ichc: lol builder

moar funny pictures

I know one of the guys behind this site, and am very happy they're making such a good run of it.

wondering: why did starbucks buy clover

Coffee hipsters have been worshipping at the altar of the $11,000 Clover coffee machine for quite a while now. So when Howard D. Schultz, chief executive of Starbucks, announced at last week's annual shareholders meeting that the company had acquired the Clover Equipment Company, these coffee hipsters were understandably surprised.

Even non-hipsters were surprised.

Mr. Schultz described the acquisition as part of the company's effort to "make better coffee".

It's a mistake.

The "overwhelming majority" of Starbucks customers buy what the New York Times described as "drinks that sound like punch lines: a tall honey latte with whipped cream, a venti caramel macchiato". These are high-margin, high-velocity products that can be made quickly and whose dominant flavor is sweet. Devotees of these products don't want better coffee, they just want whatever peculiar coffee-flavored confection they're addicted to. It doesn't take a highly-skilled person to make one, just a consistent one.

And remember that a cup of coffee prepared by a Clover machine is the product of a slow process, and the final flavor depends on the quality of the bean and even more strongly on the quality of the roast, flavors that will vanish when subjected to the sort of sugar- and cream-abuse most customers exercise on their coffee.

Mr. Schultz said the Clovers, when they appear in stores, will be the centerpieces of what he called a shrine.

OK, I have a few questions:

• Where are the "I drink my coffee black" supplicants who will worship at these shrines?
  
• What will be displaced by these shrines? I don't know if you've looked, but most Starbucks stores aren't actually swimming in excess space.
  
• Who will staff these machines?
  
• What is the impact on throughput while the on-staff barista works the Clover from start to finish? Put another way, how many cups of drip coffee or traditional espresso-based drinks could a store turn over in the time it will take to make one cup of Clover coffee?
• How much more will they charge for the privilege of enjoying a single cup of Clover coffee above the already high cost of regular Starbucks drip coffee?
  
• How many other related products will Starbucks have to sell you along with your Clover coffee to make up for the cost associated with operating it?
  
• Will the presence of a Clover bring new customers in and keep them coming back?
  
• Will the inevitable slow-downs caused by the presence of a Clover drive customers away? In case you didn't watch the video above, the cycle time to create a single cup of Clover coffee is around 90 seconds, which doesn't include the time to portion the beans and grind them.
  
• Was the buy simply an effort to bring some of the cachet of a clearly prestigious brand to a brand that is struggling to raise same-store sales in the face of an economic downturn?
• Will Clover enthusiasts trust Starbucks to carry the sort of correctly-roasted beans required to make each cup of Clover coffee "all it can be" and not just a high-priced cup of drip coffee you have to wait for?

Evidence that Starbucks isn't sure of the answers to these questions can be seen in their roll out - they are putting only six machines in the field, three machines in Seattle and three in Boston. And these are two coffee-mad cities already full of coffee-hipster shops that survive because they've created a loyal customer base that won't abandon ship overnight. I seriously doubt they will find the same sense of community and artisanal focus at Starbucks where they have to wait for the barista to finish crafting a "venti caramel macchiato" before he fires up the Clover.

Starbucks is experiencing a down-turn in same store sales because Starbucks is a luxury item, not because their coffee is bad. And there are not enough Clover aficionados who could be convinced to leave their neighborhood shops to go to Starbucks to reverse the trend. Besides, Clover's brand was built on a specialist consumer experience that does not translate to the mass-market.

"Better coffee" isn't the fix. Most consumers wouldn't know a superior cup of coffee if Juan Valdez served it to them.

The cautionary tale here is to protect your brand, because once it becomes unmoored from the reality of your business, your authenticity is lost and all the consumer is left with is a memory of an experience that they used to enjoy. Starbucks can't get back to its roots of "better coffee" because that alone won't pay the bills the same way that the tidal wave of "venti caramel macchiatos" does.

belstaff: colonial canvas changes for spring/summer 2008

Belstaff updates their accessories line twice a year. My particular (peculiar?) area of interest is in their Colonial Canvas line of bags, which are excellent for schlepping around your essentials.

