flights

Have you ever noticed the way American beer commercials emphasize packaging gimmicks? The wide-mouth can. The label that turns blue when it’s cold. The easy-pour vent. The shelf pack that fits better in your fridge.

Are there people who peruse the beer aisle thinking, “hmm… you know I really enjoy [favorite microbrew/import], but it pours all splashy, and I can’t tell if it’s cold without picking it up. I guess I’ll take the Coors.”

In the same vein, I was listening to the radio the other day, and a commercial for Miller Lite came on. Apparently, they took the top award for “American Style Light Lager” at the World Beer Cup in 1996, ’98, ’02 and ’06. Well whoop-dee-doo. American Style Light Lager? Really? There’s an award for that? How many beers could possibly be competing in the American Style Light Lager category? “American Style” itself narrows the field quite a bit, since American microbreweries typically produce traditional European style beers. This leaves you with just the big brands. When you add “Light” to the mix, you’re down to what, three beers? And Miller Lite is bragging that they won the top award only four times in the last twelve years.

The thing is, I don’t actually have a problem with the taste of some of the big brand American beers. I’m more than happy to drink MGD at a ball game.

They way these guys mostly brag about the packaging though, you’d think they’re embarrassed about their own product.

I was reminiscing with my colleagues yesterday about the dawn of the ATM machine. We were remembering how, when banks first started to install them, they all used to charge you a small fee for the convenience of using it – whether you belonged to the bank or not. Thankfully, banks abandoned this practice, although many will still charge you for using an “out-of-network” ATM.

When I was in Singapore doing some consulting for Singapore Airlines, they weren’t really down with the whole e-ticket thing. Labor is cheap in Southeast Asia, so travel agents are still the main outlet for sales of airline tickets. One of our initiatives with Singapore Airlines was to expand their e-ticketing capabilities, and we had to repeatedly push back on their desire to demand a convenience fee.

We poked fun at notoriously-stingy Singapore Airlines about this behind their backs. It all seems so archaic, but I still occasionally run into service fees here and there – like when I buy baseball game tickets online, as I did today.

So let’s get this straight… I’m making things more convenient for you, so you want to charge me a fee.

Actually, I suppose it’s more convenient for both of us, which is apparently a problem. So your fee is designed to counter-balance this dangerous increase in net convenience?

Just like the “patriot” act, this “convenience” thing isn’t fooling anyone. Let’s come up with a better name for your fee.

How about simply, an INconvenience fee? Maybe a We’re Sorry fee? Sucka fee?

I can barely remember now, but before the age of MapQuest (and, subsequently, Google Maps), if I needed to go somewhere I’d never been to before, I rarely planned my route. If, for example, I wanted to go to a furniture store in a suburb on the other side of town, my process went something like this…

1. Get in the car and start driving in the general direction of my destination.
2. Once in the general vicinity of the destination, consult a map or get exact directions from a knowledgeable human.

This makes perfect sense to certain kinds of people, but various of my friends and past significant others found it absolutely maddening. How can a person get in a car and start driving if they don’t know exactly where to go?

I was thinking about this today in the context of product development. Recently, I wrote about the value of “process,” and I think this makes for a pretty good analogy.

The Web is a very forgiving platform in the sense that building things for it is very easy, and making changes is often trivial. It’s all just pixels and code. I love this because it allows for experiments and mistakes. It encourages mistakes, because you can learn and adjust so quickly.

I have no problem putting something imperfect into the hands of the crowd and then watching it to see how and where it falls short – within reason. If the breaking of something will result in loss of life, or a lot of money, I’m very very careful of course, but such situations are rare.

I have no “brand” to protect – or, rather, a willingness to experiment is consistent with my “brand” – so this is easy for me.

What’s really difficult sometimes, though, is to get clients and stakeholders to feel comfortable with things unfinished and imperfect. Companies are understandably careful about everything they unveil that has their mark on it. When careful goes too far, however, one pitfall is a culture of fear, where people are afraid to make mistakes or deviate from what is safe and known and familiar. This is the same kind of culture where people are unwilling to deliver bad news to the boss.

Not to venture too far into another analogy, but I once had a music teacher say to me, “if you’re going to make a mistake, make it loud.”

