“No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”

-Steve Jobs

 

Technology is a key resource for businesses. As technology managers, our job is to direct technology activities to serve the business and its customers. This requires coordination and integration of technology activities with all functional areas of the firm.

“The ultimate purpose of Strategy: a plan, method, or series of maneuvers or stratagems for obtaining goals and results using the right amount of effort.”
—Integrated Strategy Development: Unsurpassable Advantage by Binnur

Technology strategy is shaped within the context of the business. Typically focused on the 3-5 year horizon, its goal is to capture the intent and behaviors for proper utilization and exploitation of technology for the long-term success of the organization. With that, here are the five essentials that need to be addressed in our technology strategy:

1. Technology is the root of the business: So say we All!
2. Technology operates as a system: Resistance is futile
3. We need habits and rituals: Life is a pilgrimage
4. Building our tribe, our ecosystem
5. And finally… Establish technology commandments

For additional ideas on developing technology strategy also check out Your 2011 Technology Development Agenda. 

Technology is the root of the business – So say we All!

Technology for technology sake does not work. Our technology strategy lays the foundation to support our business, and leads our products and customers. To do that, we need to understand what business we are in, and where and how we need to innovate.

What business are we in is an important question as it guides an organization in every facet of its decision making. Fundamentally, it orchestrates how the value is created and delivered, for the firm, its customers, employees and shareholders (Strategy 101: What business are you in.)

To understand where and how we need to innovate, we need to drill down to the profit equation (profits = revenue – cost) and analyze it in the context of technical areas (Innovation and Profitability.) And then, we need to take it a step further and look at how we are competing in the market within the scope of generic competitive strategies (differentiation, segmentation, low cost, fast follower, hybrid, etc.) These steps are important, as it answers not just the why, what and who but also how and when questions.

This analysis establishes the basis of our technology vision and mission: the role our technology will play in our overarching business vision (our inspiration), and the path we will follow to achieve our objectives (our purpose.) This is a starting point, a rough cut of our technology vision and mission. Next, we need to look at internal and external forces and continue to validate our vision and mission as new information emerges.

Technology operates as a system – Resistance is futile

We live in a world, where everything is interconnected, embedded in systems within systems with many connections and interaction points. With that, as our technologies evolve, our behaviors evolve; and as our behaviors evolve, our technologies evolve. Simply, as a closely coupled system, we coevolve: our technological capabilities, social norms, policies, standards and more.

As we work on our technology strategy, we need to acknowledge our technology as part of this larger ecosystem. This boils down to:

1. taking a stock of the technological competencies and capabilities of our firm;
2. analyzing key internal and external assets required for orchestration of its commercialization, realizing that business strategy influences technology vision (and vice versa);
3. modeling our technology as part of this larger ecosystem, and capturing major forces influencing and driving its evolution, including the STEEP forces (and vice versa).

This helps us establish the lay of the land, including a good understanding of the potential shifts, close couplings and gaps that exists. In summary, we answered key questions that are important for our success:

• what technologies are strategically important (core and enabling) with their lifecycle potential;
• how is the firm positioned to deliver with current assets, capabilities and resources, and what are the gaps;
• what are the opportunities and threats with existing and potential competitors and competing technologies;
• how to position the firm towards a given technology and competing technologies: standards, alliances, IP;
• how much to invest for what degree of market entry, performance levels and when;
• how to ready the organization, processes and partners for successful delivery;
• what are the risks and how best to mitigate and address them;
• how to accelerate technology adoption;

We now have our technology vision and mission fully formulated: the role our technology will play in our overarching business vision (our inspiration), and the path we will follow to achieve our objectives (our purpose.) Next, we need to focus on execution.

For more information, check out:

• How to identify forces impacting your innovation
• Strategy 101: What is your core competency
• Create value at every touch point
• Strategy 101: Spot technology expectation gaps via technology life cycle

We need habits and rituals: Life is a pilgrimage

“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.”
—Aristotle

Technology strategy is a living system that constantly evolves with changing business environment, new opportunities and threats, processes and technologies. To top that, strategy is only as good as its execution.

“essence of strategy “is not doing something better than your competitors but doing something different – choosing a unique and reliable position that is rooted in systems of activity that are difficult for others to match.”
—Porter

So, our technology strategy needs to clearly articulate the intents and behaviors that will be developed and adhered to, specifically in the areas of:

• capabilities to develop and acquire;
• processes to integrate and adopt;
• operational aspects of implementation and follow thru.

Building our core competency and ensuring that we maintain sustained differentiation takes effort and focus. Using this triage of capabilities + processes + operations, we can design the optimum trade offs for key dimensions of our technology:

• cost
• availability
• quality
• functionality
• performance
• other factors: social, environmental and policies

As we create the rituals and habits to revisit and check our progress, we need stay flexible. Though we are outlining our intended strategy, given day to day changes that occur in the environment, we need to be sensitive to the emergent strategies. As a technology manager, our job is to deal with complex, dynamic, uncertain environments while continuing to focus on value creation and value capture for our organization. So, we need to evaluate and incorporate those emergent strategies back into the business.

