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What do you mean you can’t build this feature? I am going to escalate it to your manager

Escalation is one of the most commonly used threats in the enterprise. A customer complains? Let’s escalate to the head of engineering. You can’t accept a task someone from Marketing asked you to finish? He will escalate it to your manager. Someone made a nasty comment? Let’s escalate to HR.  

Can we schedule a meeting to discuss the goals and agenda for the meeting next week?

Meetings to discuss meetings (meta meetings) are common in the enterprise. Sometimes you have a quick call to set a meeting to discuss the planning meeting for the offsite.

Can you please review and sign the code of conduct?

Code of conduct, sexual harassment rules, trading policies… you name it. In the enterprise you constantly sign policies that no one can remember or enforce.

I have an open slot to meet with you late next month.

I have back to back meetings tomorrow.

It is not uncommon in the enterprise to confuse meetings with work.

“Meet me in Everest at 2:00PM”

When creativity starts and ends in naming meeting rooms.

Let’s go through the Power Point deck

There is always a Power Point deck. It usually has many bullet points on it and some stupid graphics. It is often hard for enterprisers to imagine communicating without it.

This is the last warning! Your badge needs to be visible at all times!

Security in the enterprise has a mind of its own. They want everyone to be badged, tagged, RFIDed and VPNed at all times.

Does anyone know how to create an expense report with SAP?

Try to ask a 25 years old that grew up on iOS and video games to figure out the million sadistic little fields in the expense report system. Good luck.

They moved the planning offsite to the Sheraton this year. Was much better when it was at the Bellagio.

Executives call it “strategic planning” or “team building”. Their direct reports call it “free week in Vegas”.

You can find the KPIs on the intranet. No, it doesn’t work with Chrome.

KPIs are Key Performance Indicators. Don’t ask. The intranet was built in 2002 so it requieres IE6 to work — even for plain HTML documents.

We got 3 red traffic lights, 5 yellow and 6 green. Actually one of the yellows is kind of orange.

Like on the road, a common communication system in the enterprise is via traffic lights. Red means shit, we will never finish on time and with quality. Yellow means that with a little miracle we can finish on time and reasonable quality. Green means that not enough time has passed to know that we will not finish the project on time and with reasonable quality.

I was waiting on the bridge for 10 minutes and no one showed up

No, this is not an exchange between hikers setting up a meeting spot for a weekend walk. This is a disappointed employee that had to listen to 10 minutes of annoying music, waiting for a conference call to start.

Can you invoice me for the work you plan to do next month? I need to use Q1 budget or I lose it.

I don’t have an open headcount but I can hire you as a contractor.

Or, I don’t mind paying money for nothing, dear third party I hardly know, as long as I don’t let the people from my own company, who pay my salary and put bread on my table, to benefit from my team’s savings. Hiring someone as a contractor is another common way to deal with budget and hiring freezes which are another common axe-like tool in the enterprise.

I am the VP of strategy.

He used to be my manager two reorgs ago.

Who do you report to?

I report to the VP, that report to the EVP that reports directly to the CEO. I’m almost L3.

Organization changes are one of the key management tools in the enterprise. It leads to stupid roles like VP of Strategy, constant organization shuffles, and endless production of org charts.

Who is sending the minutes?

The experienced enterpriser will always want to send the meeting minutes. It really doesn’t matter what was decided in the meeting. All that counts is what the minutes are saying.

It will take us 4-6 weeks to get you on our vendor list

If we make it really hard to do business with us, we might have to spend less money.

Sorry but I can’t help you before I get an internal purchase requisition.

Most large companies have a sophisticated internal budgeting system. You want training to help you design a new class? Make sure you send them a purchase req (for way above market price…)

Opinions expressed by my Twitter account are mine and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.

Needs no explanation, I suppose…

The icing on the cake was their brilliant plot to shoot up to the top of the  iTunes most-downloaded app list (currently number 4 overall): they sent everyone on their waiting list an email which asked the recipients to download the app in order to check their position on the waiting list. Mailbox could have sent your waitlist position in that email. They could have even waited to email you until they were ready for you. Instead they chose to promote app downloads to get to the top of the free apps list in order for the app to get even more downloads.