I love this philosophy, but to make it work for a company or a client requires certain controls. Some options are…

• Brand it with beta. This is a popular Web 2.0 approach. Just put a “beta” badge on it, and people will know it’s a work-in-progress.
• Launch a laboratory. Google and Digg have pretty nifty public ones.
• Encourage your employees. There’s no encouragement like time and money. Google, again, is the obvious example. They famously encourage their employees to use 20% of their time to work on side projects. Some of these – like Gmail – have become key parts of Google’s portfolio.
• Limit exposure. Create a panel of people with whom you can share your wild ideas and works-in-progress. Or do live A-B testing, where the experimental stuff is only put in front of people who meet certain criteria.

That’s four ideas, and there are certainly lots more, so get in the car and start driving. Make loud mistakes.

In this week’s installment of his ‘Circuits’ column, David Pogue asks, “Are you taking advantage of Web 2.0?” By ‘you’ he means your company, and he describes the response this question got from the attendees at a recent PR conference:

“…within seconds, there were 132 responses on the screen in a huge, scrolling list. ‘Not enough money.’ ‘Don’t understand it.’ ‘No technical resources.’ ‘Not enough manpower.’ ‘No visible return on investment.’ ‘Fear of ridicule.’ ‘Fear of slander.’ ‘Fear of permanence.’ ‘Fear of the public running amok.’”

There are lots of common fears in there, and they’re all reasonable at first glance. Companies are understandably afraid of opening themselves up to ridicule and slander from a public running amok, knowing that all the messy results will live forever, just a Google search away. And they’ve seen some embarrassing failures from companies who’ve tried to embrace the new paradigm – like the Chevy Tahoe debacle, and Wal-Mart’s fake blog (or flog) scandal, to name just two incidents. So the safest bet is to simply stay away from all things Web 2.0.

The problem with this approach, obviously, is that the public is already running amok. That’s what the public does. If they want to slander you, they have YouTube and MySpace and a million other places to do it. Sticking your head in the sand doesn’t make all this stuff go away. It just makes your company look silly – or worse, aloof, uncaring and behind the times – and ultimately more vulnerable to whatever mud they might be slinging.

So if it’s unwise – or unrealistic – to stay out of the fray, then what’s the best strategy for jumping in? The other questions from the PR conference attendees fall into this category. More and more companies have recognized the need to participate, but they don’t know where to focus or how much to invest.

There are lots of success stories. Big companies like Dell and Mariott have generated good will and good press through their forays into Web 2.0, and this has surely translated into dollars. But it still comes down to the question of ROI. If one of the ultimate goals of embracing Web 2.0 is to engender good will, then how do you quantify it? How do you measure success?

‘h’ is for hypocrisy.

If the premier selling point of a hybrid vehicle is fuel economy, then you have to wonder why Lexus won’t reveal how economic the 600h actually is. This information is nowhere on the Lexus website or in most of the 3rd party reviews.

It took me some digging, but I did finally find a review that addresses the fuel economy of the 600h and as you might guess from all the secrecy, it’s not great. In fact, Lexus estimates the 600h will only get about 20mpg in the city, which is just 4mpg better than the non-hybrid LS 460. Bad, but not terrible for a big luxury car I suppose. But how about the fact that the 600h will only get 22mpg on the highway, which is worse than the 460. All this for $110,000.

The bottom line is the 600h is a stupid novelty designed to help limousine liberals feel better about themselves. And based on the latest Lexus commercials – where they make the ‘h’ out to be a kind of badge of moral superiority – they seem to know it.

Two thumbs way down Lexus.

A couple of times in my career as a User Experience professional, I’ve worked for bosses whom I considered to be ridiculously (some even dangerously) incompetent. One recent boss would stroll in at 10 am and leave at 3 every day. Even during his limited hours, we rarely saw him, and I can’t remember him pushing a single initiative or idea in the years I worked at that company.

At a busy agency chock full of brilliant, hard-working people, he seemed to maintain a low profile and accomplish nothing. Nevertheless, he was promoted twice while I was there, and shortly after I left, he was promoted once again – this time to the highest-profile User Experience position in the company.

He mastered his career without doing his job. We’ve all worked with people like this, and they’re easy to dislike. Their singular skill is building alliances with people who can affect their career trajectory. They might appear to have a low profile, but they are determined in their back-channel dealings. The worst of them are passive-aggressive and two-faced, never missing an opportunity to take more credit for something than they are due, or stab someone else in the back.

