The pen is truly mightier than the sword.

People lie all the time. This is the way of the new world. Whatever the cause, reason, excuse for this behaviour it is absolutely rampant in society.  I don’t know if this is something that is a part of who we are, or people’s lack of willingness to stand up and be truthful, born out of the reasoning that it wouldn’t change anything but it certainly seems to have resigned itself to statements like “that’s just the way it is.” In my daily dealings with the bureaucraziness of this world and the subsequent daily lies I found that when I ask people to put exactly what they have just told me over the phone in writing, the story amazingly changes. Is it because we are visual creatures and unless we don’t see it in black and white we don’t take stock of our actions? and hence the implications?  Similarly this applies to face to face conversations.  But back to getting things in writing and I can’t stress this enough, and this goes for absolutely everything that you do! no matter who you are dealing with, big or small, get it in writing and ask them to sign it! This changes everything.

Better than free…convenient

Most people say that nothing beats free. I think I am part of the group that disagrees with this notion. As a ever increasing hyper-linked society with less time, increased pressures to be more efficient ie do more with less,  one would have to imagine that an easy way to get something distributed in record numbers is to make it free. Perhaps.  There are certainly instances where this holds true but there is something to be said for retention, convenience, ease of use. My personal opinion that if you make it dead simple to get, use, pay for it, and as long as it doesn’t cross that psychological price point barrier, all else being equal, people are and will continue to pay.

Writing a PRD: A Living Document

The PRD is the single most important document for any product launch.It should be a living, extensible document that encompasses all aspects of the product life cycle.

What should go into a PRD:

1) Overview: a clear, crisp short summary stating what problem you are trying to solve, why you are trying to solve it and how the product will help to fill a customer need.

2) Objective: what are you trying to acheive? reach, engagement, sales etc?

3) Market Overview: What is the competition doing? mini SWAT analysis here.

4) Scope: this outlines what markets, regions, language, phases of delivery etc

5) Functional Requirements:  what is the product required to do?

6) Non-Functional Requirements: Advertising, tracking, speed requirements etc

7) Use Cases: outlines main use cases

8) Mock Ups and Design Documents: provide a visual representation of requirements.

9) Content: definition of where the content will come from. Feeds / API’s etc

10) Cross product impact: how does this affect other products or features?

11) Project Plan: definition of timelines, dependencies, owners

12) Feasibility Review: Engineering & UED review

13) QA: Ensure QA team understands product and is able to right test cases

14) Support Functions: Work across Marketing, Finance, Legal, Service Engineering, and business teams as necessary

15) Sign-Off:  every key-stakeholder needs to sign – off

A good PRD should bring together requirements across the various disciplines. For example, an engineer should be able to look at a PRD and  clearly understand what is required and should be able to start coding. Similarly, the QA engineer should be able to look at the functional requirements and produce a set of test cases from it.

Writing a good PRD is a skill learned over time and requires practice. The more you do it the better you get at it. However, it’s never perfect and always needs refinement.

Product Management versus Product Management

This is one of topics that I am most passionate about because it continually seems to come up. Product Management in most organizations sits within the marketing team.  This is not the case in most technology companies. In fact product management cannot sit within the marketing team in a technology company. The product manager is the CEO of the product. His or her responsibilities go way beyond marketing. Marketing gets people to use a product once. A great product keeps people coming back. I do not understand why it is so hard for people to understand this?

What does Product Management mean? To me this is a cross-functional role. This means being part of every single step of product research, customer insights, ideation, business case analysis, feasibility, engineering, interaction and design, iteration, QA, launch, marketing, tracking, improvements and if necessary sun-setting a product. It is not about coming up with some whity text in a PPT presentation. The product manager is responsible for the overall success or failure of a product!

For this type of role to be reporting into a marketer is simply not right. Product Management needs and should be a seperate function. It requires a solid understanding of technology, market trends, consumer needs, business acumen and solid people management skills. There are very few great product managers by this definition. Most people are strong in one or another field but rarely have the combination of skills to truly drive product innovation. Product Management requires true leadership. Product management is not a 9-5 job and most successful product managers are those that absorb themselves in their industry. Product managers need to show the value they bring to the organization by developing and launching great products. By the same accord, senior management needs to recongnize this unique skill set and empower these people to be at the core of the business.

The Killer Mobile “Application”

People ask me what the next killer application for mobile will be. For me this is not one “application”, but rather “THE” application of mobile usability methods and interaction models to provide a great and relevant mobile experience. The key word is EXPEREINCE. This is why I say that mobile is not the PC and vice-versa. There is a long standing debate, one web versus mobile web, that people continue to have. It doesn’t make sense to me at all. The mobile EXPERIENCE is and will to continue to be different than the PC EXPERIENCE. Here are my thoughts on it:

1) mobile use cases are different than PC use cases. think hyper-local in 10 years? phone camera, location, compass etc. PC’s do not have these capabilities.

2) PC technologies will always be ahead of mobile ones. At least for the forseeable future.

3) mobile hardware versus pc software: following the argument of the one web we should be able to run PC aoftware on mobile phones. we can’t, we won’t b able to and we don’t want to. The one web argument simply does not hold. Fact is that software for mobiles is built for mobiles from the ground up.

4) People understand and accept the inherent limitations of mobile. They know that the experience will be different. I think this points to the fact that we need to scale down application functionality on the Mobile. Nail a couple of use cases. Make the application small and fast.

Leaning on Mobile

People lean on mobile. Let me explain what this means. There are two main modes on the mobile phone. Lean back and lean forward.

