technology companies, especially those that sell to the enterprise, have not invested heavily in design. The most compelling and usable products today are consumer-oriented - products like the iPhone and Google, as great design directly translates to purchases and clicks.

In the enterprise, often the end-user isn't the buyer, and usability and design ends up taking a back seat in the purchasing decision to features and price. So companies that sell to the enterprise have traditionally found it hard to make the link between usability and the top line. They struggle to make the ROI link, and at best, can only make weak links between investing in usability and reducing support costs.

If you are building enterprise products, you need to read this article: The Mac in the Gray Flannel Suit. CIOs are being bombarded by workers who want Macs. Why? Because consumers are infatuated with iPhones, iPods, and Macs, and they want to use them at work too. Consider: Apple hardly has a corporate sales force. It's a struggle to get an Apple account rep. That's a dream situation for most technology companies.

What about software? Ask a sales team about their CRM system - 9 out of 10 will tell you they hate it, and reluctantly use it because it's been dictated from up high. Is it any wonder that Salesforce.com is growing so fast? They've made a usable application that makes it easy for small teams to sign-up and start using it. When Salesforce.com started, many were skeptical (and some still are) that they could penetrate Fortune 1000 sales teams. Take a look at Salesforce.com's press releases and you'll find many recognizable names. The SaaS model is empowering the end-user, and making it easier for end-users to discover and try products, and that's making it easier for companies who understand good design to leapfrog their traditional competitors.