Creating productivity tools at the intersection of product strategy, mobile software development, and user-centered design

Posts tagged Product Strategy

Getting the Right People on the Bus



Hiring the right people is a critical activity for any company, but especially for start-ups. Not only do those first waves of employees shape your product and profitably, their attitudes shape the company culture for a long time even after they’ve left. So how do you find the right people?

A common method is to hire impressive MBAs from prestigious schools with extensive work experience.  This works in most cases when your goal is a predetermined course from Point A to Point B.  However, teams run by ex-consultants and ex-bankers have a difficult time innovating because what they are taught in business school (and in subsequent years on the job) is how to apply the successful business models of the past to their current situations. The problem is that those fancy frameworks and formulas only offer limited guidance towards resolving the unknown.

Innovating within an industry requires doing something new that has never been done before. It is inherently a 0 to 1 problem (technology), not a 1 to n problem (globalization). If your start-up has already found product-market fit, and is looking now to scale, then consultants and bankers are a great asset. They are smart, and they work hard. In short, they are great for helping your company achieve sustaining innovation.

But if your company is still trying to figure out how to solve the big hairy problem for customers, then it’s not quite time for growth yet. Rather, this is the time to embrace being small, nimble and resource-constrained. The focus should be on rapid prototyping, quick iterations, and failing forward fast. For these companies, you need agile, resourceful folks who can be plugged anywhere into a system and still survive. They might not be the best at everything, but frankly at this point, you don’t know what your company is the best at doing yet either. In short, these people are great for helping your company achieve disrupting innovation.

A side note about the failing part – it is necessary and unavoidable. Trying to hold planning meetings to minimize the chance of failure isn’t going to solve anything. Instead, the culture should embrace the fact that there are many unknowns that could potentially ruin the business. Test to build knowledge. Then make decisions based on that knowledge – not on who has the loudest voice or the most tenure. Because at the end of the day, an executive can force a department to buy into a bad product decision, but they can’t force a consumer to buy a bad product.

In order to successfully innovate with an area with inherent unknowns, you must first ask yourself if you have the right people on the bus. Then you must ask yourself if you are doing everything you can to keep them on the bus. Ultimately, most companies will proclaim that their people are their greatest asset, but only a small handful will make the tough decisions to prove it. Perks like work-from-home policies, catered meals, flexible work hours, and access to equipment cost money to support, but if you’re not willing to invest in your employees, why would they invest in you?

Posted in Top Articles - Tagged

Evernote for Task Management



reminder_add_macEvernote has released an update to their iOS and Mac platforms today that gives the app the ability to add reminders to notes.  As others have mentioned, this does not make Evernote a todo-list app replacement, but it does show that they are headed in this direction.  As time goes on, it seems that Evernote is content to focus on task management related features, while allowing other apps to build out key functionality.

If Evernote wants to live up to it’s vision of being an external brain, it must improve the ability to organize information and make serendipitous connections.  Oftentimes, people are able to come up with breakthrough innovations by seeing a common problem through a different light.  For example, when Larry Page and Sergey Brin were developing the first search algorithms for Google, they noticed that scholarly articles which were cited most often by other journals were usually the most useful and relevant.  They made the association that pages on the web that have the most inbound links are also likely to be the most useful and relevant.  This was able to happen because Larry and Sergey were able to make the connection between their academic work and their search algorithm.  This type of associational thinking is so powerful that the design company IDEO has “Tech Boxes” full of random tools and gadgets, created for the sole purpose of helping people come up with creative ideas and accidental connections.  By seeing things in a different light, our brains are able to simply make discoveries it would not have otherwise.

A feature that could help Evernote move in this direction is the ability to move more items around in an simple drag-n-drop fashion. Our brains seamlessly rewire themselves when they come in contact with new information, and an external brain should be able to easily do the same. However, as things stand now though, Evernote has decided to continue being an everything bucket rather than a true external brain.   This is great news for Notable then because it’s exactly the kind of feature we plan to build.

[Official Article: http://blog.evernote.com/blog/2013/05/23/evernote-reminders-are-here-on-mac-ios-and-web-2/]

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The Magic Behind Great Products



“You know, one of the things that really hurt Apple was after I left John Sculley got a very serious disease. It’s the disease of thinking that a really great idea is 90% of the work. And if you just tell all these other people “here’s this great idea,” then of course they can go off and make it happen.

