Product Management: Attention is the scarcest resource.

I have a confession to make. I don't read all my emails. I don't even remember the last time my inbox was showing 0 unread message. I think it must have been back when I was in school using Pine to check my email over 14.4Kbps modem connection. Since then I practically gave up on keeping up with everything that came my way.

In my defense, large portion of those emails are hundreds of marketing promotions, notifications of one type or another, product announcements that I signed up but never cared to read, etc. But I'm even too lazy to clean them up. (Yes, I know there are tools out there to help, but that also takes time.)

Overflowing email inbox is just one of the symptoms of larger systemic problem. I simply don't have time to consume all the information available for me. Even if I wanted to, I now realize that I don't have time and energy or will to sit down and go through them all.

I open Twitter to get a couple of gulps from never-stopping torrent of live updates. I log on to Amazon Instant Video to choose a movie from many thousands of selections that can be immediately streamed to my iPad. (I hear Netflix has even more selections. Who knows what to do with ever expanding list to watch?) I google for any information that I want, and get millions of hits available with a click of mouse. I am inundated with information. I have way more than I can handle.

All these point to one thing. It is getting harder to share messages because our attention is getting scarcer.

This is a big problem for all entrepreneurs, sales and marketing people. Our coolest product announcement is yet another spam in the inbox that can be flat out ignored. I know because I have thousands of such emails in my inbox.

Then what can we do about them as sellers? How do we make our message stick out among sea of information?

1. Reframe our perspective: Our mission is to help people get ahead, not sell our widgets.

I just don't care for people pitching their ideas without having a clue about how my day goes around, what problems I have, what I spend the most time worrying about, and my goals for immediate and longer term future. Granted that sellers are not there to provide life coaching, but at the least I would expect them to first guess what kind of challenges I have, and offer the solutions around them.

Us sellers have to remember not to treat our customers like yet another account to close, but someone who we can help to get ahead.

This also means if we cannot help a customer, we may refer him to someone else who might be able to help him.

It's about whom we can help and how we can help them. It is not about us and our widgets.

2. Invest our own scarce resource: Spend our own attention on customers.

If we realize that our scarce resource is attention, then how could we expect customer to invest their resource to open up our automated spam mail that was generated by the latest marketing campaign program?

Before asking customer to invest their time and energy, spend our time to find out about customers and trying to understand what's bothering them the most. Pick a problem that we can solve for them, and talk to a few willing customers who need the solution now. Once customers understand that we are genuinely committed in helping them solve their problem, they will return the favor by investing their attention in us and our product.

Don't expect customers to start paying attention just because our product offers freemium model. Cost to customers is not zero because they have to go through the trouble of test driving our product.

3. Make personal relationship with customers.

No one likes to buy things from someone unknown. If I had a choice of buying from someone I know or someone I don't, I'll always go for someone I know. Even if I had to pay a bit more for the same product, I would choose to go with someone I know, provided that I like the seller.

It's the same reason why it's good to have a trusted mechanic. A mechanic who knows my car history and demonstrated trustworthiness with earlier work is a more attractive choice than trying to find someone new based on the lowest price or friend's recommendation each time. If I like the guy, it's an even easier choice for me.

Be a helper to customers first. Then become a friend to them. Earn their trust and build relationship that can last. It will pay for the investment itself and many times more by returned visits and their references.

Now even if marketers are doing all these, someone like me may not be the best person to market to. Only if I can share what my iPhone email client was showing the other day with all the spammers... (Luckily it turned out to be a bug that fixed itself shortly.)

Wow, 2.1 billion unread messages!
What did I do to deserve so much love!

Don't protect yourself from changes. Embrace them.

I have come across three interesting articles last weekend, and I want to share them.  First one is how much we all hate the changes and tries very hard to resist them.  Second is about how we all tend to underestimate the changes that we are going to go through, yet when we look back, the changes that we went through are often much greater than how much we anticipated.  Third is Glenn Kelman's story about how he embraced the changes instead of protecting his ego.

For those who cannot wait to get to the punch line.  It doesn't make sense to protect yourself.  You are going to change so much anyway.  Why not change faster to get better faster?

