Posts Tagged ‘advice’

Speek Golden Principles

Monday, May 31st, 2010

Most startups fail. That’s just a simple fact. Of those startups that do manage to get out of the startup phase intact, few are around in two years, and fewer are profitable. Those that do make it through do so through a combination of great products, stellar leadership, and a little bit of dumb luck.

I know what I’m talking about. My startup, Speek, was one of the few startups in our market that proved to have what it takes. Speek is still humming along smoothly and daily capturing more market.

I won’t pretend that our success was all due to my amazing technical leadership. In fact, some of our success was quite in spite of some of my leadership decisions. No one gets it all right, ever.

One thing I did right, though, was set the tone for what we did at Speek. I developed a set of 10 golden principles that drove every decision that we ever made about our product. I believe these principles were at the root of our success.

Here, then are the 10 things we strove for in our product at Speek:

  1. Speed. Our app must be fast from the user perspective. More than one second for any task is unacceptable.
  2. Instant Utility. Our app must be instantly useful, out of the box. If it takes too long or is too complex to configure, it’s useless.
  3. Voice. Our app must have attitude. It must have personality. It must be unique and different. Think Twitter’s “fail whale” (without the fail).
  4. Less is more. Either we do it right or we pull it. Do what needs to be done to make it work and make it work well.
  5. Programmable. We offer more than a product. We offer a platform. Customers can take what we build and improve upon it.
  6. Personal. Our app must generate endearment. We want users to be rabid fans and product evangelists. More than just a product or a platform, our product should create a community of connected people.
  7. Restful. Each aspect of our app should have a free and comprehensible URL.
  8. Discoverable. Our app should be friendly to search engines and social media. It should easily be discovered by the world.
  9. Clean. We should have a simple user interface with large fonts and lots of space. No UI screen should ever feel busy or confusing. It should be crystal clear what should be done on each screen.
  10. Playful. We have a damn monkey for a logo. Our app should invoke that kind of playful spirit and attitude.

Now, I get that some of these principles might not fit certain startups. Some are more or less specific to the software startup environment. For the most part, however, you can extrapolate these ideas to give your startup a serious advantage in your market, no matter what your product.

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Posted in Open API, Start-ups, innovation, technology | 5 Comments »

A Case for Bringing in New Blood

Monday, May 24th, 2010

Have you ever noticed that, when a new employee starts working for you, they’re highly motivated? They feel the need to make their mark on the company. They want to be impressive. They want to set a trajectory that will ensure their advancement. Sure, sometimes it’s just sycophantic nonsense, but in most cases they genuinely want to demonstrate their skills and their worth to the company.

This is a good thing. This is a really good thing. That drive to demonstrate worth will, in most cases, pay off for the company. But, how do you take advantage of this phenomenon?

Positive Reinforcement Does Wonders

The corporate environment can have a mind-numbing effect on even the most motivated, high-quality performer. Getting past the entrenched politics, the written and unwritten procedures and policies and the general corporate malaise is a challenge. And, while motivated employees like to make a positive difference for the company with their ideas, they don’t usually relish the idea of having to jump through so many hoops to make a positive change.

One way, then, to reward that new blood drive is to remove barriers. When you see a new employee who has a good idea, do what you can to fast-track the idea. Help her overcome the political barriers. Give her a head’s-up on how to grease certain wheels, or who to talk to about cutting red tape.

When the change does happen, reward him in other ways. Simple verbal praise is all right and important, but it isn’t enough. You need to offer other rewards, such as peer recognition. Ideally, an idea or innovation that makes or saves the company money ought to have a monetary reward.

Keep Staffed with Highly Motivated People

So, you understand how to take advantage of this new blood motivation on an individual level. But, how do you keep it fresh? How do you keep bringing in new blood?

It’s simple enough. You constantly evolve your staff by finding ways to always bring in new, motivated, intelligent personnel.

You have to be careful here, of course. You don’t want to lose motivated employees. If your bottom 10% are all still motivated and productive, they don’t deserve to be killed off and the company will be worse off without them.  This is what is sometimes problematic with the old GE / Six Sigma mentality of “killing off” 10% of your work force periodically.

You also need to watch out for the potential negative impact this has on productive employees. In some cases, it will have the unintended consequence of scaring the hell out of them. Employees will start to dread the regularly-scheduled new folks, and may begin to get paranoid and feel as though they have a target on their backs.

If you’re lavish with your rewards, this isn’t as much of a danger, of course.

A better option may be to occasionally find ways to bring in new staff and grow. This is especially true if you already have a dynamite, productive team. Find new roles, and find the budget. Of course, this works well with bigger organizations, and not so well with startups.

Finally, you need to realize that not every new employee has that “new car” shine. If you bring someone in who doesn’t seem interested in making her mark on your organization, cut them loose sooner, rather than later. Then, go out and find an employee who wants to make a difference.

