Cauvin

Interesting info about the demographics of the Mac user base.

Laura Ries has a funny and informative entry on her blog about brand names and colors. She maintains that colors can be powerful aspects of a brand, and that focus and simplicity in color schemes is generally better.

What do you do if you have a mature brand that is well-known and perceived positively, but the products that it stands for in the mind of the consumer are obsolete or no longer valuable? It's tempting to try to preserve the brand but attach it to a new product that isn't obsolete. According to Al Ries and Laura Ries, however, you should let the brand drown and possibly launch a new brand and product. If the tide is against you, the best strategy is to let your brand drown and launch a new brand to take advantage of the next wave. Smith-Corona should have launched a personal computer with a different brand name. Smith-Corona was once a powerful brand in the typewriting business. The advent of personal computers and word processors made typewriters - and the Smith-Corona brand - obsolete. Trying to launch a Smith-Corona line of personal computers would have been pointless.

Marcus Ting-A-Kee reminds us of how allowing design to infect requirements stifles innovation.

Confusion over product requirements terminology and concepts is pervasive. Companies are producing MRDs, PRDs, and SRSes without even understanding what "requirement" means . Despite this wasteful and unnecessary requirements document proliferation , companies are neglecting key nonfunctional requirements . To help educate the product management and development community, I have put together a comprehensive model of concepts relating to requirements. To view or download the full-size conceptual model, click the image below: (See my post on conceptual models if you have trouble understanding the diagram.) A sampling of the terms that the conceptual model explicates : functional requirement nonfunctional requirement attribute constraint metric specification condition user stakeholder use case You are free to distribute, copy, or print out the diagram, but please do not remove the copyright information on the bottom right.

With Future Phone , you can make international phone calls for free (or the cost of a call to Iowa). You simply: Dial a gateway access number (either 712-858-8883 or 712-945-1111). When the gateway answers, enter 011 then the country code and number you want to reach. Wait a few moments for your call to ring through and then enjoy your free call. I've added Future Phone as a contact on my mobile phone.

According to Wendy White, Motorola's director of global technology marketing and communications, Motorola has a healthy view of marketing. She equates marketing with margin: People here like to think of marketing as equal to margin—which comes from enabling brand premium and creating demand. She also describes Motorola's attitudes towards marketing: In many companies, it's easy for marketing to be seen as a service organization: Non-marketers are thinking, "We'll do the work; you make it pretty." At Motorola, we focus marketing on discovering what's important to the customer and then positioning our offerings based on those distinct needs. It has also helped that our new CEO comes from a high-tech marketing background and has further revitalized perceptions of marketing. Now, our marketing team seems like one unified function, compared to the more fragmented feeling we had earlier. Via MarketingProfs.

Crafting a customer survey is not as straightforward as it seems. You shouldn't simply ask the questions you want answered, as I've mentioned . The most valuable information usually comes from analyzing the correlations among the answers to the survey, not from merely looking at the responses to individual questions. Susan Abbott tells us about sideways questions : If we really want to find the answer to this question, we are going to have to come at it sideways somehow. Most commercial survey research uses multivariate techniques to tease out these kinds of findings. Like connecting the strength of your agreement with attitudinal statements (e.g."it is important to belong to prestigious business organizations") with your stated likelihood of renewing your membership. In qualitative research, we cook up exercises of various sorts, instead of just asking the literal question directly. [It's also because most of us really like to play with colored markers and Post...

Seth Godin reminds us that Irregular reinforcement is a hugely powerful message sender. Last year, I called it surprise rewards . If it's too expensive to surprise and delight every customers every time, surprise them randomly. Send one of them a remarkable gift for no reason at all. The reason surprise rewards are so powerful stems from congruity theory (which also is the primary reason you shouldn't choose a descriptive name for your brand ). Congruity theory states that encounters incongruent with expectations cause people to apply inordinate mental effort to resolve the incongruency.

One of the product development community's favorite bloggers (and mine, too), Johanna Rothman, recently wrote about a negative experience she had with a product: Even though I managed to accomplish the tasks I needed, the time it took me to accomplish them and the foreign approach to the UI made me not happy. Implicit requirements are still requirements. Is the time it takes to accomplish a task really an "implicit requirement"? I think not. It's one of the primary metrics we use to ensure usability , and hence a standard nonfunctional requirement. I have little doubt that most product managers neglect this metric in their requirements documents. But that neglect isn't due to the requirement being "implicit". It's due to the general tendency of product managers to pay excessive attention to alleged functional requirements that are in fact functional designs, to the exclusion of nonfunctional requirements that drive them.

