Make a Difference

How does mobile acceleration impact service delivery and user expectations

2013-02-05T06:07:00.005-05:00

Hi, again, it's been a while.
I wanted to mention a few words about two interesting recent announcements:

Twitter acquires Crashlytics (congrats Crashlytics!!!)
Flurry adds crash analytics and priorities

So what does that really mean?

I remember a RIM executive yelling at me and my boss, roughly 10 years ago "No application should crash. Errors are unacceptable, the least you can do is provide a graceful solution". He was right. In mobile, at the time, crashes were unacceptable and came with high support cost.

Times have changed though. According to HP/Capgemini world quality report Performance is the key to success:
"...the need for mobility has reset expectations of what constitutes application quality. With traditional software, users expect flawless functionality first and foremost, but mobile users are seeking convenience. They expect robust performance and usability on the move, and are more inclined to tolerate the occasional glitch along the way, as long as the application performs well and is user- friendly."

Thus, focus is on functionality, performance, and rapid release cycles. That's (IMO), how Crashlytics, and in general, the acceptance that applications will crash in production, has come to fruition. It The market need drives continuous, faster delivery cycles. This is headed by by mobile development.

I anticipate the proliferation of both performance and crash detection/analysis features in all analytics and APM tools such as Google, Localytics and others.
Interesting times indeed!

I'm dreaming: supermarket shopper

2012-11-14T05:00:00.000-05:00

One of the most frustrating experiences are to scramble through the superstore to find an item that's hiding. more often than not, nobody's there to help you. So you go through your shopping list and then you end up scrambling to find what you had not found yet. Another issue is to find the place where your shopping cart will be cheaper. I'm guessing the latter would not be in the benefit of the grocery store chains...

In any case, here's my ask:
1- Create a shopping list based on recipes I "add", my past shopping habits, how long typically it takes supplies to wear out etc. There are more than a few apps in this space (Link)

2- Tell me where my shopping list would be cheaper (Link)

3- When I go there, guide me through the isles and tell me exactly where each item is. You know where I am (Link). Now mapping all the grocery items is not trivial. It could be done by the store, but as said, they are unlikely to cooperate. You could tag each item with RFID transmitter. Unsure that will work and how many consumer phones exactly have RFID receivers? What you could do is crowd sourcing: Let each customer tag the location and price of each item and collect all the data. Drive sufficient benefits to the crowd, and they'll map it for you.

In return for this service, I'm more than happy to share my historic shopping cart with the grocery store chains, happy to see complete shopping cart coupons etc.

OK, whose on? ;)

Mobile revenues and user behavior

2012-11-10T14:22:00.003-05:00

I'm lumping few topics in this post, bear with me ;)

First, I came by this interesting article on "Fat fingers' based on GoldSpot media. 38% of total clicks on static banners are "fat finger" effect! Holy smokes!!
What's interesting about it is the form by which they measure accidental clicks: "engagement with post-click content lasted less than 2 seconds".

Triggers a few thoughts: mobile ads can lead to many places, including the app store and/or another mobile website. How many of those load in 2 seconds? close to none. Therefore, I assume that the measurement is really after the page completed loading.
In that case, the user had much more time to look at pieces of the page as it was loading. According to Compuware, over 77% of "top companies" mobile pages takes longer than 5 seconds to load (link). The average response time for a site, again according to Compuware, is 8.1 seconds (link). That means that PostMedia users really have something between 2-10 seconds to view content.

The other point to keep in mind is that we're talking here mobile advertising, which is a part of overall mobile revenues. To give some context, according to emarketer, advertisers will spend a relatively small amount of money on ads on phones and tablets this year — $2.6 billion, less than 2 percent of the amount they will spend over all. Yet that is more than triple what they spent in 2010 (link).
Compared to $2.6Bn in advertising revenue, according to eBay CEO, eBay and PayPal mobile to each transact $10 billion in volume this year (link).

I still believe mobile advertising is far more effective compared to desktop advertising, but I commend MediaPost for coming forward with the reality and attempt at measuring the Fat Fingers phenomena.

But it leads to the core issue (IMO). We don't really understand what users are doing in mobile. We need to dig deeper on how users engage mobile web and native apps and be able to better measure the funnel of all the complex scenarios in terms of experience performance and conversion. Some new innovation can be seen by ClickTale's mobile heat map, but there's much more to do in this space.
Of particular interest (to me) is the cross-channel revenue generated, originated by users on mobile. I believe that revenue portion dwarfs that of direct mobile revenue, and thus mobile plays a much bigger part of the overall company revenue.
Who can do it? let's see. Google? mostly yes. They know everything you do on Android (YES THEY DO), and given Chrome is the world's most popular browser (=shopping machine), they can tell. Apple also has a lot of control as many iOS users will use Safari in some form, probably on mac. Same story.
So it can be done, and it's important.

Mobile APM: Experiential vs. Operational

2012-09-11T15:21:00.000-05:00

I mentioned before, mobile APM is different. One aspect it is different in, is the structure of the delivery chain, which commonly includes the wireless carrier.

The complete mobile delivery chain (Image Courtesy: Compuware)

When you think about the end user experience, unless their on wifi, performance over the wireless-cellular network is almost chaotic. Even optimal performance, when you have good reception and reasonable data protocol, you are still bound to the doppler effect (basically at any second signal reflections and cancellations can create temporary signal drop even if you're standing still in good coverage area). Compared to the ISP delivery model, cellular interfaces are creating a headache in trying to maintain mobile APM. According to Shunra, over 60%of application failures are due to non-functional issues. Sometimes you want a "clean room" environment.

"Clean room" environment allows quick isolation and correction of the APM issue (Image courtesy: Compuware)

You still need to maintain the monitoring methodology from the end user perspective. Why? because all components making the experience come together in the browser/app. In mobile, typically there are more 3rd party vendors (which you need to watch!) compared to desktop.
So you ask yourself, should I include the wireless carrier in my monitoring, or monitor via a connected ethernet line? Here is my recommendation.

When you're trying to identify, isolate and address issues, you want to perform operational monitoring over the ethernet (eliminate noise from the cellular link). Why?

