Yuval Ararat

Continues lerner eager to explore

Product Management and release cycles

I am a bit shocked from release processes in the last few weeks and cannot hold back the feeling.
I am a supporter of release fast release often but there is a bit of a stretch named “Within Reason”, if your application size is 30Mb and you release every 3 days the commitment is, how do i say it gently, over demanding.
release within a reason is a bit like resisting the developer urge to just throw all the new magnificent features that are hot out of the testing oven and giving them to the customer. its a noble thing to do, but it has its price.
Making a person update regularly is one thing but annoying them with multiple updates makes a regularly updating customer to a deferring update customer, its like a nagging kid, the more updates there are the less you feel they are important and deserver your attention.

Another thing i noticed lately is developers putting release notes, this harms the product and should be done by the product manager. why do i say this? look at the following example from prezi desktop.

Crop images and pdf’s by double clicking on them.
Draw straight lines, bend arrows, and manipulate them much easier.
Application starts much faster.

This is agonizingly not commercial and lacks the sales pitch, we need to make the client feel the love we spread. a person reading this will think, who is running this company? how is this allowed out? what does this reflect on my information security and the way things are managed?
Yes i know that these days with the Sony fiasco there are claims that even well managed companies are not that well managed. and security is just a matter of luck.

Looking at iTunes release notes you get the feeling they know what they are doing

iTunes 10.2.2 provides a number of important bug fixes, including:

• Addresses an issue where iTunes may become unresponsive when syncing an iPad.
• Resolves an issue which may cause syncing photos with iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch to take longer than necessary.
• Fixes a problem where video previews on the iTunes Store may skip while playing.
• Addresses other issues that improve stability and performance.

iTunes 10.2 came with several new features and improvements, including:

• Sync with your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch with iOS 4.3.

• Improved Home Sharing. Browse and play from your iTunes libraries with Home Sharing on any iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch with iOS 4.3.

This has the feel that i am in the centre, yes in the middle of the product they are thinking of me and not on themselves.
We have to get the feeling of been cared for while we use the product, this is the secret sauce of the big brands.

Yes i am claiming there is merit to the Product Manager other then just setting the tone of the product and making sure features get released, he has the job of communication to the crowd and mediating the products achievements.
Especially in a startup when we are probably the developer and the product manager we need to keep this in mind when we write the release notes, the client is in the middle of the product and we need to communicate that thought.
We need to remember that releases as importent as they are, unless you are apple and i have to use your bloated itunes, need to be incremental if possible and small if can. a full release of the product is not always necessary if the product is architecture in a way its achievable.
So to all my Startup buddies i call, learn from the mistakes and improve.

The ICQ lesson

The other day I went, uninvited, to the hive in Sydney, again thank you Michel Williams (@mia_will) it was great! Thanks again Michel. I was talking to some of the guys and we started discussing business plans. It was amazing how we were all in under the same opinion that there are too many startups who are based on thin air with no real solution to the monetization problem. There is a general feeling of lack of ideas on how to monetize the plentiful ideas out there. Many of the ventures get an idea and think that they do not have to have a way of making money from day one.

Some people talk about Google’s early days and not having a plan on how to make money, it’s a nice example but they were selling their search services in the early days and made the money to survive. But mostly you see niche markets been explored with the plan on becoming the next Twitter, Gwella, Facebook or Google’s apps. It is possible to do so but on a short-term basis. Lets go back to the hay days of Internet entrepreneurs and the time before the bubble burst of 2000.

wowowowoowowwowo (time machine sound)

We were all racing to get users. The equation then was Users=Money. We didn’t know how we do the conversion but the general assumption was from either adverts or some other form of monetisation that no one thought about yet. It was a race for the best base of users. And why users you ask? That was the investors way to calculate how good you are. In those days it was not even how many active users you have but how many registered users, no one thought about monitoring what are the users really doing.

Back then there were no Instant messaging platforms so ICQ guys invented that. They got great traction and many users.  Soon after them came Odigo and other competitors to the space and they were making nice traction, not the same as ICQ but nice. When AOL bought ICQ all the other players in the IM field were all praying to do the same fate, not just the IM field, we were all praying. The sole survivor for the years to come was ICQ, none of the other independent ones survived. The bubble burst and they had to show how they monetised the service, they tried with adverts but the market was too young, some took money for the service but ICQ was free. None of them started with the idea of having a source of income.