For more information check out:

• Strategy 101 – Why building a successful strategy is hard
• Key factors for successful strategy execution
• Roadmaps and roadmapping: what and why
• Technology strategy 101: Competing technologies… Friend or foe

Building our tribe, our ecosystem

Technology as a single cell organism is not interesting, its commercialization is what brings value to the organization and the society. And, this requires support and collaboration of all functional areas and partners.

In simplistic terms, the ecosystem encapsulates the concept of a community of things and the environment in which they live. In the world of technology and business, this community includes organizations and individuals such as producers, suppliers, competitors, and other stakeholders contributing goods, knowledge, and other deliverables.

By building our ecosystem, we are enabling and encouraging everyone else to make our products better and more valuable. However, the “if you build it, they will come” strategy does not work. We need to not only ensure that we ourselves are successful, but also clearly articulate how our ecosystem partners will flourish. This includes sharing our vision and beliefs about the future, information about our customers, providing incentives and rewards that are financial and motivational, establishing communication channels; basically building an environment where we can all grow and prosper.

For more information on building ecosystems, check out Open the door and let me in.

And, finally… Establish technology commandments

Commandments basically boils down to all the shalls and shall nots of our technology platform. At the core, they reflect and identify our position and philosophy on specific technology related issues. Each of these should be captured as simple points, to ensure clear understanding by ALL parties involved (internal and external, including ecosystem developers). Some areas to consider as follows:

• privacy
• quality
• security
• usability
• sustainability
• performance
• development guidelines

Forgive me, as it has been a long time since I blogged… But, I have been lured to the exotic world of iPhone and Mac programming, and learning kept me challenged, focused and engaged, not to mention, distracted from writing…

Before I fall back to the temptations of programming, let’s dive into my article. I will be discussing strategy and the importance of building an integrated, interweaved, interdependent strategic system to create an unsurpassable competitive advantage, one that Sun Tzu would be proud of.

Unfortunately, as an over used term, strategy can also be seen as strategy soup: technology strategy, product strategy, portfolio strategy, brand strategy, HR strategy, market strategy, service strategy, IP strategy, operational strategy, social media strategy, sustainability strategy, … However, it is the integration, interweaving and coevolution of all these pieces that create strong strategic positioning for your company.

“Those who win one hundred triumphs in one hundred conflicts do not have supreme skill. Those who have supreme skill use Strategy to bend others without coming to conflict.”
— Sun Tzu, Art of Strategy

Sun Tzu saw the world as a complete and interdependent system that must be preserved. For him, brilliant strategists would rarely go to battle, as they would achieve their objectives well in advance of any confrontation: “For to win one hundred victories in one hundred battles is not the acme of skill. To subdue the enemy without fighting is the acme of skill.”

That is the ultimate purpose of Strategy: a plan, method, or series of maneuvers or stratagems for obtaining goals and results using the right amount of effort. In the context of a business, strategy builds on the organization’s mission, setting its long-term direction to achieve competitive advantage.

Porter's strategy formulation context

Establishing specific goals and performance metrics, managing resource allocation and budgets, agreeing where and by whom the value will be created and captured, the level of intimacy and engagement with customers and partners, what skills we need to develop and what opportunities we need to pursue are all part of the strategic planning process. It all boils down to:

1. how do we achieve superior economic performance;
2. how do we deliver unique differentiated value proposition to our customers;
3. how do we build our culture and organization for continuous sustained success so we can repeat #1 and #2 indefinetely.

Impermanence: strategy as a continuous process

“Plans are nothing; planning is everything.”
— Dwight D. Eisenhower

Everything changes, and with that strategy is a continual process; it is not a one-time effort. Given that, why strategize?? Because strategy:

• clarifies the direction and vision of the whole by setting specific goals and performance metrics;
• is an enabler for aligning decision making in an organization and creating focus: driving the whole organization towards its vision;
• forces you to think about not only how to advance and protect your competitive position, but ways develop it to encourage people to join and support you;
• provides a structured approach to organize your thoughts about all the complexity in your world and its evolution as conditions change;
• is designed to ensure you are asking the difficult questions and view the whole: where do we want to be, how will we know when we get there, where are we now, and what will change in our environment in the future…

The foundation of strategy

Porter's wheel of competitive strategy

Michael Porter describes the foundation of strategy as the activities which an organization chooses to excel in: differentiation arises from both the choice of activities and how they are performed. In essence, through this integration and interweaving of the system of activities, the organization creates a sustainable strategic position. Here are some thoughts to munch on…

Technological innovations drive change and enable growth. In high-tech businesses, technology and corporate strategy are tightly coupled. As technology strategy looks to add value to the business, it also brings its own mindset with unstated assumptions and biases about customers, partners and business practices. In return, it influences how products are built and businesses make money. I suspect, we’ll have plenty of interesting examples to talk about as Nokia transitions from Symbian and the MeeGo mobile platform to Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7 over the next few years.