How to run a small business

Yesterday I dropped off my wife's car for an oil change.  My mechanic is a small independent one.  He is a typical small business owner.  He always has greasy fingers and runs between his tiny 6-by-6-foot office and the next door repair shop.  When the office phone rings, he is the one picks up the phone to talk to the customer.  Often despite his best efforts he answers the phone after several rings because he has to rush to the office from the repair shop.

When I dropped off the car, the shop was busy as ever.  There were three customers waiting to speak to him.

After waiting for my turn, I asked him.

A conversation about startup

A: Hey, long time no see!

B: Yeah, it's been a long time.  How have you been?

A: Slogging through.  Still in the middle of startup phase.

B: Startup?  I thought you are well passed that stage.  I don't think anyone would consider your company as a startup.

A: Perhaps.  There are just lot going on, you know.  Hiring, getting new people up to speed, working out team dynamics, etc.

B: Sure, but that's not a startup-only challenge.  That is true for any growing company.

A: Yeah...  I am with you on that.  What would you call startup?  What makes a company startup?

B: For one thing, if it is a brand new, then obviously it's a startup.  Once someone told me that startup is a phase when money is invested for future revenue.  Basically, burning cash.  But that can't be it because my earlier startup we started making money about a month in.  It was small, but we were making money right away.

A: Positive cash flow right away.  That is the ideal model for self-funded bootstrapping.

B: Look, I have to run.  Have a meeting starting in a few minutes.

What does make a startup a startup?

Innovation comes from fuller understanding of the problem

I am still ruminating on sessions that I attended during Silicon Valley Product Camp 2013.  One remark someone made about innovation is circling around me.

Innovation comes from fuller understanding of the problem.

I don't recall who exactly said it.  Whether it was Steve Johnson or someone in the audience, I cannot quite remember.  Yet I think it captures the one aspect of how innovation happens.  That is, thinking about the problem and understanding the constraints under which a new solution needs to be proposed.

In its simplest sense, we have to understand the problem before we can come up with creative solutions that solves the problem.

Ask why?

I once remember reading that Toyota had this process called 5 Whys.  Whenever a process fails or they encountered a problem, they would ask why the failure occurred.  When they find the answer, then they would ask why again to figure out the reason for the answer being the way it was.  The would repeat this asking whys 5 times for each failure.  Only after understanding the five-levels of why, they would make changes to prevent the root cause from happening again.

I believe that asking why is an important step in understanding the entire problem domain.  Without understanding the real problem, we end up treating the symptoms.  When the band aid wears off, it soon happens again, and we would have to fix it all over again.

In order to be able to ask why, everyone needs to clearly understand the objective for each step and the reasons why the decisions were made the way they were.  But that's not always easy.  Team members may be geographically distributed, each member can have different perspective from each other, hence may see things from a different angle.  Combine them with aggressive schedule, team members may feel that their primary job of writing functional code is all that matters, and do not take time to ask whys.

Rob Walling: Lessons Learned by a Solo Entrepreneur

Rob Walling is a serial entrepreneur who advocates launching small startups and staying small.  He has launched several startups and has been sharing his experiences and lessons learned on his blog, Software by Rob.  He has launched several self-funded startups and also acquired technology to re-launch using variety of marketing techniques.

Here are some articles that I found interesting from his blog:

• Passion as a Competitive Advantage
• Nine Things Developers Want More Than Money
• Why Startup Founders Should Stop Reading Business Books
• The Software Product Myth

He also gave an interview outlining the steps that he took to acquire HitTail.com, long tail SEO site:

Wishful thinking: Enterprise licensing and deployment platform

Having worked for enterprise software company, I have seen many times where brand new software license gets shelved and never to be deployed.  I say "never to be deployed", because by the time customer decides to deploy either there is a new version of software available, or the product gets merged with some other product, older product as sold effectively getting EOLed.  Surprisingly this actually happens from time to time.  Hence enterprise software sales person talks about separating selling versus delivery.  Buying does not necessarily mean it will get rolled out immediately.

This happens for several reasons.  Having to spend the left-over annual budget at the end of fiscal year, looking for a solution and buying it before the year end.  Not having internal resource to train, deploy and manage the software once it has been purchased.  Incorrectly estimating the number of users who will be on the system.  And even the purchased system not solving the right problem.