Until yesterday I thought it was brilliant. Once you get to the top of the charts more people find you, the press writes about you again, and even more people download the app. Lather, rinse, repeat. Today I checked on Mailbox again and realized that this strategy backfired on them. While only yesterday the app commanded an impressive 4.5 stars rating (most probably by people that actually tried it out and loved it), today the rating dropped to 2 stars, fueled by legions of would-be users with 500,000 people ahead of them in line. These people felt manipulated and made sure that everyone knew that by giving the app one-star reviews.

Every startup wants a perfect launch with exponential growth from day one. But when you over-promise you run a much higher risk to under-deliver. I think that if Mailbox would have offered an alternative web-based way to check your place in line, and only sent an email when they were ready for you, it would have been a whole different story right now.

Don’t get me wrong. I am waiting myself to try Mailbox out and want them to be successful. But patience is a virtue, and perhaps Mailbox should have patiently waited for its app to top the list when it could satisfy its new users’ wishes to actually use the product they had downloaded.

With all the improvements in artificial intelligent someone should come up with a service that analyze your outgoing emails for the relative level of anger and blame (can be adapted to the user as the system trains itself). If an email crosses a threshold it will display following message: “I’ve analyze your email and it seems to be coming out of anger. I will hold the email for you and send it back in 24 hours for your review and edits”

In 9/10 of the cases, you will be calm by them and even if you still want to send this email, you will edit it in a way it helps your cause, rather than insulting the other.

Just think of how many people will not get fired/burn corporate bridges or lose a friend. So who is willing to build this service?

Later in life I understood that the most important thing to remember about any user feedback is that people don’t tell you what they think, they tell you what they think they think… I was reminded about it while listening to another fantastic Freakonomics podcast  at the gym today. The topic was human herd behavior and the subject was an experiment in ads, targeted at reducing utility bills. You should read or listen to the whole thing, but the interesting part was that the only ad that actually worked, was the one that in focus groups with the same people failed miserably.

 The ad simply said:  ”The majority of your neighbors are regularly undertaking efforts to reduce energy in their homes, please follow”. (But when asked in focus groups), they waved their hands at us when we asked them that question, “Oh come on I don’t care what my neighbors are doing. That’s not me.

The interesting part is the fact they didn’t lie. They thought of themselves as independent, uninfluenced by others or guided by their moral compass but they were not. They answered what they believed to be true, but acted based on their old habits and social norms.

The answer, of course, is not to stop talking with users. The answer is to stop asking them what they want. As I am constantly reminded by Ellen, all you can do is Just watch what they do, and try to learn from it. What do they complain about?  What takes really long? Which problem they always get back to?

The answer to “would you use this product?” or “how much do you need this feature?” will always be “yes” and “very”. We are programmed to always want more. But in reality, we act on very little. Focus on finding what sucks in the current state, and build something 10X better. If they use it, you got your answer.

PS- one form of user interview I found useful before is over a drink in a bar. Few glasses of wine and people start tell you what they really think, not what they want you to think they think…

What the book only touched on briefly is measurement as a way to build or modify a habit. Say that you live half a mile from your local grocery store and you go there 3-4 times a week to buy fresh produce. You know that walking there will save you money and add some points into your health jar but than again, you still get into the car and drive there since it is easier. Now, I am walking around with a fitbit (high end pedometer) and ever since I got it, when I get the cue (need vegetable to make salad), I changed the habit of getting into the car since the reward of walking is getting me closer to making my 10,000 steps a day goal. If I didn’t have my fitbit, these steps were not measured and reported back to me and the old habit (car) would have taken over.