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Posted in Corporate America | 18,706 Comments »

Why Speed Isn’t the Best Indicator of Safe Driving

Monday, May 10th, 2010

If you’ve never driven a supercharged Porsche, you really don’t know what you’re missing. A Porsche is the most beautiful piece of machinery ever to hit the road, and when you’re driving one you’re in a whole other world.

I can't drive 55!Needless to say, I drive a supercharged Porsche, and I drive it fast. I have the speeding tickets to show for it, too. And I don’t drive fast because I like the danger, or even because I’m necessarily in a hurry. I drive fast because my Porsche can handle it. When I’m doing 55 MPH, it handles like most cars do at 25 MPH.

So, it dawned on me one day, as the officer was getting back into her highway patrol car, how little sense the umbrella speed limit makes. Yes, driving 55 MPH is safer in many cars than driving 85 MPH. But every car handles differently. There are some cars that shouldn’t be driven at 45 MPH, much less 85 MPH.

What’s this all go to do with tech and tech business? I think it’s a good analogy for the mistake that many businesses make in developing their products and processes. They look for that one magic number, that single quantitative upper limit, and they won’t go any further. They impose speed limits that might make sense in some circumstances, but that are completely irrelevant in others.

To be successful as an individual or as a company, you have to put umbrella quantitative analysis on the back burner. Sure, there is sometimes a single quantitative silver bullet; cruising down the highway at 150 MPH isn’t safe, Porsche or no. But we need to start from a point that, for the most part, isn’t concerned about a single silver bullet but rather a good blend of quantitative and qualitative criteria for success.

So, how do we do that? Well, we need to start looking past just simple quantitative metrics and see them in context of qualitative metrics. For example, during the process of product development, I’ve used a variety of qualitative measurements, such as web traffic trends, successful new user registrations, click-through rates and referral rates. Alongside those numbers, I’ve also looked at the micro. I’ve watched new users using the app, and asked them questions. Do they like the app? What do they struggle with? Throw in some usability studies and user polls, and you begin to build a data pool that’s both qualitative and quantitative.

It is possible to go too far, of course. You can’t rely only on qualitative measurement. Qualitative measurement has its limitations. Often, it can’t be reproduced due to natural variations, whether that’s a variation in peoples’ buying practices or whether it’s a slight developmental variance, or even the proverbial fly in the ointment. That’s why the most effective methods of business decision making use a balanced blend of both quantitative and qualitative criteria.

There are, of course, risks. When you don’t put in hard and fast limits, sometimes you’re going to pay the price. You’re going to get speeding tickets. You’re going to step on someone’s toes. You’re going to face obstacles anytime you challenge the status quo. In the end, however, the payoff is so significant that you can’t just let it pass you by.

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Posted in Analytics | 4 Comments »

How to Spur Innovation at Your Organization

Tuesday, April 27th, 2010

Some organizations thrive on innovation. Younger companies, and companies that deal with bleeding-edge technologies or trends tend to make innovation a core value.

Chances are pretty good that’s not your organization. Most organizations struggle with innovation. They want to move forward with new ideas, new technologies and new platforms, but an institutional history or structure holds them back. Other companies tend to squash innovation like it’s an annoying little bug.

I’ve experienced this first hand. I’m the Director of New Media for a big company with an established past. As in, 110 years of an established past. Lucky for me, the company does have a real desire to innovate in the area of technology. They’ve just had a hard time of it up to this point.

So, here’s what I did for my organization. I’m not saying this approach will work for yours. Heck, it might even get you fired. But if your organization is going to stay competitive it’s going to have to innovate, and this process may help.

  1. Identify the problem. This was as much for my benefit as for the organization’s. We were able to get buy-in for innovative ideas at the highest levels of the company. That means when we hit organizational roadblocks down the road, we were able to go back to those executive sponsors and garner support.
  2. Create a mechanism for change. Rather than proposing specific innovations, we developed a group that would solely be responsible for incubating new and innovative technologies, tools and ideas. This group’s purpose is to identify possible technological innovations and bring them back to the specific business units. The group operates outside of the existing corporate bureaucracy, giving it a greater degree of autonomy than any departmental group might have had.
  3. Implement a change process. We didn’t leave the innovative group alone to rule the world, however. We gave them a specific roadmap. We included methodologies, such as interacting with vendors, beta testing of new technologies and involvement with conferences and trade shows, that they would use to identify new technologies.
  4. Determine the vector of change. We also gave our innovation group a specific list of technology types from which they could work. We suggested things like “Web Technologies,” “Cloud Computing” and “Delivery Platforms.” This helps to insure that the group doesn’t go rogue into bleeding-edge technological innovations when we’re struggle to even keep current.
  5. Develop an intake process. Identifying technology innovations isn’t enough, of course. We needed a way for our innovation group to bring new tech to our business units. We developed specific processes for the group to use, including reaching out proactively to various business units, and being proactive rather than reactive.

The end result has been that we’ve seen some especially useful and innovative technology implementations across the company since we started this process. Not every innovation to come out of the group has been implemented or even fully considered, but our business units now have a pool of innovations to choose from going forward.

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Posted in Corporate America, innovation | 10 Comments »