Platform strategy encompasses a general sharing of components, underlying technology elements and processes across a range products, such as Apple’s unibody laptop engineering and manufacturing, Microsoft Windows platform and the like. As a strategy, it is focused on delivering increased efficiencies through improved learning curves and economies of scale. On the HP front, we should see more on their webOS platform, and how it may be integrated across HP’s computing and printer lines over the next few quarters.

And, when firms partner with key players outside the company, they can create a powerful network effect (value of the product/service increases as more people use it) ultimately leading to establishing an industry platform. A firm’s technology choices, how it manages relationships with partners and competitors, and its processes and practices all play into its success. As an industry platform leader, the firm is now depended on the complementary contributions from the broader, interdependent ecosystem, and with that they will let go of some level of control. Take note of the Linux, Apache, and Eclipse platforms which are managed via non-profit foundations, with Apple’s App Store and the semi-constant backlash from the community, or how open Google Android really is.

Product strategy is focused on the customer: who are they, what benefits to deliver, and why they would choose you over your competitors. With close ties to technology strategy, careful considerations need to be given to product lifecycle and technology adoption when it comes to designing and deploying the actual product.

And, when we start talking about when/how to bring this product to market, how to manufacture it, and how to support/service it, we are touching marketing, manufacturing, operations as well as support and service strategy.

As Drucker pointed out, the purpose of a business is to create a customer. As I highlighted before, all these pieces of strategy boil down to:

1. how do we achieve superior economic performance;
2. how do we deliver a unique, differentiated value proposition;
3. how do we build our culture and organization for continuous sustained success so we can repeat indefinitely.

Integrated and interdependent system

As the wheel of competitive strategy demonstrates, none of these strategic pieces are meant to be decided and managed in silos. Though planning is usually seen as a top down process, in reality, it is an agile system, and it requires interaction and intelligent exchange at all levels.

Firms rely on cross-functional Product Management Teams to integrate, influence and resolve conflicts that come up through strategy disconnects during product development. While these teams do a great job of managing change within the box, the majority of required business level strategic shifts will not be addressed, even if it means the end of the business…

Agility is key for a company to maintain its competitiveness in the marketplace. Some corporations are better than others when it comes to mobilizing and shifting strategy at the business level. It could be the leadership, as in the case in 1996 with Bill Gates, when he turned Microsoft around on a dime and refocused everyone on the Internet. For Amazon, it is their culture, competencies and organizational structure that enable them to develop and execute on an integrated strategy: if you think it, and if your idea supports the business strategy, then the rest of the business evolves to support it. Amazon Cloud, Fulfilled by Amazon, Warehouse deals, Amazon Prime are all such examples.

As in these cases, we are looking at a strategic system that is integrated, interdependent, and that co-evolves with itself, other systems, and its surroundings. If you can achieve that system, you can bend others without coming to conflict, as Sun Tzu states.

Leveraging the power of strategy

Strategy development is one thing, effective strategy execution is another. Here are some thoughts on how to ensure your organization is ready and willing:

• make sure your strategy is understood: translate it into terms that every one of your employees at any level would be able to understand and act upon;
• establish organizational structure that enables individual strategies to be linked, integrated, and can initiate change as needed;
• build accountability and results into the organization so every individual looks to contribute to the success of that strategy in their day-to-day activities;
• establish a process for learning, adapting and evolving strategy – instead of an annual event, strategy becomes a continual process;
• and, as strategy evolves to reflect shifts in opportunities and threats, ensure that your organization can handle the change accordingly.

If you can achieve this level of agility and mobility in your organization, you won’t need luck.

The Kitetail blog is about the many facets of Technology Management. Using Prezi, I put together this brief introduction to Technology Management. For more information on this topic, please check out:

• Two Bits on Technology Management
• Technology vs Product Management

As always, I appreciate your comments. Let me know what you think!

Note: Click “play” (the triangle) to load the presentation. You can step forward/back using the right/left arrows, or select Autoplay under the ‘More’ menu.

“Don’t ship the org chart.”

—Steve Sinofsky

It is not uncommon for engineering focused teams to release products that are neither usable nor user friendly. It happens, and I have been there as the program manager… The important thing is to learn from it and fix it for the next set of products.

While usability refers to the ease of achieving desired goal(s), user experience encompasses the overall perception the individual gathers while using your product and service. It is never the intent of teams to produce unusable products with poor user experience. However, lack of understanding, priorities and ownership, coupled with deadline driven processes will be sure to deliver this undesirable result.

