Why COOs love roundabouts

Approaching a roundabout one early morning last week, I was riding to work on my bike, crossing through Richmond Park. It was relatively quiet with a few cars and bikes and the deer were happily munching on grass in the fresh morning air.

I sailed through the roundabout without slowing down. Almost at the same time but not quite, another bike came through from another direction. And a few moments after that a car flew through. None of us slowed down, we didn't need to. It was all fluid, smooth and unintentionally synchronised.

At that time there was no need for a roundabout. We could have all managed without one. Later in the day however, with more traffic, a roundabout would become very beneficial. Someone had wisely built one.

A roundabout is both a physical technology and a social technology. Physical because it requires certain techniques and materials to build, social because it requires rules and behaviours to have benefit. We developed roundabouts to solve a volume and interaction problem.

Growing companies have the same challenges as the road traffic network. As volume and traffic builds, more processes and organisational structure (social technologies) are needed. Plus, more servers and work space are needed (physical technologies).

The CEO sets the direction. He/she says, "this the horizon we're headed towards and here's why". It's a "what" and a "why" focus. The COO however takes responsibility for how we reach that horizon, getting the right team together at the right time, building enough (but not too much process), find the best way to make the team perform together. It's a "who, when, how much" focus.

As a COO therefore I need to figure out if give way signs, roundabouts or traffic lights are needed. I need to build junctions and roads and I need to do so with a sharp eye on making sure the costs and revenues are supporting that investment.

With a tech start up, the COO role is particularly relevant. How many people to hire, in what order, how many servers to pay for, building systems for organisational effectiveness...these things are always important in any business, but in a tech start up the impact is amplified many times over. Some companies grow at 10 to 20 percent a year in revenue, people and infrastructure. For start ups, add a zero to any number. 10 times as fast. Traffic can hit your junctions pretty quickly and you need to know whether to put in place a give way sign, stop sign, roundabout, traffic lights or flyover.

That challenge of building a team and product to make possible a vision is one I love. I guess that's why I'm a COO. I love roundabouts.

Stay on the Yellow Brick Road

The path most travelled and the path of least resistance are often the same.

On a recent supermarket trip I was at the check-out.  I saw the usual chewing gum, cooking magazines, batteries and chocolate on display.  High profit items that customers impulsively buy as they wait to pay for the rest of their goods.  I wonder, if supermarkets had to rely on people only buying what they came to the shop to buy, would they actually make a profit at all?

On this occasion, I had to deal not only with the persuasion of my inner self ('hmmm, I really fancy some chocolate right now') but also with the persuasion of my kids who were asking for lollipops and magazines with free plastic toys.  To avoid giving in to my kids I felt it necessary to not yield to myself as well.  In the process, our local supermarket missed a few extra pounds profit and our family saved some unnecessary expense.

Marketing folks have of course always understood that to generate a customer response they need to place the goods and services as close to the customer's existing path as they possibly can.  The supermarket checkout is a classic example and has been taken to new extremes these days by almost every retailer.  If I try and buy a bottle of water at the airport at the newsagent or chemist I will inevitably meet with a queuing system that sees me waiting for the next available checkout whilst I have a chance to view almost all the high profit impulsive purchase products that the retailer has to offer.  Chocolates, crisps, suncream, ear-plugs, travel pillows, tissues....the aim is to convert paying customers to higher paying customers.

Marketing folks online also get this.  Why do you think Google Adwords has been so successful at generating results for marketeers?  Because the potential customers are already there.  In this case the challenge is not to convert an existing customer, the challenge is to acquire a new customer.  As we know that potential customers are already on Google (and we know their intentions from their keywords) we can take advantage of their existing path and offer them our products and services.

Likewise with TV advertising.  You wouldn't ask parents to 'please come downtown tomorrow to view the new home cleaning product advert on a big screen'. No, you'd probably put the advert on a kids TV channel hoping they'd see it whilst they watch TV with their kids.

The best way to make change happen is to find and use the path most travelled.

Managers in businesses however don't quite get this.  If they have a program of change that they want to achieve, they need to think marketing and they need to think about distribution channels, paths and existing behaviours.  So many don't.

It's essential to start thinking about internal comms in the same way as external comms.  Who are my audience?  Where can I reach them?  How do I integrate my message into their existing behaviour?  How can I get the results I want from their existing environment?

In a previous job, our tech team were trying to figure out how to build knowledge and awareness within the customer support team about how our products worked.  Their solution, although commendable for the effort put in, was ineffective. They decided to create blog and wiki where they would explain how things worked.  New posts would be available by RSS feed.

