The Perspective is the Strategy

So every time I drive anywhere in my car I have one continuing, consistent thought – I hate my GPS. I don’t hate it in a casual, mildly annoying way. I hate it in a deep, resentful, this-is-the-worst-UI-ever-manufactured sort of way. I hate the device not for the directions, but for the device experience. It’s poor, it’s clunky, and whoever built it never spent any time using it. I usually look at that little box hanging from a suction cup on my window and think, ‘mock me now, you’re days are over since Google released free GPS for the phone’.

It’s true, those GPS manufacturers are in a pretty bad place. TomTom, Garmin, and other GPS manufacturers had their share price free fall on Google’s free GPS announcement. Why would anyone pay for a device, if they could the same functionality in their phone for free?

I think there’s more than just paid vs. free. I think the difference lies in the difference in perspective a device company has from a service company. If you’re a device company your customer buys a ‘thing’. Once they buy that thing, they’re a cost to retain until they buy again; customer service, upgrades, anything. Garmin has changed nothing about my GPS since I bought it. In the three years we’ve owned that GPS Garmin has never evolved the experience. Sure they’ve fixed bugs, but I will never get a better experience until I buy another device.

It would be a completely different relationship if Garmin was a service company. A service mindset realizes that you only have a customer if you serve them. So beyond the service being free, Google will actually interact with the customers differently that Garmin. If I were to use a Google phone as a GPS, I have assurance that Google will constantly upgrade the service. They’ll be adding ads I’m sure, but I’d also expect them to improve screen flows and consistently refine the experience.

So when people talk about the dark days for physical GPS manufacturers, I don’t really think it’s a free vs. paid argument, I think it’s about how you serve your customer. I have a lot of confidence that if Garmin or any of those players really turned out a significantly better in-car GPS experience, they could hold on to their market share. That doesn’t mean adding photo albums, or fitness feaures…do you honestly think I’m going to go running with my car’s GPS? It means you have to be brilliant at the basics, that’s what people pay you for. Garmin sells a simple touchscreen device. They could deliver a software upgrade and overwhelm their entire customer base and make a big deal about it. If you’re a device company, you can’t see that. Upgrading the interface would just be foolish, you’ve already earned those customers. Something like that would just be a sunk cost.

Good luck guys. It’s going to be a long year.

Of Course…

I was inspired today by Christian Lindholm of Fjord Design (via Om Malik). The two were talking about how product design principles might inspire entrepreneurs. Lindholm said:

Most companies are looking to “wow” with their products, when in reality what they should be looking for is an “of course” reaction from their users.

If you really understand your customer and you’re aligned with what they want, shouldn’t they be looking at your offering and saying to themselves “of course”?

• Hey did you hear the new Google phone is a completely open architecture? Of course it is.
• Hey, you know my TV was broken on my Jet Blue flight. There wasn’t an open seat, so they gave me a discount voucher for my next ticket! Of course they did.
• You know, I wanted to go camping on the west coast but I didn’t want to lug my gear. Did you know REI rents camping gear? Of course they do.
• Man, the shoes from Zappos didn’t fit, but returning them was no hassle at all. Of course it wasn’t.

Each of those examples are actually extremely phenomenal in their own right, but in the context of their brand the acts become expected. It’s some sort of higher order of consumer connection. You only reach that place if you take the time to know your customer, know your market, and really know how to deliver.

That’s not “wow”, that’s thoughtful design, incredible focus, and lots of hard work.

Here’s the thing, organizations lust for “wow” moments because that’s how employees get recognized. Those moments build consensus and momentum. Everyone likes to win, so if you’ve got a “wow” on your hands you’ll have no problem funding people with passion for what you’re building. But little of this “wow” business really has much to do with the customer, it’s an internal (selfish) motivation. “Wow” moments are more about the company winning, the customer is just the means to that victory.

Now I don’t discount the ambition and the intention to amaze and delight your customers, I just think you should push for a more meaningful relationship. Your customer should be able to complete your sentences (and you, theirs). That’s doesn’t mean boring and predictable, it means caring about them more than you care about yourself.

“Wow” moments are actually sort of fleeting and superficial. “Wow” is a summer blockbuster movie that makes a mint in 3 weeks and is on DVD by Christmas. “Wow” is a big buzz at the CES convention in January and lackluster sales in the fall. You didn’t want that, right? Of course you don’t.

No License Required

Today, I had the privilege of attending the Boston AdClub’s annual Edge event. It’s one of those industry events when people come to network and get inspired by speakers and panels. Overall, it was a pretty inspiring event but there were a couple of moments when the train sort of skipped the tracks around people and the License to Practice. It probably is no shock this came from a journalist on one panel, and a digital advertising agency on another.

The basic crux of the License to Practice problem is that people have this assumption that you have to spend a certain amount of time in an industry to be recognized by that profession. While I generally think this holds up in disciplines that require certification (medical, legal, architectural, veterinary, financial) it’s a figment in any other industry. You see in all the certification situations I named (and several others), if you don’t know what you’re doing, you could actually hurt people. Architects could build faulty structures, doctors could do irreparable harm, and so on.

