NEW ENGLAND CAPITAL VENTURES

1. Marketing & Sales Analysts are usually not engineers. From my experience, they are operationally clueless as to reality and how that plays into a requirements spec for development. They go by what they perceive to be the next marketable trend, not by what’s possible and what needs improvement. They are usually looking forward without much introspection, which can be a good and a bad thing. The sales folks identify all the enhancement requests from clients but most of these requests turn out to be ‘nice-to-haves’ or ‘cool’, seldom addressing tangible improvements in work-flow.
2. Product Management is a conduit. This group claims rights to innovation but all it these folks do is manage what’s presented to them, negotiate functionality and be a liaison to development. This group is rarely in charge of coming up with ideas that would redesign existing products. This group is responsible for identifying inefficiencies as described in the opening para of this entry but between trying to meet the competitive demand vs. trying to calm the engineering needs, they get sucked away into the politics of trying to please everyone.
3. Engineering: Now these are the folks who really know what works and what does not and where we need the biggest improvements. They might not know how to present something eloquently as a UI design nor would these folks come across as innovative. But some of the best ideas and some of the most tightly coupled systems stem from engineering teams. However, this team is the last to be consulted. They usually get the requirements and are asked to develop them as is. I have never seen a group consult engineering on a road map.
4. Finance: These folks are approached last but they are important as they control the budgets. They are clueless about the real benefits of product enhancements and work from a departmental perspective. To be politically correct, they are not empowered to distinguish between what’s important and what can be defered. They operate in absolutes where it’s either all or nothing, e.g. “We have no money for enhancements because we will put all the money in R&D” or the CEO says “I don’t care how you allocate your budget but we need these 10 things with our next release”. This attitude is further fueled by the fact that your average finance guy is not an engineer, thus it is impossible for them to comprehend risks and dependencies. One might think the product folks may communicate to finance but I’d like a show of hands here to see if it is really true.
   

So now the million dollar question: Who prioritizes what needs to be done and who decides what really goes into each release? The answer is not easy. Microsoft makes collaboration tools so that all the above dots in corporations can work together but their own products are consistently the crapiest with each major release. New product development is supposed to be in the hands of a product manager but in reality is controlled by the VP of Marketing and/or Sales. They can’t continually sell old stuff; they need new ideas to sell. They often sell products which are not even built. They need new buzz-words and jargon and need to be in sync with the useless junk that comes out of research companies like Forester and Gartner. And finance needs to improve the valuation and stock and the PR folks need to justify their job by talking about something . . .anything. Holy cow . . . what’s a poor product manager got to do? His job sounds like a recipe made to displease everyone. And who cares about the engineer sitting in his windowless cube in a basement floor? No one . . . Paul Allen of Microsoft jumps on the stage during his speeches and acts like a frat boy using new words to describe all the innovation – but when Vista was released, Bill Gates himself said in his interview with Gizmodo that Vista was a disaster.

So what results from the above process-flow? Have you ever tried to navigate your TV remote . . . . especially the one from Comcast Cable. Have you ever tried to call any 800 number, have you ever wondered why the sun-visor in your car never blocks the sun? You get my point! The outcome can be very damaging to a company.

There are very few companies, like Apple, that are able to leverage design over functionality and still manage to create enough interest for demand to outpace supply E.g. Mac Airbook, dubbed the world’s thinnest laptop. I tried to use it over the week-end but other than browse web-pages and listen to streaming media there was nothing much I could do with it. I mean it’s a concept product, a look into the future of how laptops will be with all the buzz around SOA, qbit Computing, processor speed, etc. But for now, it would just sit on desk, impressing curious technophiles.

To put these examples in perspective, here’s a typical use case:

1. Marketing (Marcom) gets wind of a new feature then pushes it to be in the current release cycle so that they can upsell it as a premium service and meet rev goals.
2. Marketing communicates with the executive board and presupposes revenue potential. The heavens rejoice and everyone agrees that this was a great idea.
3. Marketing communicates with sales - which starts selling it in conferences, magazine ads, etc.
4. Product management (PM) gets whiff of this “new thing” and ultimately, the marketing folks reveal their “idea”.
5. PM is clueless about what they are saying and how it is going to even make any money, better yet – this functionality already exists.
6. Marcom folks look like idiots and go back to the drawing board to save their behinds and come up with a “functional plan”.
7. A new plan is presented to the PM, very late in the game, few months before a major release. PM is told he has no choice as all the new brochures contain this idea.
8. PM has no choice but to accept. PM argues how they will use the data behind this new idea and gets a blank look from everyone.
9. PM talks to engineering. The development folks think the PM is smoking something alien and scoffs at this idea. The functionality is pushed regardless being prioritized over bug fixes, UI improvements and existing work-flow enhancements.
10. Frustrated engineers struggle with time constraints trying to make sense of the functionality while integrating this new idea. Some yahoo engineer tries and does it all and gets a piece of paper called “Certificate of Achievement” – which usually hangs in his cube. In fact, this engineer has many such certificates around his cube.
11. The VP of Marketing is presented with a prototype, which is of course not what he had anticipated and calls it “Version I”. The PM gets a call from the CEO that the requirements were not met while the PM argues the requirements were not well defined.
12. The client is presented with the new version by the sales team. The clueless client (typically a new client with only management representation) is ecstatic whereas the informed client questions how it integrates into all his other systems. The super-user client declares “Nahhhhhhhh . . . we already built something in-house to bridge our gaps the way we wanted it”.
13. Sales struggles to sell a half-baked idea and Marketing comes up with a new buzz-word to help sales. PM is summoned and asked if this idea can be improved. PM argues he needs 6 months and several millions to actually make sense of this idea. The CEO fires the PM.
14. The bugs and bad ideas never get resolved.
    
