palm pre: use-case analysis vs iphone

Like many of you I've been tracking the development and release of the Palm Pre as an example of how to go after a market leader.

And like many of you I've been wondering how the Palm Pre stacks up against the iPhone where it truly counts - the day-to-day user experience. Because the Pre certainly looks nice and seems to stack up well on paper, with a few key advantages that you'd think would really resonate with the buying public.

So when I find detailed user experience comparisons between the two devices, I pay close attention.

Here's one I discovered this morning on a comment chain in response to an article describing a Palm Pre tear-down over at AppleInsider.

Reader MacShack (not his real name, in case you were wondering) offered the following:

You want to go to a website on the Pre? You go to the browser. Shift open de (sic) keyboard. Type in the web address. Slide it in again to read the website. Now imagine that you are reading a web page sideways (which I do a lot). You then want to go to a different web site. You first have to turn the phone, shift open the keyboard, type in the address, shift the keyboard back in and turn the phone sideways again. What an obvious design error. At least they should have, just like the G1, have the keyboard come out from the side. This way they would have had more space for the keys, which I read are very hard to type with, and wouldn't have to turn the phone back and forth to type things on a webpage or other stuff.

I'd like to hear from someone at Palm why the aforementioned design for this use-case was chosen and implemented, and I'd like to know if they measured how often users manually navigate to webpages from other webpages while using the phone in landscape mode as part of the decision process.  Because it seems broken.

How often do the minute details of a product's design spell the difference between success and failure? Obsessing over these sorts of details may not show up in marketing materials or websites, but it is critical to the success of products you expect to be used by "real people" who get frustrated by inconsistencies in the user experience.  It's the equivalent of sand in your shoe - you can live with it for a while, but sooner or later it drives you mad.

user testing: success

I wonder what the disclaimer for this looked like. . . to say nothing of the requirements.

electric stimulus to face from toniwenwen on Vimeo.

surprise: gordon ramsay's scrambled eggs

And surprise surprise, not a single F-bomb.

deck: why most presentations suck

Thanks to Jon Gatrell at Spatially Relevant for turning me on to this.  

And may I suggest that step one to making your presentations suck less (if not lose their suckiness entirely) is to start thinking of yourself as a storyteller who needs to entertain first and inform a close second.  It unleashes a flood of karmic goodness when you put the well-being of your audience first.

Why most presentations suck

View more Microsoft Word documents from Slideware Manager.

transitions: onward and upward

Thoughtful readers of ack/nak will have noticed I've been rather quiet this month.

Like many Americans I got caught up in the economic downturn, and found myself on May 1st to be, as the euphemism goes, "exploring new opportunities".

What I made were a lot of discoveries.

One of the biggest was in stress management, as I took to going to the gym on a near-daily basis, figuring if I exhausted myself I could purge some of the stress-toxins.  It worked quite well.  I'm sorry I didn't discover this a long time ago.

I discovered there were a lot of people who appreciate what I "do".  Thank you to all of you who reached out to me with ideas and opportunities for collaboration.   Thank you.

I discovered there is a world of difference between "manning the oars" and "holding the rudder" when it comes to approaching problems - it's hard to see where you're going when you have your back to the bow of the boat.

I discovered an ability to visualize that I hadn't fully exploited.  As they say in "The Secret", thoughts become things - the Law of Attraction is a powerful force available to everyone to turn your dreams into reality.  And as I started to dream, I felt the fear melt away.

And I discovered - again - how wonderful my wife and kids truly are.

The journey of the product manager is never easy, it is never straight, and it is never predictable.  It is also never, ever boring.  As I begin a new product management adventure, I'm proud to be part of a community of professionals who never lose sight of their humanity.

I'll keep you posted.  Keep those cards and letters coming.

musashi-sensei: rules for product management

Shinmen Musashi No Kami Fujiwara No Genshin, or as he is commonly known Miyamoto Musashi, was born in the village called Miyamoto in the province Mimasaka in 1584.