Most issues have to do with backend issues which you can correct, and those manifest themselves in the same way on wired connections (you can think of a wired connection as the equivalent of iPad on wifi).
Issues related to cellular link performance are highly intermittent and you can't fix them (unless you're the carrier or someone the size of Google, and even then.).

When you're trying to optimize the experience, understand the true end user experience, perform experiential monitoring (using real user experience data that includes the cellular and wifi links). Why?

Because you can understand the end user experience globally and tune your CDN, composition of components on your page/app
You can better identify trends and address those by dynamic tuning of the backend

Naturally, experiential monitoring is best served by tagging apps and websites ('Real user monitoring') like many companies offer (Compuware, Google, Localytics, Flurry, Yottaa etc.).

Hope this helps, interested in your thoughts!

A Winning Product Manager: The Organized PM

2012-09-09T10:00:00.000-05:00

Image Courtesy: Go Planet Go

One of the things I stressed to PMs I worked with is the importance of being on top of your product, having the verbal and written supporting knowledge and materials. You have many constituents (internally and externally), most don't report to you. Your job is to acquire their confidence in you, and maintain it. Being organized and knowledgeable helps a lot.
It also helps you. If you're nearly as successful as you want to be, there will be immense pressure from all constituents to consume your documents. You're helping yourself if you can find them quickly.
Therefore, my recommendation is to keep an organized folder of updated documents that describe your product in details:

Business aspects

Complete P&L excel of your product: know all of your product expenses (CAPEX, OPEX), know the pricing structure of your product (sold independent and as part of the portfolio), and your margins in different deal levels. Know your current expenses and revenues.
Business Plan: Know the sales forecast of your product, by sales team, region, deal size etc. Base your assumption on current user base.
Top customer and lead analysis: know your top customers perfectly. Document monthly calls/meetings with them. Document their top 10 requests and describe their roadmap and your translation into what it means to your product. Know their contract, and usage of the product. Note the top prospects for your product. Who is chasing them, what's stopping them from signing, what product and/or business gaps exist.
Competitive analysis: note your current and future competition. Where you stand compared to them, what areas reflect most on your customers and prospects. Note investment areas by VC and analyst coverage.

Product

Product requirements and/or backlog: without going too much into SCRUM methodology, I believe every product manager should know by heart the required features for the next 12 months ('H1') and his customer needs on a quarterly level. If you're doing waterfall, 2 releases should be covered at 90% confidence. If you're doing waterfall, the top requirements on the backlog should be covered at the same level. Here, clarity is gold.
Roadmap: Describe H1, H2, H3. H1 should be, as said, 90% confidence. You know you're getting it. H2 (12-36 months from now) at 75% and H3 (goes up to about 4 years away) at 50%. Strategic insight from analysts, industry and your vision are key here. Give execs a sense you know what you're doing not only at a tactical level but also strategically.
Key support cases: Many times PMs forget support (the 'ugly' side of customer interaction). In my view the number of support cases relates directly to your ability to control churn and gain more traction. The list of support cases is a key driver to immediate fixes or highest-priority requirements in next release/cycle.

Marketing collateral

Product brief, Portfolio brief, on a technical, value and business level: PPTs, one-page brief and the likes. It's not an overkill to have a version of PPT that can be delivered verbally, and one that's designed to be read offline. Ensure you cover business benefits and how your product integrates in the portfolio to drive a holistic solution, which is better than the competition.
Customer use cases & references: Create compelling & educational evidence of how your customers gain value, increase productivity and RoI using your product.
Some thought-leadership topics: if you were invited to a conference today, what would you talk about? What can you say that is A- thought provoking, B- you're pretty much the only one who could back it up with data and C- that is interesting and valuable to the outside world. Have 2-3 topics like that in your back pocket.

A product manager who has that collateral in their folder, is someone who, in my view, is on top of their product. Needless to say, backup and version control are key. You will have many versions of each of these ;)

What do you think? what else should be part of the product manager folder?

Explain that to me? (or: I like to poke at things!)

2012-09-08T00:18:00.000-05:00

Preamble: We recently relocated to Israel. After 10 years in Boston.Big change. More later, perhaps, when the dust had settled.
One of the first things we did is connect ourselves to the internet. I know, Web = Oxygen for some people (me). I know what you think. First on the iPhones, then home.

My darling, dead Linksys router

Of course, one of the things I hauled with me was an excellent Linksys router. I plugged it in, then power. I noticed it's supply took it 110v, so I attached a converter. In the plug, a short hiss, leds turned on for a fraction, turned off, and the horribly, hated smell of fried electronics. Hip hip hurray. (Office Depot win 100 shekel: Amir 0).

Which brings me to the point (finally eh?): In 2012, why 110v vs. 220v? Increased market size for device diversity? creating more jobs? What's the point?
It seems like some things in the world are like they are and will stay like that simply by avoid cost of what makes sense.
There are no additional OEMs because there are different standards, the same OEMs install different power units. There are no customer facing features or benefits to the customer because of that. On the contrary: If you move between regions, as far as electrical devices go, you are forced to buy the device that will comply to your target region pretty much. And you will pay more for the same value.

I want to poke at that. I want someone to explain the logic to me.

Here's another one. In Israel, many consumer products and services are small, not the best quality. Why? IMO, it has to do with buying power. It's the cost of importing cars, computers etc. into a 5-million people island (I'm using the word 'island' because economically, Israel is on an island. No economical cooperation with neighboring countries.). Toyota can't bring here & sell (in a reasonable price) their Camrys and jeeps because it's too expensive for them, because we look nothing like EU, Canada or the US. No buying power. Ok, Israel can't build economical relations with Syria and Lebanon (and I'm not interested in any political discussion), but what about Egypt and Jordan? What if all 3 became a multiple of consumer power? What would strong economical relations do to political relations? Economical relations would strengthen the political ones. So I say, fix this, for the benefit of everyone in the region, the OEMs and service providers. Let the region flourish.

Here's a bigger topic: driving on the left or on the right. In past jobs I was fortunate to travel. Yes I'm an addict. Sometimes I was on a red eye to London, and I had to rent a car. Imagine flying from a left-handed steering into a right-handed steering on a red eye. My solution was to always drive behind someone. But I was on a 747, I was not alone. I don't know the numbers, but I argue there is human price for this idiotic fact.