And the problem with that is that there’s just a tremendous amount of craftsmanship in between a great idea and a great product. And as you evolve that great idea, it changes and grows. It never comes out like it starts because you learn a lot more as you get into the subtleties of it. And you also find there are tremendous tradeoffs that you have to make. There are just certain things you can’t make electrons do. There are certain things you can’t make plastic do. Or glass do. Or factories do. Or robots do.

Designing a product is keeping five thousand things in your brain and fitting them all together in new and different ways to get what you want. And every day you discover something new that is a new problem or a new opportunity to fit these things together a little differently.

And it’s that process that is the magic.”

- Steve Jobs

Posted in Articles

Designing the Perfect Note-taking App



Currently, there is no One App to Rule Them All.  Many note-taking apps have critical features to become the category killer, but none of them have all the fundamentals.  While adding features is already difficult, the key to success is being able to integrate the functionality seamlessly without ruining the user experience – a tall order indeed.

Integration will be the holy grail of note-taking and thought-support software going ahead. Picture a day when you can take notes right into a mapping solution by hand, by keyboard or by voice, move it around with touch-screen ease, and with a keystroke identify action items complete with priority, deadline and other pertinent information. These go immediately into your task-management system, such as Outlook, where you can act and track them to completion.

The good news is that all the requisite technologies are already available, so it’s just a matter of putting it all together the right way.  The note-taking revolution is upon us!

[Reposted from: http://rcpmag.com/articles/2013/03/20/cohen-analysis-perfect-notetaking-app.aspx]

Posted in User Experience - Tagged ,

How Dropbox is Printing Money



Dropbox stores only 1 copy of every unique file and serves everybody the same unique file – provided that it is the exact file – but charges everybody for the full file size. E.g. if 1 person uploads a 5MB file, but 99 other people upload it too, they don’t have 100 copies of that 5MB file for 500MB of storage. The only use 5MB of storage, but charge everybody’s quota of 500MB.

I don’t think it is hyperbole to say that I haven’t encountered any other business model that produces as much profit as this one. It combines the best elements of fractional reserve banking, SaaS cost structures and low-cost viral marketing.

[Reposted from: http://marcgayle.com/how-dropbox-is-printing-money]

Posted in Strategy

Evernote at Rocketspace



Phil Libin of Evernote on This Week in Start-ups

Yesterday, Phil Libin (CEO of Evernote) came down to RocketSpace (co-working facility in SF) to talk with Jason Calacanis from TWiST.  The talk was quite informal, and touched on a number of topics before jumping to Q&A.   These are my piecemeal notes from the talk (still not taken with Evernote yet, but I hope to do so one day!)

Company Growth

Starting out in June 2008, Evernote wasn’t doing so well because Phil “wasn’t the best at fundraising.” The VC pitch at the time was, “we have software to write stuff down to remember things, and we’re giving it away for free, give me $10 mil.” Oh yea, and our competition is all note-taking devices out there that ship for free with every operating system. They were finally about to close a deal with some European investors, but on the day of the deal, Lehman Brothers collapsed and the VCs had to pull out – they simply had no money in the bank. Phil remembers clearly that there was “3 weeks of money left, so you have to be an adult and lay everyone off. And being an adult sucks.” (Agreed, I’m going to keep chasing my dream of working in the productivity industry for as long as I can.) Then, at the last minute, Evernote got an email from Sweden half million at that night – the investor was a passionate user. The rest, as they say, is history.

Actually, it’s not all done yet because the company is only 5 years into its 100 year journey. But here’s the update. They have ~285 employees now, which is almost triple the size from last year. There are about 20,000 developers working on Evernote Trunk. This works really well because unlike the situation at other companies, there are no conflicts of interest between Evernote, the developer community, and the end users.

Finally, the funding: Evernote has raised over $250 million from VC at this point, not because they need the money, but just so have a buffer for when the need arises. This is important to (a) pay off investors who want to cash out early (b) allow developers to focus on great product even during tough economic times and (c) it’s better to have the money than not have it. Ultimately, it’s worth a little bit of delusion for that kind of security.

Product Direction

In relation to the D3 Productivity Framework, Evernote has always been great when it comes to collecting ideas, but lacking in organization and retrieval capabilities.