Now let’s take a social example: we all know that it is better to buy from a store in our town- tax money goes to our town which in turn improve roads and schools we all use. This is why almost every city has a Shop Local program (see San Jose as an example). Nevertheless, no matter how much money San Jose is spending on this program, it does’t change the shopping habits of its residents. When they want to go out to eat, their cars will auto drive to Los Gatos or Palo Alto, although there are some really good choices in San Jose. There is no problem of awareness or motivation- there is simply not a mental reward for doing in town since no one recognizes the effort one made to change the habit of dinging out of town. But what if San Jose and other cities convinced the credit card company to report back on local shopping? They know where we live and the address of the business- they could easily show us on our statement the percentage spent in our own town and perhaps the city could have recognized top local “investors” this way and give them local points. All of a sudden, the reward of shopping local will be the recognition and after few months of active local shopping, one will not even think of driving out of the way to buy a shirt.

There is a silver lining connecting the two examples: being measured can modify the reward that can change an old habit. In order for it to work, measurement need to happen in the background (fitbit, credit card) so we don’t end up asking people to build a new habit just to change an old one.

Can you think of any other examples?

Here are some dos and don’ts that will make your designer much more productive, and therefore creating better products:

• Your “gut feeling” about the design is not important: We all watch baseball matches but don’t think we can play professionally. We all watch hospital dramas but don’t think we can operate on anyone. We all use  web products but we DO think we can design them better than the designer we hired. Your design expert is the designer you hired. If he/she are not good enough, replace them. You are unlikely to be better than them.
• “I am the target and if I don’t like it, no one will”: But you are not. You are a product manager or a tech executive living in NY or San Francisco. You are involved in the product 24/7. You can’t possibly be the target market (unless you want the market to be = 1)
• “I showed it to my girlfriend/best friend and she hated it”: don’t ever bring the girlfriend to the discussion. Everyone knows that she is not objective and you are not objective in translating her views.
• “But the competition built it this way”: so what? how do you know that the feature is successful? Why would it work for your different product? Copying is always risky as you can never copy the thought process, only the feature in isolation.

The above doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have an opinion about design. Of course you should. You just need to use different tools to explore if your “gut feeling” is right or wrong:

• Ask questions, don’t share opinions: It is possible that your designer didn’t get the use case in full. It is possible that her thought process was wrong and if she is a good designer, she will be happy to improve on it. Telling her that you don’t think the design will work is nothing she can work with. Ask questions like: “What did you try to achieve in this design”? “What do you think the user did before he got to this page?” or “What is the most important thing for the user to do on this page and how does the design support it?” . Through these questions you can understand if strategy and design are aligned and it gives the designer a real feedback she can use when iterating on the design, instead of simply redoing it.
• Don’t argue, measure- you still don’t see things eye to eye? run a test. Instead of getting into a fighting match (that you are very likely to “win”), design a test or run an A/B testing. There is so much technology that can be used to run those test that arguing became almost a non viable option.
• Challenge the designer to experiment- even when you are right, there are ways to convey it. I solved an argument on readability on a mobile app by asking the designer to load the designs on his phone and go out in the sun and “use” the app while walking. He came back and changed the colors/type weight on his own. It was much more powerful than saying “I don’t think users can read it”.
• Send then out- product managers and executives like and need to be out, interacting with users and getting feedback. In many cases, designers don’t like or are not pushed to do the same. Take them out with you to set an on boarding test in a coffee shop and spend couple of hours buying coffee to people and watch together how they experience your product. It will give your designer direct access to feedback and in your conversions on what you’ve just seen you can learn to work better together.

It is always better to manage by asking rather than telling. For most, it is a natural thing to do when you have no knowledge in an area. The trick is applying the same methodology when you do.