And don't tell me it can't be done. Man landed on the moon, Google are inventing self-driving cars. It can be done, and it's the right thing.

Side note: if you work with me, you'll find that I rarely 'accept' challenges at face value without really understanding them. I'm passionate about driving differentiated value to the customer, so spend the time and convince me the existing approach is the right one. Otherwise, help me change it ;)

A Complete Mobile QA/Application Performance Management (APM) Strategy

2012-09-07T02:01:00.002-05:00

Image Courtesy: Flickr

You want to create and maintain a valuable, optimized mobile service to your audience. There are different solutions and approaches for effective performance assurance of your mobile service over time. It is important to understand and optimize the performance of your mobile service in different scenarios: pre production, post production, under load etc. A more modern aspect of mobile data is the rapid evolution of rich media content (not only in the context of entertainment, but also as brand promotion, product description and reviews etc.).

This post describes different mobile APM and QA solutions and what constitutes and complete solution. To start, I'd like to describe several macro-trends and challenges that affect the space.

First, Mobile is unique ;).

Retailers/marketers ability to offer targeted services to their customers on mobile is better than desktop. That highly targetable audience had high expectations: in 2011, Compuware found that 71% of all users expect mobile services to match or exceed the availability and performance of desktop experience. Since the competition is around the corner, failure is expensive. More expensive on mobile.

Compared to services delivered to desktop users, mobile devices are highly fragmented: screen sizes, OS variants, OEMs and device features, behavior under different 'environmental' conditions such as the wireless (cellular/wifi) signal and protocol, number and composition of applications running on the device, driving resource consumption (memory, battery, throughput) etc. Further, mobile phones and tablets are not production-testing designed devices: under ongoing testing, they will suffer inherent stability issues. These certainly aren't enterprise-quality servers. To add, phones and tablets are expensive! Scaling a QA/APM solution is challenging.

Another uniqueness of mobile, specifically in B2C scenarios, are resident apps. Most desktop experiences are delivered via "standard", limited set of (almost) browsers. Apps are more difficult to QA/APM. A former carrier employee once told me: "The trick is not to test the phone or app. It's to test it in random combination with other apps".

Another interesting trend is recent closer integration between development and operations. Deployment cycles are getting shorter and even 'heavy-enterprise' applications are more open for experimentation in return for user feedback as genuine contributor to the optimal product composition. As a result, functional testing and application performance management are becoming closer. Last, true rendering of mobile experiences are an integral part of the QA cycle.

The market wants a unified solution: QA+APM. The breadth of the deployed solution depends on a growing maturity of the Dev/IT/Ops organizations in leveraging value from the solution. At all times, RoI from functional QA/APM solutions needs to be clearly demonstrated to the LoB (prevention of outages, revenue/customer loss and brand damage).
There will likely be more than one technology buyer. A QA/Dev representitive will usually make the initial purchase. Initial APM buyer will be somewhere between QA and IT/Ops. Eventually, every mobile APM strategy will become part of the overall APM strategy and owned by IT/Ops. Assuming functional QA starts with physical phones, the interest will be to proceed with real-device based APM.

In my view, the ultimate mobile APM/QA solution consists of the following toolsets, integrated into a central reporting solution:

Functional Mobile QA & Automated Testing: Pre Production testing of mobile services, on real handsets. These can be offered onsite or remote (dedicated or shared). The main point is to run tests on real phones in as many scenarios as possible, representing use cases, environmental parameters (location, carrier etc.). I call it "Clean room QA and regression". While testing on real devices, ensure you get screenshots or even videos of the transaction. Companies who offer this service include Perfecto Mobile, Jamo, Device Anywhere (Keynote) etc.
Crowd Sourced QA: Unlike the structured QA, crowd source QA can offer insight to issues caused by human users in unplanned scenarios, which may contain use cases, combinations of applications running on the phone, different locations, carriers etc. Companies who offer this service include uTest. Unsure who else ;)
Proactive APM: Ongoing monitoring of mobile services, from the end user perspective. Both pre and post production. These are robots located where the user is, running recurring scripts. There are several options: Real phones/tablets vs. simulators. Onsite vs. SaaS. Ethernet vs. over the cellular carrier. My preference would be toward simulator-based remote monitoring in a SaaS environment, using both the wireless carrier and a wired connection. Very close to the end user experience. Simulators can be instrumented to provide signal strength, CPU consumption, application metrics and much more. It's cost-effective with lower management overhead. It's a clean room environment for ongoing monitoring. Who provides this?? unsure.
Real-User based APM - SaaS: This approach lets your users work for you. Passive tags are instrumented by the service owner into the app/website, and as your users access those, data is generated, describing the end user experience (therefore, it's all post production). This approach is scalable, insightful and real. Moreover, W3C is defining timing APIs for browsers as well as resource timing APIs. This is really exciting: imagine mobile users could submit complete HAR files describing the real user experience. There are a lot of startups in this space because all you need is simple (relatively) collection tags, and the heavy smarts is in the data analysis. It's been a pleasure hearing a retailer saying: "For as long as I was proactively monitoring my site, I had no idea of the countries, devices and experiences my users were going through. As soon as I turned on real user monitoring, a whole new reality dawned on me. My users are mobile, they travel and consume my service from everywhere, specifically from places my proactive monitoring does not exist". The SaaS approach here really means that there are no on-premise installed components. So you have limited insight on what happens on the backend. Companies offering this service: Compuware, Yottaa (I think), others
Real User-based APM - On-Prem: Like the above, except there are on-prem installed agents or appliances. The big difference is the ability to correlate between the transactions users generate and the response time of each server in the backend. It could be extremely insightful and help identify and resolve issues quickly. (It's worth though keeping in mind that a lot of mobile services leverage 3rd party components. So if your 3rd party vendor component does not perform, these on-prem agents you have installed on your backend, really don't offer much insight.). Companies offering this service: Compuware, others.

In the spirit of optimizing an app/mobile website, you can't forget analytics. So important. What's really exciting (to me) is advances in analytics done by W3C (timing APIs) and really cool innovation like what ClickTale are doing (seen it in action, it's awesome!)