He was the author of A Book of Five Rings (Go Rin No Sho), a philosophical treatise on the way of the sword.  To the Japanese he is Kensei (literally "sword saint"), and his teachings are an essential part of the Kendo bibliography.

In his 1974 translation of the book, Victor Harris remarked that "the book is not a thesis on strategy, it is in Musashi's word 'a guide for men who want to learn strategy'  and, as a guide always leads, so the contents are always beyond the student's understanding.  The more one reads the book the more one finds in its pages.  It is Musashi's last will, the key to the path he trod."

Go Rin No Sho is definitely worthy of that warning.  I've been reading it for 25 years and it reveals something new each time I visit it.

Musashi-sensei generously provided a list of nine guidelines for students who would follow his Way:

1. Do not think dishonestly.
   
2. The Way is in training.
   
3. Become acquainted with every art.
   
4. Know the Ways of all professions.
   
5. Distinguish between gain and loss in worldly matters.
   
6. Develop intuitive judgement and understanding for everything.
   
7. Perceive those things which cannot be seen.
   
8. Pay attention even to trifles.
   
9. Do nothing which is of no use.
   

For individuals interested in strategy these are powerful and quite intimate personal lessons.   Victor Harris describes the book as ". . . unique among books of martial art in that it deals with both the strategy of warfare and the methods of single combat in exactly the same way."  Put another way, Musashi-sensei teaches that you cannot master the grand strategy of armies without also mastering the self.

For product managers, this is the most powerful lesson of Go Rin No Sho.  We operate in a world in which we are called on to assimilate information, formulate plans, execute on campaigns and adapt to changing conditions - all without direct control of or authority over the resources who will perform the work required to achieve the goal.

I believe the superior product manager is able to accomplish this work of grand strategy if he or she demonstrates a strong competency in personal strategy - in the individual disciplines that give evidence of an ability to direct and accomplish the larger works.

Musashi-sensei wrote "all of the five books (that make up Go Rin No Sho) are chiefly concerned with timing.  You must train sufficiently to appreciate all this."  When to strike, and how, and why, are at the core of his teaching.  Is there anything more fundamental to our craft than timing?  This is worthy of some discussion, I think.

I carry these nine guidelines with me wherever I go.  Next time we meet, ask for a copy and I'll give you one.  You'll probably be better at many of them than I am, and I'll look forward to learning from you.

____

A Book of Five Rings by Miyamoto Musashi, translated by Victor Harris (The Overlook Press, 1982)

transparency: your calendar

If I were to magically gain access to your work calendar would it tell me anything about your priorities?  Or would I just see "meetings"?

Product managers and product marketers live in an intensely networked world - our jobs require us to spend a disproportionate amount of time in meetings with others in order to accomplish our goals.  Take a look at any of our calendars and you'll see a patchwork of weekly/monthly/quarterly/yearly recurring meetings.  During release seasons, you may see that we're completely booked.

It will be immediately clear what's "urgent".  But will it be equally clear what's "important"?

I ask because one of the quality-of-life problems for practitioners of our craft is - wait for it - not having enough time to dedicate to the long-cycle problems.  And one reason we don't have enough time is that we're too free with it.

Have you ever heard the following statement: "I looked at your calendar and saw you were free, so I scheduled a meeting with you"?

Conversely, have you ever heard the following statement: "I looked at your calendar and decided what I needed you to do was more urgent than what you had scheduled at the time, so I scheduled a meeting with you"?

My bet is you've heard both - the former from peers and subordinates, and the latter from the folks you work for.

In both situations you ask yourself- do you want to be the one who DECLINES the meeting and upsets the cart?  Or do you just accept, secretly resentful that you've been pulled away from a task that you need to accomplish?  Are the first words out of your mouth at the meeting "where is the agenda" and "I have a hard stop at. . ."? 

Or: do you schedule time to advance your non-urgent (or "long-cycle") agendas, and if you do, do you label them in a manner that would make sense to a third party?   Beyond the title, do you include any details in the meeting notes that could help the viewer understand what you were doing and why?