Good enterprise sales person is one who can identify these opportunities and take advantage of them.  It takes uncanny skill of understanding budgetary cycles, political power distribution and knowing which button to press to get the biggest deals closed without slipping the deal.  In practice many enterprise sales people can separate selling versus delivery so well that they can sell something without having the actual product.

End of 15 hour work day

I spend about 13 hours a day working.  It is not something that my boss demanded of me.  I just put in as much as I can to solve things that are coming my way, and when I count all the hours that I spend on average, it comes out to be about 13 hours a day.  That does not include chores like washing up, eating and commuting.  It's 13 hours in front of my laptop doing one thing or another.  That means I work about 15 hours each day, Monday thru Friday.

When I put in 15 hours day in and day out, I started to notice that I lose my daily rhythm.  Each day bleeds into another.  Back-to-back 5 hour sleep cycle starts to wear on me as mid week rolls in, and by Friday I become a walking zombie kept awake by the power of black Peet's coffee of the day.  There is no unplugging, hence there is no transition.

I am finally acknowledging that it may be causing more harm than doing good.  Being always on is not the answer to increase the productivity.  I have to take a longer term perspective, and pace myself.  The race won't be determined by who gets to cram in more working hours a week.  Instead it will be about how fast I can evolve the product, and whether I will keep going when product-market fit starts to find its sweet spot.  As they say, it's a marathon, not a 100m dash. 

Simply allocating more time to get more done cannot be the sustainable strategy.  I first have to specify the beginning and end of each day, then put the rest of things within the available time.

It's going to be difficult to do because I'm used to adding more time to get things done.  But it's something that I am willing to try.

Let me see how successful I can be.

What's more important, great product or great team?

A couple of weeks ago, I had a chance to talk to a product manager at a partner company.  We were having a casual dinner and talking about different topics.  One of the topics was about launching a startup.  She had thought about launching her own startup and she mentioned that she didn't have a concrete product idea yet. She felt that identifying a worthwhile problem to solve and coming up with a solution was where startup got founded.  She wanted to find a problem that was socially responsible as well as personally interesting as studying impacts of global warming on ocean life.

That's great, I thought.  Finding meaning in one's work is important to persist through all the trials and tribulations.  It is also true that identifying a problem that is worth solving is an important step in creating a startup.  But there is more important piece.  That's putting together a right team.

Jason Cohen: A smart bear

Jason Cohen is a founder of Smart Bear and WP Engine.  He has successfully started multiple startups, and grown them to over million dollars of revenue.  He currently runs WP Engine, Wordpress hosting company.  He has been sharing his startup lessons on his blog, a smart bear, since 2007.

Here are some articles that I found interesting:

• Rich vs. King in the Real World: Why I sold my company
• Enough with the “expert” guilt
• How do you tell a non-technical person that they can’t understand?
• Teeny bit of traction — what next?

Integrate perspectives to solve the entire problem

As a young boy, I remember reading a puzzle went something like this.

Q: There was a bus that only allowed 10x10x10 inch carry-on luggage.  A boy had a 15x1x1 inch stick and he wanted to get on the bus to get home before dinner time.  Somehow he was able to manage to bring the stick on the bus.  How did he do that? 

A: He put the stick in the 10x10x10 box diagonally and carried the box on board.  Because diagonal distance of 10x10x10 box was roughly 17.3 inches, 15-inch-long stick fit in the box.

When we get multiple descriptions of a problem from different perspectives, it is easy for us to think that the problem is not solvable.  But there could be ways to solve the problem while satisfying all or most of the constraints.  The trick is to think of the problem holistically without getting bogged down by any one of the constraints.

Product Management: First explain why

I often have a conversation like this with engineering team:

A: So what happened with X?  The piece that we discussed the other day?
B: No update.  There was a discussion and that was about it.
A: Didn't we agree that we will do Y to get more data?
B: But we weren't sure whether it's really needed.  We didn't think customer was asking for Y.  It was not clear to us.
A: We just lost a few days.  When we realize there is something wrong, we have to do something.  Anything.

There are two lessons in this conversation.

What to measure, how to measure

I wrote this post soon after I wrote this earlier post on my flight out to NYC earlier this week.  I was thinking about how to measure what I do, and figure out whether I am making progress or not.  If you want some context as to how I arrived at my thoughts, you can read the following earlier posts:

• What are you doing to get better
• Set your goals, measure your steps
• Asking questions

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There are two things that you should measure.  Measure what you do everyday, and measure the impact of your everyday action.