OK, this came out a bit long, but I hope it gave some insight to whoever was looking for APM+QA solutions for mobile. Nobody has the complete solution, I'm sure VCs are creating complete portfolios around similar concepts.

As always, very interested in your feedback!

(Mobile) Topics that get me excited these days

2012-09-03T16:19:00.000-05:00

You may have picked up, following me relo to Israel, I'm on the job hunt these days. Relocating is a full time job. But, on occasion, I get a free hour to connect to the web, and I come across exciting spaces and solutions. Here are some that excite me (AKA, I want to product manage ;)):

App store analysis and discovery: Social sharing, recommendations and discovery of apps is just not where it should, or can be. Some startups are taking on that challenge: Appsfire, Quixey, XYLogic and Chomp (now Apple). More here
Real World eCommerce Link: Between (fail?) Google Goggles (which I had huge hopes for) and QR/other barcodes (really? show me how to monetize) nobody has been massively successful in building a complete an eCommerce solution that recognizes physical objects and offers shopping experience around those. I've no doubt it can be done, it's just a solution that consists of many complex pieces. I've seen interesting technology by SuperFish. I think this space has huge growth and reward possibilities.
Advanced mobile analytics (dare I say combined with APM and production quality?): In mobile I believe there is huge opportunity for advanced analytics. Localytics, Google and others are doing a great job at it, but there are two areas (IMO) for improvement:

Mobile usage 'heat map': Understand what your users are really looking at, what exactly works and what doesn't, and what's the impact on your success criteria. One company that does an interesting job: ClickTale. I've seen them in action in NL Facebook mobile equivalent. Massively impressive. Again here, I believe there's huge areas for improvement in market awareness.
Integration with APM and production quality solutions: Yes, most likely there may be multiple audiences. Marketing will look at straight analytics and understand how it impacts the success criteria. IT/Ops will look at the latter. In reality, your bottom line is impacted by both and this is understood by the customers (who are approached by all players in these spaces). So whether you're an analytics play (Localytics, Google), APM (Compuware, Yottaa), Production quality (Crashlytics, Crittercism), you really want to be thinking about integrated services/dashboards/APIs etc.

Enterprise solutions/BYOD/Virtualization

Enterprise solutions: I personally believe the space for B2C games/music/productivity is limited. There's just so much there already and the ability to make it big is just slim. An easier way (to innovate at least) is to find what apps Enterprises need and offer that to them. Easier said than done, but the potential is there. I've been inspired, for example, how General Motors, Lowes and Home Depot, Verizon and others leverage mobile as a sales associate tool. Is there still opportunity to innovate in sales force enablement? Absolutely.
BYOD: I think there's some debate around the BYOD opportunity. Like coffee, people are split into extremes on this one. Clearly, it offers an opportunity to the enterprise (and a headache to the CSO). Enablement of BYOD in the organization requires a complete MDM solution, which is very complex (remember how touch it was to deploy Blackberry?).
Virtualization: I can't tell you how ridiculous it is to see folks (I've seen them mainly in EMEA) walking around with 2 or more phones. Good for the operators, I suppose, but not so great for the person and an opportunity for their employer. Virtualization enables one phone with multiple personalities (+high walls between them). Whether BYOD or employee-provided phone, it's easier on the employee, and the employer can potentially gain some of the employee attention on the off hours.

Social Navigation: I'm a bit split about this one. I'm a constant user of Waze. What they do and the value they provide is unparalleled. The only problem with the solution is that it depends on user input. The input needs to be entered on location and in real time. OK, you may be in a traffic jam and there's no big damage if you look at the phone (illegal!!). But if you're driving and there's a hazard, that's downright dangerous. I think that if input could be handled verbally (A-La Siri?) that would make it all very attractive, and safe.
Personal interest: Way out of my field of expertise, but there is highly interesting 3D printing technology being created. Fascinating, and feels like rocket science. One I took a look at was EZ3D.

Of course, this is a partial list. Interested in your thoughts, what do you think of those spaces? What excites you?

Top 10 Characteristics of a Winning Product Manager: Preamble & 1st Post: "Product Manager: The Eternal Optimist"

2012-09-01T01:08:00.000-05:00

What?

If you're lucky (like me) to travel between Europe and America, you know the world map is presented differently. Each region draws itself as the center of the world.
I think product managers are the center of the organization. Good ones lead winning products and inspire winning teams.
I've decided to spend some time summarizing what, IMO, makes a strong product manager. While my expectations from a good product manager are well defined (in my head), what characteristics identify a good one (or how to identify your next PM recruit) is more challenging. Seeing a few PMs in action, I thought I'd put some of my impressions down.

Why?

Really? another blog post on strong PM skills? YAWN.
Here's why. In a ocean of free digital media, wealth of information, blog contents rarely are original. What's original is the author's personal view. Here are a couple example of blogs I love: Fred Wilson, Bijan Sabet (+his Hallway chats with Nabeel Hyatt), and others. Recent jewels are Hadas Sheinfeld and Guy Nirpaz. Their blogs are worth adding to your reader because they are educational (technology and business) and personal at the same time. I'd like to think I can be interesting like that too.

I split the "Winning Product Manager Characteristics" post because you won't read all of this. Posts need to be short and to the point.

So, w/o further ado:

A Winning Product Manager: The Eternal Optimist

Image Courtesy: People-Results.com

A succeful product manager is a team leader. They lead a team internally (everyone who builds the product and sells it: Eng, QA, Sales, Marketing etc...) and externally (customers, analysts, partners and channels etc.). But they are not a formal team leader: nobody reports to them. They lead by vision, optimism and ability to inspire. The product manager shares the successes and gaps of the product in the most transparent manner, and drives enthusiasm around the ability to drive that unique value.
Therefore, a product manager has to be the ultimate optimist. Their belief in the success of the product has to be fundemental and eternal so they maintain their optimism and spread it. Optimism is contagious (and therefore can be precieved as a tool).

Is this the most important feature of a strong PM? Questionable. I chose to start with this one because when you're hydrated, in good spirits, your brain will work out the toughest of challenges. Back to basics. Notice how inspiring leaders are always positive.