As a service to you, the ack/nak reader, here is an update on what Belstaff has in store for us this spring/summer.

First, the good news - Belstaff is still making their Colonial Canvas line. This should not be a surprise after the appearance of the Shoulder Bag in the recent film I Am Legend.

And next the bad news - they've discontinued two of the more interesting bags from the line - the Large Man Bag Marsupium and the Body Bag are no more, according to the (very recently updated) Belstaff website.

Note that I've struck the Large Man Bag from the list of discontinued items - it's back in the line after a brief hiatus for the Fall 2007 / Winter 2008 season. Unfortunately now the Marsupium is out of the line, in a blow to all kangaroo fanciers.

The other bags from the spring/summer 07 collection are still in play - you can see them featured in an earlier ack/nak review here.

The number of available colors is currently unknown to me, as the color widget on the Belstaff website isn't working. If they are the same as Fall 2007 / Winter 2008, they have been pared down as well to Black, Mountain Brown, Kaky (sic) and Panama. Having seen the Mountain Brown up close, I can recommend it very strongly.

If you've taken the plunge and have bought your bag (L'Uomo in NYC still carries them), drop me a line.

Current product codes are:

756194 Large Man Bag

756150 Large Shoulder Bag [554]

756148 Man Bag [550]

756195 Medium Man Bag

756115 Shoulder Bag

756176 Travel Bag

If you're from Belstaff, drop me a line. I'd be happy to do a more detailed review of any of these products, wink wink.

chat: is product management incompatible with passion

Paul: You were going to blog in response to my Product Management/Passion in Products post, did you ever get the chance to do that?

me: Curiously, that topic was such a blocker for me that it was making it hard to write about other topics - I have an idea of what I want to say, now I just need to say it. The short response is there is room for passion in product management but it should be for the craft of product management, never for the individual decisions. Passion for individual decisions can backfire on PMs because PMs shouldn't be making unilateral decisions - while passion for the craft makes it possible to organize the team around the "right" decision in a way that is acceptable to them. It's counterintuitive which is why it is hard to write about.

Paul: Yeah you nailed it; in all my reading about the products that inspire passion, there is a "designer-executive" at the core e.g. Steve Jobs or the guy who did the Mario Bros. franchise, and PM doesn't lend itself to that.

me: Believe me, there are benefits to having a designer executive around they insulate PM from a lot of pressure by taking design responsibilities on themselves. The trick is learning to leverage the strengths and passions of those around you in the pursuit of the PM craft - when you think of PM as an operations role, it's easier to have this perspective.

Paul: good thoughts; my follow up post was going to be "Does Passion Matter?" ...because if the end goal of PM is to maximize profit, there are a lot of plain vanilla products and services out there solving real needs, but doing so in a transparent way that doesn't inspire passion. I think that people (like myself) in tech get excited about passion products because they inspire, and we (I) aspire to the greatness they represent...

me: Passion matters, but it's a strong tonic that should be used carefully. Strong emotions create adrenaline, and we can't sustain them indefinitely. In the long run "passion products" are transient, because passion is transient. Products that "make meaning" deliver a more lasting value that persists in the mind of the buyer even when their passion is at a low. Ultimately "meaning" is correlated very strongly with "solves problems", and if we can combine products that delight the consumer and solve meaningful problems, we've got the perfect storm to motivate not just the PM but everyone involved. A PM who can lead a team to accomplish this has achieved greatness, but only inasmuch as they've helped to expose the greatness of the people on the team. Again, it's counterintuitive.

link: picture imperfect

Alain Breillatt's blog Picture Imperfect is one of a few blogs I read and enjoy regularly. If you are a practitioner of the product management craft, you will too.