It turns out that Evernote is great at capturing ideas because (1) being available on all platforms and (2) being compatible for all data types has been part of the core philosophy from the beginning. This means that Evernote works well with iOS, Android, Windows and MacOSX today. It worked well with Blackberry, Symbian, and Palm in the past. And it will work well with Windows 8 and whatever else comes out in the future. In fact, Evernote has made extreme efforts to always be ready as one of the first apps whenever a new platform launches. They made cardboard cut-outs of the iPad before any devices were released, just so they could start prototyping as early as possible! The goal has been native for every platform, and will always be. This allows teams compete with each other to come up with different options, which leads to versions leapfrogging each other to be the best. Going native means a lack of consistency in the short-term, but a faster route to consistency in the long-term when all the apps reach a level of general excellence.

In the next stage, Evernote will continue to get better at recall (and has already done so quite a bit in Evernote 5). There are now smart searches, location-based tags, simpler navigation and shortcuts to the most used notebooks. But it gets better. The area where Evernote has consistently been lacking in the past is the ability to organize your thoughts and ideas. This is not because they aren’t trying, but because this is a hard problem to solve. The goal though is to move beyond just “remembering things” to where Evernote can actually make your brain smarter as you think better through cognitive prosthesis. Currently, it can already present you options for connections through related notes, but in the future there will be more automatic support for making serendipitous relations.

Evernote realizes that software historically has been made based on technical limits, rather than on how our brain actually works. Therefore, a tangential goal is to take the burden off of email, which is currently being abused beyond its original intentions. Email is just communication through delayed memos, which is never how our brain worked before. Rather, tools like Skitch are much better suited for communication because you can just grunt and point. Ultimately, Evernote and Phil are making all the right calls, and there isn’t much standing in their way.

Competition

On the topic of things in the way, Evernote doesn’t believe is has any real traditional competition.  It’s not really Microsoft OneNote or Word.  And it certainly isn’t Google Drive or Dropbox.  In fact, Evernote employees use Google Drive and Dropbox when needed.  To Phil, Google Drive is useful for real-time collaboration and Dropbox is useful for structured file-sharing, both of which are outside the realm of Evernote.  On this area of competition, I would have to disagree because I do think Evernote has competitors.  On the analog side, millions of people still use physical notebooks and legal pads to take notes.  On the digital side, there are companies like DevonThink and SpringPad.  Do I think Evernote will win out in the marketplace?  Sure, but that doesn’t mean there’s no competition, just that Evernote will beat the competition.

Business Strategy

Finally, there were a couple threads discussing general business strategy.   Starting with user feedback, Phil noted that incorporating user feedback is good to have if you can tone down the rhetoric since there is usually a nugget of truth in there. Criticism is bad at telling you what new features to built, but great at telling you when you messed up. The key is to strike a balance between the two sides to figure out which comments have merit. An example of following this advice is with Skitch, where three months of work was paused to update the product based on feedback.

Next, on the topic of the Freemium Model, Phil believes that Free users should have the same expectations as Paid users. Even though the prevailing notion is that “If you got it for free, you get what you paid for”, Freemium should not just be a gimmick in Phil’s eyes. His argument is both groups should have decent quality software since both types of users have made the investment of time, energy, and attention. The proof of this can be seen in the cohort analysis of users. When you look at any particular segment of users, the performance over time has been quite consistent with 0.33% converting immediately, 5-6% converting in a year, 10-15% in two years, and 25%+ in three years. As a business analyst though, I would love to see the segmentation based on other metrics as well such as amount of data stored, demographics, feature usage, etc.

On the topic of user testing, Phil advises that this is not the same as beta testing (and I want to add, not the same as A/B testing either). All three are forms of gathering user data (without having to directly mine information), but they all serve different purposes. Beta testing is a way for power users to give direct feedback and can give detailed insights (Retention). User testing is good for understanding new user experiences (Usability). In the end, neither will tell you what you should build, but it will be good at telling you what you should not build.

There were a number of other jokes thrown in as well, making the entire conversation a pleasure to watch.   Personally, it would have nice to know more about Evernote’s intentions to add note organization capabilities (and whether they need a PM to lead the project), but of course Q&A ran out of time.  Overall, just a great interview with a great CEO and host.

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Dropbox and Evernote Rivalry



Within the document syncing industry, Box has taken over Enterprise Storage, Dropbox has taken over Personal Storage, and the other players (i.e. SugarSync) have more or less died out.  Within the note-taking industry, OneNote has control over the Education market, Evernote has control over the Home market, and traditional players (ie. Moleskine) have learned to partner and adapt to the changing times.  However, as the dust settles in their respective industries, the battle between Dropbox and Evernote has just begun.