How to recognize them
In job interviews, they spend an inordinate amount of time haggling for more salary and better titles. Once they’re hired, they take full advantage of executives’ open door policies. They figure out which ones they can manipulate, and they spend a lot of time behind closed doors with them. Eventually, this extends to lunches, golf outings and more, where they have ample opportunity to spin stories of their own greatness and the incompetence of everyone else.

What to do about them
If they have cast their spells on the right people, there’s not much you can do. If you work at a company where the execs are fooled by people like this, then update your resume and move on.

What to do if you’re one of them
If you’re one of these people, then you don’t know it. You think you’re awesome, and although most of your colleagues can’t stand you, the ones who can help your career are in your court. Congratulations.

At the other end of the spectrum are people who excel at their jobs but struggle to move onward and upward in their careers. In fact, being great at your job can almost guarantee career paralysis. Your company won’t promote you because it would mean replacing you with someone inferior. On the plus side, these people are much more likable than the back-stabbing, two-faced good-at-career people. You just feel a little sorry for them (or yourself, if you’re in this category) as you repeatedly watch less-qualified people zoom by in the passing lane.

Sometimes these people are vindicated – Al Gore didn’t secure the presidency, but he eventually won an Oscar – but you can’t count on it. And, come to think of it, an Oscar pales in comparison to the most important job on the planet.

How to recognize them
They are the go-to people for solving actual business problems, so their names come up all the time in ad hoc work conversations and meetings – often preceded by “go ask…” These people are in high demand, and they’re always busy with actual work.

What to do about them
If you’d like to see them get that well-deserved promotion, then sing their praises in conversations with key people (the same ones the good-at-career folks are always having lunch with). Be specific about the role you can see them stepping into.

What to do if you’re one of them
You probably know you’re more skilled and more qualified than the people who’ve passed you by, and you’re a bit baffled. You need to get on the radar of the people who can take you places. Start acting a little like the leader you want to be. Figure out how to delegate some of your busy work, then carve off a meaningful bit of your boss’s job for yourself – with his or her blessing of course.

The guys at 37 Signals have a list of what they call “red flag” words that often come up in business communications and can get teams into trouble. Words like “only” and “can’t” (as in, it should only take you a day to add this feature, and we can’t ship the product without it) lead down rat holes of feature creep and finger pointing.

For me, one of those red flags is “what if…”

What ifs are the sparks that ultimately generate every interesting, fresh, unconventional idea. They are the stuff of all the brainstorm sessions and experiments that characterize the really exciting parts of the product development process. What ifs produce ideas, and ideas are easy, so when a team is in the slog of getting things done, it’s hard not to get way ahead of them with lots of big and interesting ideas. You start to anticipate every possible scenario and edge case. You think about ways your product might tap into new markets before you’ve even addressed its core market.

Ideas are also impatient. They pile up behind the older ideas, and they push and they push until a few get through. And then a few more, and a few more, and while you may have started with something simple, you now risk ending up with this:

(Click thumbnail to enlarge. Photo courtesy John Maeda)

On the other hand, what ifs can be part of a sanity check. Asking “what if…” can be like hitting the pause button, allowing you to step back, size things up and gauge whether they’re on track. What ifs can also help you subtract and simplify. It’s a great exercise to look at your ideas and ask, “what if we got rid of…” and “what if it just…”

I think the “It’s about time” clock is a great example of this kind of thinking:

These guys asked themselves how many people really need precision around what time it is and effectively said, “what if clocks only told you what you need to know – in plain English?”

This isn’t to say that thinking small is always better than thinking big. Each has its place, but either way, “what if…” is a phrase to look out for in business communications. When you hear it, make sure it’s leading you in the right direction.

In my post yesterday, I questioned the value of “process” in web and software development and discussed my successes and failures both with and without it. The biggest problem with process is that it deludes people into thinking they have the fundamentals in place to guarantee a successful project. Process is too often a crutch in this way.

Over the course of decade and a long list of projects, I’ve worked with variations of waterfall, agile, RUP and other methodologies, and I’ve also done my share of winging it with no formal process at all. Process or not, I’ve learned that the successful projects I’ve worked on all had certain ingredients in common. Namely…

Smart people.
This is a no-brainer, but a team of smart people is key because smarter people work faster, make fewer mistakes and are able to adapt to unforeseen changes. All it takes is a one weak link, however, to cause things to break. You can’t rely on smart people alone.