I mean, look at the shayna punim on this guy.

idea: don't sell to the wrong buyers

In an editorial for Inside Healthcare Computing, Nicholas Birdcage writes, "In a Capitalist Society, Somebody Will Always Sell a Fat Man a Speedo or an Unprepared Hospital a Clinical System."

I'll wait a second for that visual to sink in before continuing.

Ready?

In a similar but thankfully Speedo-free conversation last week, Jim Foxworthy and I got to talking about the old sales chestnut "We're looking for people who need holes, not shovels". In a moment of inspiration, I added, "And I'm really looking for people who want to plant trees, not bury bodies."

All of these add up to an idea that shouldn't surprise you, but is worth thinking about. Jim summed it up really well in a follow-up email:

First, we find buyers who want holes in the ground, not shovels. Second, we learn if they want that hole to bury a dead body or to plant a tree. We only allow people to buy from us who a) have the problem and b) exhibit the values systems that we want aligned with our brand. It is partnerships we seek, after all, not customers.

How many of you have been burned by a customer who shouldn't have bought your product but did? When a company spends perfectly good money on a vendor solution it doesn't need or can't possibly use successfully, the vendor loses more than the buyer. Why?

• Because buyers have this strange habit of talking to each other - and bad cross-talk is damaging to you at a multitude of levels.
• Because supporting an unhappy customer who you can't make happy is a useless exercise.
• Because wrong buyers exert the wrong sort of pressure on product development.
• Because sales learns that they can sell to anyone with impunity and someone else will pick up the pieces.

Feel free to suggest your own "becauses" if you'd like. It's fun to share.

One of the vendors in the market I play in these days is particularly clever - you can't just go to them and say "here is some cash, sell us your stuff." No, this vendor has to choose you before it will sell to you - before they let you sign, this vendor determines up front if you're ready, committed, and in doing so gets agreement that the outcome of their partnership with you (their word) will be good for both parties.

What Jim adds to the argument is an assessment of the values of the buyer by the seller - are you going to be proud to name this company as one of your customers? Will they make you a better creator/provider of solutions through your relationship, or will they be a constant drain on your resources, creativity and patience? Will having them as a customer send a message to prospects that you don't want to send?

The Speedo Argument is a cautionary tale to all of us. Especially those of us who, frankly, shouldn't be wearing them.

dvorak: the iphone is no desktop

In a spasm of clarity, John Dvorak has correctly observed that the iPhone is no desktop.

It will take me a few days to try and figure out of there is any deeper message to this article beyond "little portable things are less durable than big stationary things".

It's obvious that the iPhone is no desktop.

(SET BAD_FRENCH_ACCENT=ON)

The iPhone, she is small, and portable, totalement petite, n'est-ce pas? She does not have a keyboard, or a monitor, or a plug. Spill coffee on her, does she not complain? Drop her in the toilet, does she not sink? Mon Dieu! Vous devez faire attention avec l'iPhone!

(SET BAD_FRENCH_ACCENT=OFF)

By comparison, desktop computers are both coffee- and toilet-resistant. Believe me, I've tried doing in desktops both ways, and it only makes them mad. And damp. Desktop computers have other things going for them. They are gravity-enhanced. They are noisy. They don't look cool when you carry one on your shoulder, like a boom-box.

I can neither confirm nor deny that Mr. Dvorak carries a desktop computer on his shoulder like a boom-box, trailing a very long extension cord, lost in an endless search for a monitor and a keyboard to make his durable, gravity- and toilet-resistant computing experience complete.

In the meantime, iPhone aficionados, detractors and everyone under 25 will pillory him as crank (unless they have [correctly] realized the futility of doing so) for having the temerity to write:

And, yes, the kids are all looking for alternative platforms, but what do kids know? Seriously, what do they know?

Seriously, what do kids know, with their. . . hip-hopscotch music and their. . . baggy clothes and. . . their piercings . . . and no respect. . . why I remember Harold Stassen used to say. . .

Zzzzzzzz zzzzzzzz zzzzzzz zzzzzzz .....

