JT Pedersen » General

Been Quiet Recently–Here’s Why

JT — Sat, 28 Apr 2012 21:50:18 +0000

For the benefit of my regular readers I wanted to share why things were a bit quiet of late. The past couple weeks were spent preparing for a series of meetings in Denver, Colorado. Overall, the meetings were very productive and the trip worthwhile.

In some of my spare time, I took some pictures in the mountains to the west. For those not accustomed to the views, particularly my fellow flatlanders, the scenery is simply spectacular.

Following are a few pictures for you. [CLICK images for full-size versions]

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How Long, Before You’re Legitimately Experienced?

JT — Thu, 05 Apr 2012 18:49:30 +0000

This is a question you probably have asked yourself, at some point in your life. Odds are you have asked the question more than once. Once for each new job, each new profession, each new…

The question tends to be ‘professionally’ oriented when it is being asked. How long until you can consider yourself an experienced…whatever it is you are? Bar tender? Manager, Leader, Teacher… The trigger for my comment today was raised by Katherine, in one of the motorcycle enthusiast groups I participate in.

How many years do you have to ride before you can legitimately consider yourself an experienced rider? The responses to Katherine’s question showed it is a very relative, subjective answer.

Mulling it over, I think you might consider yourself experienced, when you find yourself automatically responding in crisis situations without conscious thought. For instance, last week I had come to stop behind another car at a traffic light. A few moments later, I heard this squealing of tires approaching—directly—behind me.

I didn’t think. I found myself having brought the engine RPM up to about 3K RPM, slid the clutch out, having moved about 8′ toward the space between vehicles in front of me, looking in my mirror, ready to bolt. For a moment, I found myself sitting there, legs on the pegs, engine running fast…ready to bolt…but not moving any further. Ready. I saw the van behind me stop (I’d given him that extra ‘bit’ of room he needed). Crisis averted.

When you find yourself taking action, even in non-crises situations, as though it were a natural activity, just like walking, you are probably experienced.

When you can ride as subconsciously as you might walk, you’ve probably arrived. That’s not to say you’ve become ‘master of all.’

Your overall proficiency is driven from experience: a nice balance of diversity; time in seat; as well as frequency. I include frequency for a specific reason. You may have 300,000 miles or kilometers behind you, but if you’ve not ridden in 6 months, you may not be as well prepared for a crisis as the 20,000 mile rider who has ridden weekly for the past two months.

Experience, like respect, is something you never stop needing to develop.

It is easy at times to become complacent, and forget that. Whether you’re riding a motorcycle, managing or leading at work, or operate machinery of some type: Experience, respect, perhaps your very ability to survive, is based on diversity, practice (time in the seat), and frequency of the activity.

Season’s here: Have fun. Ride safe!

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Things Your Children Say

JT — Sat, 31 Mar 2012 16:47:48 +0000

[My 13 year-old child, working around a current grounding]:

“I’m a child. There’s a loop-hole for every rule.”

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Social Media & Product Management (Pt. 5)

JT — Thu, 01 Mar 2012 00:43:59 +0000

(Part 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 See also, supplement)

Continuing the discussion of employing social media as a component of the product management toolset…

Up Front Time Needed

One of the key reasons product managers eschew using social media, is that it requires more time than they care to invest. Often, they have an improper perception of social media mechanics.

One cannot simply set up a website, put out a few pictures and posts, and expect comments (let alone quantifiable input) to start rolling in the next day.

Social media is all about relationship building. Developing your social media network draws a very close parallel to networking, to relationship building in person.

You wouldn’t go to a networking event, introduce yourself to people, shake their hand, give them a business card, then wonder why they didn’t offer you a lead, tip, or job. It doesn’t work that way. Yet, too many people seem to try approaching social media in exactly that manner.

As with in-person networking (read: Networking Magic) you need to invest time. And, invest is precisely the right word here. You make an ongoing, persistent, consistent effort to build on your relationships. Only after an extended period will you start to see results in the form of follower engagement and feedback.