Leadership.
A film has both a producer and a director. A restaurant has a chef, a manager and a maître d’. People need freedom to lead their respective domains, but smart people inevitably disagree with each other, and smart people without a recognized leader is a recipe for scope creep in the worst possible way. Everyone wants to put their best work into the mix, and a committee approach encourages quantity of ideas. Ultimate power needs to roll up to a single, clear authority with the tools to make good decisions and resolve conflicts within the team.

Constraints.
Frank Lloyd Wright once said, “Man built most nobly when limitations were at their greatest.” Jason Fried of 37 Signals says, “Embrace constraints.” Artists recognize that constraints help focus one’s creativity. In web and software development, constraints usually come in the form of hard deadlines or agreements around scope (often a bit of both). But constraints must be balanced with “a healthy disregard for the impossible,” as Marissa Ann Mayer – VP of search products and user experience at Google – put it. Innovative ideas by nature will often push at the very edges of constraints, so there should be some flexibility. The key to balancing constraints with a “disregard for the impossible” are good filters for managing new ideas. Which brings me to…

Filters.
You don’t want to discourage innovative, unconventional ideas, but you need some way to filter them. The same goes for the more typical dynamics that lead to scope creep. Stakeholders second guess their decisions. Important customers complain about something or make specific requests. Some jackass in a meeting spouts off about some edge case, and boom… more stuff to cram into the project. Leadership (see above) is important here, and so are constraints like deadlines and scope. New ideas mean an increase in scope, which means moving the deadline. Either that, or something already in scope drops out. Each incoming idea needs to be considered, scoped and prioritized against everything else. Edge-case thinking just needs to be stopped. This is what I mean by filters – a change-management process that the team leader needs to enforce. Too often, outside ideas are subject to this process, but ideas originating within the team get a free pass. Filters need to apply to everyone equally.

Simplicity.
This is its own kind of filter. The team and the stakeholders need to understand the essence of the thing they are building. They need to look at it holistically and know what it needs to do in order to be considered complete. It’s important not to look at features in isolation, because this encourages people to explore every possible expression of every nook and cranny of every feature (edge cases again). Instead, the team needs to determine only what is essential to each feature as it relates to the whole. Finally, the team needs to understand that the product can grow and evolve after it’s launched, so “complete” doesn’t mean perfect.

An understanding of “X” factors.
I mean “X” as in multiply. There is a list of things that add risk to a project and multiply its challenges and complexity. I’ll discuss these in detail in a follow-up post, but among them are:

• nature of client
• size and “spread” of team
• complexity and novelty of the thing being built
• time between designing and building
• depth of QA
• distance – with regard to both time and personnel – between deployment and maintenance

Good Tools.
Smart people can survive with just email and whiteboards. That might be the bare minimum, but I’ve had good experience using wikis and simple PM-ware like Basecamp.

Padding.
Because shit happens. A good project manager knows it’s necessary to add 50% to every individual person’s estimate of time and effort, and then add another 20% or so across the board for good measure.

A good contract.
Too many contracts are essentially crafted by BD people who don’t understand what a project will really take, and who don’t have a vested interest in whether it actually succeeds. Too many contracts fail to consider the “X” factors, or encourage constraints, simplicity or leadership.

Transparency.
Otherwise known as communication. But “communication” is a cliche, and every team thinks it’s doing a good job communicating to stakeholders. The bottom line is, stakeholders need a strong consensus around the essence of the thing being built. They need to understand the change-management process (filters), and they need to see steady progress.

Even knowing all this, I’ve still worked on projects that have gone awry. But it has always been because we failed to follow something on this list. The good news is, when a new project starts to take a southward turn, I just take an inventory of the ingredients above, and when I identify what’s missing, it’s usually not too late to put the project back on track.

UPDATE: There’s a Part 2 now.

When I started in the web development business about a decade ago, I worked at a small agency with a few smart people, and we were basically winging it. As the dotcom bubble expanded at a frenzied pace, we grew along with it, and inevitably we had a couple of projects take sharp turns south. People suffered on both sides, and it became clear that winging it was not scalable.

We needed a process – one we could articulate to clients, propagate through the organization and of course put into action in a repeatable way.

This is what “process” is supposed to do. It exists to mitigate unpleasant surprises by telling stakeholders what they can expect from a project. It’s also supposed to save teams from continually reinventing the wheel.

