Make sure you have autotest-rails gem installed.

My brother and I caught this fish right off the beach at dusk at Sanibel Island last month. (My brother hooked it, I fought it for 15 minutes and brought it in, that’s my dad holding it for the camera.)

It’s been nearly 11 months since I last played a pickup game of basketball at a gym. I went down to Beechmont Racquet Club this evening with my family, was just shooting around with Emerson, and lo and behold it was men’s hoops night.

When I first started shooting around a few months ago, I was horrible. But I’ve shot around about 5 times now, and I was actually shooting quite good tonight (made 12 free throws in a row, hit like 5 threes in a row).

So I decided to give it a try. My physical activity/strength/flexibility has improved a bunch over the past month or so. I still can’t “run”, but I can jog.

I was careful—and pretty nervous. I did manage to score once in my team’s 12-7 loss, got a steal (pass interception), 3 rebounds, and an assist or two. I was slow as hell, but luckily there were 2 games going on and the courts were running sideways, so I was able to camouflage it well enough.

But it was very exciting, and definitely a milestone in my Achilles rupture injury recovery. Just in case someone out there is going through a similar injury, there is light at the end of the tunnel.

Before doing anything (in business), keep asking “WHY” until you get to the root reason for doing it.

If what you come up with is anything but

• increase revenue
• protect revenue
• reduce cost

don’t do it. It’s non-productive busy work.

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I was thinking — I wonder if there is a country in the world with a constitution like the United States Constitution that hasn’t drifted as far towards socialism as the United States has. I’m too lazy to search for that… but while I was thinking of that, I had an idea for Canada.

What if it adopted the original US Constitution, implemented the FairTax, incentives for establishing & growing businesses, and gave special incentives for Americans with annual incomes over $250k to relocate? It would be a bold, bold move, and I think they could “steal” a lot of America’s wealth.

I’d very seriously consider moving across our northern border.

What have we come to?

Great read for web application geeks: http://hurvitz.org/blog/2008/06/linkedin-architecture

Interesting narrative on how they started with a monolithic app, and eventually broke it down both vertically (services) and horizontally (partitioned by type and/or ID ranges), and how they surrender to the reality that the data isn’t going to be 100% up-to-date for all uses.

I was asked recently to share my thoughts on what the role of a product manager should be (related to B2B intangible services). It’s a complex subject.

Experience Cycle

DDO has a paper on what it calls the Experience Cycle.

In a nutshell, I love the model, and I think it forms the core for what product managers should be focusing on.

1. connect & attract possible customers
2. orient them to the possibilities (i.e. product presentation, documentation, demos, trial account)
3. interact with the product/service, with a good experience as the outcome
4. extend & retain, develop customer loyalty
5. help them become an advocate, communicating their satisfaction with other people

They break down Apple at the end of the PDF, which has some of the best managed brands on the planet.

Google Product Development Product

Evelyn Rodriguez posted her notes from a talk about how Google focuses on user-centered design, using small, agile teams (like startups) to develop ideas.

“If you build something users will use, there will be a way to make money.”

“Good quality, by itself, improves usage.”

1. Build something that is valuable to people.
2. Monetize it (with separate monetization team)

I think this Google stuff is very complimentary to the Experience Cycle content from DDO.

So my “short answer”, with evidence from two very successful brands I admire, is this:

“The essence of product management is designing, creating, improving, and monetizing customer journeys.”

Great consultant-speak, but what about execution?

For existing product, I think execution =

• Maintain or improve product quality (& customer experience)
• Monetization (attract customers, clearly communicate potential benefits of product usage, getting them to buy, keeping them happy & getting them to renew, and hopefully getting them to talk about us in a positive way)

We can change the language, to be less consultant-speak or put it in specific terms for our projects.

• Assign a small team (2-3 people) to manage the product/project. Don’t make the error of assigning one person solo. A small team helps ensure continuity of knowledge & healthy peer pressure to perform.
• Their mission: 1) ongoing monetization 2) improving customer experience.
• How to accomplish the mission is up to them. They should feel free to find customers directly, or to try to sell product through the existing sales force—let them decide how to grow revenues and improve user experience, with assistance from specialists & executives, as requested.

Of course, you have to have good people for it to work, of course, since each project acts as a mini-startup.

Business Initiatives are a Form of Art

Leonardo da Vinci once said “Art is never finished, only abandoned.”

Whenever we’re attempting to develop a new project, refine an existing product, reorganize a department, re-envision the brand (really any business initiative or project), execution requires significant creativity. These sorts of projects, like art, are never finished, only abandoned.

You might be saying “no.” If we reorganize the department, the project can be called “done”, we can move on. I argue that if you analyze WHY you reorganized, you’ll uncover an underlying unachievable ideal. You reorganized the sales department because you wanted to MAXIMIZE THE EFFECTIVENESS OF YOUR SALESFORCE, an initiative that is perpetual.

You redesigned your website in order to IMPROVE CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE. An ideal that cannot ever be fully realized.

Very little project management software supports this worldview, that projects are never finished, only abandoned. So I’ve been thinking about how software like that might work.

Products are like Fireworks Shows

Products are like fireworks shows. If you put on a good fireworks show, people expect you to do it bigger & better next year. To meet their expectations, you need to plan an escalating annual budget.