You have to hand it to the man. He can hit deadlines like a champ and he creates controversy, which together are solid gold.

I just wish he'd invest his decades of experience on an article that highlights what the desktop marketplace could learn from the iPhone.

Or perhaps he's left that to us.

thoughts: on (winning) culture

Brian Anderson asked:

Some leadership teams attempt to create culture by acting as wordsmiths, spending untold hours carefully crafting vision, mission and values statements. That's unfortunate, because in the end culture is not created by words plastered on the wall or carried around on laminated cards, but rather culture is defined by actions on the ground.

A winning company culture is simple and emphasizes three areas: serving the customer, growing the business, and developing employees. A losing culture is confusing and complex, places customer needs behind those of the company, and emphasizes personal gain over team achievement. Your thoughts?

Why, yes, I do have thoughts:

A winning culture is aligned, motivated, trusting and open.

A winning culture *believes* in the destination and the journey.

A winning culture creates its own energy.

A winning culture welcomes new members.

A winning culture breathes, adapts, forgives, learns.

A winning culture knows deep down that its very existence is a major competitive differentiator, and that sustaining that differentiator takes energy.

A winning culture is focused on solving meaningful problems with authentic solutions.

Ultimately customer-focus flows from problem-focus; it's more sustainable to acculturate around the craft than it is to do so around the consumer of the craft, as consumers come and go as their problem foci change.

This is not to say you don't take care of your customers - but the passion that animates a culture is better focused on solving the problem first.

Culture animates focus the same way that the soup animates the noodles in ramen.  OK, maybe not the same way.  

animation: for tax reasons

My Steampunk Papercraft Commodore 64 MMORPG Identity Crisis
(animation by For Tax Reasons)

source

Also by For Tax Reasons: Three Nerds Turn a Nativity Scene into a LARP Battle

request: ask customers what they hate about you UPDATED

IT WAS the oddest experience. We visited two signficant customers yesterday and asked them to tell us (I'm paraphrasing here) what we do that sucks.

That we should put four people on a plane to go ask these questions was an original experience for me. That the customers would go so far as to complete a "scorecard" in advance of our visit, share the responses, and talk about how we can improve was another original experience.

But the big take-away for me - the one that still has me blinking - was how happy they were about it.

At the end of both calls, the sense was "there are areas where you can improve, but we're glad to be working with you."

As hard as it is, being honest with your customers about where you fall short, what you plan to do to not fall short, and setting expectations for how you're going to measure progress, these are all high-value activities.

My other big take-away was just how much customers value communication - about roadmaps, about new ways to use our products, about what they're going to be doing next. Neither customer asked for new features. Both customers asked for better dialog.

All of this is hugely ironic given that this happened the same day that customers were descending on Ning to "show their love". Who knows, maybe we're witnessing the start of something novel - a broad-based recognition of the essential value of treating your customers well. Woooo....scary.

UPDATE - The more your customers can trust you to listen, the more likely they are to talk.  In the two years since this was written I've found this single practice has meant more to me than any other, which is why I've dug it up to share with you again. As my personal guru told me today, "All your answers are out there in the marketplace waiting for you, so go out and get them."

NIHITO, neh?  Wakarimasu sensei.

(photo by Dave Walsh)

(original publication date: 2/16/06)

hopkins: peace

When will you ever, Peace, wild wooddove, shy wings shut,
Your round me roaming end, and under be my boughs?
When, when, Peace, will you, Peace? I'll not play hypocrite
To own my heart: I yield you do come sometimes; but
That piecemeal peace is poor peace. What pure peace allows
Alarms of wars, the daunting wars, the death of it?

O surely, reaving Peace, my Lord should leave in lieu
Some good! And so he does leave Patience exquisite,
That plumes to Peace thereafter. And when Peace here does house
He comes with work to do, he does not come to coo,

He comes to brood and sit.


