The Four Ways to Succeed in Business
Tuesday, March 2nd, 2010 | product vision | No Comments
As I see it, there are just four overarching ways that businesses achieve financial success:
- Satisfy important unmet needs
- Convince people that they are doing #1 (whether or not they actually are)
- Exploit a human weakness
- Exploit cracks in the system (creating them if necessary)
You might want to think about this a bit. What types of companies epitomize each?
The focus of this blog and my company is succeeding on the basis of method #1. It’s the sustainable, no-BS way to go about it. But we must acknowledge that companies can and do succeed without it, at least financially.
How about you? How does your company succeed? What type of business do you, personally, like to be involved in?
Design Thinking vs Six Sigma
Wednesday, December 30th, 2009 | news | No Comments
A nice article in the NYTimes discusses the melding worlds of Design Thinking vs Six Sigma.
Predicting the impact of an innovation
Monday, November 9th, 2009 | commentary, product vision | 2 Comments
Over at Steve Portigal’s blog there was a discussion of France Telecom which has been introducing high quality audio to cellular voice calls. (This is #7 on my 10 UI Wishes for 2008.)
A commenter asked, and I paraphrase, “The question is, will people care? Is existing voice quality ‘good enough’ that a jump in quality won’t matter that much?”
What is important about this question is that it gets to the product vision skill of being able to distinguish revolutionary technologies from those that only sound revolutionary.
One guy seemed to think HD audio was radical, “This is a bigger innovation than cameras on handsets or app stores for the industry.”
Is he right? Here was my response on Steve’s blog:
Will customers care about HD audio? I like to think about these things in terms of needs. The HD audio people cited in the NYTimes thinks that this is more revolutionary than the camera in the mobile or the app store.
The guy is wrong. The cellphone camera and the app store are important because they enable the satisfaction of a host of new needs and scenarios. You can now email a picture of a sinking airplane from a boat on the Hudson river. The innovation is valuable to customers because more real needs are being met. Simple as that.
HD audio,while difficult to do and very welcome, is still an incremental innovation to customers, because it merely does a better job of addressing needs that were adequately covered for the last 70 years.
In the market, incremental refinements like HD Audio are not irrelevant, but they tend to be tie-breakers. Given two otherwise equal offerings, a customer might as well choose the more refined one.
Eventually the competition responds, and the refinement becomes table stakes for all players. But until the advantage is neutralized, the company with the more refined solution has bragging rights that can distract customers from more important unmet needs.
It may be fairly obvious that HD audio is a nice-to-have, because we are all intimate users of telephony. However this way of thinking — connecting the technology back to scenarios and needs — applies to less familiar ideas. It’s a useful way to break through reality distortion fields and make predictions about the true relevance of exciting looking technologies to customers.
Is it worthwhile making predictions for 2013?
Sunday, November 8th, 2009 | predictions | No Comments
My prediction for January 1, 2013: cataclysmic levels of hindsight justification.
And if none of us make it that far, why not make as much money as we can?
What is a realistic growth rate?
Wednesday, October 21st, 2009 | commentary | No Comments
What is realistic growth rate to expect for a high-potential startup?
Here is an inflation-adjusted chart of 100 high-tech companies (click for interactive chart):
This chart is a useful reality check on business plans. It’s very hard to be a “rocketship” – one of the red curve companies in the chart that attains $50mm within 5 years. Neither Microsoft nor Oracle did so and if your business plan says you will, it’s probably incorrect.
Steve Blank on Customer-Driven Development
Friday, October 16th, 2009 | commentary | No Comments
Fantastic slide share by Steven Blank. Ostensibly on Customer-Driven Development, but really about so much more:
Complexity slays giants
Thursday, October 15th, 2009 | commentary, predictions, product vision | No Comments
Nokia reported a $1.36 billion loss in the third quarter as the company wrote down the value of its wireless networks venture by $1.35 billion and global sales declined 20 percent.
The company [..] acknowledged that its lead in smartphones, the fastest-growing segment of the market, had fallen to 35 percent from 41 percent, losing ground to Apple’s iPhone and Research in Motion’s BlackBerry devices.
Nokia’s problem is not execution. It knows how to build things and bring them to market: it cranks out new models by the dozen. Its problem is not innovation, at least not at the tactical level: every feature you’ve heard has made it into a shipping Nokia device. Nokia’s problem is in product vision, of being able to imagine a coherent future reality with an ideal smartphone.
You might think that Nokia, with 25 years in the business, wouldn’t have allowed itself to be surpassed so easily. But we should expect it. It’s common pattern among big, old, successful companies. Sony, Dell, GM, Motorola and countless others have fallen into the product vision trap, opening the door to disruptors.
Product vision becomes a bigger factor the more dials there are to turn in product formulation.