To combat this, especially with established teams that already have products in the market, you need to inject customer empathy into the organization. For this, four activities are critical: increase customer insight, make everyone responsible but one accountable, adopt and adapt to accommodate shift in the mindset, and walk the talk.

Increase customer insight

Lack of domain knowledge is one of the top reasons why products fail. On the quest to change the world, it is too easy for teams to get blindsided by their visions, neglecting customers’ needs and downplaying their desires.

Customer visits are frequently used to increase customer contact and awareness in teams. If you are new to market, and looking for ideas or have certain hypotheses, these visits can deliver the insights you need. However, if you already have a product on the market that you are working to improve its usability, you need to go deeper.

I talked about immersing your engineering team with your support organization before. It is painful and you won’t be winning any popularity contests, but it gives immediate hands-on experience and insight into your customers’ world. At the end of the day, your team will not only get a holistic view of the product and customer, but also see how small changes in their design and implementation can contribute to better user experience.

The nature of customer connection is also important. You want to achieve a good balance between visionary customers that push boundaries, and your mass-market. You need to inspire your team, and make sure they don’t fall into mediocre thinking.

Make everyone responsible, One accountable

Usability and user experience is the responsibility of everyone in your team. Every little detail matters, from error messages/logging, flow of work, accessibility, consistency, … All these details are embedded deep into different parts of your code, making everyone responsible. However, you can only have one accountable individual, as the whole product matters more than its parts.

As a note, accountability and authority goes hand in hand. You can’t have authority without accountability, nor accountability without authority.

Make sure the accountable individual is knowledgable in the field of Human Factors Engineering. This individual also needs to have the facilitation skills to bring a diverse group of individuals to the table in order to design the best experience possible within the constraints of the system.

As you are dealing with changes to existing products, no doubt you will run into my baby is beautiful, or our customers want it this way arguments from senior engineers. Change is hard! As the sponsor, your role is to push change forward, work with data and communicate for forward progress. Make your biggest nay-sayer your friend! And really mean it!!

Adopt and adapt to accommodate change

Usability and user experience are about the whole product. In contrast, engineering and project management processes are about componentization and managing parts. This is why you may see the reflections of your organization’s internal structure and politics in your product…

To overcome this disconnection, you need to manage white space carefully and focus on linkages between parts. Especially for your engineering team, as inherently they are not the most outgoing bunch.

“Don’t tell people how to do things, tell them what to do and let them surprise you with their results.”

—General George Patton

Customer-centered thinking is not isolated. Communication and collaboration is a must to build great products. And, you need to encourage agile processes, where your team can fail quickly and cheaply. To support all this, you need to invest in revision control, your deployment process and your product architecture to help organize what may seem like a chaotic activity.

Walk the talk

You are what you measure! You have to walk the talk! The vision and values you communicate, verbally and behaviorally, and what you focus on sets the tone and guides the efforts of your team.

You want your team to move beyond just implementing features at face value to understand the context of their users and the problems they are trying to solve. This is beyond just stating usability and user experience is your #1 goal. You need to frame the issue and simplify it in a way that enables everyone in the organization to participate in its creative solution.

To help your team, you need to be clear on what critical performance variables you are tracking and how you are prioritizing them. You also need to understand what needs, resources and skills needed by your organization, and fill in the gaps.

And, finally, reward publicly as a team. This is team-work.

Interesting resources

There are too many resources to list them all here. However, here are a few on the topic of building a customer-centric organization. Any other recommendations? Please lets us know!

• Employees: Meet your customers by binnur
• Making user & customer experience a business competency by UX Magazine
• Design for Developers: Making your Frontend Suck Less by Idan Gazit
• Kano Model (tool to predict user satisfaction) by Jared Spool – tool to predict user satisfaction
• Zappos lessons: Building a Customer-Focused Culture

To be successful, you don’t have to be good at everything, but you do need to be good at the right things. The end of the year is a great time for reflection, to evaluate what went well last year, and what needs to improve or change in the upcoming year. With that, let’s take a look at some potential areas to improve your technology management capability in 2011.

First, take it down a notch

God, grant me the serenity
To accept the things I cannot change;
Courage to change the things I can;
And wisdom to know the difference.
— Serenity Prayer

Start with recognizing your scope of control and influence within your organization, its processes and structure. As you formulate your goals for 2011, make sure to keep this in perspective to ensure achievable outcomes.

Also, as you work through your list, include areas of personal growth and development. In many cases, you will find your technology management agenda will interlink with your personal development and growth.

Second, make a list and check it twice

Create your list of interest areas as you think through your organization’s current capabilities. Make sure to include seeds that you already planted in 2010, but which haven’t matured yet. Here are some good starting points:

• Innovation research studies, such as Booz & Company’s annual study The Global Innovation 1000.  Their 2010 research emphasized understanding of emerging technologies, broad consumer & customer insights, engagement with customers, product & platform management, and pilot-user selection/controlled rollouts as critical innovation capabilities.
• Walk through your core competencies, your degree of innovativeness,  your innovation and product strategy (first mover, fast follower, low cost leader, differentiator strategy, …) to identify any additional areas of focus.
• Consider cultural and process related improvement areas, including rigorous decision making, strategic alignment, talent management, improving usability and quality, breaking silos, …
• Think through your experience with technology expectation gaps and various lifecycle frameworks to evaluate your organization’s current capabilities.

