Why Product Managers Need to be Involved in Implementation

Ok, it needs to be said - every Product Manager that has ever said to a developer "hey, I'm just the marketing guy." or "hey, I'm not responsible for the implementation." (which, btw, are my 2 favorite lines to say to a developer) is not doing their job.

I can show you why...

TD Bank has my money in Canada, but I'm wondering if I should trust them when they have UX design like this:
Why does their search look like the cockpit of a plane?

Are they purposefully making it difficult to find them to hedge against a bank run?

Are bank addresses more difficult to find than restaurant addresses?

Why are Yelp and Google Maps able to have search boxes like this? (just enter what you're "near")


I suspect, that doing a query across all these fields, or the "join" was deemed "too expensive" by TD's development team.

That's it - I'm taking my lifesavings and buying Google stock.

Ignoring the Buyer Purchase Decision Process Online

It has been an incredibly busy time over the last couple of weeks: SXSW, the post-SXSW SARS, board meetings, hiring, massive system failure on my Lenovo laptop. Despite all this, one of the talks at SXSW, "Peas in a Pod: Advertising, Monetization and Social Media" continues to bounce around in my head. The talk featured Kent Nichols (Ask a Ninja) and Tim Kendall (Facebook), Ellen McGirt (Fast Company) and Seth Goldstein (Socialmedia Networks). The talk was timely because Livemocha is thinking a lot about monetization these days, and advertising is certainly a candidate.

The premise of the talk was to address the well-publicized disappointment of social advertising. Essentially, advertisers are disappointed with the click through rates they've seen in advertisements surfacing on social networks. I actually experimented very briefly with Facebook ads, and I can verify that the performance wasn't nearly as good as what we're seeing on Google.

Depending on what you're selling, how you sell it is highly contextual.

The talk contained what seemed to be 2 un-spoken themes:
1. The success of your advertising is dictated by your goals (and your goals are dictated by where you're playing in the user's purchase decision-making process).

Anyone that has taken marketing 101 knows the purchase decision process, but in tech we're obsessed with advertising as a means of moving a user from evaluation of alternative->purchase. As a social advertiser, if purchase is your criteria for success, you'll be disappointed. The pop culture's current wisdom says, CTRs on Google are much better than social advertising because when I'm searching, I'm looking to buy. When I'm on a social networking site, my focus is on interacting with my friends.

The point is, sometimes advertisers aren't looking to sell something RIGHT NOW, their goal may be to stay top-of-mind, or be perceived as a premium brand.

Kent Nichols (ask a ninja) made a good point: Tech people's obsessions with automation and scale have made them myopic about advertising. Unless it's measurable, and repeatable tasks can be done in an automated way, we tend to shy away. Ask a ninja has been successful in acquiring sponsorships because he worked the old-fashioned-way: "networking/ having dinner with people who sweat" (those were his words). In other words, he recognized that his "Phoenix University" ads weren't performing well, so he sought sponsorship partners (Yes, there are more advertising options out there than just banner ads) who were looking for creative ways to promote their products further back in the decision making process.

2. There are 2 types of brands: aspirational and functional (or, NO I don't want to play a video game about soap)

With the launch of the Facebook Platform, we heard a lot about how Facebook Apps are a great way for brands to engage their users. Further, Facebook Pages allow me to express my support for a specific brand so my friends know I love Mac computers or Nike shoes, or whatever the case may be. The idea here is to extend the school yard "cool kid" influencer to the online world - my friend Andy is cool, and he likes Nike shoes, so I should get a pair too.

The problem is: not all brands lend themselves to aspiration. Maybe I think my Mac computer says something about me, but I don't personally identify with my soap, and certainly my friends don't care. The table here provides a break down of advertising options based on the advertiser's context.

I can understand the appeal of online games by clueless big brands, with stats like these being thrown around:

Predictions for the size of the market for in-game advertising by 2010 range from $1.5bn, according to Citigroup, up to $1.8bn, according to Forrester. With the videogame industry being worth some $25bn in 2005, according to analysts PwC, it's clear that there is enormous scope for advertisers to work with the gaming industry.

But seriously, what was aquafresh thinking?

When Metrics are Distracting

I was thinking about my post yesterday because I'm spending a lot of time thinking about metrics, KPIs, analytics in general these days. In fact, I'm spending a disproportionate amount of my time thinking about metrics. Related to this is A-B and multivariate testing: relentlessly tweaking copy, imagery, and click paths to eek out a percent here and there. I hear stories "you won't believe how big a difference just changing one word makes!", but at the stage we're in, is this really the best use of our resources?