Image credit

• Amy’s Ice Cream- The very best ice cream in Austin. Don’t miss! My Original comment: “Like Cold Stone but with high quality ice cream”
• The Steeping Room- In the middle of the town of ribs, greasy food and Mexican beer you can find this elegant place with awesome coffee and tea selection and sophisticated brunch food. A bit out of the way but can be a great place for a meeting away from the crowd. What I said back then? ” I am back in the sane world where they serve artisan coffee and organic granola and yogurt. This place is my new BFF (plus an amazing selection of teas)”
• BBQ Heaven- BEST. BRISKET. EVER (Ellen makes a better one but only once a year or when a friend is having a baby). Open really late and a perfect place to get a late night sandwich you’d never forget. “Same awesome Brisket, same great people. Best (immobile) food truck ever.”
• Gueros Taco Bar- don’t usually like Mexican food but really liked this place. It must mean something… They also have wild Margaritas.
• Lanai- Great rooftop bar with decent drinks and good collection of people. “Loved the roof top bar and the sliders”
• Driskill Hotel- Don’t come back from Austin if you haven’t visited Driskill at night. It is a gorgeous hotel, packed with people in its bars and a typical meeting place when switching between parties and events. “if the titanic was a bar and didn’t crash, it was the Driskill.”
• Magnolia Cafe- a bit out of the way but the best breakfast I had in Austin. Well made Tex Mex homemade food that worth the wait. “Gingerbread pancake is great. Great place for breakfast. “
• La Traviata- No one comes to Austin to eat Italian food but if you do want some fine dining for a change, this is your place. “Great Italian food and fantastic ambience.”

There are many more great places like the legendary Salt Lick (which is a schlepp out of the city), or Torchy’s Taco so don’t start arguing… These are the places I will visit again when in Austin. Enjoy and tell me what you thought… (and please, bring back some brisket)

I was watching this TED video today where Avi Rubin, a security expert, explains how everything (from your car to your Pacemaker) can be hacked.  It was all very interesting but what I found fascinating was his example about hacking the two way radios that are used by law enforcement officials. These devices, made by Motorola (not known for employing the best in UX…), have an option to encrypt radio transmissions  with a switch of a button.  As you can see from this image, moving from open air to a secure channel requires 1/8 turn of a multi-purpose switch. When secure, the device is showing an indicator which is few pixels large. Because of this failed UI, 20% of the discussions in the secure channels that were sampled, actually happen in open air. 

The hackers didn’t even bother to unscramble the channels. All they had to do was to listen to the channels that were meant to be encrypted and wait for the officer to fall into this UI trap. With that, all they needed was a  scanner that allowed the hack.

Imagine all the engineering years that went into creating the most elaborate encryption code that went to waste because of bad UI. I am mostly convinced that good UI was not on the list of the buyers when they decided on the device they will buy. Larger companies both building or buying products should learn what consumer internet startups know for years- design matters as much as good engineering. 

• Bunch of hacks-  I know we should keep it a secret, but you  did you really think that we developed “a state of the art architecture”? and that our product was developed based on years of research according to a 5 years roadmap? No, a startup product is a child of intense trial and error,  on the job training and constant hacks to make it more desired by its users. While it works, you have to remember that what you bought is a combination of a product and a roadmap and it needs to either be rebuilt or updated, taking into account all the experienced and user feedback. Google does it right by taking the core team, adding smart google engineers and rebuilding everything it acquire. While it might be an extreme approach, setting an agressive feature roadmap for the acquired team is just as extreme  and is likely to lead to a “house of cards” product, littered with technical debt, product that will be hard to maintain and support.
• Knowhow- this is by far the most important asset one can buy. Years of working 20 hours days trying to understand what your customers want and how to make it work for them are something no big company can replicate. Often times, this knowhow stays locked in the team’s brains as the large company insist on teaching the heathens how things work in the real world, rather than trying to learn from them. Another problematic strategy is reorganizing the team and let managers report to the respective departments (i.e. marketing, product…) of the large company. While it sounds like a way to transfer knowledge, it often ends up in frustration on both sides, as the new manager focuses on integrating the new team, rather than embracing it.
• Group of passionate individuals- when you bought them they were a company. Now they are a group of individuals that has different interests and goals.  Joe wants few calm years in the big company, Jane wants to get back to work on a new startup and Julian can’t work in a large company bureaucracy and thinks of the fastest way to quit. They no longer have a common cause and common goal, and often develop an “us vs. them” approach towards the large company.

So what to do? I need to write another post on that. The one line preview is: embrace, empower and elevate the new team. Let them teach you and let them have an unfair vote and influence as they have to fight inertia and momentum in order to be successful.