As you create your list, ask yourself:

1. what frustrates you the most in your existing processes;
2. what you believe is the biggest barrier for your organization;
3. what do you think you would need in order to double your success in 2011;
4. what do you think will bring the biggest return in investment;
5. what changes you foresee in your business, industry, competitors, …

Third, establish your theme for the year

As you narrow down your list to the vital few items which will have the biggest impact, make sure to focus on areas in which you have control and that you are passionate about. Also, I recommend limiting your agenda to 1-2 areas at most, as these are big elephants!

Now, using your list as a blueprint, look for an overarching theme for the year. In addition to your agenda, this theme will act as your anchor, guiding you in your day-to-day activities. Here are some examples:

• Increase organizational agility for faster time to market;
• Strengthen customer touch, visibility and connection within your R&D team;
• Explore emerging technologies and expand IP portfolio accordingly;
• Align technology strategy with corporate strategy for better technology investment decisions and talent development.

Fourth, break it down

Once you have your theme for the year and your agenda(s), break it down into specific goals and tasks, and make them SMART: Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, and Timely. Where possible, I recommend developing a mini-roadmap that you can use to establish deliverables and due dates, measure progress and capture results.

You can also look at using Balanced Scorecard dimensions (learning & growth, operational excellence, customer, financial) to set a broader take. And, make sure to share and delegate as appropriate.

Fifth, establish the right habits

Create the needed rituals and habits to revisit and check your progress throughout the year. Remember to stay flexible, and recognize when you are beating a dead horse (learn and let go!). When necessary, you may need to change trajectories, refocus or even abandon your goals.

Now that you’re on your way into the new year, what’s on your agenda?

Wishing you a very productive and fruitful 2011!

First, definition of touchpoints by Albert Tan from frog design mind: a touchpoint is the moment upon which a sensory interaction results in an emotional/psychological one. … The touchpoints that are part of your brand and marketing strategy — moments people interact with a brand from initial awareness to evangelism — are all opportunities to engage with your audience in richer, more vivid ways.

Next, series of posts from Harvard Business Review blog by Adam Richardson looking at customer experience: what it encompasses, how to structure it, how to approach and improve it.

In Understanding Customer Experience, Adam defines customer experience as:  the sum-totality of how customers engage with your company and brand, not just in a snapshot in time, but throughout the entire arc of being a customer. Recognizing the challenges of fully controlling customer experiences, he emphasizes the importance of springing these experiences from concrete, controllable elements — the touchpoints.

Following, Adam moves onto mapping out your customer journey in Using Customer Journey Maps to Improve Customer Experience. Customer journey map is a diagram that illustrates the steps your customer(s) go through in engaging with your company. As part of the framework discussion, he shares an example of the home theater journey from the point of awareness to the out-of-the-box experience, with further emphasis on understanding the customer actions, motivations, questions and barriers at each step. Adam also shares additional resources for creating customer journey maps in this article.

Finally, in Touchpoints Bring the Customer Experience to Life, Adam discusses how an organization can orchestrate touchpoints — a touchpoint being any interaction point between the customer and your brand. Adam highlights four general categories for looking at touchpoints: products, interactions, messages, and settings. And, he concludes that this integrated look at touchpoints requires multiple parts of a company, and often outside partners, to work together to improve the experience.

What do you think is missing from these discussions? Given I just heard about Delicious service potentially shutting down, my thoughts are around how poorly we tend to handle disposing aspect of our customer life cycle… And, as we depend more on software running on the cloud, with new startups continuously entering into the space, how will our customer experience and more importantly expectations will change?! Finally, what would be the impact to the rest of the ecosystem of products, companies and customers, as some services will bloom while many others won’t… Reflecting back at one of my favorite books, I suspect we are in the verge of entering the Brave New World!

Though I am only half way through, I can honestly say it has been one of the best things I have done for my creative journey. When I decided to finally step in and take the challenge, I knew it would be a commitment. And that it would pay back in some form. I just didn’t realize how much I would learn and benefit from it. With that, here is what I have learned about creativity and myself through my 365 photo project.

Creativity is a commitment

Regardless if you have natural talents or not, creativity requires dedication and time. You need to manage your creative activities as a project, and you need to make time for them within your busy day, from taking pictures to evaluating, processing, sharing and learning from them. And, you need to manage and organize your workflow, so that you are spending less time on the mundane and more time on your creativity.