Products should be work the same way. If you spent $50k on a product in 2008, plan to spend $75k in 2009, and $100k in 2010. Don’t fool yourself into thinking that there was some upfront investment in year 1, and that year 2 can require 1/2 the investment.

Yes you can skimp in year 2. However, your “fireworks” are not going to impress anyone—your audience will see that you cut your budget in 1/2. And YOU FAILED TO MAXIMIZING YOUR INITIAL INVESTMENT.

The metaphor is getting strange, and I know nothing about the real business of fireworks shows, so I move on to a better metaphor…

Project Portfolios Require Gardening

Smart business people are charismatic and results-driven, and sit in leadership & management roles. They tend to generating lots of great ideas. Let’s call these “seeds”.

They influence the organization to act on many ideas. Let’s call these germinating change initiatives “seedlings”. Taken individually, the idea was sound, the cost to get it started was low. It was a no-brainer to allocate resources to get started, to test out the idea a bit.

The problem is in aggregate. The resources required to tend the rapidly growing garden greatly surpass the organization capacity.

It’s FUN and seems very productive to grow a seed into a seedling. Unfortunately, that’s where the problems start…

The Overcrowded, Decaying Garden of Too Many Plants

The problem with many small businesses is that we often plant many seeds, grow many fragile seedlings, and then don’t dedicate adequate resources to continue to nurture these seedlings into maturity. Creative executives move on to the “next great idea”.

The landscape becomes crowded. And important initiatives of yesterday are temporarily dropped in order to focus on germinating some new idea. Decay sets in. What can we do?

See the Landscape

The software would need to help expose the landscape. What investments has the organization made? What is the state of those investments? Which important initiatives are being underfed? What initiatives should be terminated? Which need to be be pruned or changed?

IS THIS A PROBLEM YOUR BUSINESS FACES?

I’m curious if this is a generally universal problem, or perhaps I’ve just been exposed to a subset of industry where this problem seems to be most pervasive (web software companies).

Perhaps ERP software covers this off? I’ve not been exposed to ERP software, nor have I seen anything tailored to Small- and Medium-Sized Businesses (the market segment that I’ve spent my career focused on.)

So I was talking with Michael Guterl, about the lack of a true Ruby user group in town. Rather than complain about it, I whipped out http://cincinnatirb.org/.

There are some well-known Ruby people in town; I’m not one of them. Despite my lack of credentials, I do love Ruby and don’t totally suck, but more importantly, the time has come for a Cincinnati.rb.

Come one, come all, it’s open hacking night every night—we’re going to let the meeting drive itself to wherever it wants to go.

P.S. We’re flexible about meeting space, but we’ll kick it off at the RecruitMilitary HQ in Loveland on Nov. 17th for meeting #1 at least.

Drop us a note if you want to show up :)

I just blocked Barack Obama on Twitter… Felt good ;)

The past few months, I’ve been straddling working for two organizations at the same time. Phasing myself out in one, “trying out” for the other. From The Devine Group, Inc., I was transitioning from a VP/Information Technology role of the 20-person company. To RecruitMilitary, LLC, as Chief Experience Officer of the 55-person company, a position I accepted last week.

At Devine, my role was somewhat limited to IT. At RecruitMilitary, I will ensure that the experiences the organization delivers its stakeholders are a strategic advantage, not a liability. I’ll work to map out both present-day and ideal experiences, seek to understand experience expectations, identify “pain points”, and determine how to deliver better experiences for improved ROI. This will involve analysis & implementation of solutions to minimize/remove “choke points” in our processes. I’ll also be responsible for establishing and continuously improving core metrics for our online business model & products.

I feel fortunate to have been given the opportunity to design my own job, for the most part, and that I managed to make the transition without any loss of income at all. All while trying to recover from reconstruction surgery on my Achilles (which has been very trying, both emotionally + physically) and a new baby! I look forward to the possibility of a run of non-eventful months ;)

Morals of the story:

1. Blog—it creates visibility (the CEO of RecruitMilitary found me through this pathetic blog)
2. Design your own job—Good employers want you to be happy in your day-to-day work, they know your productivity is tied to it.

1. SPAGHETTI FLOWS FREELY: The codebase is large enough to require some refactoring, but very little of it has ever been done.
2. OUTDATED PLATFORM: The site is using outdated technology that no good developer really wants to touch anymore (i.e. Microsoft ASP, data-processing-centric Java, VB.NET, etc.)
3. EXPERIENCE SUCKS: The site is ugly, hard-to-use, etc.

If your app passes on any of the three, it may be worth salvaging the app. 3 strikes, it’s out.

Side note… who is to blame for an application to get to the point that it needs tossed out the door? If resources were unreasonably constrained by non-IT management against the recommendations made by IT, then the non-IT management is to blame. However, if IT never asked for additional resources to avoid the 3 strikes, then it must take full responsibility for the impending death of a codebase.

It’s been 6 weeks since surgery, 8 weeks since the rupture.

I went to see my doctor today. Here’s what I learned:

• I am allowed to put as much weight on my left foot as possible without major pain.
• He told me to go down to one crutch when I feel ready for it.
• I got my “prescription” to begin physical therapy.
• I’ll get to ditch the boot in 4 weeks, and so will end “the summer of the boot.”

It’s still a long, long road back, but each stage is getting more bearable.

I’ll never take for granted the “miracle of walking” again :)