What you do everyday is your steps to your goal.  It measures how well you are executing your actions.

The impact of your actions is your goal.  It measures whether your steps are having the effects that you hoped for.

Both are important for different reasons. Let me tell you why.

Andrew Mason's farewell to Groupon

Andrew Mason has been fired.  He posted a very candid farewell letter publicly anticipating that the letter will be leaked to public anyway.  You can read the letter here.

I have only watched the his interview on Charlie Rose, and seen his talks, so I don't know how he has been in the office.  But the farewell letter really spoke to me as his genuine message.  The way he shared his disappointment was well handled and I think it offers a few lessons that we can all learn from.

Benefits of face-to-face communication

I practically live on the phone.  I get on the phone to talk to development team in India.  I get on the phone to speak to sales engineering team all over the world.  I get on the phone to talk to customers and support team.  Thanks to desktop sharing apps like WebEx and Microsoft OCS, I get to share documents, do awkward whiteboard drawing using my trackball, and get to see the feature requests or bugs directly as it happens on customer environment.

I cannot imagine working without a phone line and desktop sharing application.

But whenever I get to visit a customer, a sales person, a support engineer or anyone in person, I realize how much signal I am missing from just muffled VoIP audios.  It's like one of those moments when you don't realize what you are missing until you actually try it.  All of sudden you are noticing details that you did not notice from voice calls.  The information bandwidth is qualitatively different with a in-person meeting.

Asking questions

It's easy to cruise through life.  When in motion, breaking the flow is hard.

But to get better at what you do, you have to break the flow from time to time.  You have to stop and question whether what you are doing is leading you in the right direction.  It could be that you are missing something that you could be doing.  You may know more about the goal.  Or the goal may have changed along the way.

When I started my career, I thought that working hard meant writing lots of code or finding as many bugs as I could.  If I was doing more, I had to be adding more value, so I thought.  I did not stop and asked whether one more line of code would make our project more successful, or one more known bug would help us ship a higher quality product.  In reality, it's neither the lines of code nor the list of known bugs that create a better product.  They are the steps to the goal.  They are means to an end in implementing a solution for our customers.  Writing more lines of code does not necessarily mean that the product will be ready earlier.  Knowing one more bug does not necessarily mean that customers will find the product quality to be higher.

Jordan Cooper: Startups, VC, Hyperpublic

Jordan Cooper is a VC and an entrepreneur who founded Hyperpublic.  He has been sharing his experience of launching and running Hyperpublic on his blog: jordancooper.wordpress.com.

Here are blog entries that I found interesting:

• 35 Gut Checks When Founding Your First Company
• What Apple Has In Common With Prep School Gangsters
• The 2 States In Which A Blogger Doesn’t Suck
• Seed Stage Valuation Guide

For those who might wonder about what Hyperpublic did (it got acquired by Groupon Feb 2012), here is the TechCrunch interview with Cooper.  In short, it was an open localized database of place, people and things.

It's broken, someone please fix it

The other day I wrote about creating an open bug tracking system.  Instead of tracking bugs that users find in software, the idea is to track bugs that we sees in our every day lives.  Think of Bugzilla for our lives.  We all can report what is broken.  And the hope is that someone looking for startup idea or weekend hacking project can take some ideas and solve some of them.

So I decided to set up a Tumblr site to document these bugs.  It's called It's Broken, [Someone Please] Fix It (itsbrokenfixit.tumblr.com).

I made it so that anyone can submit their bugs as well.  I hope I see lots of bugs that we run into in our lives.

Looking for bug reporters and startup idea seekers.
Source: http://itsbrokenfixit.tumblr.com/

Will Smith's secrets to success

"The only thing that I see that is distinctly different about me is I'm not afraid to die on a treadmill. I will not be out-worked, period. You might have more talent than me, you might be smarter than me, you might be sexier than me, you might be all of those things you got it on me in nine categories. But if we get on the treadmill together, there's two things: You're getting off first, or I'm going to die. It's really that simple, right?"

- Will Smith

I have seen this Will Smith's quote from a few places before.  And the other day I accidentally discovered Smith making the quoted remarks on YouTube.  It starts 2:36 into the video below: