Of designers and developers

In today's post at The Heretech, I come out of the closet. Yes, I am a bigger history geek than you can possibly imagine. Hello, my name is Tom, and I play wargames.

However, by playing a lot of games designed to simulate historical events, I've learned a couple of things that apply to designing products in the technology industry. Specifically, how do you create a design teeam that can overcome some of the common pitfalls, such as unnecessary complexity? To read more, follow this link.

[P.S. Thanks for pointing out the problem with the link. Typepad is intermittently eating the hyperlinks I enter. From now on, I'll just have to test them before I publish.]

Why use cases should drive technology design

During a briefing from Microsoft's xRM team, the question of how to integrate structured and unstructured data arose. If xRM (the Dynamics platform) is good at the structured stuff, and SharePoint is good at unstructured content, what's the right way to bridge the two?

Back in my Oracle days, we faced exactly the same question. At a technology level, there's no obvious answer. Bring together two development teams (the structured and unstructured specialists), and you'll first get a lot of technical-level discussions. How should security work? What API changes might be needed? How will metadata span the two kinds of information?

Unfortunately, there's no immediately obvious answer to these questions. In fact, the options are so broad, and the risk of technological quagmires so great, that the endeavor might easily grind to a halt. People ponder the options, argue over which one is best, go back and ponder some more...

At Microsoft, a clear use case accelerated this discussion. The Public Sector group developed a constituent services application for local governments that combines both SharePoint and xRM. Notice how specific the application, the Citizen Service Platform, is. Not all government, but local government. Not several government functions, but constituent services. 

Undoubtedly, the Citizen Service Platform team made it clear which kinds of integrations were important, and which weren't. It's not too hard to generalize the use case to other situations. After all, we're talking about the same CRM platform that property managers and church pastors use, for different but similar purposes.

For people who are already sold on use cases as the right foundation for designing products, this might seem like a "Well, duh!" sort of observation. However, many product teams go full speed ahead with only the haziest use case, or to be honest, none at all. If their product decision-making process is too slow, or too error-prone, they might reconsider the value of a very specific use case.

[Cross-posted at The Heretech.]

Podcast: My interview with the Cranky Product Manager

Stepping out of the shadows, the Cranky Product Manager and I talked about the sources of crankiness in the technology industry in this week's Heretech podcast. The conversation also ranges from the reasons why product management is a "wretchedly awesome" job, to how overzealous Agile advocates hurt their cause.

To maintain anonymity, I masked the CPM's voice. A couple of listeners have already compared the effect to the Cylon voice effect in the old Battlestar Galactica series. I'm not sure if the CPM would be flattered or mortified by that comparison.

In the same podcast, I also review a movie that you've never heard of, but which has a lot of relevance for a recent hot topic in the PM blogs.

Agile Executive post on "regime change"

Many thanks to Israel Gat at The Agile Executive for posting my thoughts on how Agile is following the same path that many revolutions take. After you've had some initial successes, and take your new programme seriously, what now?

Making a SaaS of yourself

I've worked on both SaaS products and on-premise ones. While the challenges may be different, I was never at a loss for things to do in product management and product marketing. In fact, some of these tasks became more challenging, not less so, in a SaaS world.

Which makes me wonder, why on earth would someone who purports to be an expert on SaaS say that PM is not necessary in SaaS applications? To get my complete reaction to this recent post on SaaS University's house blog, click here.

New PM podcast, with Adam Bullied

This week, I interview Adam Bullied of Write That Down. Among other topics, we discuss why PMs shouldn't try to be mini-CEOs. (Or just tiny.) For the actual podcast, click here.

Microsoft Microphone: Market Research Via Facebook Apps

[Posted by Oliver Young. Cross-posed from Strategic heading.]

A few months ago I went looking for technology vendor Facebook applications and found one from Microsoft that had just launched: Microphone. At the time there was not much activity, but I recently checked back in and was impressed with (at least parts) of what I found there. Now, I should admit that I am grading on a curve here; most of the apps I found were miserable, like this one from HP. However all things considered there is a lot to like about what Microsoft has done, and they seem to be attracting an audience.

So what about the Microsoft app works?

First, the entire application has a gaming element to it and they award prizes to the most active users. Time and time again we see that these sorts of competitive games resonate with users and Microsoft has done a nice job of taking advantage -- if you notice the leader board is monthly, so no one should feel completely frozen out.

Second, they have taken steps to incorporate other social networks and communications tools like Twitter. Microsoft has taken good advantage of a SocialEyes application to scrape Twitter and bring the conversation into Facebook (see below). Integrating both Facebook and Twitter gives Microsoft more opportunities to engage their audience, and saves them the trouble of reinventing their relationship with users on each platform. I've actually never heard of this company but LOVE the approach; has anyone out there worked with them in the past?

Third, they have focused on tangible business functions like market research. A lot of companies have made forays into Facebook, Twitter, and other communities over the last few years and thus far few have real tangible business value to show for it. With this implementation Microsoft has done a great job of keeping their feet firmly planted on solid ground, focusing on customer care and market research. I am likely a bit biased by the fact that I am a market researcher, but this aspect of the application is especially well thought out. For example we see Microsoft measuring customer reaction to recent television ads (see below). Admittedly this is not a substitute for real quantitative market research, since anyone adding the Microsoft Microphone application is likely a bit biased in the first place, but if done right it can provide solid directional data at almost no cost. The poll question about joining a programming competition is spot on -- you already have a group likely to participate and this can be a great way to get their input.

Now, I would lose my analyst card if I didn't lob at least one stone at Microsoft and this one (at least for me) is a doozy. Look closely at the Apple and PC TV ad questions. Notice anything? Oh yes, they inverted the scale from one to the other, starting the Apple ad scale at "Hate it" and forcing people to keep reading if they don't hate it. For the PC ad they start at "Love it" and head back the other direction. Subtle, but a MAJOR problem if you are looking for objective research! Then again, maybe the marketing guys were looking to show some success to management, in which case, carry on gentlemen.

All things considered this is one of the best vendor Facebook applications I've seen and it should serve as a pretty good model for others, even those selling B2B -- know your audience, provide them some value, provide them an engaging experience, and keep it grounded in real business needs.

MOCCA & MarketingProfs: B2B Marketers Focus On Social Media and Metrics

[Posted by Laura Ramos]

During the past week I’ve had the privilege of presenting to two different organizations that I think B2B marketers would benefit from exploring further: 

June 3, 2009 I spoke at the MOCCA quarterly meeting, held at Adobe’s facilities in downtown San Jose. The Marketing Operations Cross-Company Alliance (MOCCA) is a community for sharing practical experience between Marketing Operations professionals in technology companies.

June 9, 2009 I joined Roy Young, President of MarketingProfs, LLC, and Sandy Carter, IBM’s Vice President, SOA & WebSphere Marketing, Strategy and Channels, at MarketingProfs B2B Forum in Boston, MA, to discuss the impact of the current economy on marketing mix and budget trends. MarketingProfs recently published their report about the joint research we conducted in Dec 2008/Jan 2009.

I have written some thoughts from the presentations on B2B Marketing POSTs - I encourage you to check it out.

Sharing Social Media Insights With Business.com

[Posted by Laura Ramos]

Through LinkedIn and Twitter, the folks at Business.com found me and invited me to interview with Ben Hanna, VP of Marketing, on the B2B Online Marketing Blog. Ben wanted to get the "big picture" perspective on the B2B social media opportunity and found Forrester's groundbreaking study, that I authored with G. Oliver Young, of how business technology buyers use social media. He thought it was a wake-up call for B2B marketers, and asked me to share perspectives that any marketer looking to better understand B2B social media would value. 

A copy of the interview is up on B2B Marketing POSTs - I encourage you to give it a read. 

What's the Dev team's interest in social media?

Most aficianados of social media emphasize the customer-facing applications of these technologies. By now, we've all heard interesting stories about how Marketing used blogs to get the message out, Sales used forum postings to help qualify leads, and Support used Twitter to respond to users wrestling with technical problems.

Exciting, new-frontierish stuff, to be sure, but you hear far less about Development's social media strategy. What about the "inbound" applications of social media?

That question was my inspiration for what turned into a three-part series on "inbound social media." The first research document appeared today (Forrester subscription required to read the whole enchilada). The second and third parts are coming shortly.

A lot of development teams are skeptical about their company's investment in social media. Frankly, they don't see what's in it for them. Worse, it threatens to be a distraction from their mission to execute, execute, execute.

But, as I found, social media fills an important informational gap, as long as you're willing to make the commitment to taking it seriously. You may have already heard my rants about traditional sources of product requirements, and why they stink on ice. (And believe you me, I speak from firsthand experience on that topic, as well as the vicarious experience of many PMs I've interviewed in this job.) If not, here's a sample.

The first document in this series is really a summary of why Dev teams should take social media seriously, and how they'll have to adapt to use it effectively. For example, inbound social media are a mechanism for answering questions, some of which will be ongoing, and some of which will be ad hoc. Most development teams (broadly defined to include QA, Doc, and PM) don't necessarily have the right organization and habits to juggle both of these types of inquiry. Driven by release schedules, teams focus on the questions relevant to the next release--not necessarily the bigger questions that span releases. Social media can address both kinds of questions, but teams will have to make some adjustments to find these answers.

Many technology companies will have to change the way they make product decisions. I used to annoy the heck out of stakeholders by saying, "If we've reached a question that we can settle empirically, then let's shut up and find the answer." Not everyone wants to sacrifice their dearly-held opinions, or their freedom of action within the organization, on the altar of the scientific method. But that wrenching change may be necessary for these teams to survive and prosper, given the challenges of convincing customers to buy and adopt new technologies.

[Cross-posted at The Heretech.]