What needed to happen for this to work was that all the customer support people needed to have a separate login for the wiki.  Then, they all needed to configure their email client to pick up the RSS feed.  Then they needed to remember to check the RSS feed folder in their inbox on a regular basis and read the articles. Sounds dead easy if you work in tech. It failed.

Imagine if our supermarket had a separate room for all of their high margin add-on sales.  You had to go there specifically in order to see the product offerings.  And you needed to pick up a separate basket in order to carry these products to the check-out in addition to your main trolley.  They wouldn't sell anything would they?  Of course, not.

The path most travelled is why the supermarket check-out system works for the add on sales.  The path most travelled is also the reason the tech wiki failed.

For the tech wiki project to work it needed to use the systems that the customer support staff were already using on a daily basis.  There were three; the company back office system, the CRM database and email.  Anything outside of these three systems was irrelevant because support staff were busy enough dealing with these three systems to think about adding another.

So, when trying to introduce a change to an organisation, focus on making your change happen using existing pathways.  Making change happen is hard enough.  Having to create new pathways at the same time makes it even harder.

As a bonus, not only is the path most travelled the easiest place to introduce your change, it's also the path of least resistance.

No matter what their discipline or function, the more a manager thinks like a marketeer, the most likely he or she will succeed.  Be where people are and be where they are receptive.

Find and use the path most travelled. It could be your yellow brick road.

Why in the Future We Will Own Less

Ownership.  It's over-rated.

I grabbed some mountaineering gear from my cupboard and packed my bags to head to the Alps for the weekend for some ski touring.

I wondered, how many ice axes are there in the world sitting in cupboards and how many are actually being used right now? Maybe 99% are in storage, the rest are in use. Same goes for cake mixing machines, suitcases and tennis racquets. To a lesser extent, cars and computers.

As human population explodes across the planet, as natural resources dwindle, as consumption and desire for goods and services increase because of increased wealth; we will need to adapt. I am an optimist. I see humanity as a self organising complex adaptive system. We make mistakes, we figure it out. Before we destroy our planet? I believe so, yes.

So what will the next 50 years bring?

I think it's pretty obvious and it's already starting to happen; we will increasingly (but not completely) discard "ownership" of property and instead share and exchange more than we've ever done before. Where the costs of ownership are too much to bear for a single individual, that's exactly what we do. For example, we'll buy an airline ticket, not an entire airplane. Unless you are super duper rich, but even there you can use Netjets and share a private jet.

The cost of ownership of everything will go up. We've already optimised the cost of production So there's a limit to how cheap things will become. Primark, Lidl, Walmart - these guys run it pretty lean already. So, it's inevitable. Owning things just won't make sense.

I'm not saying that we will not own stuff. Of course we will. You wouldn't want to wear my shoes and you wouldn't want to wear mine. We'll still own shoes. Maybe not as many pairs.

What we will start to do is to figure out how to share more. There's already a few examples out there doing very nicely. Why own CDs when you can stream music from Spotify on a subscription? Why own your own car when you can use a pay as you go one with Streetcar? Why own a holiday home when you can rent an apartment from HouseTrip?

There are 5 distinct types of consumption that I can identify

1. The producer-owner-purchase-model.
Here, someone produces a product (say a car) which someone purchases for cash. Very common across the world and a great way to see the benefits of division of labour and trade as a foundation for the creation of wealth. Sustainability: very difficult because a lot if products are not used, discarded or left in cupboards.

2. The distributor-rental model
Many people can use the product on a subscription or one time rental basis. Much more efficient.

3. The secondary-reseller-market model
You don't need it anymore? Sell it on to someone else. At least this way the product is used by more than one person.

4. The charity model
Give it away when you don't need it anymore. Take it to the charity shop, then they will give it to someone who needs it or, they'll sell it to someone to make money.

Then there's recycling of course. And maybe communism. There is however fifth way, and I'm convinced that due to evolutionary necessity we'll see more of it very soon.

5. The fifth way
We will create marketplaces to trade goods and services that don't use cash as currency. Instead of going shopping, you will connect with your community and offer and receive favours. You will lend out the things you own but rarely use and you will borrow the things you rarely use but don't own. The taxman will hate this if course.

This is not communism with joint ownership. This is peer to peer trading at a hyper local level. You will accumulate points of some type as you lend and you will burn points as use consume.

These marketplaces are already possible with the advent of PCs and mobile phones. As connectivity becomes better, we'll start to see goods themselves connected to the net with their own unique IP address and history. Objects will connect in the same way that people connect and people will connect with objects and objects will connect with people.