When one starts to consider the amount of overlap between Dropbox and Evernote, the similarity between the two services can be quite surprising.  Consider this: personal document storage mainly consists of personal notes.  On the flip side, personal notebooks greatly benefit from being synced across devices through cloud storage.  Since these services are just two sides of same coin, the two companies involved are actually fighting to solve the same use case for the same users.

Now, the logic above contains some major assumptions, but let’s see if we can validate this chain-of-thought.  To start, does Dropbox mainly consist of personal notes? Right now, the answer would be “No”, since Dropbox also stores images, presentations, spreadsheets, movies, code snippets, and anything else you can throw into a folder.  However, much of that can be labeled as “work-related stuff”.   MS Office documents, application code and visual designs are all files that sync across devices so users can work on them at any place and any time (one might even say it helps users become productive anywhere).  If we play out current trends to the extreme, then Box is the company who will take over the majority of those users.  This just leaves more personal items to be stored on Dropbox such as pictures of friends, family videos, personal checklists and other notes.  At the same time, Evernote gives users the ability to store more than just – the app can also capture images, videos, and lists!  With the addition of Clearly, Food, and Hello, Evernote can even help store websites, food memories, and names. Therefore, the first half of bridging the gap between the two companies is to realize that Dropbox will eventually be useful for fewer file types and Evernote actually encompasses more file types.

The other half of the equation is answering, “Does Evernote greatly benefit from being synced across devices through cloud storage?”  From a superficial standpoint, the answer is obviously “Yes.”  Evernote’s users definitely benefit from accessing their notes across a wide range of operating systems, powered by Evernote’s dedicated servers.  The deeper point though goes to the  question of whether or not Evernote is a cloud storage company, rather than just a standalone note-taking service.   Since Evernote actually offers a number of different apps, all built on top of their storage capabilities, one can respond in the affirmative once again.  More significantly, Evernote is pouring lots of support into their developer community to build out Evernote Trunk, where programmers can use various APIs to access all the notes stored in Evernote’s servers.  In this sense, Evernote is very much playing the role of general note storage, and leaving the content creation piece to third-party services.  Thus, Evernote is definitely in the cloud storage business.

All that being said, a multitude of other highly uncertain variables must also fall into place.  For example, one must assume other competitors won’t suddenly start gaining traction, when in fact the space is filled with players big (Google Drive, Apple iCloud) and small (SpringPad, Catch) alike.  Additionally, there’s the possibility that one of the companies starts to move into new territory, namely going after the enterprise market (Dropbox for Teams, Evernote Business).  Finally, there’s always the chance that customers opinions just change.  Altogether, there’s actually very little certainty of what will happen in the productivity industry, which is what makes it all so exciting!

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A New Enterprise



It is clear these days that enterprise productivity is transforming, and the old way of getting things done at the office simply cannot persist in an age of ubiquitous cloud computing, open social networks, and a highly mobile workforce.  Slowly, companies are waking up to the fact that their employees will no longer tolerate email overload, confusing spreadsheets, and pointless TPS reports.

The real question then becomes, “What will the new way of working look like, and who will lead the way?”

At a high level, companies producing enterprise software must start showing empathy for the end-user, in addition to satisfying the buyer.  Traditional user experience techniques require an iterative approach in finding appropriate solutions, which is especially critical here because the tools that work for one organization might fail miserably at another.  The right solution then, should be well designed for the majority of users, but also be flexible enough to adapt to a myriad of differing enterprise disparities.   And because this software is built for the enterprise, it must also be scalable, centralized, and secure.

In discussing this technology shift, most other articles discuss how to fit enterprise software into a new paradigm of consumer empowerment.  However, I’d like to flip the process around by applying my D3 framework, a tool originally conceived for personal productivity, and attempting to work that onto enterprise software.

As a quick primer, D3 stands for “Discover, Decide, Do” – a three part process for getting things done in your life.  Part one is about considering the various solutions to the task at hand and deciding on the best one, theoretically through a moment of inspiration or discovery.  Part two is about figuring out a plan of how to best delegate the resources at your disposal in order to reach the goal.  Finally, part three is about executing on the plan and following through.