Personally, I'm not the eternal optimist, I wish that was different. So I use and recommend adopting a quick dictionary, and interpolating it. Here are a few samples (in no particular order):

The competition is doing better = The market size is growing. The competitors are showing you one way to be successful. You have an opportunity to play this game. Figure out what they did well and improve on that.
CxO wants a product review = Executives are interested in your product and want to help. Leverage this opportunity to harness them into what you need most. Don't tell them pretty stories, give them the truth and get them to work for you.
I'm not getting CxO attention = They trust you and your judgement. You've been given resources, right? go make the best of it, show results and make sure to make that visible such that customers demand increase in product features and investment, and be willing to pay for it.
I'm bogged down by thousand of sales calls = The sales force is fully engaged. They (think they) can make 'Club' selling your product. More importantly, the market is thirsty for your product. Teach them how to fish: participate in a few calls, raise the knowledge and more importantly the level of confidence sales reps can have in your product, and let them sail away. Early time investment with your sales force is a well worth investment that will pay off big time. Travel with them, be their friend and let them buy you a steak ;)
Engineering are hard-headed = Engineering are smart, passionate and are eager to contribute to the overall success of the product. Leverage it in the product requirements, go to market, whatever. Reach technological understanding with them that makes them feel their opinion is heard and considered, and that they are important to the overall success. Make sure the areas of responsibility are kept clear (you answer 'WHAT' and they answer 'HOW'. Moi importanta. more in a separate post). You'll learn much from engineers experience, knowledge and insight and your product will be better.
The product has huge gaps/bugs (usually, vs the competition. Sometimes against minimal shippable product criteria) = Your product potential is huge. And, you know what's missing. Prioritize it, break it down, define your roadmap. Show the case to everyone around you: here's what you get for this investment. Make as much advancements with what you have and incremental, customer-facing meaningful deliverables. Show the world (and yourself) the potential is really there.

OK, 6 little common 'translations' I've adopted to keep my chin up, and to motivate others.

What do you think? makes sense? How do you keep your team (=internal + external, and I mean customers and analysts as well!) motivated and inspired? How important you think subjective optimism is? How do you keep optimistic at tough times?

A penny for your thoughts!

A Good Product Manager

2012-08-31T08:10:00.000-05:00

Just as I was jotting down some thoughts (A-la "top 10") on what describes a good product manager, I came across this excellent post by Ben Horowitz (Thanks @guynirpaz). I couldn't put it better (so maybe this is just a reblog? ;)).
While I'm still writing my version of it, here's my preview. A good product manager is:

CEO of the product (AKA owns overall responsibility for ALL aspects of the product; defines his role)
Excellent communicator
Organized and clear
Analytic
A Mensch

More soon!

Quick snippets on Google+

2011-12-14T15:47:00.002-05:00

I've restarted reading the feeds I used to and like before, I come across a lot of interesting short nuggets (like this).

I don't want to clutter this blog, so if you're interested, follow my Google+ roll (it's the easiest tool I know of for now..).

What makes a successful, monetizable mobile app?

2011-12-12T09:16:00.000-05:00

Recently there's been a interesting movements in the mobile payments space. For example, Amazon-Bango mobile payments for Fire, Mastercards' $18M investment in mFoundry and Square's recent $100M D-round (with a rumored valuation of $1B!).

The interesting topic, IMO, is, if I'm a marketer/retailer, what's the best strategy to A- define a realistic mobile success criteria, B- execute, measure and improve. Of course, that's a very broad topic: success criteria could mean uniques, visit depth, cross-channel transactions, bottom line etc. I hope everyone agrees, defining a success criteria is critical to the success of your mobile strategy.
Let's not diverge: I wanted to write about monetizing mobile strategies.

Devin Coldewey has an interesting TechCrunch post on Starbucks mobile revenues as % of total. To summarize (please read the article to get the complete message), the question is: well, mobile Starbucks card reloading in FY11 accounts for $110.5M vs a total of $2.4M global Starbucks card transactions (Source), that's "nice". But minuscule (in his view). Will Starbucks continue using a lone-wolf payment solution or align itself with a more universal payment system like Google Wallet?

Tricky. Starbucks, as I'll discuss shortly, has the means to be very successful in the short term. Does that place them on an island (mobile payment method-wise)? not necessarily. They can add or replace the payment method once one becomes prevalent.

I argue that consolidation and unification of mobile payment solutions is coming, however not tomorrow and not 1-2 years from now. As you can see above: Mastercard believes in NFC. Square believes in their tiny HW add-on. Ebay predicts $5Bn revenues from their mobile shopping app in 2011. Back in my barcode scanning days I witnessed first hand how everyone in the service chain wants a hand on the users and revenues, and can't agree on the %. Dejavu: Verizon just decided to block Google wallet. I rest my case.

So who can make it happen?

Strategically, those who control large pieces of the service chain. Take Google for example: they control devices, have a mobile payment solution, figured out relations with businesses etc. Heck, they could even have their own spectrum. They have the name and $ to do it. They haven't done that so far even though they could (!). Further, IMO Android is still perceived as the less secure platform to do "serious business" on.
Tactically, there are plenty of businesses who control just enough pieces of the chain. They can take ownership of the user and monetize nicely in the short term. That's my main interest in this post.

Back to Starbucks. Love their app, and have been visiting their stores more frequently because the whole experience is so smooth. What drives 26M mobile transactions in 2011 and growing 3M monthly?

Slick experience: controlling the point of sale (PoS) and the application allows incredibly smooth 'checkout' process.
Loyalty program: Combining the loyalty card with freebies etc.
Trusted micro payment solution: The Starbucks card isn't an independent payment solution (like a Sears credit card is, for example) but you can load it once a while (that too is dead simple and slick) and make coffee micro payment. Trusted, slick, awesome.
Brand loyalty: coffee is a great example for brand strength and it's impact on loyalty.
The need to come into a store when you want a sip. Unlike online+physical retailers, Starbucks transactions happen in the store, when you're not in front of your computer. So it's either your wallet or your phone. For Amazon, Sears,..it's a combination. When you're at home, you'll use your PC, not your phone (that's a generalization, but assuming you'd do product search on a PC..).