Of course, how long that ‘extended period’ is, is directly related to how much of your own effort you put in up front. Many bloggers will tell you, the more active you are online (across the board), the stronger your follower base is and the more engaged they will be. Posting daily gives better returns than once a week. Posting daily or weekly, gets far better return than posting monthly or less (who are you again?).

Social Media is a Time Suck!

Realizing the gist of the preceding discussion some folks fall into another trap. Realizing they need to invest time, they treat the effort as a sprint, pouring tons of time into their social media networking efforts. And are then tremendously dissatisfied at the results of their effort.

Pouring tons of effort in, getting little out, is perceived as a, ‘time suck.’

The reality is, employing social media as a tool requires a constructive approach, one more like a marathon than a sprint. You cannot force results to happen. You need to develop, to nurture them.

Amber Naslund, Brass Tack Thinking, wrote a good piece that ties in here well. In

The Social Media Time Suck Is Our Own Fault, she points out, "Everything worthwhile in business requires time….can become a waste of time…if the strategy and implementation is considered in isolation, apart from the ripple effect it can and will have through the rest of the business."

She continues, "Adapting how we work isn’t easy, but it’s necessary and it’s not new. We adapted to the phone. We adapted to the emergence of the web and email, and learned how to integrate these things into how we build and operate our companies. There’s good uses of all of those things, and there are complete wastes of time. Social’s value is still partially hidden in – or hindered by – our adaptability and vision.

If there’s a waste of time involved, it’s based in errors of human judgment and not in the nature of social itself."

To get a decent return on social media, like any investment, requires an initial plan. What do you want to accomplish? What do you need to learn? How will you execute? And, how will you measure your results, and adapt as necessary? Without any planning, without conscious awareness of what you’re looking to achieve, social media can indeed simply become a resource hog, a time-suck, with sorry returns. Don’t be that guy (or gal)!

image credit: Dario Lucarini

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3 Reasons Websites Won’t Die

JT — Fri, 17 Feb 2012 20:07:23 +0000

Not too long ago, Forrester released a report, “Tech Changes to Expect in Next 3 Years,” discussed on CIO.com. It makes for an interesting piece. No surprise regarding how computing (e.g. the Cloud) is becoming increasingly centralized again and analytics increasingly important.

And then there’s this little piece:

“The App Internet, if it plays out, would mark the end of the website as we know it and the dawn of the mobile app era, states the Forrester report. It’s also certain to change how developers and enterprises create apps and manage the devices that run them.”

The ‘end of the website…(in the next 3 years)’ It wouldn’t be an analyst piece, if they didn’t try to hyper-imagine ultimate outcomes.

Apps may (likely, in my view) become a dominant form of mobile interaction with the internet. However, declaring an ‘App Internet’ falls dangerously close to the ‘everyone is doing it’ type of zealous comment. For one, it ignores the immobile (desktop/laptop bound) existence altogether.

Here are three basic reasons why the ‘website’ isn’t going to die any time soon.

You need to go somewhere to get an App!
To get an app for your phone, you need to ‘go’ somewhere to discover it. Quite often, the corporate website is the launch point for direction as to ‘where’ to go retrieve an app.Not too many of us I suspect, start our day browsing the App Store, just looking for new apps to discover. We do our search–looking for a product or service (not an app); ending up at a (web)site; that says, “Here’s our app,” and go from there. The website will need to exist as that jump off point, at a minimum.
Over-zealousness.
Mobile is clearly where tremendous growth exists. Yet zealots need to be cautious (regardless of their preferred domain) to not believe, “Everyone’s doing XYZ.”It is a common statement I hear at events, whether it’s, ‘everyone is using Twitter,’ or ‘everyone has a smartphone,’ or… Sorry. But not everyone gets Twitter, and no, not everyone has a smartphone. Smartphones are still in the minority sales-wise.
3G is not everywhere.
Do you have 3G? If you’re west of the Mississippi, east of the West Coast, 3G coverage is spotty. That means the value of your Apps will be just as spotty. It’s still not hard to find millions still using dial-up; it just isn’t discussed much.