When I say "resources", I'm referring to the 10's of thousands of dollars on an analytics package, management's time scouring reports, my time taking the derivative of reports for management, the developers time parsing log files to get me the data and "tweaking" a word or image here or there. I'll be the first to admit these numbers, and this analysis is valuable, but if I were to represent it like this.

A Hypothetical Retention Graph:

Where I spend my time between week 1 and week 8 making tweaks. Of course, I can paint this hypothetical scenario in a way to prove my point, but what if each variant costs me and the rest of the team 10 units of effort per week? Then. between weeks 1 and 8, I spent 70 units of effort.

Now, what if the reason my hypothetical retention is low isn't because my copy is bad, or my hero image sucks, but because I have a core product issue?

Not to pick on Dogster (from my last post), but their issue wasn't copy, it was that their feature mix wasn't right. It took looking at their metrics to uncover the issue, but they didn't use their metrics to SOLVE the issue.

If you assume the effort to re-architect the site between weeks 8 and 9 also cost me 10 units, then there's a clear ROI given the results (my retention # significantly improved). But, even if the re-architecture cost me 100 units, I would argue it's the right thing to do:

• If you have a core product issue, then the product isn't healthy, and probably isn't a sustainable/ viable/ optimized business in it's current state. You'll need to take the plunge eventually.
  
• There's an opportunity cost to delaying the "hard decision" for 8 weeks. In those 8 weeks, retained users could be adding content, buying subscriptions, and clicking on ads!
  

When Sociality Takes a Back Seat

At SXSW last week, one of the best panels was "Start Up Metrics for Pirates": Dave McClure - 500 Hats (moderator), Ted Rheingold - Dogster, Todd Vernon - Lijit Hiten Shah - CrazyEgg Lance Tokuda - RockYou. I'd seen Dave McClure's presentation previously at Ignite Seattle, but having the other folks on the panel to provide applied examples of the metrics made the topic more relevant.

Ted Rheingold from Dogster provided his account of Dogster's loyalty issues. To quickly summarize:

• They were spending a tonne of money on Google Adwords
• The drove a tonne of traffic, and they were pumped.
  
• When they later looked at the loyalty numbers (the number of newly registered users that were returning) they were disturbed to find that most weren't returning.
• They did an audit of their Google Adwords keywords, and they noticed that the highest converting keywords were informational NOT social in nature. (no real surprise, people were searching for "boston terrier breed information" not "dog friends").
  
• Dogster redesigned their site to accommodate the information searcher. They de-emphasized their social networking component, and emphasized breed and animal ailment information.
  
• The result: they stopped spending money on Google Adwords and were driving traffic because the site was SEO-friendly (relevant-information-dense).
  

What Dogster and Livemocha have in common:

• Niche Social Networks: That is, unlike Facebook and Myspace which address a non-specific target audience, Dogster is a social network for dogs (and their humans), and Livemocha is a social network for language learning.
  
• Social Graph Comprised of Common Interests, not "Real World" Relationships: To put another way, just because I'm learning French, doesn't mean my friends are AND just because I have a boston terrier, doesn't mean my friends do.
  

Are common interests sufficient to drive strong online social ties? Clearly in the case of Dogster, it wasn't. It dawned on me during the talk that this was a perfect example of Josh Porter's Del.icio.us Lesson: Personal Value Precedes Network Value.

At Livemocha, we dodged this bullet because we built the social network as a feature to support our underlying value proposition. We looked at our goal (to help people to become communicative in a new language) in terms of a "language acquisition curve" that started with self-study (not particularly social) lessons, but gradually worked the user into the community as it benefits them.

... and, yes, in case you're wondering, here's Sousa's profile.

Livemocha Mention in New York Times

Can't ask for better press than this. The print edition goes out tomorrow.

From an academic perspective, this is an interesting case study in the effectiveness of online vs offline promotion AND mainstream vs "long tail of the blog-o-sphere" promotion because this press is so isolated (ie we don't currently have any other promotion happening right now other than this NYTimes article). Using analytics, I'll be able to see the # of visitors that have been referred from the NYTimes.com site, as well, I can see the increase in visitors (increase from to our typical visitor count independent of the NYTimes.com). So, Increase in visitors - Increase in visitors being referred by the NYTimes.com = Increase in visitors associated to NYTimes print edition. I wonder how online vs offline conversions will differ?

Also, this could help us make future ROI-based decisions wrt PR investment. Purely for example, if our current Google Advertising conversions cost $2.00, and we get 10k conversions as part of this press, then we break even if our firm costs us $20k.