The same happened to a startup I was in, TreeWay – we made some thing like homestead, it was competing in a market where the major player was in and had considerable amount of users, when investors stopped funding we were not in a position to continue but Homestead was. They were offering premium services and collected money from 15% of their users at that time.

wowowowowowowwo

We all hope to stumble upon Twitter or Facebook with our ventures, it’s a great dream! But it is quite rare and mostly unlikely. We are in a business environment and we need to play the business game.

When going to the market these days you need to have a plan on how to make money, not huge amounts in the starting point but enough to show investors that people give money to get your product. You should also plan on how to make lots more when the time comes, it can be a simple plan since that is not set in stone.

As a sidenote I personally hate integrate advertisements and think they don’t make the point of people paying for a service, but that does not disqualify them as part of a business plan, the only problem with them is that they don’t scale very well and you will need to be Google to really make something substantial.

enterprise focused startups?

I find myself gazing at the headline above and thinking, man this is impossible!

Why would i have such a thought? i am suppose to be positive! bright future! look at the full glass! but alas, i giggle at the thought. its not that i think this space is not potentially loaded. its just that enterprises way of carrying business will probably kill any cash starving startup, signing a contract and paying isnt always the top priority and they know it. Enterprise conglomerates use big companies because they know they wont be able to do business with a startup unless it is a small running business with some cashflow.

The cases i hear about tend to be in the Social space where its all experimental and there are only now some companies that are marching in with social offerings. look at the collaboration space and the story of Atlassian. it took them quite a long time to make the big jump to the real enterprise size companies.

But i see it more as a david and goliath story where they need to work together, not rock each other to death, and david’s agility gives a great value to the goliath needs. its just a matter of trust, will goliath ever trust david to survive the starvation and the hardships of the way? if you can only make goliath believe in you…

Even Larry Dignan is under the impression that the startups for enterprises are not the best bet from the IT personal in the enterprise

But a lot of the stuff you’ve seen this week either has little enterprise use, is too raw or would get you fired if you seriously pitched buying anything from said startup.

Any thought on how to become the next Yammer?

TripAdvisor gets sued but could be saved by Facebook

As i mentioned in my previous post there is a vacuum out there, the vacuum is getting sites in trouble and will have to be solved soon.

The latest news about a class action against TripAdvisor just strengthen the sense of that void. since the hotel owners are suspicious over the legitimacy of the reviews they get, especially the vicious ones, they are left to speculate about the reviewers authenticity and if the person behind the user has ever stayed in their premise.

Its true that if a person is going to be pointed out to a bad review he will not make the same review, but there could be mechanisms to allow for him to be anonymus while digitally authenticating its existence.

In a perfect world, of course, anonymous reviews like those on TripAdvisor are honest and true and insightful.

Combine this anonymity with the value of a review, if you are anonymus your less valued then if you are not,  with the knowledge that the person is real and you got a better grasp of the reviewed venu.

The problem is that we still dont have any organization/company to enable this identification, yes you can hook the Facebook API and get some half breed. But Facebook or any other organization do not state that every login has a real person behind it, this is the missing link.

What your brand needs #startup

You need a sweet after taste.
Thats it, i am done.
But wait this is not twitter here man. give us some more you say.
Let me tell you a story about a store named Five Senses Coffee, they got some loud noises from a displeased customer over the twitter space lately, but they have opted the game.
My Guatemalan coffee beans stock dwindled and I needed a fresh batch. so i ordered the beans somewhere pre noon on a thursday and went along with my day.
The next morning to my surprise a courier with the bag buzzed the door, it was 8:15 am.
This surprise was so welcomed and left a great after taste over the purchase.
This is a great lesson to every business and especially a startup, if you can leap over the competition and give your customers some nice after taste when they expect the normal business routine do it! you will get much more customers at this point.
The competition of the coffee bean market is huge but making me rave about it without paying me is what you want.
To a web startup you need a product that will make your clients think “How nice and easy was that?” make them go the extra mile and rave about you.
They need to think what a great service.
I have just seen how its not done. when i was in the market for an online backup i was testing Carbonite to see how good are they and also used iDrive.
When i had issues with the speed with Carbonite i turned to the Customer support with a question as of why it is happening. to my surprise the tech response was so out of focus and blaming, it gave me a feeling of “why the hell did i bother?” and “better pack your bags and go!”,
But Carbonite CEO has his email in contact us page so i decided to give it a go and sent him an email with the trail of the email, surprise surprise, i got a better rep.
But all they did was to give me extra time to try.
Man that bitter taste is still lingering. will i recommend Carbonite?
No.
So what can we do when the product sucks and we have users who are complaining? how do we make them feel good and leave with sweet after taste?
This is your golden question, just don’t ignore these users and don’t over compensate them, let them feel the sweet after taste of a good deal.