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Strategy is an Act of Design

Strategy is an act of design….You can’t analyze your way to real strategy. You have to create it from data, guts, empathy, creativity, and a little thin air.
- Roger Martin

I love this quote, (full article here). I don’t think good strategies are always an entirely linear and rational act. We post-rationalize things so great businesses feel like they were ordained by some higher power, but that’s not how the world actually works.

Founder’s Journey

This Monday I had the pleasure of speaking at MIT in a class called The Founder’s Journey. Ken Zolot is running a really cool seminar class out of the engineering school that gives student a view into what it’s like to start a business (without having to slave through tons of pre-requisite classes in the business school).

I met Ken at IDEO’s Big Reset event this summer, and he asked me to give a similar/shorter talk to one I gave at TBR. It’s sort of a rambling run through human-centered design, identity, experiences, participation, T-Pain, Stonehenge, etc.

Even thought the slides don’t capture most of the details of the talk, you can check out the deck here. (I pulled the very few IDEO-related bits since that would compel someone to post the file to slideshare.net….which I don’t get, but whatevs.)

Lemons, Lemonade, & Lululemon

So it’s no secret that the mall is in trouble. A number of factors have put this american institution in hot water; the current economy, changing consumer preference, renaissance in boutique shopping, the internet, you name it. The farther we seem to progress as a society, the smaller the mall seems to grow in the rearview mirror.

Tonight I had some errands to do, and having not been to a mall in probably a year, I decided to check it out. I’m not a fan of malls at all, but on a Thursday night I knew it wouldn’t be too bad. In general everything was pretty empty. Sales associates lounged around waiting for the night to end. There were a few uncomfortable situations where the people that work the hair extension carts were shaking down random passers-by, but mostly things were pretty dead. Then I walked past the Lululemon store.

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Airline Hatred and Online Aggregators

Ok, so I hate airlines.

Actually, there’s a little more to it. In general, I’m OK with the flying experience. I know it could be better, but for the most part, it’s good hearted people doing the best they can in a very tough, complicated, interlocking service industry. (Full disclosure: my bother is a pilot.)

The hatred I have for airline comes from their management decisions. I hate them for their inhuman inflexibility. I hate them for their nickel and dime tactics. They remind me of banks, both lay out very narrow rules of engagement and give themselves the right to tax you if you deviate from the plan. They let the policies play bad cop and stand unaccounted for some pretty unfair treatment.

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Hey Ryan: I’d Measure for Experimentation

So in our ongoing online nerd-out, Ryan posed the following question around measuring innovation:

If you had to measure one thing, just one thing, for (growth and) innovation, what would it be?

Holy hard questions, how am I supposed to answer that? Never mind the fact that every major management consultantency and their boutique spin-off siblings are manically running around trying to figure out how to measure innovation, now you’re only going to let me chose one thing? Ok, fine, I like a good unsolvable problem, lets do it.

The nice thing about really hard questions is that it forces you to really break things apart, which is sort of the whole point of this exercise. I started to think about how most metrics actually measure multiple things, it’s a synthesizer of the organization. GE, for example, tracks innovation through measuring organic growth. In that case you have find new revenue and the assumption is that to capture that revenue, you must be innovating to create that value. Diego’s Mileage Metric is a readiness measure that looks for people that have operated in a certain environment AND those products have gone to market. It’s not enough to just be near innovation, you need to have soldiered through the morass.

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Rebellion on Automattic

Online piracy is a pretty fascinating phenomena if you think about it. In the beginning it was pretty much petty hacker theft; people sharing files because they could. If athletes celebrate their talents by winning races, hackers celebrate their skills and intellect by getting away with things most people can’t. In that vein, there’s a fascinating article in Rolling Stone about a blind phreaker who used to terrorize late-night voice chat lines, bizarre and fascinating – article here.

File sharing is an evolutionary meme. Today, the phrase “meme” is usually synonymous with internet jokes – lolcats, orly owls and the like. However, the idea behind a meme is so much bigger and stronger than internet jokes. By definition a meme is a unspoken idea or agreement that’s transferred around a culture through indirect communication. No one defines it, no one writes it down. Internet jokes are a great example because it’s impossible for everyone to get together and agree something’s funny, it’s funny because everyone’s simultaneously getting the joke. Meme’s are sort of the basic principle behind humor, obscenity, justice, and community – all those very abstract concepts. You know them when you experience them, you’re able to know what it is because you get all the meme.

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Speaking of measurements…

…and I just was. I noticed a really nice twist on the old restaurant secret shopper scheme. According to this article, Five Guys Burgers & Fries hires secret shoppers to find people who are doing things right. So instead of feeding a fear-based culture of screwing up and getting caught, they find ways to highlight people who are getting it right. And by doing secretly, they’re probably getting around the apple polishers who only do it right when they think it counts….because really, it always counts.

Funny how your perspective really influnces how your solve you problems.