So now take any number of similar businesses: Panera, any fast-food restaurant with a drive-thru, Larger retailers like Sears (who even have their own credit card). The above principles apply. Mobile monetization made simple.

What does a business like Panera need to do to get to the same level like the Starbucks app:

Loyalty card: check. Already exists, need to drive more awareness. Also, drive adoption via freebies.
Payments: allow loading funds into the card and payments via scanners at the PoS, or right from the app as I'll discuss a little later.
"My food": allow users to define their favorite plates so ordering is made incredibly easy.
Skip the line: That's the one I want to emphasize: You already know I'm in the store. Let me order straight from the app, pay, get a number and go sit. Let me know when my order is ready. Done.

Hope this post is interesting and helpful. As always, interested in feedback and views. Looking forward to see more of these apps, and skip the line! ;)

What's next? Cross-channel monetization

2011-11-18T06:18:00.000-05:00

Hello blog. It's been a while. back for a quick visit, let's see how long this lasts..

Anyway, I'm reading this morning an insightful survey from Limelight. Mobile shoppers expectations, experiences etc. All the good stuff.
What caught my eye and has been on my mind is quantifying the cross-channel revenues topic. according to Limelight:

76% (shoppers) have purchased a product at the store after they have researched the product on their Internet-connected mobile device but did not purchase it on that device
72% have purchased a product on the retailer website on the computer after they have researched the product on their Internet-connected mobile device but did not purchase it on that device

Further, 71% of respondents report using their Internet-connected mobile device to research products while they are physically in the store.

Clearly, mobile has a significant contribution to the overall bottom line in a way that's never been measured before. Most of it, indirect. Why is this critical? in an early ecosystem, many people 'get' the need to have a mobile strategy and are executing on it. But in the lack of clear, quantifiable success metric, your mobile strategy is nothing other than cute.
Perhaps one way to address this is to isolate those online revenues for which the search was 'short' (whatever that means..). That seem far from being accurate.
Figuring this metric out in a way that is transparent to the shopper will help, I believe, many retailers to measure success and further invest in their mobile strategy.

Interested in your thoughts. Maybe I'm behind and someone already figured it out, I'd love to learn about it.

Take Control over your destiny

2010-02-11T09:47:00.000-05:00

I really enjoy reading Bijan's posts. They are very insightful, and, since there are mutual interests (consumer-facing tech, music and mobile) many times the advice or view given in his posts applies directly to me.

This morning's post is a good example: Take Control over your destiny. To summarize (I recommend reading the original post), try to control your dependencies on operators and OEMs on direct consumer plays, as much as you can.

Here's my thoughts on the topic:
I couldn't agree more, wouldn't that be terrific. However in some cases, the operators and OEMs control a critical piece to be worked around. I'm not suggesting employing a full-time BD guy to be in front of operators and OEMs, but you better be able to leverage the assets they own well. Let me give two examples: Mobile Payments and Mobile Enabling Technologies (from barcodes to speech-driven 'activities').

In the case of Mobile payments, the operators *own* the critical bits that allow for acceptable user experience. At least as it comes to mobile web (mobile apps are different). I hate to admit, but the Paypal/Amazon/Google checkout are simply not as friendly as the 1-click WAP checkout button that results in an on-bill transaction, that's been deployed and heavily used in the UK for years now. The UK operators realized the need and potential, and gathered to create a solution called PayForIt. I believe that every startup that wants to see mobile commerce on mobile web has a real problem exactly because of that.

Similarly, mobile enabling technologies have been proven to drive revenues through increased usage, device and plan sales. Enabling technologies, IMO, aren't best positioned on the device as a silo application. They really should be preloaded as an infrastructure background service with APIs to any application: then, let the user search the web using speech browser, play games and dictate. Use barcodes (or google goggles) to scan a real-world item and embed as recommendation to a friend in your FB app. Things like that. Getting preloaded, or embedded as infrastructure layer, as we know, is a pretty complex OEM play.

In some mobile consumer app plays you can provide a good service without heavy dependency on operators and OEMs, but not all. My 2 cents.

What's Square mean to you?

2009-12-15T09:42:00.000-05:00

Image Attribute: Square

In the past few days there's been a lot of buzz about Square, the new mobile-phone credit card swiping solution. Point of Sale to the people, so-to-speak. Few peeps asked me of my thoughts, and how does it affect Adva Mobile, so here it is.
I think Square is a terrific little gadget that, more than it's own independent value to the world, the buzz it brings with it drives more awareness to the things one could do using their mobile phone. The more we can see from that, the better, IMO.
I admire their approach: I think that of the mobile payment solutions, they win on simplicity (to the end user) and reach. (almost) all other mobile payment solutions require pre-registration, which is a killer for the ad-hoc shoppers.
On it's own, I have my healthy skepticism how many people will end up owning and using the device. Requiring extra hardware? We've seen what happened to Zeemote. It will be interesting to find the payout rates, the installation process and other factors. Of those long-tail merchants, you need to find people with the right phone and plan, willing to pay for the gadget, and share their revenues with another party. For those people, Square complements the cash-only sales with cash and credit. I'm trying to think who those people are: Street artist selling paintings? Active musician next to the merch table? Do they really need this? time will tell.
Now if you contrast paying using Square and on a mobile website (with, say, PayPal), then I'd say it's hard to determine how many of the fans would rather use one or the other. Square wins in the consumer side, Paypal (I think) wins on the merchant side.

As far as Adva Mobile is concerned, again, the buzz that Square brings is a blessing. We'd like to see less and less "I didn't know I could do that". As mentioned, Square complements well the financial processing for products that entertainers would like to sell, say, on their merch table. It is important to note, Adva Mobile is a Mobile Marketing Service for entertainers. There are mobile sales tools that come with it, that entertainers can leverage, but our focus has always been helping entertainers acquire new fans and keep them engaged, coming to shows and participating in the "community" you're building.

Overall, Square is certainly an interesting solution that will stir things up for a while. It certainly brings a lot of buzz with it, which is great. I'm looking forward to see what will happen with it as time goes by.

Real World Connection: Finally in the US?