So, yes, tech will continue to change. As regards, ‘websites are dead‘ type commentary, No, I don’t believe so. And, neither are fax machines.

image credit: sxc

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4 Ways iBooks is One of iPad’s Best Apps

JT — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 19:23:54 +0000

Really, I think it is. Normally you hear people talk about ‘best apps’ in the vein of ‘other than those that came with the device.’ It’s as if, because Apple created them the apps are automatically disqualified from consideration.

For those of you having followed me a while, you know I do a fair number of book reviews. In the interest of continual self-improvement I am constantly reading new books. Shortly after I finish each (business) book I generally post a review. After all, why not share?

Some have commented that my reviews are almost always on the plus-side of neutral. That’s my parents’ fault. I don’t always succeed, but in general, if I have nothing good to say, I try not to say it. And so it is with my book reviews. I think I’ve only done one, practically speaking, negative review of a book.

My technique for doing book reviews looks something like this:

Read the book through, cover to cover.
Take notes, underline key text, jot down key segments (in the book or on separate paper)
After first (occasionally second) reading:
- Review Table of Contents
- Review notes
- Flip pages to capture key ideas highlighted.
Write the review
Find some cover art or suitable imagery

Generally I’m doing this every 3-4 weeks. You’ll note a lag sometimes; I do enjoy a good novel from time-to-time…

iBooks on the Apple iPad makes the entire process paperless!

Consider it a necessary evil, collating my notes is the least productive part of writing a review. Not to overblow the issue, but making sure you’ve got all your notes, flipping pages, and putting it together could be easier. Even with my first ereader, the process wasn’t that much different. It didn’t let me do anything more than create generic bookmarks.

Bookmarks

Bookmarks are easily created while reading. Just touch the upper corner to toggle placement of your bookmarks. Think of this working very much like folding the corner of your book. As you create your bookmarks, the TOC|Bookmarks section is populated with your bookmarks. Not only is the page section annotated (the current Header section), but the date the bookmark was created is also displayed.

I like the bookmark creation date being captured. There are times where knowing the date can help you recall other events that day that set the context for why you might have created a given bookmark. In some cases, its because the spot in the book dovetailed with a current event.

As with the traditional TOC page, click the bookmark, jump to the section. Still, seems trivial, but if you’ve been writing down page notes and thumbing to the pages in the book again, this little self-organized time saver is really appreciated.

Now, here is my favorite part.

Highlighting

Used to be, I treated books as pristine things never to be abused. I prided myself on reading paperbacks without ever creasing the binding. (Don’t ask why, I just did) This also meant never writing in a book.

Well, somewhere along the way that went by the wayside. Now, I feel free to use my mechanical pencil (preferably) to underline, call out, or otherwise annotate key passages as I go along.

While useful, it still requires you keep a separate index of notes on paper and go back to them. Or, thumb through the book, hoping not to miss any of significance.

With iBooks, as you read, you can directly highlight passages of interest. Simply select the passage of interest (as you would for cut/copy/paste in iPad/iPhone). You are then given the option (among other things) to highlight the text.

When highlighting, you can also choose from 5 different colors. Or, you can choose to underline. I like to use the different colors to color code my highlights: General note, Important, Action Item. Action items are often things like calling out other books I’d like to read that the author mentioned.

As I read, my collection of highlighted passages grows quickly. As each is created, they too, just like Bookmarks, are added to the Notes TOC automatically. One unexpected feature, even though I may highlight a sentence fragment, only that fragment is highlighted in the TOC, but the entire sentence is still displayed for context. Cool!

Notes – The 4th Dimension

If you weren’t already pleased with the preceding, you’ll really like Notes. When you go to highlight a passage, the same popup menu also gives you the chance to create a note.