Sony traveled a similar arc in consumer electronics. Sony was untouchable when their gadgets did only one or two things. Like Nokia, it could master those core capabilities and move on to providing a variety of product variants for every segment, on marketing and on operations. These were the business drivers as long as there was a steady state in the market.
But as technology enabled new classes of products, those old recipes no longer worked. As the number of dials to turn in product formulation increase, the tried-and-true approach of cranking out incrementally better products breaks down. Leadership gets overwhelmed by the plethora of choice. In lieu of product vision to guide the way, they resort to guesswork, throwing everything against the wall to see what might stick.
Without a clear, coherent image of how things should be, design suffers. Nokia’s products (and Sony’s, and Motorola’s, etc.) became complex, incoherent, and frustrating to use. When products take on more capabilities, keeping things simple gets exponentially harder, because every feature relates to every other feature. The possible associations grows with the square of the number of features. (Even the best-of-class iPhone and Palm Pre are not immune. Both could do their core tasks considerably easier.)
When products get more and more capable, the only way to cut through the jungle of choice, and the only way to keep the user experience coherent is with a clear product vision.
PS: Nokia has the market power but not the product vision. Palm has the vision but not the market power. I’m hungry for my Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup. When will Nokia acquire Palm?
—
Philip Haine is principal of Product Vision Associates, a product innovation consultancy that helps product leaders and their teams envision new, breakthrough products and reboot older ones. To follow him on Twitter click here.
Prototyping your store
Monday, October 12th, 2009 | commentary, news | No Comments
Apple and Steve Jobs influence the re-imagining of Disney stores. This tidbit stuck out:
Mr. Jobs [..] insisted that Disney build a prototype store to work out kinks, a costly endeavor that most retailers skip.
Most retailers skip the prototype step for store redesigns? Really? Then how do they know the full rollout, which is much more costly, will work?
What is this, advertising? (ba dum tchhh)
Build the right thing
Monday, October 12th, 2009 | Uncategorized | No Comments
your top priority is to ensure that the team is building something worth building, and that the development team is a very big investment for the company and should not be wasted, either by having people waiting around or by rushing to build something that will just have to be done over again later.
Enter, product vision.
Dell innovates for real
Tuesday, September 29th, 2009 | commentary, news | 2 Comments
Some meaningful innovation coming out of Dell. Its premium Latitude Z has:
- a second on-board OS (Linux) and subsystem for instant-on computing:
“Some users Dell surveyed spent 70 percent of their time working in the instant-on mode. Microsoft is sure to take note of that figure. Windows has turned into a clunky, cup holder.”
(Then again, this sub-system is not integrated with the main system. Different OS, different file system, different apps. It’s like having a cheap netbook hacked into your laptop.
This all points to the still-unmet need of a truly instant-on system. I still await the time when our main laptops achieve the instant-on performance of the 1983’s TRS-80 model 100.)
- a docking without cables, including inductive charging (is that energy efficient?),
- wireless USB (sweet!) and:
- wireless display interface (beat Apple to the punch)
- a super thin enclosure (Zzzz)
- an interesting black cherry finish (ooh aah)
- “the right side of the monitor acts as a sort of touch-wheel, letting you scroll through application icons and start applications just by rubbing your finger along the edge of the laptop.”
It reportedly doesn’t work well in this incarnation, but the idea of having more touchable surfaces has potential. (Wouldn’t it have been more convenient to reach along the edge of the base rather than the edge of the display?)
- a few other minor innovations
Good for Dell. These premium innovations can be perfected, reduced in cost, and trickle down over time to their lower end hardware.
Take this as a sign that the world is finally learning Apple’s lessons. Consumers will be better off. Product companies better be prepared for more intense competition.
My big question: did Dell pull all of this off in-house? Or did they enlist the help and vision of an external innovation agency?
If you can’t beat ‘em, buy ‘em
Monday, September 21st, 2009 | news | No Comments
Last week, Intuit announced that they had purchased Mint (to the chagrin of former Quicken users who had been happy to escape from years of dissatisfaction with Intuit).
If you can’t beat ‘em, buy ‘em, and then either grow ‘em or eliminate ‘em off the market. It’s a common tactic for the big guys who have trouble growing breakthrough products in-house.
The problem is, it’s too risky to be a reliable strategy. A competitor might snap up the company first. It could start a bidding war forcing you to overpay. Bad acquisitions will happen, as with any huge investment. (I’ve seen too many). And the upstart may refuse to sell themselves to you for inordinate greed or non-business reasons (such as, you are Microsoft). You have to be among the fattest of cats to be able to absorb this risk.
Intuit has struggled to invent substantial new products. And the Quicken business was slowly dying off (even Microsoft exited the business). Intuit got a great deal by buying the disruptive Mint.com for a mere $170m.