Peace
Gerard Manley Hopkins
Poems and Prose - Selected and edited by W.H.Gardner
(Penguin Books, 1984)

status: perfect storm

All ack/nak readers belonging to the product management / products tribe will recognize the perfect storm of busy that I'm currently enjoying:

1. Quarterly roadmap update underway
2. New product development at the MRD-phase
3. Multiple out of town customer visits
4. Off-site meeting preparation
5. Pricing analysis underway
6. Product launch underway

Thanks to all of you who have written asking such insightful, caring questions as "are you dead" and "you don't care about us enough to write" and "can I have your dessert if you are dead". I am not dead, I still care, and no, you can't have my dessert.

More soon. Hang tight.

get a life: best magic eye evar

(click on picture to view a larger version)

source

dark room: a writeroom clone for windows

When my kids ask me what I do, some days I say "Daddy sits in meetings". Other days I say "I write stuff to teach people", still others I say "I herd cats". All are invariably correct, depending on the season.

On those days when I'm writing stuff, I try to avoid distractions. When the shades are closed, the overhead florescent lights are off and my is desk cleared, all that remains is the awful clutter of the Windows desktop.

That's where Dark Room comes in.

Its author describes Dark Room as follows:

Dark Room is a full screen, distraction free, writing environment. Unlike standard word processors that focus on features, Dark Room is just about you and your text.

Basically, Dark Room is a clone of the original WriteRoom that is an OS X (tiger) exclusive application. It is a child of necessity, as there were no viable alternatives in Windows to produce the same behavior. Sure, you can kind of emulate the behavior by jumping through a bunch of hoops in Word/Writer, but it isn’t the same. Also, you can do something similar in emacs, but who wants to learn a bunch of obscure keyboard shortcuts?

The goal of the project is to capture the essence of WriteRoom, while keeping it simple and just as free.

You can download Dark Room here. Now turn those lights off and get to work.

statcom: product manager job opening UPDATED

I got a note from former colleague and all-around good guy Jim Rosenblum that his company is looking for a product manager.

StatCom, a division of Jackson Health Care Solutions, makes "patient flow logistics and tracking software". You can learn more about the company here.

Jim describes StatCom's solution as "an innovative enterprise health care IT solution which coordinates patients and resources from admission through discharge, including bed management, environmental services, transportation, patient LOS management, OR patient flow, ED patient flow, and discharge coordination. It informs physicians, staff, and family as to the location and status of the patient throughout the care progression. It provides real-time tools to effectively manage that flow within and between departments."

You can also read about Jim's background here. That's where you'll see that his previous gig was as CTO of my company; while I was certainly sad to see him go, I'm very excited for him and the solutions he's building at StatCom. If you're up for a challenge, you'd like to work with someone who is scary-smart, and you're a fan of Atlanta, let me know and I'll make an introduction for you.

UPDATE - Here is the job description (thanks Jim):

The Product Manager will be responsible for the Company’s enterprise-wide, Patient Flow and Logistics product throughout the product lifecycle, including: gathering and prioritizing product and customer requirements, helping to define the product vision, and working closely with engineering, sales, marketing and support to ensure revenue and customer satisfaction goals are met. 

The Product Manager's job also includes ensuring that the product supports the company's overall strategy and goals. 

The Product Manager is expected to:

• Help define the product strategy and roadmap
  
• Deliver MRDs and PRDs with prioritized features and corresponding justification
  
• Run beta and pilot programs with early-stage products
  
• Be an expert with respect to the Hospital environment as it relates to HIS
  
• Contribute to the core positioning and messaging for the product
  
• Perform product demos to customers and partners
  
• Develop sales tools and collateral
  
• Brief and train the sales force
  

Required experience and knowledge:

• Minimum of 7 years experience as a Product Manager
  
• Demonstrated success defining and launching software products in Healthcare
  
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills
  
• Technical background
  
• Excellent teamwork skills
  
• Proven ability to influence cross-functional teams without formal authority
  
• Must be able to travel 40% of the time
  

aagpm: what role should sales have in development?