    

The above is typical of any mid to large corporation. It’s shiny from the outside, questionable once you start digging deeper. In reality, the way it should be working is:

• Gather usage data from existing installs. Often you see a pop-up from Adobe, Microsoft, Sony products or when you come from your car service about taking part in a survey to help them better their products. Most surveys appear to be statistically useless from what I can see while very few do a good job. However, I never hear back from these companies nor do I see any changes – which means I will never fill out another survey for that company again.
• Engineering should be consulted consurrently with marketing.
• There should be direct tangible ROI associated with each feature. Each feature should be reportable. Logitech did a study with thousands of people to prototype and design their new TV remote, priced at almost $150 at BestBuy. They made it more complicated than running a derivatives software on the NASDAQ trade floor resulting in big losses. Besides, they forgot the mute button and it was incompatible with Samsung, the 2nd largest TV manufacturer in the world. Lastly, it was a touch screen, which means my oily pop-corn hands will not be able to operate it.
• New feature development should come from real feedback loops like data mining, blogs, rants & raves from competitor’s clients. Unfortunately new features are developed for all the wrong reasons. Anyone who went to CeBIT or CES this year knows what I am talking about.
• In today’s world of inter-connectivity, make sure you don’t leave any loose ends hanging. Create something that allows a seamless work-flow, not a bottleneck. E.g. If you allow someone to track their online orders hour by hour, make sure the data-feed from your logistics partner is fresh in order to represent real time. This is critical for highly perishable items like Blood supply, berries, flowers from Holland ($1.6 Billion market in US), genetic samples, human organ transportation, etc. Even a 2 hour delay in tracking the product can make or mar millions in revenues.
• And lastly, do not sell and create value on features alone. Talk about how you can apply what you do to change the rules of the game and truly become a market leader. Leading innovation is not trivial, neither is leading change.
  

My favorite list of useless features is:

• Microsoft error control: You have encountered error #87238hd ubcv1y9xd4y4ry Continue?
• Sun visors in cars not able to block the sun
• 800 # Messages that can’t reach a human. Worse of all, when I have been on hold for 20 mins and it continues to loop through the message “We appreciate your business . . . “ No you don’t, otherwise you wouldn’t put me on hold for 20 mins.
• Cisco/Nortel Corporate Phones: More than a decade later, I still can’t figure out how to use these darn things. They are still the same.
• Beef from Vegetarian Fed Cows at a local supermarket: Cows are vegetarian. Same with eggs, vegetarian fed chickens.
• Organic Clothes: There are companies who sell these e.g. Lululemon’s VitaSea Clothing line.
• Comcast Email: While checking your Comcast email account online, you can only view emails that are unread. If you read an email once, that’s it.
• $100 join in fee for GYM’s: Notice what the person does to register you and give you your badge, in about 30 seconds.
• Login requirements for reading news (e.g. Boston.com allows you to read only 2 or 3 stories, after which they hard-stop your news browsing - unbelievable).
• Use of words inappropriate for the product: E.g.# 1 conversation at Sephora between me and sales-lady – “ . . this face cream declares a pre-emptive strike on your skin and destroys all known surface cells”. Next she was going to drop a JDAM on my head. I declared a truce and signed the peace agreement. E.g. # 2: conversation between me and BestBuy Sales guy selling TV “. . . this TV can sustain up to 300 degree Fahrenheit. It has also been clinically proven to reduce eye strain”. None of this is true.
• Sales people at Clinique counters wearing white lab coats: Not sure what to make of it. Some of these folks don’t even have a high-school education.
• People calling/emailing me to renew my subscription with some publication and require me to answer 50 gazillion questions. 1st, I never sign up for anything and 2nd, why am I giving my corporate information to some random phone call. Companies hire hundreds to make these calls.
• Call center personnel from India trying to talk in an American accent. There is no need for it. Companies spend millions training these guys to talk like us.
• Lastly, assuming that the customer is wrong because of an error in your software.
  
  

For once, I would like to see mainstream services and products performed right. The “Walmart’ization” is surfacing and is likely to bring some big industries down. Put customers 1st, not your investors. Put your products 1st, not your valuation, design something right the 1st time. Everything else will just follow!

Sorry Marketing folks! I love you but I love engineers more.