|
 |
Monday, May 27, 2002 |
4 Product Mgmt Blunders and 5 Tips on Getting to Market..
From correspondence with Al Sargent, an experienced and accomplished software product manager.
Some classic blunders that have contributed to my experiential learning:
- Setting the product schedule to meet the needs of one prospective client, which later bailed out.
- Not getting buy-in from engineering before setting the schedule.
- Not being able to convince the VP mktg that we needed to have both a MRD [marketing] and functional requirements document, plus other supporting documents. (result = a bloated requirements document that no one read.)
- Not being able to get the engineering director to "open his kimono" and show PM his schedule, flow diagrams, prototypes, etc. for our feedback.
Some thoughts on how to get to market:
- Clear requirements that everyone agrees are the top priority and are feasible
- Staying in touch with eng and creative during the implementation process, giving feedback and providing additional feedback where needed.
- Brownbag lunches where the extended dev team (including mktg folks) can explain their deliverables, whether documents (e.g., UI mockup) or code (e.g., text processing system). Get budget to have lunch catered. This'll be some of the best food money spent by the company.
- Having a great rapport with everyone. People that are friendly with each other and feel like they know each other are more likely to raise issues earlier and more frequently, and are more cooperative, which leads to solutions earlier in the cycle, and better solutions. Rapport is built by 1:1 lunches and coffee breaks; team lunches, outings, soccer matches (esp. for international folks that grew up with the sport - the Indians, etc. have a chance to shine), etc.; devoting some of the morning time to walking around and checking in.
- The quality of a piece of software is a function of the shared understanding of the team. So you need to get everyone on the same page through both formal and informal methods. Formal = MRD, etc.; Informal = walking around and checking in.
[diJEST: a journal of extrapreneurial strategy and technology]
9:28:29 AM 
|
|
Amazon Scam. A "clever" author of a $3 Self Help PDF has developed a program to put his book in as a recommendation 12 times, on every single top seller at Amazon. As a result he is now the #3 best seller on Amazon. [Adam Curry: Adam Curry's Weblog]
9:26:19 AM
|
|
Conference Speakers and Weblogging. More on Conference Weblogging: Buzz is talking about his experience with conference weblogging and he got me thinking: how can speakers use Internet technologies on stage? I just gave a talk at the WWW conference in Hawaii. I apologize to the 50 people in the audience. I'm not Don Box and I ain't gonna give my talk naked, especially when I am not getting paid for doing that. (I'm jealous of people who can enthrall an audience like Don can). Anyway, over the past four years I've talked with hundreds of speakers and I'm wondering how they could use Internet technologies like chat rooms, weblogs, etc. on stage. First, if you've never been on stage, you don't realize how fast 30 or 60 minutes goes. When you're on stage time appears to go faster. Almost all speakers are nervous on stage (even Don Box admits he gets nervous). It's very hard for a non-experienced speaker to do well. Don told me one time that the only way you get to be a good speaker is to do it often. I also found that when I'm on stage I become hyper focused and that it was hard to pay attention to anything but my outline. It didn't even occur to me to look at the IRC chat app that was running in the background. I had my content to get through. It was fairly easy to take a couple of questions from the immediate audience (cause when you put out a statement, the audience likes to add their own two points -- I know I do when I'm in an audience). As an audience member I want the speaker to succeed and I want a way to slap the guy around on stage when he's failing (I'm sure many in my audience wanted to slap me around). The trouble is, when you're on stage, you're there with one goal: to deliver your speech. So, anything that distracts you from that goal is seen as an irritant. Many speakers tell me they don't like taking questions from the audience until the end because of this (and speech coaches that I've seen typically spend quite a bit of their time teaching how to control the audience so they don't disrail you). So, it'll take an extraordinary speaker who can look over at a chat window every few minutes to see how he's doing. Another idea: I'd love to "rate" the speakers live at a conference. I've talked to lots of speakers about this. Most want to see how they are doing in the eyes of their audience. But, really, do they? Let's assume the audience had a little Web service called "rate the speaker." Let's assume that each audience member could rate the speaker 1-4 with 1 being "you suck" to 4 being "you're better than Don Box." Now, I know that my ratings would hang around the 1-2 range. Could my ego take that blow while on stage? I don't think so. It'd probably make me more nervous, which would make my speech go even worse, which would make my ratings go down. I'd be in a loop to hell. So, I don't know that I'd want to watch my ratings while I'm on stage. I would like to know, though, how I did as soon as I'm off stage. When I gave my talk I asked a couple of people "did I do OK?" Human nature being what it is, we all just don't want to look stupid. Isn't that stupid? :-) Speakers I like never ask "did I do OK?" It demonstrates that the speaker doesn't have much self esteem. We like listening to people who are self confident. After all, if they don't believe in themselves, why should we believe in them? So, we have a condundrum. If a speaker sucks, the audience wants to help the speaker improve. It's awfully uncomfortable listening to a speaker who sucks (I sat through a speech at the WWW conference where I could barely hear the speaker due to her