Creativity is a process

Your output is what you share with others, but creativity is a process. It starts with seeing what is ordinary in a new light, and blossoms through your imagination, experience and perspectives. It continues by seizing, shaping and sharing that vision with others, in order to strengthen the learning cycle. The better you understand that process and workflow, nurturing and reinforcing it, the more successful you will be at growing and deepening it.

Creativity is about the mastery of your tools

Yes, creativity is learning to see and capture beyond the ordinary. But, it is also about learning and understanding how best to use the medium and tools that are available to you. To be effective, you need to have mastery of your tools: understand their interactions and limitations within your environment that will enable you to express your vision fully.

Creativity is about understanding self better

In the process of learning about digital photography, I have read several books that emphasized the importance of having a vision. How does vision apply to becoming a better photographer??!! Isn’t it just about seeing and clicking?! The reality is that our creativity comes from our insights and perspectives that are unique to us. Knowingly or unknowingly, we apply a filter to what we see. And, the better we understand ourselves, the better we can seize and share that unique voice and vision with others.

You may wonder what my vision is… For me, I realized my voice and vision boils down to contrasts. I love exploring the contrast in light, in life, in technology, and I plan to bring out more of that my writing as well.

Creativity is about details

It starts with noticing what is different and moves to capture its uniqueness. This process is all about deciding what (and how) to include, exclude, emphasize, so that you can highlight the mood and evoke emotions in the story you are sharing. Details matter, and how you exploit those details matter even more.

Creativity is a lonely process

Don’t get me wrong.. I have many supporters, especially my family. They not only remind me about my picture of the day, but are willing participants when I need a last minute photo idea, model, or just by being my pod-boy

But, in the end, I am the one with the camera and the vision. Yes, I share what I capture on flickr. But, when a tree falls alone in a forest, does it make a sound? Yes, I do get excited when my view count increases; trust me, I am a metric-oholic… My point is, unless you are doing this for yourself, you will not have the motivation to keep going. Remember, many exceptional and famous artists died poor.

Creativity requires inspiration

I lost count on the number of photo books I have borrowed from our local library, or the blog posts I have read on photography. Each one gives me yet another insight, from deepening my understanding and knowledge to inspiring me try and see things differently. In order to keep nourishing your creative juices, you need to identify and bring in new inspirations.

Creativity is diverse

I may be focusing on my photography, but in the past 6 months, I have also been spending more time reading about art history, perception, design, semiotics and more. Creativity is a multi-disciplinary process. All these filter into what I see and how I express my vision.

Creativity requires the beginner mind

It requires one to willingly see things in a different perspective and ask: what else do I see here? It is not just an old, sagging barn, but an exploration of rusty locks, the feelings it reflects and more…

Creativity is about trial and error

Some shots I still can’t get; but, eventually will.. With each click of the shutter, I get a sense of what works and what doesn’t. This process teaches me about the importance of letting go. Yeah, I might have really worked hard on that shot, but if it is not capturing my vision, I am not afraid to trash it.

Creativity can fuel and can drain

There are days that I just don’t feel like pulling my camera out… And that is ok. Not everything I do has to be creatively done. When I walked through Seattle Art Museum’s Picasso exhibit, I was amazed at how Picasso kept working his themes using different materials and styles. It is all a process that feeds into the creative habit.

Creativity is fun

Creativity is a challenge and it is challenging. It is about constantly trying, developing and learning. It is about you, and what you are interested in. It is one place where you can be selfish freely!

Will I do another 365? Very likely.. But, I will be more purposeful on the next one… In another 6 months, once I am done, I plan to revisit these learnings.

Recently I had the pleasure to attend Deploy 2010 hosted by Seattle 2.0, and I watched several startup pitches. I know there are millions of ‘how to pitch’ articles out there, but it prompted me to revisit and update my previous article on putting together a winning startup pitch.

My previous article, Lights, Camera, Action!, highlighted what to present and communicate if you were given 15+ minutes for your product and technology. In contrast, Deploy pitches were about 3 minutes, in front of the entire audience. In other words, they are intense. How do you send out a clear signal, when the noise level is high in such environments? That is the focus of this article.

“I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.”
—Mark Twain

As Mark Twain’s quote captures, the less time you have to deliver your message, the more time you need to invest in your pitch. It is difficult to use just a few words to boil down the essence of your idea… So, where do you start when you are so short in time!? For that, I like to reflect on Chris Orwig’s thoughts on poetry and photography from Visual Poetry: A Creative Guide for Making Engaging Digital Photographs.

“What the novelist says in 20,000 words, the poet says in 20. And, after reading a poem we don’t just have more information, we have more experience. A good poem isn’t about reductionism. It is about reducing, simplifying, and deepening. A poem always gives more. And poems are spare. With so little space, they require a distillation, which concentrates and intensifies their meaning and effect. Like evaporating seawater, where only the salt remains, those few lines communicate more.”
—Chris Orwig

Distill your poetry

With the frame of mind of a poet, you need to distill your startup pitch and demo to:

1. create awareness;
2. intensify meaning;
3. spawn engagement;
4. provoke action.