2009-12-07T16:16:00.001-05:00

For the longest time I've been a fan of, working in, and following various attempts at Real World Location technologies. Whether Mobile Barcode Scanning (Nextcode, NeoMedia, Scanbuy and others), real 'things' picture analyzed (mobot, Pongr and others), there were many attempts at getting it right.
No doubt, with the current possibilities through image recognition technologies, a lot can be achieved.

The question, IMO, has always been one of two:

Who has enough power in the marketplace (exp. in the US) to bring together all the players, commercial and customers, to agree on one "Standard" or "Scanning Form" that translates from a real-world "Thing" to digital content, AND
Who has enough images and sufficient search, image recognition power to beef up an end-user acceptable performance

The answer, of course, is Google. For a long time I've been anticipating it, and now it's here: Google Goggles. Watch and enjoy. Good luck to all other players in this market, I think the market just got swept away from under your feet.

"Tell A Friend", Mobile web version OR reverse mobile carrier lookup

2009-12-03T23:09:00.000-05:00

One of the key components to enable word-of-mouth spreading of a good service, is the ability for one user to share the experience with their friend. Duh.
In mobile, how can you enable that? SMS your friend, Email your friend, Twitter, maybe others. Facebook connect has been anticipated for ages on mobile web, but they seem to like only iphone apps, for now.
Trying not to force a behavior change or forcing someone to type in a full email address on their phone, I was looking for a simple, and free way for users to "tell their friends" over SMS.
If you have a service that uses SMS, then you're working with an SMS aggregation, and, for the most part, they need to know the carrier as well as the phone number you're sending the SMS to. But, what if you don't know the carrier?? I mean, the user of the service may know the phone number of their friend, but is it realistic to expect them to know the carrier? No, it's not.
So, you turn to the aggregation and ask them about reverse carrier lookup.
News flash: On top of the $.03 the resulting SMS will cost, the lookup will be additional $.02-$.03 and some 2-3 digit monthly minimum. Right, the US carriers are starving and need to make more money.
Alright, Google search takes you into this terrific FREE White pages feature. You can reverse lookup mobile carriers by phone numbers, and, from my experiments, they have it right!
Next step: sign up for their API. But: the API returns completely different, incorrect results!

I asked their API people for their thoughts on this, and here's what I got back:
"The carrier information available through our free, developer API is the same information we display in our search results on WhitePages. So, in terms of search results for a reverse phone query, the information is the same. However, on WhitePages, we offer an exclusive “Mobile Carrier Lookup” feature. We do not plan on including the mobile carrier information available through the “Mobile Carrier Lookup” feature on WhitePages via the free, developer API."

I'm speechless. This is really valuable information that's available one place and not in the API. Easily fixable, but they don't seem to see the value. ugh.

To DYI or not DYI. That is the question!

2009-11-23T08:25:00.000-05:00

Yesterday at MusicHackDay, I was listening to the "Starting a Music Business" panel, and two topics ran in my head:

DYI vs. centralized management service for artists: A discussion started about the value, and load that new 'DYI' tools provide for entertainers. Derek Sivers (whose truly an awesome dude) had a really great way of putting it: "DYI? great! and now there's this tool? oh great, and now 'more information'? oh boy...". He's spot-on, I think.
We at Adva Mobile definitely see how artists check us out and some stay, some move on. There's just so many tools. That's why integrated serices like ArtistData are the right way to go, IMO.
There's just way too many different offerings for artists right now, and consolidation of the really good ones is bound to happen, hopefully soon (Hopefully Adva Mobile will be one of them). The flip side, though, is that many artists who would never get heard or make any money (to make art) would never have been heard by anyone without those DYI tools. So definitely the DYI tools is not for those who aren't prepared to invest in the promotion bit to be successful, and it also depends on how big you are. Hopefully, those issues are handed over to a band manager of sorts when you grow big enough.
The other topic in my head (that was not discussed) was triggered by the inevitable "Now's a great time to start a business in the music space". Sure, Duh. But seriously, without going pessimistic about it, what do you make of the recent iLike and iMeem fire sales? Or Spiral frog shutdown or Qtrax needing add'l $50MM? I mean, these are all players who've been alive for sometime and have been trying to figure "it" out. If iMeem is worth $1MM, I'm asking myself what are we worth? A Grand latte?

Reblogged: Music as the ideal virtual good

2009-11-23T05:52:00.000-05:00

This weekend I was fortunate to attend MusicHackDay organized at Microsoft NERD. I was even more fortunate to ask Nabeel Hyatt about recruiting talent in the music space who will help us geeks find that moonlight on the bridge between technology and entertainment. Anyway..
Nabeels' post "Music as the ideal virtual good" is one to pay attention to, whatever your involvement in the entertainment space is. His illustration of the "music business state of affairs", if you will. is excellent. I recommend walking through his deck. I think the point is, for the creative community as well as the technology, there is a place to make money. It just needs to be found in places it wasn't there before. For Nabeel, it's music inside social games:
"While virtual goods are usually confined to conversations about pixelated clothing and weapons, music is by far the highest grossing digital good. A look at what makes music sell as a virtual good."

My take? If you're an artist, think through your revenue stream. Some of it always will come from straight music sales, no doubt. But people today are much more about the live experience in shows followed by the memorabilia that comes with the experience (that's another way to name your CDs or T-shirt). Of course music creation is the driver for all of it, but on it's own, perhaps is not what's going to get you money.

Chart Courtesy: Nabeel Hyatt

Geeky wishes...

2009-11-17T21:12:00.000-05:00

I wish...

There was a free way to do mobile carrier lookup from a mobile number. That way I could enable people on mobile web pages to share their favorite sites with their friends in a rifle mode (the shotgun approach is easily supported via Twitter). It cost way too much to do a carrier lookup and then send the SMS. Operators should want this more than me, because when I'll send that SMS, I will pay to send it, and the receiver will pay ~$.10 to receive it.
There was a way to find location on mobile web pages for all phone types, not restricted to whether those devices have GPS or not (cellid or wifi router mac address is better than nothing). OEMs should want this more than me, because it opens a sea of marketing opportunities for them.
There was a simple, easy way to bill people off-deck, from an app or mobile web pages. The current on and off-deck billing solutions in the US are unusable. Every time I hear news from the UK about PayForIt I become green with envy. If there's such a successful model, why can't the US replicate it?! *everyone* in the mobile space should want this. This morning GoPayforit announced that it lets vendors set up a payment service for their site by inserting one line of code.

