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?

Product Management: Launching a new product? First go get some customers

"We don't make it until you order it."
                       - Jack in the Box

Jack in the Box used to feature this slogan on their TV commercials.  It was meant to tell customers that their food is made fresh every day.  Software industry is not going to win any customer by making things fresh.  But there is a good reason why just-in-time manufacturing makes sense for software.  It is to avoid building something that no one wants.

It is easy to fall into the trap of thinking that we know what customers really want.  In most cases customers themselves don't know what they want.  They have a vague idea of what their problem is.  Sometimes the problem itself is not known to them.  Yet we software makers think that we know exactly what customers are looking for and will love our product that we are building.

Truth is that no one exactly knows what will work well in a real situation.  We all have guesses as to what could work, but our guesses are often too far off to be useful in its first iteration.  There are a number of odds stacked against any new product.

Simplify what it does to absolute minimum

I like simple things.  When I sign up for a service, I already have a problem that I would like to solve.  What I look for is the quickest path to solving the problem at hand.  From user's perspective it should be dead simple.  Simplicity of user experience means that someone else took the trouble of thinking through the intricacies involved in solving the problem, and laid it all out.  As a user, when I discover a simple product, I am thrilled.

There are different aspects to creating something simple, however.  Creating something simple is anything but simple.  There are three aspects that I can think of:

• Problem that the product solves
• Product UI and UX
• Implementation

Product Management: When to add a new feature

When do you add a new feature as opposed to improving the existing feature?

Past week I had a chance to spend time with a bunch of customers.  It always gives me a new perspective, a perspective that really matters to the company, i.e. the reality.  

Customers care about their unique problem.  They might not be at the stage where they can make use of all  the product features.  Their users may not have been trained on all the features, they may not have the browser version that supports the latest feature, or their internal roles may not have been set up the way product was designed to support.  Or they may not even know about the capability of the product.

Each customer is at different adoption curve.  They have a different set of problems they are dealing with.  When they are having user adoption problem, they are not interested in hearing all the great features that the product has to make it easier to scale the roll out.

Because of the unique customer perspective, many customers have their wishlist.  It is a list of enhancements to make their jobs easier.

Facebook Trusted Contacts & Mother's Day Notification

A couple of weeks ago, Facebook rolled out a feature called Facebook 'Trusted Contacts'.  Instead of relying on security questions and two factor authentication, Facebook is saying that they can solve the problem by using social graph.  Facebook is thinking that our identities can be verified easier by sharing the secret codes with our Facebook friends.  They can forward the codes to us, and we can enter them to regain access to our Facebook account.

A neat idea on the paper.  I like the idea of password-less login.  But asking them to send me a secret code that they received just so that I didn't choose to pick my security question or enter mobile phone number?  For me, the pain of bothering someone to solve my forgotten password problem is greater than regaining access to my Facebook account.

What about this push notification that I received from Facebook Pages yesterday?

Push notification that I got from Facebook Pages yesterday.
Sorry, Facebook.  My mom got a phone call from me instead.

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.

Thoughts on social network and its API

I have been thinking about what API meant for social networks.  Social in nutshell is about identities, sharing content and engaging with readers in two way conversation.  It made existing blogging concept easier to adopt and more accessible to millions of users.  While popularizing publishing and subscription model with social relationships, social found new exciting applications like user-reported breaking news network, 1-1 messaging networks, and photo and video sharing services.

Blogging platforms were available well before social networks.  But it took Facebook and Twitter for content publishing and subscription model to really take off.  People saw what they can do by easily sharing updates with friends and families.  Technology (publishing and subscription) disappeared in the background and the user benefit (staying connected with friends and families) emerged.

Social API on the other hand is all about allowing developers to integrate social network identities and social graphs stored in each social networking service.  Social API is there to allow other applications to incorporate what social network has done to blogging platform.  Social API made it for social applications easy to use identities, share information and get engagements from people around us.

It allowed many applications to introduce social component by plugging into social network APIs.  What could have been a run-of-the-mill word puzzle turned into real-time family room board game that could be played across cyberspace.  Flower shop applications knew before I did that my mother's birthday is coming up and reminded me to send her bouquet.  Social API instantly allowed developers to run their applications in context of user's own social graph.  These applications in turn provided richer environment for the social network and its users.