I worked with my bosses at that first agency job to define such a process, and we were very proud when it was complete. Some months later I left that job for an agency on the West coast. As it happened, I arrived just as this company too was in the midst of a campaign to define a process. People from every part of the agency worked on it for weeks, and the final product was a lovely thing to behold. We made posters for the office, and glossy booklets to give to would-be clients.

My next company – a large telecom – used a version of RUP that was the most over-engineered process I’ve ever experienced. When they laid me off, I returned to the agency world. I worked for two of the biggest interactive agencies, and both had processes that were beautifully-rendered in company collateral.

It might not surprise you to learn that all of these processes looked pretty much the same on paper – characterized by big phases with catchy labels. In fact it was only in these labels where the various processes really differed – one company’s “explore” is another’s “discover.” Even the language the agencies used to sell their respective processes was the same, with a lot of emphasis on words like flexible, adaptable and proven.

Finally, it’s worth adding that all of my agency work was in the service of clients who had their own processes, so at one time or another I’ve had to use variations of waterfall, RUP, agile, spiral and triple lindy. Kidding about that last one.

They all share similarities, but the really striking thing these processes have had in common in my experience is how quickly they broke down and became meaningless when put into practice – even by solid teams of nothing but smart people.

I had been a big believer in process, but because of repeated failures I eventually came to see the whole idea of “process” as a fantasy designed to woo clients and placate bosses. I began to believe that assembling a small team of really smart people and simply allowing them to wing it is the right approach after all.

At the very least, this approach doesn’t raise false hopes. If projects are destined for chaos or collapse, isn’t better not to expect them to go smoothly in the first place?

I’m joking of course. There are many reasons projects go south, and there are many ways to help make sure they don’t. Working within the framework of a heavy duty process is not the solution, but having no process at all amounts to blind luck, because successful projects depend on the right mix of a whole range of ingredients that aren’t likely to converge if you’re just winging it.

This is starting to run a bit long, so I’m going to push the rest to a sequel. In Part 2 of this series on process, I’ll talk about the ingredients that need to converge to make sure projects go well.

Starbucks To Begin Sinister ‘Phase Two’ Of Operation read the headline from The Onion. That was 2001, and Starbucks was heading for world domination. Seven years later, domination is accomplished, but it’s not all it’s cracked up to be. The stock price has slumped badly, reflecting drops in both sales and general affection for the chain and all it represents.

So, yesterday evening, in a highly-publicized move, Starbucks closed all of its nearly 7,100 locations. A sinister phase two, as The Onion prophesied? Apocalypse imminent? Or simply a company-wide huddle to “teach their employees how to make coffee,” as several snarky bloggers put it.

The official word from Starbucks spun it, essentially, as a publicity stunt designed to demonstrate one company’s commitment to quality…

At the training sessions, managers instructed workers to make sure it takes between 15 to 19 seconds for each espresso shots to pour from the machine so they come out like honey dripping from a spoon. They urged workers to stop resteaming milk and only steam fresh milk, to let espresso shots sit for no more than 10 seconds and to pour foam onto drinks instead of scooping it with a spoon. Managers also told baristas to thank customers, smile and make eye contact when they hand off their drinks. Many of the teaching points already were official policy but weren’t being practiced consistently, managers said.

This morning I decided to test their new brew and sure enough, right there on a chalkboard behind the counter it said, “We promise your coffee will be perfect every time.”

As I stood in line, I glanced over at the lanky young clerk standing behind the pastry case. He smiled at me in a calm, closed-lipped sort of way, and I smiled back. When it was my turn to order, I asked the smiling girl behind the counter for a single espresso, served in a real demi-tasse instead of a paper cup. In Starbucksian – a dialect similar to Italian – a “single” is called a “solo,” but the girl didn’t correct me or ask for a clarification, which was already a notable improvement. She simply smiled at me in the same way as the pastry kid.

I handed her my money, and she smiled again. As I waited for my drink, I happened to glance at the pastry kid again. Smile. Another glance at the cashier girl. Smile.

A minute or so later, the barrista placed my espresso on the counter. I added half a teaspoon of sugar, swirled the cup to mix it in and then sipped it down.

It was tasty. A fine cup of espresso.

The Stepford smiles of the staff made me wonder about that Onion article, but mild creepiness aside, job well done.