Just like a spiral staircase, you need to build on each separately, while weaving their effects jointly. To do that, you need to pull together pieces of your product; your vision; what is here today while hinting at future possibilities; what is it that you do that no one else does; and who will benefit from all this hard work and how.

Of course, this all depends on the action you want to provoke. If your focus is on creating partnerships, you need to twist your story a bit. You need to do all that, but also add the tangent as to why the potential partner would want to be hitched to this brand new bandwagon.

And, unlike the line from Jerry Maguire: You had me at “hello!”, it is way too easy to loose your audience in just a few minutes. Remember, you don’t have the luxury of time to win them back. Once you’ve lost their attention, that is it… No soup for you! Next!

Create a flow

To create and maintain an engaged audience, you need to have a steady flow through your presentation. As a poet, at each step, as you reduce and simplify your message, take the opportunity to go back and deepen your audience connection using your product features, competitive differentiation, customer stories and such. Keep working to close the circle between awareness to action, while leaving room for curiosity and interest with your audience. If nothing else, make sure your energy, excitement and passion is contagious!

Your ugly duckling is beautiful

Words such as amazing, gorgeous, beautiful are not the exclusive sayings of Steve Jobs about Apple products. After working so hard on your product, why not take the time and share how amazing it is! Even the small things, such as readability of fonts and balance of colors can make a difference to your audience. Remember, first impressions do count!

Streamline your product demo and weave it together with your pitch. Show the most exciting features of your product that you want to leave your audience with, which are also aligned with the action you want to generate. It is important to leave something to the imagination. Practice until you release the poet in you, so much so that when something goes wrong (and it will), you won’t lose a beat and your audience will stay with you.

Don’t ramble, don’t use buzz words, but be human and humorous. Realize that, without sufficient background as a foundation, your product will not make sense. So, keep weaving the concept together, and layer it until it is simply clear.

And, if you want to stand out from the crowd…

Understand your audience, and use whatever you can to keep their attention. Make sure to have your female counterpart present at the pitch, and include her in your presentation. That is, unless you are pitching at Women 2.0…

Statistically, the successful launch of new products are rare, as there are many challenges to overcome. The successful development of new products incorporating new technologies is even more challenging. Execution matters for success, and is all the more critical for technology focused products. Managing expectations is part of the successful execution process, and this article focuses on how to spot technology expectation gaps.

“Oft expectation fails, and most oft where most it promises; and oft it hits where hope is coldest; and despair most sits.”
— Shakespeare

So, what is a technology expectation gap?! Whenever there is a disparity between the value or experience delivered (feature, performance, quality, …) by your technology vs. what your customers and users actually perceive they are getting, you have an expectation gap!

For high-technology products, the existence of an expectation gap is a given; it is the nature of the beast. New technologies are constantly chasing the old ones, but never quite catching up. If successful, they enable breakthrough innovations, new product categories, markets and users. But until they are successful, there are lot of judgements, hopes, dreams and disappointments that are laid upon them. However, by utilizing concepts from technology maturity, life cycle and diffusion of technologies, you can spot potential expectation gaps (internal and external) and manage them for success, or exploit them as a competitive advantage.

Look Ma! No hands!: technology maturity

The technology maturity process feels a lot like watching kids grow up... From a baby to a child, teen and finally an adult. Understanding this process can give the needed insights and observations for better management of business, technology and expectations. For instance:

• What is crucial and sensible for one stage, may not be appropriate for the next. In the embryonic stage, aggressively developing key functionality is critical to showcase the potential for the new technology. But, as the technology grows and matures, performance and cost become the driving factor.
• Technology maturity is a good risk indicator for increased vulnerabilities, as it will experience emergence of substitutes.
• Recognizing the maturity level of a technology can feed into your business strategy and portfolio management process. Such as, relocating resources away from mature and aging technologies.

When a new technology enters the scene, its performance and functionality will not match the existing technology capabilities. This is expected, as one to one substitution is rarely an incentive for the new technology creators. However, as you integrate/introduce this new technology with your product, your customers and partners may not share the same excitement that you feel about this new technology. And frankly, your internal partners and your program team, Customer Support, Marketing, Sales, etc., maybe your loudest critics.  To better understand the conflict, lets take a look at the product life cycle and technology adoption framework.

Design for the technology adoption

I previously wrote about technology adoption and the importance of designing for technology adoption (along with a few others tagged as s-shaped-adoption-curve.) This is a quick recap, as I don’t want to repeat myself. These articles emphasize that:

• Technology and innovation is a change: change in the behavior of customers, in how they work and produce. It is important to recognize the change, design and manage it accordingly.
• You need to understand the needs, values and characteristics of your customers in the context of where your technology and product is positioned, as well as where your customers believe it is positioned at. Through this understanding, you can focus at delivering value to increase adoption rates.
• It is important not to fall in love with your own technology and ideas, but to continuously analyze and question your assumptions.