Exactly like a Post-It™ or say a Sticky Note in Windows, you can go ahead and add your textual annotations.

When you’re done creating the note, the note window closes, and a simply Post-It™ like icon is placed in the margin. Tap it to open the note again.

The notes are then associated with the highlighted text in the Notes TOC.

Here, rather than an icon, you get the actual note text displayed immediately under the highlighted passage.

Tip: Don’t want a highlight/note any more, just do a Swipe|Delete in the TOC and it’s gone.

For me, iBooks really streamlines the process of collating notes, highlights, and bookmarks for later reference. If you have an iPad and haven’t tried using it to read books yet, or, you haven’t experimented with highlighting and notes, you really should.

Bonus Items

What I’ve described above, on the iPad, works on the iPhone as well. Here are three bonus items:

When your iOS devices sync, they update your place in the current book you’re reading, as well as all TOC entries (notes, bookmarks, highlights).

On iPhone, you only get one color (yellow) for creating highlights. The multi-color notes from your iPad efforts are preserved.

Finally, on both devices, there is a Night theme. If you like to read in bed, your partner will appreciate the fact you can dim the 40 watt light bulb in your hands.

Elegantly implemented, simple to use, iBooks is more than ‘just a reader’ application. In the right hands, it is a tool you can leverage to really make life easier.

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The Making of Squishy History

JT — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 17:23:23 +0000

As we move forward, history’s solidity will become increasingly squishy.

As digital books become increasingly popular, so does awareness that a medium we once considered immutable, no longer is.

Nicholas Carr penned an article for the Wall Street Journal, “Books That Are Never Done Being Written.” He highlighted how, having published his own book on Amazon, he decided a tweak was needed, and how easily he did it. No one but Amazon’s database and he knew that the book had changed.

The article points out, “Digital text is ushering in an era of perpetual revision and updating, for better and for worse.”

I agree, for better and for worse. My personal, primary concern with after-the-fact book updates is the potential for revisionist history. The potential has always existed but remained largely muted because its hard to overcome a million hardcopy books once in circulation.

Now, with the flick of the wrist, or tap of a button, entire paragraphs can be deleted, replaced, or flavorized. And you might not know it. The ability falls right into the hands of people like Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. What about your government?

There are certainly cases where book (i.e. ‘content’) updates are not only reasonable, they’re desired. Encyclopedias, research studies, technical journals, and other reference sources are simple examples. Course textbooks are a popular example.

However, updates to ‘history,’ revisionist history if you will, are cases demanding special consideration. We will fight this battle interminably. What we consider yesterday’s editorial piece, or today’s research study, is tomorrow’s history.

My strong view is that revision updates should be an opt-in scenario for the content’s purchaser. Update notifications should be mandatory, with an option to override. Fortunately we need not reinvent the wheel. Updating user-side content (e.g. something you downloaded) is no different than software. The software industry already has well-established best practices.

Clearly different types of content warrant updating over time. It may even be eagerly sought after. However in some cases, it is important that we reserve the ability to just say No to updates, enabling us to preserve original flavor, intent, and focus. Otherwise, we need to learn to live with squishy history.

Share your own thoughts. How do you feel about this? Is it a valid concern or no, or do you care?

image credits: We Can… Mike Licht, See…Holger Selover-Stephan

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Happy New Year!

JT — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 01:56:00 +0000

I’m tickled to have all of you with me as we venture into this new year. Thank you, to each of you, my readers and subscribers, for having been with me in 2011.

You have probably already noticed, JTPEDERSEN.NET’s seen significant change over the past week or so. It was time. Nearly 3 years since the last major refresh, it seems almost everything continued to evolve.

Most of you won’t be interested in gory details, so I’ll keep it light. The prior theme had issues. It served its purpose but, using an older architecture, it just couldn’t keep up with all the changes going on around it. Now, I’m using a new platform (Genesis Platform) that will let me keep infrastructure and cosmetic layers separate, allowing continual updates moving forward.