soft voice. I wanted so bad to be able to tell her to speak up, but I knew that doing so would totally blow what little self confidence she had -- I'm sure there were people in my audience thinking the same thing about me). At the WWW conference speakers were non professional (we weren't paid. In fact, I had to argue with the conference organizers just to get a free pass for the day of my conference. That's bullshit. If someone is speaking at your conference where you charge attendees $400 a day, the least you could do is give your speakers a free badge.) I'm rambling again, huh? Well, it's 7 a.m. so there. Getting back to the topic. How can speakers use tech on stage? I found that I really liked having the IRC chat room before and after my talk. It helped keep me from getting nervous before hand (and helped me get an idea of what my audience was expecting). Afterward it was a great place to answer the few questions that remained. So, an IRC chat room is one thing. I put my slides up on my weblog and linked them there. So, putting slides or an outline of your talk up on your weblog is a good idea. I wish I had taken a stronger stand in my talk. So, it probably would have been a good idea to write an essay about what I thought about my topic two or three weeks before my talk. That would have helped me get some feedback about the appropriateness of my stance. Plus, webloggers would have told me ahead of time about other resources or ideas that I should consider. If you're on stage, you should have a strong enough ego so that you'd want to know what your audience thought of you. So, I would love to see a "rate the speaker" application of some kind. As a speaker I'd like a choice of whether or not to watch it during the talk, but it's inexcusable not to have some feedback right after the talk to give the speaker. Why any conference team still does paper evaluations is beyond me. I guess most conference planners still don't know how to get audiences to visit their Web site (or are scared that they wouldn't get enough response). So, make it a game. Give away $100 per session and choose randomly from the folks who rated that session. That alone would get me to visit a URL. At Fawcette's conferences there are usually about 30 sessions. That'd cost about $3000. They pay that much to have all the paper evaluations tabulated -- a process that usually takes four to eight weeks. By doing all evaluations online they could get far faster and more useful results for the same price (plus they'd be giving that money back to their attendees, which would increase the attendees' satisfaction with the event). So, what else can speakers do? I loved the O'Reilly Panopticon (it's a web app that lets you put a little icon of yourself on top of a map of the conference site. The icon is clickable so people can easily get to your weblog from it). If I'm a speaker at the Pop!Tech conference, I'd love to be able to see a map of where the attendees are sitting. That way I could point out someone like Dan Gillmor and say "hey, Dan, what do you think about XYZ topic?" Plus, if I know the audience member is a weblogger (they could identify themselves as such) I could quickly read their weblogs and see if there are any comments that would be useful to the audience (and I could point to them from my own weblog so people could see a variety of points of view pretty quickly after my session). As a speaker, I'm very interested in my topic, and I'm usually pretty interested in talking with other people about it after my session (and even before). So, I'd like to invite people to a BOF (Bird of Feather) session or a dinner or something to discuss the topic more in depth. With some speakers this would be a huge hit. I always remembered Alan Cooper being swarmed out in the hall for hours after his talks (his best talks were ALWAYS in the hall after his "professional" remarks). Wouldn't you kill to hang out with someone like that at dinner? Particularly when you're a lonely geek at a conference and don't have anything to do except stare at the bizarre patterned carpet that most hotel rooms have? So, it'd be interesting to have a "arrange a BOF" and an "arrange a meal" application as well. Something where folks who all are interested in the same topic could get together and chat. Anyway, that's enough ideas for the morning. More to come as we prepare for building an artificial world at the Pop!Tech conference. [Scobleizer Radio Weblog]
9:23:34 AM
|
|
From Dave Winer's Scripting News:
Anyway, we went far and wide and swung around to desktop websites, a subject near and dear to my heart. He wondered why more Mac developers weren't using the combo of PHP and Apache that comes bundled with every Mac. I think it's just a matter of time before Unix developers get there. Users like apps that run in the browser.
9:10:38 AM
|
|
David McCusker has a thorough and reasoned analysis, so I'll take a different tack. So Joshua Allen discovered my evil plan to accrue vast influence through the shadow reputation economy and use it to get women and gadgets without being accountable to anyone. (Don't worry Joshua, I don't have any plans to eliminate you.) Honestly I'm not sure why I should be accountable to the general public since I don't work for them. So here's the rub. People are going to form their good-old-boys' networks and their A-lists, and influence will flow throughout human society like currents in the water. There is no way to stop this. This creates a barrier to entry in the open source world and makes it vulnerable to corruption. But no one said life was easy, and if you want to get rid of corruption you can fight it head-on. It is also certainly a problem for some people that the GPL aims to swallow the software world, but why not fight it by writing better software instead of casting moral aspersions at its proponents? [Hack the Planet]
9:02:11 AM
|
|
Java Swing can do HTML display & reasons why Swing apps haven't proliferated. Rebelutionary says:
Swing or DOM - should DHTML replace Swing?
