Say What You Mean

by: stacey - December 6th, 2011   Filed under: Communication, Product Management Add Comment

Abbreviations are getting out of hand in business. Every department of every busines seems to have hundreds. On top of that, we’ve all gotten on the band wagon of branding. The company intranet isn’t the intranet, its “The Informer” or “Mercury” or something else branded and sexy.

Let’s consider what this does for the business.

The pros:
*Abbreviations or shortened brand names enable easier communication for those in the know
*Better advertising- people ask “what is?” and you get the chance to sell them

The cons:
*If all employees are not in the know, it impedes communication. For example: everyone probably knows what the intranet is. Everyone probably knows the company has one. Everyone also goes to use it when they need to. It’s part of their jobs. Why does it need a different name in order to communicate about it effectively? Why do you need to sell it? If you need to sell it, then it isn’t doing a good job for the company at what an intranet does.

*Employees have to learn what all these terms mean. Managers have to learn what thousands of them mean. Wouldn’t the company be better off if these people were spending their time learning to do their job better instead?

That second con is a big one. Everyone has a certain amount of bandwidth for receiving, processing and understanding information. They can only truly learn so much per given day. This is what the whole “information overload” crisis is about. If you are creating product names for internal applications that don’t need one for the sake of branding, or you are creating abbrevations for things that don’t need them, are you helping the company by eating up employee bandwidth for learning?

Certainly, corporate culture can help you spread your abbreviations and internal brands. Is this what you want to use your corporate culture for? Wouldn’t your company better profit from the corporate culture spreading values and knowledge instead?

The bottom line is this: Abbreviations are for things you already know. Brands are for selling things for a profit. Use them in the right places, and at the right times.

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Find a question to answer and you’ll keep your direction

by: stacey - November 17th, 2011   Filed under: Leadership, Product Management, Project Management Add Comment

Dane Carlson posted an interesting quote from Paul Graham over on his Business Opportunities blog last week (many moons ago).  The quote is from an essay on ideas for startups, and the essay itself is on seeing your original business idea as a business question that you want to answer, and letting the company grow into an answer to that question.

This is a great idea for startups, but it’s also a great idea for keeping direction in general examples include:

1) Finding direction in projects
At some point early in a project, you must decide what question your project is answering. It could be anything from “how can we share spreadsheets better?” to “How can we get orders to customers faster?”. This is the core of your project. Never lose sight of this question. You will write a scope to your project that defines what you intend to do in your project. When you develop that scope, it better answer your initial question. When you write requirements, they better trace back to that question. When you build the prototype, it better offer an answer to your question… you get the idea. If your project ever reaches a point at which you aren’t answering that original question anymore, then you’re off-track. You better fix it or start over.

2) Finding direction in product lines
“The question” can also drive the development of your product line over time. How many times have you seen this: you’re on a project, it completes successfully, everyone is happy, then a thousand ideas pop up for how to ‘improve’ the product. You have manpower to do maybe five of these things over the next year. How do you choose what to do? Simple. Look at the question you set out to answer. Which ideas support that? Which ideas move you away from it? Ditch the ones that move away; if you follow those, you may undo all the progress you made. Go with the ones that support your original goal. Repurposing a product is very practical, but if you change the purpose of the product in the process, you’ve lost the solution to your original question.

3) Maintaining and marketing your Brand
If you have a brand, it means something. It answers a question. When I think “How do I find what I need to know?” I think “Google it”. The google brand answers questions for users. When I think “Where do I get coffee?” I think Starbucks. See? Brands answer questions. They become associated with very specific ideas in a customer’s heads. A customer can usually associate and recall about as many things with a brand as they can keep in short term memory easily- that is, five to seven things. Get outside of this, and your customer has to stop and think about it before they can decide what your brand means to them, and you’ve diluted your brand too far. Therefore, you should develop a question that your brand answers, and stick with that question. When you decide how to expand your brand, stay close to that question. Starbucks would seem like they didn’t do this with putting music CDs in their stores, right? Ahh, but no. When I think of Starbucks, I think of drinking coffee, sitting in a coffee house, reading, relaxing, and listening to good music- which begs the question: why doesn’t Starbucks sell books? Probably because they locate some shops inside book stores, and that would be biting the hand that feeds them. Book stores need more space than a Starbuck’s does, anyway.

See the point? A single question drives so many things in business. It brings focus. Find your question to answer, and it will help you keep focus in what you do as interruptions, new ideas and distractions pop up in your day each day.

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Ready for the End

by: stacey - November 14th, 2011   Filed under: Customer Relations, Product Management Add Comment

For better or worse, sometimes you have to part ways with a client.  It may be that the client wants to move on, it could be that you have had enough of the client and need to move on yourself.  It could be for financial reasons or any number of other things. When the time comes, though, it comes. When it does, do you know what to do?

It’s good business to make your client as prepared as possible for life without you.  That may sound counter-intuitive, but it’s true.  It will save them time and make their life easier.  This is likely that this will get you better references from them in the future, which is always a good thing.  The better their experience leaving you, the more likely they are to come back someday later on.  Insofar as word of mouth reputation goes, the impression you make leaving a client is probably the second most important impression you make on a client, right after the first impression.

It will also save you time and effort, as whenever the former customer hits the wall regarding anything you’ve worked on in the past, they are likely to call you.  In many cases, they’ll expect their questions to be answered pro bono.  A clean cut-off is in the best interest of everyone.  Also, prepared to leave you completely also means good choices for you such as easier to migrate to the next generation of your product, easier to back up their data, easier disaster recovery and business continuity, and other important things.

That said, here’s five things you can do to make life easier:

1) Have any and all client-owned project material boxed up and/or burned to CD. Return this to the client as soon as possible. You may consider keeping a copy for yourself, if legally allowed by your contract (if the customer loses it, they’ll probably call you).

2) Have any and all source code, scripts and whatnot also burned to CD and sent to the client. Be sure to keep a copy (again, if allowed) for reference, and be SURE to document everything as carefully as possible. You may have to reference this stuff later, the customer will possibly have to, and who knows who else. One thing is for certain- if anyone in the chain has questions, they’ll likely call YOU.

3) Have at least one (preferably more than one) different provider reference ready and provide it to the client. Try to be sure that the provider meets the clients needs- financial and otherwise. This may seem like a bad idea, especially if the client is firing you. It’s not- anything that you can do to help the client, in the long run, helps your company’s image with them. You may yet get a referral from them someday, and even if you don’t, you never know who is calling them to ask them how your service to them was. The better you are to them, the better off you are.

4) Have all customer invoices ready. Provide them in hard and soft copy. Try to set terms on them that are clear and concise, and bring the financial terms of your relationship to as clean, quick, and polite an end as you possibly can.

5) Document everything you can about the client relationship. Keep up with contacts, who did what, and any notes you can think of that will help you with relationships with these people in the future. Remember, you may not ever do business with this customer again, but people do change jobs nowadays, so you may do business with the individuals who work there later on. You need this info to help protect yourself, possibly build new bridges into new clients in the future, and maybe even know what bridges not to cross later on. There’s no end to the value of good notes.

Stick with these guidelines, and they will help you down the road.

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