If I got any of the above wrong, feel free to educate me!

Can Freemium Content Model Survive?

2009-11-17T15:19:00.002-05:00

Image Courtesy: HypebotFollowing last weeks' rumors about MySpace starting to charge for streaming and this weeks'MySpace-iMeem possible acquisition rumors, there's a lot of (repeating) talk about the business model of free content. Of particular interest is Wireds' post "Music: Too Expensive to Be Free, Too Free to Be Expensive".

Here's some of my thoughts, and what led me to start Adva Mobile

Licensing Music from the majors is a difficult financial commitment to recover. If you're small and nimble, prove your bus model with the long tail, or at least the smaller players before paying the huge upfront fees. Sure, you gain (if you're lucky) the major's marketing wind behind your back, but when the honeymoon is over, you start paying. Another Wired writer's comment is almost (but not) funny: "In the world of online music, you're nobody until somebody sues you"
"Advertising was supposed to be music’s magic bullet". Not. In all metrics, advertising payouts are dropping fast. Even on mobile, even when you can provide pretty accurate fan profiles, the payouts are way below your operating costs or licensing costs (if you have any).
"Fans don't pay/Expect free". Not (again). As Debbie Chachra explained in her insightful post, fans will pay for relationships with the artists they follow in a number of levels. From tickets, hard goods to funding artist recordings, fans will pay for the experience that comes with the music. You just need to find a way to leverage those.

What's interesting in the entertainment space is that there seem to be no big winners in the game. Big problems = Big opportunities. That's what I'm banking on, anyway.

Economy's turning?

2009-11-06T11:54:00.000-05:00

Tough times these days. With Microsoft dropping 800 peeps, Nokia-Siemens dropping thousands etc. I have a sneaking suspicion that layoffs in the mobile location space are imminent, following Google's launch of the Android full featured free GPS app.

There's no good reason for rehashing all of that other than sharing my feelings about the recent one to bite the dust: Zeemote. To be honest, I was a bit cynical about the use case and liklihood for proliferation of their gadget. But, as we know, the gaming industry has gone places no-one has predicted. In any case, Zeemote was built by a true visionary, Beth Marcus. I cringe when I think of the people who put so much effort in, go home empty handed.

All those talking about the economy turning, and there's no better time like now to start something new, I'm not sure what you're smokin', it sure is great stuff!. Here's my advice to working people: if you have a day job, get some super-glue, and put a lot of it on your chair. And I mean, A LOT!

IODA gets iPhone app for artists from MixMatchMusic

2009-11-04T10:03:00.000-05:00

Image Courtesy: MixMatchMusic

Congratulations to MixMatchmusic and Alan Khalfin for getting IODA on the bandwagon for their artist mobile promotional tool. IODA is a key player in the marketplace and their recognition that promotion on mobile is important, is great.
I found the quote from Adam Rabinovitz (IODA VP Marketing) interesting: "The MobBase iPhone app is an innovative and low-cost solution for independent artists who want to participate in the explosively popular iPhone app market".

We at Adva Mobile asked ourselves the question whether an iPhone app was the way to go initially, or Mobile Web. It was fan reach vs. hype. Admittedly, an iPhone app has far more hype than mobile web. From our little research, it seemed like artists wanted to reach all of their fans in the crowd, using simple and known tools like mobile web and SMS. We ended up deciding that resident iPhone, Android and blackberry app would come second.
The 2nd question I'm asking myself, reading the article, is the economics of providing artists a tailored app. We all know creating and deploying an app is not an insignificant effort. What kind of revenue artists need to make to pay $20+$15/month just for this app. (BTW, the iLike iPhone is not free). What's gonna happen in a year when Android is expected to come close to the iPhone reach? Are artists expected to pay another $15/month or more? An artist who can justify this expense is a household name. Selling out big venues, music and merch. Again, this is a dilemma we've been discussing at Adva Mobile. We ended up deciding that by charging artists that much, you essentially give up a huge chunk of the market. Our service is currently free, and maybe in the future we'll add some premium services.

Overall, I'm delighted to hear these news. It means more people add mobile to the promotion toolbox, and that's good for everyone!

Mobile Location is here (now for real)

2009-10-22T09:31:00.000-05:00

In the last couple weeks I've been playing around with new mobile technology. This time, I came across this nice piece that enables marketers to learn their audience location as they view their mobile web pages.

Mobile location, it seems, has been the talk of the industry forever. Devices that don't come out with GPS chips installed seem to be the minority these days. Many applications have some form of mobile location awareness to them. Even Google has stormed in with Google Latitude, although the availability of that database for commercial purposes remains unclear. Has the real time location awareness made a dent in how marketers think of entering the mobile playground? questionable, I think.

One reason for not making a dent is that the effort associated in creating a mobile application is not insignificant. You need to consider coverage, features, maintenance etc. There's not an obvious easy entry point for marketers to test the ('mobile') water if the options are limited to mobile applications. If users' location were available on the mobile web, then with the development of a small portal, marketers can get huge reach instantly, and figure out the next step.

It seems that the technology is becoming available to create location-aware websites, and more specifically, location-aware mobile websites. I am hoping that this will really open a new path for marketers that wasn't available before, it is certainly an exciting opportunity for innovation!

New England Mobile Sector

2009-10-21T15:05:00.000-05:00

As I read XConomy's post on the top 10 NE Venture deals of Q3'09, all I can do is remember that only this last Monday, at Mobile Monday, I was inside a room full of mobile entrepreneurs, money people, business people and what not, everyone saying: Mobile in Boston is reality, look around you.

Well, maybe we can argue that there are people working in the mobile space in NE, trying to make a difference and make miracles happen, but at the bottom line, money talks:
NE ventures are about science projects, or late-stage successful businesses. Numerous NE VCs are uncomfortable about investing in mobile, as are the early stage angels and independents. They need infrastructure, health, IP, enterprise. That works.

Maybe it's a way to ensure mobile businesses in NE are stronger (whatever that means) because there are fewer who can survive w/o funding. Or otherwise, if you want mobile, go west.