I ask for two reasons - one external to you and one internal - with a bonus outcome you may not have anticipated.

Externally, booking your own time for activities that make sense to an external viewer raises the bar for someone looking to take that time away from you.  It also forces you to "reschedule" those activities to remove the conflict from your calendar (if you accept the meeting), which means they'll still get done.  Marking a time for "projects" is OK, but it's not going to stand up to much external scrutiny.

The bonus outcome is you become more transparent.  Your process for advancing your personal agendas is visible to everyone, especially those whose contributions are required for you to accomplish them.  For the members of your team, imagine seeing an item on your calendar that reads "update team MBO progress" every month.

And this helps to make time for the activities that can get "lost" - how many of you PMs wish you had more time to spend with telesales?  Get it on your calendar.  Tell them that you've got time dedicated to them each month, and that they can book you for time to sit at their desks with a pair of headphones on, listening to actual prospects.

It also serves as a helpful tool for justifying an investment in additional staff - when you run out of time to advance the agendas you've been assigned you have three choices: find more time, eliminate some existing agendas from your list, get more resources.  Option number one is only an option if you're not managing your time well, and option number two is only an option if you're not managing your priorities well.  Once those are both as tight as you can get them, you can make a good argument to add staff.

I'm sure there are other benefits that you, my dear reader, will remind me of.  But I've run out of time today to write you and must move on to my next activity.

"7:00am: make coffee for Julie"

No way am I rescheduling that.

quiz: do marketers and programmers talk?

Please respond in the comments.

Yes - our marketing guys and our developers talk all the time, and have a deep appreciation for each other's perspectives on creating and selling products.  That's not to say that they're best friends, but they have an active dialog going on.

Maybe - I think they know that the other guys exist, and I think they've been known to say hello and share brownie recipes.  Occasionally.

No - our marketing folks and our developers get along like turkeys and wood chippers.  In fact, I don't think I've ever seen them talk to each other.  I'm not sure they even speak the same language.

the tyranny: of twitter

SET RANT_ALERT=ON

True story: Since I started "tweeting", my blog output has sunk to an all-time low.  All Time Low, I tell you!

Yet during the same period my tweet-rate has increased.  Increased!  

Am I proud of this?  Buh no.

Do I think that tweeting has the same nutritive value as blogging?  Buh no.

And yet.  It offers a poke to the pleasure center of the brain that blogging does not - specifically, it focuses the mind to be expressive in 140 characters.  It's fast.  Oh, so very fast.  Hit the update button and shaZAMM, you've blurted 140 characters of erudition at all of your followers.

Instant gratification ho!  

Why wait for your loyal readers to wander by your blog and tediously shamble their way through your latest article when you can submit them to an episode of id gavage.

When I'm writing here, 140 characters doesn't buy you much.  I can't get out of bed in 140 characters.

And yet, I have been tweeting.  Quite a lot, at least by my standards.

And in the course of doing so I've learned two simple lessons: you can't create and sustain a narrative thread in 140 characters.  And it's really hard to establish a relationship with readers 140 characters at a time.

So here's the challenge.  In a world in which the tyranny of Twitter is compressing attention spans in inverse proportion to the volume of messages assaulting those newly-compressed attention spans, what can one do to adapt?

Well, we can settle for reducing complex concepts and thoughts into fortune cookie-length declarative statements, like "product managers must lead" and "it's important to be nice".

Or, we can agree that Twitter has its uses.  And like all good tools, it should be used for what it is good at.  Not more.

The bottom line:  I apologize for my drop in ack/nak posts. I've learned there are a lot of things I can't express 140 characters at a time. So I won't try.

I look forward to sharing them with you here, even if I end up reducing complex concepts and thoughts into fortune cookie-length declarative sentences.  The difference is that over here, they're short by choice, not by design.

And I promise to use whatever "influence" I gain for good, not evil.  You're not so much followers as fellow travelers, and I value being on the road with you.

best: excuse for not podcasting

It's unfair how clever certain people are (exempli gratia).