1) Lean Back: when I am bored give me something! Entertain me! I want access to the lastest news, sports, entertainment and games. I want it now and optimized for my mobile. This is about people being passive.

2) Lean Forwad: let me engage with my world. This means email, communications, social networking! This is about me. It’s all the personal information that is personally relevant to me. I want to engage with my friends and the web and do something. This is about people being active.

Things I have learned so far….

these are not hard and fast rules, but my experiences so far have taught me the following…

1. everything is relative. the question is relative to what.

2. problems represent opportunity. the bigger the problem the bigger the opportunity and hence potential reward.

3. everything is personal. when people say its not personal and its just business, they lie. everything occurs between people.

4.  be analytical. use data and anaylsis to make your decisions.

5. organizational structure breeds creativity. recognize that not everyone is the same. individual work environments are fundamental to success.

6. the loud ones don’t matter. look at the people that do not say a lot. they are the ones with the best idea.

7. understand what you are good at and work on that. you will never turn a weakness into a strength. people are valued for expertise. know yours.

8. the price of indecsion sometimes outways the cost of wrong decsision.

9. get the product out! it will never be perfect but have a system in place to iterate quickly.

10. have an open line of communication to your users and listen to them. the customer is king.

Mobile Widget Development

The developer story so far…. “write once, run everywhere”…has always been and will continue to be the ultimate goal for any widget development platform. J2ME made that promise years ago, but talk to any developer and they can tell you first hand if that is truly the case! the mobile space today is more complicated then ever! the big problem lies in fragmentation and lack of general standards. there are guidelines developed by bodies like the W3C but they are not universally enforced. the developer today is faced with a myriad of handsets that they have to develop for, a number of different platforms to choose from, countless widget SDK and development frameworks to pick from, hundreds of pages of documentation to read, numerous variations of browser implementations to cater for and not enough time to do any of it properly! add into the mix the hardware manufacturers, specific operator implementations, browser proxies and you have one big mess! today more then ever we are in information overload. this not only applies to consumers but to developers and the mobile eco-system as a whole. mobile has become the new marketing buzz word and everyone wants to jump on the band wagon. all agree that it will be big one day but the path seems to be diverging with every passing day. there are very few people that understand what is really happening and how they can position themselves, their company within the eco-system to provide value as part of that system and hence gain value from that system. understanding and recognizing that is the key.

the approach most developers take today is to select one platform and technology that they are most comfortable with and provides them the best possible return on their investment. There is an inherent investment in terms of time, money, hardware, learning and QA that every developer or development house needs to allocate for when starting a mobile development project. This is also one of the main reasons that many media houses, advertising companies, and media agencies are outsourcing the entire process to skilled mobile development houses. the biggest mistake that most developers make is that they inherently want to replicate the 2.0 PC experience on a mobile phone. this is not pragmatic nor does it scale well. equate the mobile web and mobile widgets today to the PC internet 10 years ago and you will understand the context a little better. mobile development needs a mobile first approach. to do that you need to understand what people do with mobile phones (answer the WHAT) and compliment that with a technical solution that efficiently solves implementation pain (THE HOW). there is no single company, technology, process that will will solve all these issues immediately. there are too many opinions, money, pride involved for this to be sorted out quickly. the solution must come from a commonly acceptable approach that is strictly adhered to by all members of the eco-system.

issues will always arise when companies go outside of their natural core competency and begin to dabble in things that have traditionally been foreign to them. history tells us that when others feel attacked, one natural tendency is to become defensive, and in this case proprietary. widgets in theory, the technical implementation aside for a moment, cater well to the inherent limitations of the mobile phone today. they are small, lightweight applications that reside on the phone, the data resides in the “cloud”, they are connected and they usually do one thing very very well. we know from research that most people visit a few trusted sites and do a few repetitive things on the PC. this lends itself perfectly to the mobile web.

trying to develop an application for every single use case is foolish. becoming the enabling force as a part of the eco-system that brings together millions of current and potential users with the developer community that can empower engaged usage and application stickiness is a much more powerful proposition. the goal must be simple. give developers and audience, and underlying technology and a way to share in the profit and they will do more individually as developers and collectively as a community than any one company. the mistake is always to try to be all things to all people. It is always a strategically dangerous proposition to move into a space that has traditionally not been part of a core competency. the question to answer is whether to grow the pie or eat the pie today.

Apple as the mobile platform

There is a new report out that the Apple iPhone has 66% market share of the mobile browsing market. I assume that this “scientific” survey was done in the US.  There seems to be no mention of the  ROW (Rest of the World) and market share breakdown by platform for regions outside of the US. Regardless, if to be believed this is an absolutely staggering figure and is continuing to propel Apple as THE mobile platform. So much for fragmentation!

Here is the link to the report: http://marketshare.hitslink.com/mobile-phones.aspx?qprid=55

x and y

The world is split into those things we know exist and are true (fact) and things we seek to find out (the unknown). One could argue that every problem is just a solution waiting to be found in that we use the utilize the things we know to find out those that we do not.  However, the path to discovery of new information, and hence our ability to solve for the unknown, is a relative question for each individual. It is our ability to learn, collaborate and utilize each other’s common and accepted facts to creatively solve for our problems. What is important for one may or may not be important for another, but using the power of collective thought we can solve for that unknown. This is the very foundation of every company, group, team or organization.

Information is power. Use today’s information, past cumulative experiences and technology to solve the problems of tomorrow.