the business of doing business

Despite the fact he seems to appear on pretty much every TV program at the moment, I enjoy watching Gordon Ramsay’s kitchen nightmares: the latest US series of which has just appeared here on Australian TV. The US version of the show tends to be a lot more formulaic (staged?) than the UK version, but if you’re after a weeks worth of swearing in one shot it’s an enjoyable view.

If you boil it down though (pun intended),there are some common steps that make up the ideas for improvement in pretty much every show, and these got me thinking about a conversation I had recently regarding product development.

Somebody suggested to me that a lot of proven practices for releasing quality products on time were simply meaningless motherhood statements. At face value that’s mostly true. Unfortunately when you’re in the howling storm of a product release cycle with the pressures to release, meet quality guidelines, satisfy the market, keep costs under control, manage change control and to retain your team - just to name a few, you sometimes forget to think about even the basics.

It’s almost as if you’re asleep at the wheel, except instead of a peaceful dream-state, it’s like a living nightmare.

When I watch Kitchen Nightmares I often find myself thinking ‘it’s your business, how could you not realise that having 7 managers on duty/losing 20 grand a week/having a menu with 400 items/rotten food/dysfunctional teams possibly be a good thing? Are you stupid!’ The fact is, it often takes a simple reality check and dose of motherhood to wake you up and give you even that millisecond opportunity for the light to go on. I’ll quite often find that during sessions helping teams with similar issues someone will say “you know, what you’re suggesting we already knew. It’s really obvious, just commonsense, but it’s like we’d forgotten!”

And so if you look at what Ramsay typically does in each show you’ll see not only the seemingly simple nature of his suggestions, but how most parallel any number of other business situations:

- Simplify the menu. Focus! Don’t try and do too much or be all things to all people: you won’t deliver. Learn to do the basic stuff very well.

- Understand the roles. Know who is supposed to be doing what, take joint responsibility but have clear accountability.

- Create a shared vision. Are we the best Indian restaurant? Or in fact an Indian restaurant that also does Mexican, French, Korean and Chinese? If we don’t know who we are how our customers supposed to?

- Get the message out there. Promotion, advertising, signage and presence.

- Understand your key demographic. How many five-star businesses has he visited in two-star locations?

- Get stuff out on time, every time. But don’t sacrifice the quality.

- Create a compelling reason for customers to come back. It can be as simple as just one thing. Meatballs anyone?

- You’re the boss. It’s your business. Take charge!

I’m sure there are more, but you get the idea.

If you’re now thinking ‘pah, how obvious’ then great! If you’re confident that you’re wide awake, and that the light is on - even better!

I’ve been having a bit of a play with the new Google Chrome browser.  There’s enough noise on the interwebs about it already, so I won’t go into a detailed review.  It is though very fast:  Firefox 3 was driving me crazy with how slow it was and the fact that there appears to be a horrible memory leak which causes it to eventually grind to a halt when switching between tabs.  

There are also a couple of subtle user experience items in Chrome that I l prefer over FF.  Firstly when you type in the address bar, the auto-complete is highlighted on the first item without needing to scroll down to select it (just hit enter).  Secondly, opening an item in a new tab opens that tab next to the one you’re on - not at the end.  As I say, it’s subtle but obviously well thought out.  Right now it’s become my default browser.

It’s a smart move by Google, given their emphasis on data and applications being in the cloud.  The browser essentially is the shell to host all of that, and ties into their ability to send targeted ads and track users behaviour.

The last part of that is the interesting/worrying part though.  Google have already been given a serve regarding their T&Cs for Chrome (subsequently modified) but I still can’t help getting the nagging feeling that Google is like some science-fiction uber-company that you’d see in a James Bond or Matrix film.  Or Doctor Who perhaps.  You know where everything you do is made and controlled by the one organisation: their headquarters being the 200-storey mega-complex in the centre of the city.  Laser beams or mind-controlling death rays beaming from the upper levels!

Power generation, cabling and infrastructure, search, advertising, bio-sciences, medical records, libraries, email, IM, web browsing and mobile handsets (and probably more) all currently fall into the scope of the Google empire.  

Right now I’m floating along fairly easily with that, but if Sergey and Larry set-up on a remote island somewhere with sharks and strange-looking cats on their lap I’m heading for my bunker!

[edit: the sharks are obviously not on their laps too ;-)]

The other day I had cause to write up some thoughts on some of the ‘gotchas’ associated with developing and managing a product: less about the technical development, but more the business development side. The subject seemed like a good blog post, so here’s the extract:

Every day is a day at school, right?. Some lessons I’ve personally learnt when it comes to shipping and selling product would definitely include:

• Sometimes you can wait too long to move: you’ll never have all the answers. First-mover advantage still counts (but not in 100% of cases!).
• Channel conflict will happen. It’s inevitable: learn to deal with it and manage it. Also, if you sell through the channel, be very clear on the terms under which this works: expectations, targets, scope etc.
• Understand and manage the product request cycle, but know that no matter how tempting there will always be somebody who isn’t getting their features anytime soon. Learn to be very clear about priorities in this regard and as transparent as commercially makes sense.
• Don’t pre-announce stuff that you really aren’t sure about.
• Don’t be afraid of open, honest constructive feedback. Nobody likes to hear their baby is ugly, but the truth hurts at times!
• Develop an evangelist network.
• If you’re selling and demoing the product, you’d better really understand it – and understand it from the perspective of who you’re demoing it too as well. Better still, demo with the attendees data pre-loaded.
• Developing and selling product isn’t a cookie-cutter approach. What worked for one product line may not work for another.
• Don’t over-promise and not deliver – customers will always remember that one time you failed much more clearly than the ten times you delivered. But .. learn to get creative in delivering and spotting alternative opportunities for product growth.
• Get the customer involved in feeling they have some involvement in your product direction.
• Release often – people will wait a release or two for their features if you are doing so. Release every three years and no’one will ever believe their features will make it into the product, which makes your roadmap planning sessions even harder!
• Don’t lose sight of key architectural decisions that will come back to haunt you later..
• ..but don’t gold plate it (unless that’s really your USP).
• Don’t let technology and commercial activities get disconnected from each other
• Understand that international markets really can be different from your local market: they’re not just being difficult!
• Get your technical folk to understand the bigger picture. They need to be working on delivering a ‘product’ not simply working on a subset of a technical function.
• Know when to partner, but know that in many cases you’ll almost never get the benefits from the relationship that you were expecting. Neither will your partner.
• Support really does matter – and has a value (it’s also a very nice source of annuity revenue)
• Testing really does matter. And no, developers simply running basic unit tests before handing the system to the PM doesn’t count
• In today’s environment, if your product sucks there are going to be far more people who get to hear about it – and fast.
• Focus! For new products you’re likely to be constrained by time, resources etc so pick some clear, key target market(s) and geographies to prove the concept. Your future vision isn’t going to be delivered overnight and you need some runs on the board first.
• Buying should always be an option over building, but beware the integration and psychological overheads

There are loads more so extra suggestions more than welcome!

You may have noticed the tardy posting level since I switched over from the old blog.  I must admit that apart from being busy on other things I was kind of annoyed that my templates had all gone wonky so this place went on the back-burner for a while.  Anyway, I’ve fixed up the templates (more or less) and am getting back into it (famous last words!).  The next blog will be along shortly …   possibly even two in a row

Just testing … 123 with a photo

Today I had one of those ‘oh sh*t’ moments when logging into the Thursday Club website.  Like a lot of other (much higher-profile) sites such as USAToday.com, ABCNews.com, News.com, Target.com, Packard Bell.com and many more, we’d been hacked with some form of iFrame injection.  Basically most of the main data had been truncated and replaced with some script code.

Thankfully the site was able to be restored reasonably quickly, and for that I’d like to give a special mention to Quadra Hosting who were very responsive and did a fantastic job.  We spend a lot of time complaining and not so much commending, so to remedy that a big ‘thank you’ to Brenton and the support folks there who saved my bacon!

Now if they can just help me hunt down and disembowel the scumbags who hacked the site in the first place, I’d be even happier!

You may have seen the news by now that eBay Australia will shortly be forcing their sellers to offer Paypal.  In addition, they will be dropping the ability to let buyers pay by direct bank transfer.  Security of transaction is cited as the reasoning behind this, but it seems to me to be a revenue-grabbing lock-in exercise.

The big sufferers will be the casual ’small-sellers’ who have also had to deal lately with increased fees and changes to the feedback system - none of which were exactly welcomed with open arms either.  As you can imagine, the Internets are buzzing with people threatening to take their business elsewhere.  eBay have one or two serious advantages though: size and seller investment in their reputation.  Sellers are reluctant to join a new marketplace where there are fewer potential buyers - for obvious reasons.

I do wonder though whether we are reaching the point where competition to eBay may start to become viable again.  Certainly sites like Oztion and the (currently seriously stealthy) yabena will benefit enormously from this move.  If you look at the success of Craigslist with a simple, no frills, back-to-basics approach to classified ad selling (which is essentially all eBay is, bar the ability to bid up the price), will we see users start to jump if the price and ease of use is right?  Take even 1% of eBay’s global business and there’s close to US$60M right there.

It will be interesting to see if eBay Australia continue to take the high-ground on this issue, and whether the noisy users will really vote with their feet.  It’s high time for some serious competition in this space though I’d say.

Yeah, yeah - I know!  It’s all gone a bit quiet hasn’t it?  Normal service resumed v.shortly just as soon as real-life stops invading my blogging time ;-)  Hopefully some interesting things to update on though.

Even in a (’non’) recession it’s sometimes a tough job to attract and retain good staff.  Re-living the good old / bad old days of the late nineties, Google has gone back to dotcom basics in its (frankly stunning) new Swiss offices.

Bean-bags, pool tables and free lattes are one thing, but how about firemen’s poles, slides, penguins and cable-car meeting pods?

Us geeks love toys, right

Yeah yeah, it’s all designed to keep people in the office - Calacanis would be proud - but if creative thinking generates creative and motivated employees, then why not?

The BBC have a great video of the new office in action.

Whilst searching around for more on the Zuckerberg/Lacy interview, I stumbled across Bitstrips. If you haven’t seen it, it’s a fantastic flash-based comic creation site. You can pick various characters (or create your own), scenes, actions, speech bubbles and so on. It’s an amazingly flexible way to easily create great looking web comic strips. I don’t have much talent for drawing (ok, I don’t have any!), but I love the way it simplifies the whole process. It’s an interesting way to create an alternate commentary on current events. How about a pure comblog?

Here’s one I did for Sarah Lacy after her interview success at SXSW.