Using this lens, enterprises are really engaged in three unique tasks.  Within the Discovery Phase, a company is charged with creating a roadmap on how to grow the business.  It is a matter of deciding on company strategy, which oftentimes comes down to making bets on how to differentiate the company from the competition.  During this period, having meaningful, accurate and timely data will usually lead to the greatest innovation.  In this sense, emails, analytics, and reporting can yield valuable insights that lead to the discovery of novel solutions.  Done correctly, businesses providing “Big Data” or general analytics services (i.e Cloudera, Mixpanel, IBM) can add a tremendous amount of value in this area.

Within the Decide Phase, a company should be focused on how best to allocate their time, treasure, and talent across various verticals while being cognizant of the inherently limited nature of these resources.  In addition to traditional project management solutions, this area includes collaboration and file sharing tools that effectively multiple the resources available.  For example, a good video conferencing tool allows access to remote “Talent” that would otherwise not be able to work with your company.  Another example is mobile technology, which allows workers to be productive anywhere, expanding the “Time” that work can be done.  In this realm, the companies supporting resource allocation and project management tools (i.e. Asana, Citrix, Basecamp) can offer major value to the enterprise.

Finally, within the Do Phase, a company must execute on their gameplan, which is a matter motivating employees to take the right action at the right time.  Proper execution hinges on the ability of workers to adapt to gaps in the strategy, moving targets within the industry (ie. competitor introduces new pricing model), and unforeseen changes in the overall ecosystem (ie. hurricane knocks out entire East Coast presence).  Companies must learn to strike a balance between ensuring that orders are followed versus empowering employees to take calculated risks.  In this area, tools that make people motivated, happy and productive (i.e TriNet, AMEX, NetSuite) are the most useful.

Personally speaking, I believe the best company poised to take over the new entreprise market is one that is able to build a platform that supports all three phases.  Whoever is able to accomplish that, while fighting off all the legacy systems, has the chance to improve the working lives of millions of people, and make billions of dollars in profits to boot!  if you think about it, how can someone not be excited about the new enterprise?

Posted in Strategy - Tagged , , ,

Emerging Productivity Technologies



A critical component of start-up success is having a credible product that satisfies a sizable market with an unmet need. However, clear opportunities rarely exist because most lucrative industries are either entrenched with a handful of colossal incumbents, or in absence of high barriers to entry, these markets are filled with countless me-too companies scrambling for any slice of ever-thinning margins.  However, in rare cases, start-ups have an amazing opportunity to enter into a space as the foundation of an industry is shaken up by external change.  This could be due to social shift beyond the industry’s borders or when emerging technologies signal a shift in what the standard product can provide.  Therefore, one of the reasons productivity software is so exciting is the existence of both factors that allow the potential upheaval of current market leaders.

  1. Cloud Computing – allows a user to store their ideas in the cloud and access them on demand
  2. LiquidText – allows a user to manipulate their ideas through a natural user interface.
  3. Tablet Adoption – allows a user a large screen to view their ideas simultaneously, a portable form factor to carry with them at all times, and enough consumer penetration to shift the burden of teaching users to use the technology to the tablet manufacturer
  4. Operational Transformation – allows a user to message and collaborate other people at real-time speeds, with the technology available through an open-source protocol along with a number of other userful APIs
  5. Touchscreen Responsiveness – allows a user to write to a screen like they would on a real piece of paper

Altogether, we have a future where online, real-time collaboration is not only possible, but actually a norm.  The user experience will be intuitive, interactive, and fluid with minimal delays in user feedback.  What makes this inevitable is that once users acclimate to new technology, they soon see it as standard.  With the thousands of productivity apps in iTunes alone, some of them will offer these features and soon everyone else will follow.  The leader though will be the one who can combine everything in a elegant and seamless experience, which is exactly what I intend to do.

Posted in Strategy - Tagged , , ,

All Things for All People



“While it may be obvious that Evernote and OmniFocus are not meant to do the same things, pointing out this difference speaks to a larger point about apps like Evernote that try to be all things to all people. That simply is very hard to do, and rarely works out for the best. It would be better, I think, for Evernote to do fewer things very well than many things just okay.

That may be the biggest reason why Evernote simply hasn’t worked for me.”

Evernote, you can’t be an Everything Bucket, please focus!

[Reposted from: http://readwrite.com/2012/10/24/why-evernote-just-doesnt-work-for-me]

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