And, since I didn’t have enough fun for last week, this week, jtpedersen.net also moved to a new ISP.

If you have an opinion on the new site (looks, functionality, whatever), please leave a comment.

Over time, I have evolved through three different email subscription services. I plan to consolidate on just one for a while. For the next couple weeks I will be evaluating Feedburner. If you want to try it out with me, go ahead. Use the new Email Newsletter sign-up widget to the right. Let me know what you think.

If you are receiving my posts by email, via AWeber, I anticipate migrating you to the new service. More on this later. Just know I’ll do the heavy lifting for you.

So, now its time to get on with the Show! I’m eager to get back to writing, sharing my thoughts with you. New posts, on their way real soon.

Thanks!

JT…

(image credit: mokra)

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Social Media & Product Management (Pt. 4)

JT — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 18:47:37 +0000

(Part 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 See also, supplement)

Continuing the discussion of employing social media as a component of the product management toolset…

Advertising

Product management is a role defined differently by almost every company. Product management tends to focus on the holistic view of a product: lifecycle, customer expectations, feature specifications, roadmaps, and so on. Product marketing tends to look at messaging, advertising, and promotion. Crude, but sufficient for our purposes.

In the context of product management it may seem strange then to discuss the advertising aspects of social media. After all, if you’re thinking about what features you’re going to put into your product or service, ‘advertising’ seems premature. Right?

Despite what zealots may profess, even now most people do not fully understand social media, tending to simply lump ‘social media’ offerings together without distinction. That is perhaps no more true than for product management professionals. Consider the 2009-2010 Pragmatic Marketing Survey, that asked: Do you use social media to listen to the market? 62% of respondents said No. Only 27% use social media personally and another 11% ‘as an individual or as the company.’

What Are the Options?

There are a number of online advertisers available. You are likely familiar with Google AdWords. Perhaps less familiar are relatively new offerings such as LinkedIn Ads, and Facebook Ads. The latter two are relatively new and growing in popularity.

Even though there is similar functionality (e.g. you can loosely, or tightly narrow your ad’s visibility), each has a distinctly different audience. Google AdWords lets you reach the largest audience. LinkedIn and Facebook focus on business professionals or social interests respectively. If your focus is a B2B customer, you may wish to leverage AdWords. If your focus are church youth program administrators, you will prefer Facebook.

Here is why considering social media advertising, as part of product management can be important:

AdWords is actually a cheap and highly reliable wind tunnel you can rent by the click to discover and validate your market… (Howie Jacobson, HBR Blog Network)

I am really happy I discovered Howie’s article because its well worth reading (link). he points out that most people simply think of site like AdWords (LinkedIn Ads, Facebook Ads, etc.) as, "…a [way] to generate leads and sales from online searchers."

Some practical examples to show how ‘running an ad’ can be used to improve (your) product or service.

Book Title Selection (via Howie)
Timothy Ferriss and his publisher wanted to find a title for his upcoming book. They used AdWords to test several titles. Search feedback provided feedback they had not anticipated.
New Features, Pricing
When considering development of new features, one of the hardest things to determine is market pricing and acceptance. These are typically key components of any Market Requirements Document (MRD) or related ROI justification. Running a ‘micro’ advertisement gives you the ability to test the market.Run multiple tests. What price points capture the most attention? Which product feature packages gain the best reception? Best part: applies to online and ‘off’line products—anything people may search for.
Alternative Focus Groups
Tightly target advertisements to specific customers. I really like Alec Brownstein’s approach. Looking for work, he ran an AdWords campaign specifically targeting individual people he wanted to engage. Cost of his campaign, $6. Might you have a person, or group, that you’d like to query…for $10. What could you do with $100?

Between the Lines

A key product management skill is the ability to read between the lines. To see trends, connections, needs, and desires, where others have not. And then, you need to test your findings.