That said, our "free" blog-press has resulted in almost 1300 blogs. It's hard to beat free.

Silicon Valley North(West)

For my entire academic and most of my professional career, I grew up in Canada's Tech Triangle, bordered by Kitchener-Waterloo-Cambridge; an area dominated by RIM and the University of Waterloo. This area didn't receive the label "Silicon Valley North" which was given to Ottawa; dominated by Nortel, Alcatel, Corel back in the day. Seattle, which has always been known as a "tech-ish center" thanks to MSFT and Boeing, got props from NYT's John Markoff today: Seattle Taps Its Inner Silicon Valley.

When I lived here to work for RIM, I didn't see much of the entrepreneur culture. At Livemocha, I've really enjoyed participating/ attending/ witnessing the action:

• Ignite Seattle: This is great. Put on my O'Reilly, a dozen folks get 5 minutes to hammer through a presentation on something geeky. I liked Dave McClure's Product Marketing Metrics for StartUps and Shawn Murphy's Hacking Chocolate.
• Refresh Seattle: Typically a speaker on something design related, then drinks in Ballard. I saw CommonCraft Lee Lefever give this talk on Community is Like Hosting a Party.
• StartPad: Pretty cool concept - basically it's an organization that offers shared space allowing startups to share costs and collaborate. They put on a session on OpenSocial a while back - no we're not building an app... yet.
  
• StartUp Weekend: I'm not this hardcore, but I like the idea. Teams of 8 compete over the course of a weekend to kick off their start up.

On related news, the Seattle 2.0 list came out today - Livemocha is #35!

Google's Elephant Named "Privacy"

I attended a talk on privacy at Google's Kirkland office on Thursday. It wasn't nearly as attended as I had expected, maybe 30 people, but that's probably because they scared people off by saying you could only attend one of the 3 sessions they have scheduled.

Wendy Seltzer, of Northeastern U, was the speaker and did a good job of providing a sort of "history of privacy" crash course. To summarize:

• Katz vs the US - basically, a man is charged because the FBI was snooping on a call from a public phone. The FBI position, "there was not physical intrusion" and his position, "yeah, but I (and society) have an expectation of privacy" in that context. The supreme court ultimately sided with Katz, but Seltzer raised the question, "How does the 'expectation of privacy' apply when we're posting all of our information on Facebook?"
• Netflix had a $1M contest asking someone to come up with an improved movie recommendation algorithm. Here's the scary question: can your movie recommendations be traced back to you? Does it matter? The answer is 'yes' (researchers reverse-engineered it) and 'yes' (because this teacher didn't get her teaching certificate due to the contents of her MySpace page).
  
• AOL's mishap over a year ago reads like a dark comedy. The example that Selzer gave was the discovering of the identity of a 62 year old woman "No. 4417749" that searched for : “numb fingers”, “60 single men”, “dog that urinates on everything.” I thought this was 'funny':

User 311045, possibly a Florida resident, is preoccupied with another topic as well:
how to change brake pads on scion xb
2005 us open cup florida state champions
how to get revenge on a ex
how to get revenge on a ex girlfriend
how to get revenge on a friend who fucked you over
replacement bumper for scion xb
florida department of law enforcement
crime stoppers florida

The net of it, according to Seltzer, was that future legislation needs to take into account the "context" of privacy violations. In other words, if I post a drunk picture of myself on Facebook, that's not intended for employers or the electorate, but for my friends only.

I'm not sure I agree.

• Ubiquity makes information "contextless": The availability of the information makes the "context" of this information indeterminable. It would be like painting my social security number on the side of a building and trying to claim that it's intended only for my wife.
• Legislation shouldn't replace personal responsibility: If I post my social security number publicly in Facebook, I'm sorry, it's my fault if my identity is stolen. This also assumes adequate public education, which may not be a fair assumption at this point. It never occurred to me that my searches and netflix activities paint such a clear picture of my identity.
  
• Legislation should protect from consolidation and broken promises: If two companies (say Google and Blogger) merge, both of whom I've consented to having my information, that doesn't mean I consent to my data being merged. If a company promises a level of privacy protection, and fails to do so, I should have recourse. Though, this just seems like standard contract law.
• Existing notions of privacy are antiquated: Society should fundamentally rethink personal privacy instead of trying to find technology and legislation to maintain our current notions. The genie's out of the bottle.
  

The silver lining in all this may be more transparent and authentic society where we accept that people get drunk on the weekend and not consider this a negative reflection of individual professionalism. :)