Jeff Lash's excellent site Ask a Good Product Manager lets clowns like me respond to questions posed by non-clowns like you.  And he occasionally posts your replies gawd luv 'im.

Last night an email dropped into my spam-crowded inbox with the following question:

How much should Sales be involved in Product Development?

We will develop about 10-15 new models this year, the list of which has been agreed upon with Sales at the end of last year.

Since then, we've been discussing these new projects with Sales at each of the monthly meeting they're holding.

I have the feeling that this was a bad idea; the projects have almost been re-discussed from the beginning each month, and there's still endless discussions about what the projects are exactly. The scope just keeps changing.

In my opinion, we should just keep them informed, through the meeting, of the progress of the projects (on track, waiting, ...). Not more.

What's your take on this?

There are those who believe one should treat sales like mushrooms when it comes to product development - keep them in the dark and feed them s__t.

Why?

They are coin-operated - sales people are interested in what it will take to close the deal they are working on Right Now, or ones that are looming large in their funnel. This makes them interested in features that are interesting to their customer, regardless of whether the feature helps the company. It's good for their deal, therefore it's good for them. Given the opportunity to steer development, they'll steer it into their deals and their customers first. Speaking of customers. . .

They believe they are the voice of the customer - salespeople spend a lot of time talking to people with money. This, dear colleague, gives them the impression that they are the voice of the customer, an impression they are more than willing to share with you if you give them the opportunity to do so. They will even argue that their opinion counts more than yours, because after all, they spend all day every day with customers, while you, Mr. Product Manager, spend your days writing requirements and looking like you need sleep.

They respond best to Big Animal Pictures - if you feed salespeople on a steady diet of detailed information, they will forget it. This has nothing to do with their intelligence, but on their uncanny ability to filter unnecessary information out of their world. They remember things like "when is it available" and "why is it better than the competition" and "how much does it cost".

Don't get me wrong, I love salespeople. They've got a tough job, and the best ones can be a joy to work with. But if you want to bring them into the development process, there are a few ground rules:

1. Interact with them one-on-one, not in groups, when it comes to getting their feedback - find the reps with accounts you want to talk to, or reps whose experience you respect. Interacting with them on a one-on-one basis doesn't create the sort of group-pressure that comes from one rep bringing up feature x and a lot of other reps chiming in that they want it to. It also gives you a Bat Phone to key decision makers and thought leaders with cash, always a good audience to cultivate.

2. Set expectations up front on how and when you'll communicate with sales - if you do training, if you write collateral, if you do customer visits to review roadmaps, whatever you do, set these expectations up front and stick to them. Ad hoc or unnecessarily frequent meetings too far in advance of a launch can confuse your message and diminish your credibility. Keep it simple, keep it focused, and you'll keep their attention.

3. Be the voice of the customer - more than anything, you need to understand the needs of the customer and translate them into solution capabilities. If you give up this responsibility and depend on sales to tell you what the market needs, you will live to regret it.

4. Publish and maintain a high-level roadmap on a fixed schedule - if sales knows they can go to a certain place on your intranet to find out what's in the queue and where it is in development, they won't need to ask you for it. And every rep will get the same answer. And every rep will understand how and when they can provide feedback to you regarding candidates for the roadmap. Leave out details - those require an NDA. And at some shops, communicating any roadmap information or futures of any sort requires an NDA, so be careful with this one.

As I said, there are those who keep sales in the dark. But I believe that sales works better when they can communicate a coherent, believable and reliable vision to the customer. It's your job to make sure that happens.

UPDATE - Regarding "being coin-operated" - it goes without saying (which is why I didn't say it) that prospects with cash who are interested in capabilities you are planning on developing can have a real impact on your roadmap. Think of their cash as a vehicle to help you set priorities. Just so long as you are talking about features that are still a little ways off - far enough off that you can schedule them without trashing your current devqueue - a salesperson's coin-operated inner nature can help you a lot and make you look like a hero.