It's easy to embed applets in web pages, but it's almost impossible to show web pages in a Java application.
Ay, there's the rub. Many times could I have built cool Java applications (like a Java rich client version of Radio based on JXTA) but the lack of a Swing HTML display pane has stopped that. Pity. [rebelutionary]
No, displaying HTML in a java application is not impossible. There's at least one way in the JDK: JEditorPane. I use this here in Swingin' Google! Now, I'll be the first person to tell you that displaying HTML in JEditorPane sucks. Sun has done a horrible job keeping this component up to date with the latest web standards. But, as you can see from the screenshots, it's not impossible. In fact, it's surprisingly little code. If Sun really wants to compete with M$, they need to fix horribly broken crap like this. I'm not holding my breath waiting for that to happen. And I have yet to see an open source alternative. There are commercial alternatives but who has the money?
Rebelutionary also says:
In my opinion no, Java GUIs are not dead at all - if anything they're steadily growing and improving (see IDEA for one example of a very fast, Swing based, cross platform application).
It's definitely possible to produce usable softare with Swing. My favorite example is limewire. However, it's very difficult to do it right, both in terms of the external user experience design, and the internal code design. In my mind, this is one of the primary reasons that Swing apps have not proliferated. Underlying that, I believe, is a Sun culture that makes UI work a second class citizen to the highbrow kernel stuff.
Swing suffers from the same problem that VB suffered from for a long time (still?) in that there isn't an easy way to produce a shell application that looks and feels like what most people expect from a Windows app. Thus, you wind up with people writing a lot of GUI that looks like it was designed by a crazed fortran programmer.
The problem with internal code design is that I've seen a lot of people come out of the Microsoft world, namely VB or MFC, where placement of GUI objects within a container is typically static. Exceptions would be something like NSViews from Nanosoft. I don't even know if that's around anymore. Regardless, I've seen a lot of GUI code written by Swing novices in which placement of all the objects in the GUI is static as opposed to being done dynamically with layout management, which IMHO, defeats the purpose of Swing. This leads to two other conclusions. First, typical GUI programmers have real problems learning layout management in Swing. I should know, I taught a group last year consisting of mostly VB programmers that struggled tremendously to think of all of those objects in terms of containership and hierarchy. That's a huge leap for some people. Second, the Java IDEs have only recently begun to improve to the point where the resource editors there can produce marginally useful layout management code. Netbeans ability to allow you to layout in static mode and then switch to grid bag layout and have it do all of the code generation is probably the best example that I've seen. [www.davidwatson.org]
8:06:11 AM
|
|
.NET Meets Grid Computing. Philippine researchers last fall created what they say is the first generic system for Grid computing that uses an industry-standard Web service infrastructure, according to a paper to be presented at the Second IEEE International Symposium on Cluster Computing and the Grid in Berlin, Germany next week.
Article. May 24, 2002. [Sam Gentile's Radio Weblog]
7:39:49 AM
|
|
Reeves Teases Matrix Sequels.
Keanu Reeves, who reprises the role of Neo in the upcoming sequel films The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions, told SCI FI Wire that his newly powerful character faces stiff challenges and continues his journey of discovery in the new films. "The brothers [writer-directors Andy and Larry Wachowski] have put up some great obstacles to test those powers, and the story kind of goes outside of the Matrix and starts to concern itself with the machines in Zion," Reeves said at a press conference at Fox Studios Australia in Sydney, where the films are currently in production.
....
For his part, producer Joel Silver promised to reporters that the visual effects in the two sequels will outdo anything seen in movies so far. "When we made the first movie ... we didn’t have an enormous amount of money to work with, and the boys had very strict ideas about a specific visual effect that they wanted to explore, and they ended up using it four times in the picture, and ... we called it ... bullet time. And it was during the Stone Age. It was a Stone Age effect. ... And immediately when the movie opened, we saw repetitions of that. ... Television commercials came first. They were the first out. And then we began seeing it in a few movies here and there. And then every movie. And it wasn’t just the visual effects that were being stolen. ... It was the way the boys staged, shot, cut, moved the camera. It was pretty much everything they did began to be copied in every other movie." ...Were the Wachowskis flattered? "For a while ... I bet they thought it was flattering," Silver said. "But after a while, they kind of got angry about it. So they decided that, in these two movies, they would create visual effects that could never be copied. So we have done visual effects for the movie that, because of the time that we took to make them and the cost, will never be seen again. So I really think that the bar has been raised so high that, you know, there is no bar.
I can't wait for these!!! I'm wearing out my Matrix DVD!! [Sam Gentile's Radio Weblog]
7:33:54 AM
|
|
© Copyright 2002 Mark Oeltjenbruns.
|
|
|