We will see highly targeted and relevant sharing, bartering and exchange websites and services.

Over the next 50 years we will transition through necessity and through efficiency to only own what we need to own. The rest we will rent or borrow.

It's the only way.

The Experience of Others

You're sitting in a restaurant having a great time, in fact it's a wonderful evening.  You have a good round table with a bunch of friends, the food is fantastic, the service is excellent, the wine is flowing.  The next day you get an email from the restaurant owner asking to rate your visit and you give it 5 stars.  It was fantastic.

Mrs Restaurant Owner is very happy because her customer was deeply satisfied with the experience.  She also runs a good business so she made some money that night.  Overall, it was a success for everyone involved.  Fantastic guest experience, good business, everyone is happy.  Wonderful. Beautiful. Perfect.

Ah. Experience.  That's a troublesome thing you see because it's actually quite difficult to establish what precisely was it about the experience that was good.  Was it the conversation?  Was it the company?  Both of these things?  Or the food? Or the seating configuration?  In fact, it's all of these and much more.  Experience is an emergent phenomenon.  It's emerges from a set of relationships, objects and timing in a specific moment for a specific individual to feel, well, something.

Product managers of a website have the same challenge as a restaurant owner.  They need to create an emergent set of experiences that support the business objectives.  Those emergent experiences could be for example, ease of use, joy, engagement, desire, advocacy (telling others), typing in credit card numbers, or creating a profile.

A Product Manager is an experience engineer.

Creating something which is emergent is not easy.  It's bloody difficult.  If everybody could do what Apple have done with their products in the last 10 years they would have done, but they didn't.  If something is difficult to do, it's difficult for others to copy.  And creating emergent systems that create wonderful experiences is extremely difficult. It's part art and part science.

In this world of emergence first you need to understand the systems from which your experience will come from.  The restaurant owner looks at all the details, from hiring of chefs, their kitchen organisation, the staffing rotas, the buying of ingredients, the menu design and hundreds of other small details and tries to create repeatable patterns of success that result in emergent experiences that restaurant goers rave about.  It's difficult in a restaurant and it's difficult on a website.

This web of interrelated influences that creates the emergent behaviour is a 4D world.  It's like the web itself, connected nodes of influence that act like the synapses in our brain, triggers firing behaviour from one sphere to the next. The fourth dimension is of course time, because each customer interacts with your company several times in several ways in different states of mind at different locations.

A creative product manager will first try to understand the web of influences, understand the triggers and amplify the ones that work, as well as trying new things that could be new influences and triggers.  All the time, measuring the impact as best she can.

Here's the thing though, experience can never be fully measured.  It's indescribable, intangible.

I can try and explain to you how I felt thinking this through on my walk up Shaftesbury Avenue this morning, Run DMC pumping through my headphones, excited because I'd pulled together some thinking that I'd been dwelling on for weeks, rucksack on my back, thinking of my next ski touring trip.  I could try.  No-one can ever really feel that except me, at that time, in that place with my history, future and present before me.

You can measure many aspects of experience, many dimensions.  Snapshots. Like the restaurant rating from the delighted customer.  You cannot really feel the experience of others, but you need to do your damn best to try.

As a product manager you are dealing with millions of those experiences.  And furthermore, you are building an interface that your customer will experience using a team of other people.

Building great experiences for others, through others.  A tough, but rewarding challenge.

London to Paris by bike

Did you know that life expectancy if you're living rough on the streets of London is only 46 years old?

The Big Issue helps people to help themselves. By buying magazines for £1 and selling them for £2, vendors have a chance to make a living and a way off the street. I want to help The Big Issue help more homeless peole to help themselves.

So - I’ve signed up for the London to Paris bike ride 2011.

I’ll be cycling 230 miles over 3 days, 90 miles of which will be in one day, and it's all on behalf of The Big Issue Foundation.

The Big Issue Foundation is dedicated to the well being of Big Issue Vendors, working with over 2900 individuals across the UK. Their skilled staff work one to one with vendors, tackling issues ranging from health and accommodation through to money management and aspirations.

The Big Issue Foundation is about taking control, moving forward, gaining independence and rebuilding lives. They exist to enable vendors to continue on their journey away from homelessness.

You can help support me, and The Big Issue Foundation, by making a secure online donation.

Click on the link below:
http://my.artezglobal.com/personalPage.aspx?SID=310397&Lang=en-CA

So far the tech-media community in London have helped me raise over £1000!  Please help push this amount higher.

Thanks for your support!