You can’t focus on fog
Monday, September 14th, 2009 | commentary, product vision | 2 Comments
The CEO of a hitherto search engine company reportedly told the troops:
Let’s focus on a great Yahoo! Our average user is just trying to get through the day…looking to find out what’s going on in the big world and their own world. They want their Internet site to be great, and to work. They don’t care about how or about deals. They care that we are a trusted dependable site.
That is our simple mission. Focus on it!!!
Let’s itemize that. Yahoo’s simple mission is to:
- Help users get through the day
- Help users find out what’s going on in the world and their own world
- Make an Internet site that is great, and works
- Have a site that is trusted and dependable
That’s a rather hazy vision to try and focus on. Only #2 provides a modicum of guidance. And even that amounts to, “Let’s do more of what we’ve been doing for the past 10 years.” If that was the right strategy I doubt Yahoo would be where they are now.
Someone could use a little help with their product vision.
Favorite reads of the month – August 2009
Wednesday, September 2nd, 2009 | monthly compendium | No Comments
Here are the most interesting articles I read this month:
1. The New, Faster Face of Innovation
This article discusses the qualitative changes taking place in the nature of innovation itself:
Technology is [..] allowing companies to test new ideas at speeds—and prices—that were unimaginable even a decade ago. They can stick features on Web sites and tell within hours how customers respond. They can see results from in-store promotions, or efforts to boost process productivity, almost as quickly.
The result? Innovation initiatives that used to take months and megabucks to coordinate and launch can often be started in seconds for cents.
And that makes innovation, the lifeblood of growth, more efficient and cheaper. Companies are able to get a much better idea of how their customers behave and what they want. This gives new offerings and marketing efforts a better shot at success.
2. Succeeding with Scrum: Start by Creating an Effective Product Vision
A common question I am asked is how my product vision process fits in with Agile. The short answer is that they are complementary. The product vision process is for establishing the product vision. Agile, on the other hand, is a development methodology. It can help tune the vision, but it is not a proper process for generating the idea.
Have you ever worked on a Scrum project where the overall goal was not clear? Where you had a product backlog but the people involved in the development effort only vaguely understood the purpose of the release? It happens more frequently than any of us would like, even on projects with multi-million dollar budgets! Often Scrum’s emphasis on “getting work done” is misunderstood as a rush to develop with not enough thought to where the project should be going. Don’t make that mistake. Every Scrum project needs a product vision that acts as the project’s true north, sets the direction and guides the Scrum team.
3. Apple Afraid Google is Taking Over the iPhone?
If you consider yourself a student of product vision and strategy, you might want to follow the fascinating dance playing out between Apple and Google. Two of the world’s most visionary companies are erstwhile friends, and now, looming competitors. Techcrunch has the scoop:
[..] Apple expressed dismay at the number of core iPhone apps that are powered by Google. Search, maps, YouTube, and other key popular apps are powered by Google. Other than the browser, Apple has little else to call its own other than the core phone, contacts and calendar features. The Google Voice App takes things one step further, by giving users an incentive to abandon their iPhone phone number and use their Google Voice phone number instead (transcription of voicemails is reason enough alone). Apple was afraid, say our sources, that Google was gaining too much power on the iPhone, and that’s why they rejected the application.
4. Reed Hastings on Culture of Innovation
This slideshare on Netflix’s corporate culture is really about your corporate culture. There are enough powerful insights and ideas here to warrant multiple careful viewings:
Lots of companies have nice sounding value statements. Enron had a nice-sounding value statements with 4 values: Integrity, Communication, Respect, Excellence. Their four values were chiseled in marble in the main lobby, but had little to do with the real values of the organization. The real company values [..] are shown by who gets rewarded, promoted, or let go.
Reed Hastings on Culture of Innovation
Tuesday, September 1st, 2009 | commentary | 2 Comments
Reed Hastings, CEO of Netflix, made his first batch of millions building a company that merged with another. Things went downhill for the combined company as bureaucracy set in. He then spent two years thinking about what went wrong.
This remarkable deck on Netflix corporate culture reflects what he figured out in those two years. It’s longish, but worth grabbing a cup of tea, closing your door, and taking time to reflect upon each slide and what it says about your company.
Reed Hastings has been added to my list of heroes.
How to transition newspaper readers to paying customers
Friday, August 28th, 2009 | commentary | No Comments
The jury is still out on whether newspapers will be able to sustain themselves by charging for content.
But if it were to happen it would have to be done right.
Over at my sister blog, StealThisIdea, I describe a strategic approach for newspapers to start charging for content, that borrows heavily from the proven precedents and takes customer psychology into account.
Please check it out: How to transition newspaper readers to paying customers
Subscribe to email list
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Follow @dphaine on Twitter