If you have a one-to-one-to-one match between where your technology, your product and your customers are at, life is wonderful! You aligned all the dots. However, technology has a life of its own, and every product incorporates one or more technologies… So…

What a beautiful life… the life of technology…

Technology expectation gap occurs when your technology maturity, product life cycle and customer stages conflict. The result could be a simple irritation and loss of customers, to more extreme public outcry such as Google Buzz experienced when it was released without appropriate privacy controls (and later their public apology. I guess they weren’t paying much attention to all the racket over at Facebook…)

These gaps can be experienced in the various dimensions, such as cost, performance, scalability, flexibility, functionality, usability, deployability and maintainability. And, they may have differing impacts to your internal and external customers/partners. Once you internalized the tension and are aware of the gap, you can use communication tools, ecosystem partners and positioning strategies to mitigate impact.

Mismatch of technology/product with customer segment

Positioning your new technology for adoption by a maturing customer segment will certainly raise eyebrows. Recently, Google announced the WebP image format for the Web. WebP’s adoption as a substitute will be interesting to watch, as existing image solutions have been around for a long time. With that, key areas that need to be managed are:

• penetration to the existing ecosystem in order to speed the adoption process: browsers, content creators, image converters, content management systems, … Building ecosystem maps, identifying key partners, control and influence points will certainly help the process.
• development and evolution of WebP functionality to address existing concerns and achieve the good enough stage. Communicating planned roadmaps with time frames, and being clear with users on WebP best practices (rather than positioning it for mass market) can help position it appropriately with skeptics.

Migrate to a substitute technology, or upgrade your existing technology

Whether you migrate to a substitute technology, or even just upgrade your existing technology, you will experience some level of discontent. This could be experienced as deployment and maintainability woes by your support team, or performance, flexibility and functionality conflicts for your customers.

Understanding your customers’ use models, as well as extreme use cases will shape your migration and upgrade strategy. When appropriate, call on your ecosystem for support, such in the case with iOS and H.264 vs. Flash. Utilizing HTML5 and transcoding, Apple’s ecosystem has been increasingly delivering H.264 video to iPhones/iPads. In summary, instead of working to increase the capabilities of substitute technology in all dimensions, think outside the box to see how else you can reduce gaps in acceptance.

Announce the discontinuance of your technology or product functionality

For product managers, managing discontinuance is a challenging area. Perhaps more so due to emotional attachment than factual reasoning. Either way, when your customers are arguing against your discontinuance plans, you better listen. I still remember when Netflix tried to retire Profiles…

When appropriate, offering the new technology along with the existing one can allow your customers to migrate themselves, such was the case with transition from floppy drives to CDs and beyond. Another strategy that could work is using ecosystem partners to fill-in gaps as needed. However, as in the case with Netflix, if you have no workable solutions, be ready to retract on your announcements.

Implement a technology as its standard is being defined

There’s nothing like building the airplane wings while the plane is lifting off the tarmac! Implementing a new standard as the standard itself is being defined will certainly appeal to your visionaries and early adopters. Clearly communicating the capabilities of the new technology, such as the HTML5 showcases, will feed excitement and accelerate adoption. However, positioning and maintaining clear communication is a must, as technology implementation or its interpretation will change, potentially resulting in frustrated customers.

Change your technology strategy at midcourse

OK! This is given; technology directions can and will change on a dime. However, with recent discontent around Microsoft’s Silverlight, I had to mention this one. I don’t believe the root issue is the change of strategy by Microsoft. Rather, the fact that people don’t like change and uncertainty, especially when it is delivered in the form of an unwelcome surprise. This issue, yet again, highlights the importance of maintaining communication with your customers, and utilizing your close relations with your supporters when change is coming. Through this, you can prepare your customers, but also build a compelling story that they can rally behind to support you in the shift (instead of feeling like they wasted their precious time and effort…)

Increase customers’ intangible costs

Any changes to your technology and technology strategy will somehow impact your customers’ bottom line. This could be due to unexpected system upgrades, time and cost associated with learning the new technology, or just changes in the usability of your system. Key point here is not to underestimate the impact of your changes, but to help your customers to transition successfully. Alpha/beta testing can help identify unanticipated impacts, and highlight strategies to address existing gaps prior to your release.

Parting thoughts…

“There is nothing more difficult to plan, more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to manage than the creation of a new system” – Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince

A bit of understanding and utilizing frameworks can help to spot gaps. Through this, and technology and product roadmap alignment, you could do a better job of communicating and managing these gaps. These frameworks can also help you identify gaps in your competitors’ offerings and enable you to build a more competitive offering.

Technorati Tags: technology maturity, technology expectation gaps