Product Development : Designer Speak, Definitely Absolutely Seriously

 

I have been learning to think, work and communicate like a product guy/gal.
 

I read this article in the print version "Dave Morin Explains It All," Fortune September 24, 2012. Online version is at "Dave Morin Explains It All"
 

Now, here are some quotes, only one of which was actually uttered by the great Dave Morin. (First, he worked in Apple's marketing, then he worked at Facebook where he invented Facebook Connect and Facebook Platform, and now he's running Path), and the rest are made up by me.

Can you tell the authentic from the fake, the profound from the pseudo-profound?

1. "With life, mobile has become the platform" 
2. "With platform, mobile has become life"
3. "With mobile, life has become the platform"
4. "With life, the platform has become mobile"
5. "With mobile, platform has become the life"
6. "With the platform, life has become mobile"

The answer can be found in the article: Dave Morin Explains It All

This is how we develop tastes, right? Good luck.

 

Comming Posts

I'm going to compare HungryGoWhere to Yelp/Singapore. This is a sort of preview/teaser.

 

Invitation to Marketers and Promoters

November 23, 2012

We are developing an application for primary and secondary students all the world over.

It's a free app with premium services for paying users.

We want as many students themselves and their parents as possible to become aware of it and to try it out.

1. Can you help us locate where they are?
2. Can you spread our message among them: email, direct mail, flyer, social media groupings, Youtube, slide share, ezine publishing, mobile messages, PR, ANY OTHER WAY?
3.  Can you drive traffic to our app/site?
4.  Once they are at the site, can you help us encourage / cajole / entice / seduce them try out our service?

Beyond that point, we take over.

We take it upon ourselves to ensure

1. that our app is intuitive and easy to use,
2. that its benefits are obvious to the users,
3. that the fees are reasonable and affordable and easy to pay, and so on.

Here also, we are open to your contributions
e.g.

1. What features will increase our value to the users?
2. What benefits will they like to get?
3. What concerns would we address?
4. Reduce or increase price? and so on.

Are your team comfortable doing these activities?

PS. True, we will stop funding any product that fails to meet our milestone/target.

But, before we do that, we will try to morph it into a far better product. Even if we kill a product, we stay in the same line of business and still go after the same types of customers.

So, please also think about long-term benefits that you can get from starting a long-term relationship with us. When Product AZ 1.0 of ours goes, AZ 2.1 will come, and when AZ line goes, there will be BQ, CW, DY lines and so on. And you should still be promoting them for us to our mutual prosperity.

Life Being Stranger than Fiction: MVC in Joomla!

How many steps do you think you have to take to write a Hello World MVC in a web app? About 17, and about hundreds of code lines and configuration lines if you are doing ti in Joomla! I am not making this up. Check the links below.

1. http://docs.joomla.org/Developing_a_Model-View-Controller_Component/2.5/Introduction
2. http://docs.joomla.org/Developing_a_Model-View-Controller_Component/2.5/Adding_a_view_to_the_site_part
3. http://docs.joomla.org/Developing_a_Model-View-Controller_Component/2.5/Adding_a_menu_type_to_the_site_part
4. http://docs.joomla.org/Developing_a_Model-View-Controller_Component/2.5/Adding_a_model_to_the_site_part
5. http://docs.joomla.org/Developing_a_Model-View-Controller_Component/2.5/Adding_a_variable_request_in_the_menu_type
6. ...
7. ...
8. ...
9. ...
10. ...
11. ...
12. ...
13. ...
14. ..
15. ...
16. ...
17. http://docs.joomla.org/Developing_a_Model-View-Controller_Component/2.5/Example_of_menu_parameters_and_stylesheets

Product Strategy : Military History Emphasizes its Importance

Reading "Agile Experience Design," I noticed the following quote on page-52.

"Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat."

The source is Sun Tzu's "The Art of War":

I've read different versions of and addendums to Sun Tzu. But I've never seen this before. However, the concepts are in line with his spirit and philosophy. So, I'll regard them as authentically put down by the Master himself.

We're taking our own medicine. Our strategy&UX  campaign may be just a mere noise before it dies out. However, we are attempting in  some other fronts, too.

Hedgehog vs All-terrain Homosapien

Bill Gates: "Intelligence is not fungible."

Proverb: "Jack of all trades, master of none"

Jim Collins: "hedgehog"

Buffet and Munger: "circles of competence"

Mark Twain and Andrew Carnegie: "Put all your eggs in one basket and watch that basket extra-carefully."

I like this spirit of humility and modesty.

Given our human limitations, we can't escape focus and specialization.

However, hedgehogs shouldn't be too smug either.

With your shiny, trusty hammer, what if everything does look to you like a nail?

Creating Original and Non-original Softwares

The Original School

 "ambition,""revolutions," "revolutionary"
"original," "radical"
"creativity," "innovation," "lateral thinking,"
"invention," "reinvention," "disruption,"
"leadership," "platform leadership," "leapfrogging," "blue ocean strategy,"
"positioning," "re-positioning,"
"market domination,"

The Non-Original School

Copycats
Fast Seconds
Entrepreneurial Judo
Busting profit pool a la Michael Dell, Dell CEO
The margin, the opportunity a la Jeff Bezos, Amazon CEO.

The Honest School

1. Einstein (in paraphrase) : Originality is nothing but forgetting one's sources.
2. Scott Adam (in paraphrase) : Originality = theft + lack of talent + time
3. Bruce Lee (in paraphrase) : Origin of the technique doesn't matter. Just express yourself honestly, truthfully.

The Deep School

1. An old German tract that suggests , for three whole days, shutting out the world, listening to one's own thoughts and recording them faithfully. 
2. Go into yourself and see how deep the place is from which your life flows: Rainer Maria Rilke

Product Strategy : Useful Astrology Apps

This happened about 15 years ago in Myanmar. This is also happening with many softwares today.

At that time, I had taken a 4-weeks course in Visual Basic, and another 4-weeks course in Visual C++. I had already rented a Windows PC at home.

I knew a bit of many kinds of astrology techniques, those kinds you can read in magazines and can master in a few minutes.

I was eager to code those astrology techniques into some GUI/desktop apps.

Before I started coding, I looked around. I read in some Myanmar magazines about some theses on astrology at our Computer University. Their calculations were thick,deep and complex. That's fine.

What was not so fine: their outputs were also very hard to understand.

I also checked out some Astrology CD's written by Myanmar programmers, selling at about K 400. Their outputs were of the same kind as those of the theses. (At that time Don Norman hasn't written Living with Complexity. He hasn't proclaimed that "Make output understandable.").

I couldn't learn from them, and so I coded my own design.

Front End

1. 1 text box to enter user's question
2. 1 button beneath it

Back End

1. Read the user's question.
2. Throw a 6-sided dice 6 times, since this is I Ching.
3. Using the result from the dice throws, read from a table of answers.
4. Show the answer to user.

I padded the answer with some folk psychology. I tested the app on my students, and I watched them discreetly from a distance.  At that time, "Usability Testing" was not even in my vocabulary.

My cost to create this was about 8 hours of coding and 8 hours of reading. And users liked it a bit.
Compare this to the other software makers' costs and the users' reaction to their softwares.