Consider this a unique opportunity to be innovative in your role as product manager. Who says the marketing folks are the only ones that can expense their AdWords efforts?

Image credit: Dominik Dwarek

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Social Media & Product Management (Pt. 3)

JT — Mon, 05 Dec 2011 23:33:29 +0000

(Part 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 See also, supplement)

Continuing the discussion of employing social media as a component of the product management toolset…

Media

For fear of being long-winded, I had chosen to skim the top regarding Media. In hindsight, I’ve decided to step back a moment and expand on my comments in Part 2.

Yes, Media is the multi-faceted mechanism enabling interaction between participants. However, from the content creator’s perspective one might look at it this way:

Networking
Aggregators & Curators
Outposts/Websites

Networking…
or relationship building, is perhaps the ‘meat and potatoes’ of social media. All of it, ultimately boils down to two or more parties wanting to form a relationship with one another. In some cases, as in the case of companies, it can take the form of an individual giving a ‘face’ to the company they work for.

For instance, Ford Motor Company has received numerous kudos for its successful social media efforts. The person most singularly responsible is Ford’s won Scott Monty. Scott tweets, uses Google+, and other venues to build relationships with Ford’s customers.

Robert Scoble did much the same for Microsoft. As an evangelist working at Microsoft from 2003-2006, he regularly interacted with customers. They did well for each other. His relationship with Microsoft certainly gave me a credible platform to lean against. Yet, most importantly, by lending his ‘face’ to Microsoft, he lent a touch of humanity to a company frequently thought of as big, ugly, arrogant, and heartless. And his followers loved him for it.

Perhaps the best example, is @ComcastCares. Frank Eliason was Comcast’s Director of Digital Care. He came up with the idea to create the Twitter personality, ComcastCares. Customers could tweet their problems and ComcastCares quickly, actively, dove into solving their problem. I’ve interacted with @ComcastCares and can tell you it’s better than the 800#.

In each example, a single person built powerful relationships—with millions of others—through social media.

Aggregators & Curators…
are platforms letting consumers easily share their social networking experiences and discoveries. Stumbleupon is a perfect example. You can tell the service what things you find of interest, and it will make recommendations for you. These recommendations are found by people, like you, that ‘stumble upon’ things of interest, and tag them.

Another very good example of an aggregator, is Alltop. Think of Alltop as your very own newspaper. Alltop provides a broad range of categories populated with content from sites around the world. You can simply view their most popular stories for each segment. Or, you can build your own front page, or MyAlltop, by selecting those news sources you have found of interest.

A key benefit of these aggregators, or curators, is that they help consolidate the seemingly infinite amount of content on the internet. Further, they help sift the wheat from the chaff as it were, helping good content rise to the top. Much easier than wading through reams of search results, no one link better than the next.

Outposts & Websites

If you’re actively using social media, it is almost a certainty that you use more than one service. For instance, you may maintain a blog, promote your products via your website, tweet to those interested in what you offer, have friends on facebook, and be exploring Google+. (Note, I am only using the big, recognizable names. There are thousands of lesser-known, niche-oriented offerings.) Each of these can be thought of as ‘outposts.’

What is key in your social media efforts, is that you have—however simplistically—a basic strategy in mind. You need to have a primary outpost to which all your other ‘satellite’ outposts point back to. For instance, if you have a blog, it should take zero effort for a reader to get to you primary product site, if that’s what it is. If you use Twitter, your profile and comments should point toward your primary outpost.

Each outpost serves a specific function. You can use your blog to express the day’s thoughts; as product manager, what new directions is the team thinking of? You can use Twitter to call attention to your blog; Hey, Everybody: My day’s new thoughts are posted! You can develop very visible discussion using Google+, facebook, or even LinkedIn.

Chris Brogan is one of the world’s foremost bloggers and social media evangelists. His focus: Helping People. He’s written a good article, "What’s Your Communication and Media Plan?" offering yet another take for you.

image credit: Ayhan Yildiz