CNET News tells us about an internal company memo at Yahoo. A senior VP at the company warned in the memo that the company lacks focus: "We want to do everything and be everything--to everyone. We've known this for years, talk about it incessantly, but do nothing to fundamentally address it. We are scared to be left out..." The internal memo, dubbed "The Peanut Butter Manifesto", continued: "I've heard our strategy described as spreading peanut butter across the myriad opportunities that continue to evolve in the online world. The result: a thin layer of investment spread across everything we do and thus we focus on nothing in particular. I hate peanut butter." It takes tremendous discipline to maintain focus in your product and its marketing .

Paul at the Product Beautiful blog hits the nail on the head : First, develop to your average user, not your subject matter experts. SME’s will feature pack your product with interesting features of dubious usefulness to the rest of the Market. Worse, they will mutate core features (armor and firepower) to the extreme, and you’ll end up with a scenario where you have important features that should solve user’s problems but are so bloated that they are unrecognizable or hard-to-use (Macros in MS Word, Adobe Download Manager, the HTML blink tag, etc). BTW, Engineering/Development are super-SME’s, so don’t let them define the product - ever! SMEs are a valuable resource, but the primary source of requirements should be buyers and end users, as I have mentioned .

Funny exchange from the Ali G show before the 2004 election: ALI G: Does you think that Saddam ever was able to make these weapons of mass destruction or whatever, or as they is called, BLTs? Mr. PATRICK BUCHANAN: The--was Saddam able to make them   ALI G: Could he make BLTs?   Mr. BUCHANAN: Yes. At one time, he was using BLTs on the Kurds in the north. If he had anthrax, if he had mustard gas...   ALI G: Whatever he put in them.   Mr. BUCHANAN: No. No, no. If he had mustard gas, no.   ALI G: Let's say he didn't have mustard and the BLTs just was plain. Would you have been able to go in there then?   Mr. BUCHANAN: No. Somehow Ali G tricked Pat Buchanan into referring to WMDs as BLT sandwiches.

One of the most useful tools for explicating the terminology of customers is a conceptual model . Conceptual models depict the concepts in the problem domain and their relationships. At Cauvin, Inc. , we compose conceptual models in the form of static structure diagrams . Conceptual models resemble glossaries (in that they define the words in the domain), but they are richer and more concise. Here is an example of a conceptual model: Conceptual models in this format contain the following elements: Concepts. Each rectangular box depicts a concept. Links. A line between two concepts shows that an association exists between them. Association. The name of an association is shown on or next to a link between two concepts. Multiplicities. Multiplicities show how many instances of the concepts participate in the association. An asterisk (*) means that an indefinite (potentially infinite) number of instances participates in the relationship. Specialization. A specialization...

Explication is the process of analyzing the usage of a word or phrase and formulating a logically consistent definition that clarifies its meaning. Product managers explicate the terminology of customers to settle on the most effective way of wording product requirements and communicating with customers. Conventional wisdom dictates a product manager should communicate in the "language of the customer". Unfortunately, there is no such single language. Different customers use words in different ways and use different words to describe the same thing. A product manager must therefore navigate this terminological landscape and determine the best words to employ in requirements and customer communications. The product manager should explicate the various alternative terms and, after deciding on an operational meaning for each alternative, select the ones that she judges customers will most readily understand. For example, imagine your company provides Internet data centers to...

Google's Marissa Mayer told an audience at a Web 2.0 conference last week that quick response times are a critical - possibly the most important - contributor to usability. Response time is the amount of time it takes for a product to respond (provide useful results or feedback) to user requests. Slow response times lead to user frustration and less usage of your product. For example: In a survey on search, Google asked people how many results they would want by default; they responded that more is better, Mayer said. So the company conducted an experiment, providing some searchers with 30 default results. But it took, on average, a half-second longer to get those results than when the default was 10 results, she said. Out of frustration, people conducted fewer searches. "This indicated extreme unhappiness," Mayer said. "It was clear that we weren't going to make this change." A half-second increase in response time resulted in a large increase in fru...

Michael recently wrote on his blog: Right after gathering and prioritizing high-level requirements, get to the User Interface (UI) design. Do this before you complete your MRD or PRD. Yes, before! This suggestion supports one of the reasons for employing an agile approach to product management . You can't specify all the requirements up front; BUFR is inefficient and unrealistic. When you design a user interface, you "test" the initial stab at requirements and uncover additional usability requirements that nobody had considered. I would go further than Michael and suggest that organizations produce a "releasable" iteration of the product; i.e. work not only through UI design, but also technical architecture, some detailed design, implementation, and testing. (In some cases, GUI mockups can be the output of the first iteration .) See this entry for more details.

Brandon writes about two different types of leaders: Motivational . Communicates vision and strategy, not detail oriented. Operational . Implement the processes and nuts-and-bolts decisions, detail oriented. Brandon observes that most organizations are strong in one form of leadership but lacking in the other.

CEO Steve Ballmer, commenting on the name of Microsoft's new media player line, Zune: It means nothing; it's just a cool name.

I think I have a crush on Google's VP of Search Products and User Experience . Seems I was able to find her on MySpace, too :-)