Thoughts of a Flâneur

Augmentation, iteration and continual improvement

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So you want to build a successful and profitable web site, mobile or Xbox app, service or platform? Get started with these guiding questions ...

Often when I tell newly met acquaintances how I make my living this statement/question arises - "I have an idea for an app (or website, etc) - tell me how do I make it?"

Where to begin? Perhaps with a minor detour through my past experiences. Over the past 14 years I've made a wide array of products and services, monetised through advertising, subscription and mixed revenue models :

Streaming video portals

Screen savers

Advertising creatives

Flash-based games

Marketing microsites

Educational assessment

Breaking news, live video & video-on-demand sites and apps

Despite the differences in scale and diversity, nearly all of these products began by answering a series of “guiding questions”. These aren't quite the classic "five whys", but instead designed to provide the foundation for further development of your idea or proposition :

How would you describe this in 60 seconds?

What problem does it solve?

What is the service?

What is the opportunity? 

Who are the competition?

What is our competitive advantage?

How will we monetise this?

What is required to deliver this?

What don't we know and how will we find the answers?

Answer these questions and you'll be well on your way toward making a commercially viable product or service.

NB. This will be the first in a series of articles discussing how one conceives of, constructs, delivers and maintains a digital product. It’ll be a blend of commercial considerations, project management, product delivery and technical development.

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What it takes to be a consultant

As I prepare to launch a new phase of my career, I'm mindful of this thoughtful summary of precisely what it takes to be a great consultant by Matt Gemmell. Essential reading for anyone looking to up his/her game in business.

Today is my final working day with Perform and this paragraph sums up what I hope I've achieved over the past several of years - and aspire to continue to do long into the future :

Being a consultant is about diplomacy. It’s about being a fact-finder for the client’s issues, and an interpreter for their wishes and business goals, and a translator between the domain of a difficulty, and the necessary steps to solve it. It’s also always about being an ambassador for the real stakeholders, which are usually the customers.

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The elegance of simplicity

"People don’t understand the elegance of simplicity," Willis said once. "If you take a sophisticated idea, reduce it to the simplest possible terms so that it’s accessible to everybody, and don’t get simple mixed up with simplistic, it’s how you mount and present something that makes it engaging." - Gordon Willis, the great cinematographer who died on the 18th of May 2014, in a piece by the Paris Review

That's precisely what I strive for when writing copy, planning a project, giving a presentation, taking a photograph. Finding the essence of an idea and expressing it simply, elegantly.

Sometimes it's an agonising process, but one feels so profoundly satisfied when it all falls into place.

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How a recommendation engine supercharges your content strategy (and how to avoid syndicated junk)

Do you find "recommended content" useful? It usually irritates me, little more than distracting sludge.

The content syndicator gives a free widget (a list of news articles or video clips) in exchange for a share of advertising revenue. Implemented correctly, it can be lucrative and add value by filling a gap in one's editorial coverage.

Most of the time though, the paid content widget does little more than splash irrelevant link bait across the page. It kills the perceived value of a respected brand and makes editorially-questionable sites appear all the more cheap and spammy.

For example this nasty Sponsored Content by Taboola widget is from the bottom of a sports web site :

Completely irrelevant!

Quality sites don't want this kind of junk, but giving customers recommendations is a great way to add depth and value to one's product.

But how would a recommendation system work?

Recommendation Engine Requirements

I've been thinking a lot about the requirements of an effective recommendation engine for use in an editorially-driven product.

At the most basic level, there is content-based filtering. This kind of filtering uses aspects of content itself to group like items and determine what is most appropriate to recommend. Some criteria would be:

Time-based

Most recent

Editorial ranking

Relevance to a given topic

Category

Keyword

Popularity

Additional metadata?

Diversity

Limits on number of recommendations from a given subcategory

Content types

Articles

Videos

Broadcast streams

Photo galleries

Other "atomic" units of content

Collaborative filtering generates another kind of recommendation and uses multiple inputs to determine the most relevant content. Most of the time this means the user will have expressed a preference for a certain kind of content (film, book, sport team, player, league, etc) and the system matches those preferences with the preferences expressed by other users to arrive at a set of recommendations.

Used together, a recommendation engine that combines collaborative and content filtering, user accounts and personalisation supercharge your content strategy :  increases engagement, lengthens time spent within a product and delights users with relevant, useful content.

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What do you do when things go horribly wrong?

Twice I've been complimented on my ability to manage a crisis.

A couple of years ago a colleague called me "icy cool" whilst dealing with a room full of grumpy stakeholders during a failed rollout of a new CDN config, despite working flawlessly on production. It was drama-free and simple enough to activate a rollback plan and restore service. More recently, a client suggested I give classes to colleagues on crisis management.

Here's a random list of possible commercial and technical disasters, do you recognise any of these?

Unrealistic client-dictated deadlines

CDN partner borked a configuration rollout

DNS failure

Two of your developers have the flu right before a launch

Third party API doesn't return data reliably

Content is missing or appears in the wrong part of the product

I've worked on a number of high-profile web sites and mobile apps powered by complicated back-end services and inevitably something does go a bit wonky along the way.

Sometimes it's an impossible deadline with CEO-level pressure to "just get it done", a faulty 3rd party API, a failure of cloud-based services - or just a mistake. I've found that the old adage is true - the important thing in a crisis is how you deal with it.

Avoid the stench of fear and panic at all costs. I've had colleagues who simply couldn't deal with chaos and, when the pressure was on, I spent as much time managing their flappy response as I did on the problem itself.

When a real emergency strikes, people often forget that communication - internally and externally - comes first. Someone with the ability to understand the nature of the problem and speak to multiple stakeholders at an appropriate level must be drafted into the crisis team and dispatch regular updates with clear, authoritative information. This person neutralises any and all drama and frees up the technical response team to methodically focus on solving the problem.

Whenever I've been on the client side of a crisis, nothing infuriates me more than a service rep asking me to "explain where on the site you think there's a problem". Similarly, opaque emails about "product teams working swiftly to resolve the problem" tell me nothing about who is working on what or that what they're working on has any relevance to my complaint.

Even with a less-critical incident, one must communicate clearly - define the problem, be clear about the desired outcome and then bring stakeholders with you along the path toward a swift, successful resolution.

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I've been in meetings like this before. A brilliant takedown of ill-considered requirements and dysfunctional group dynamics.

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John Matthews, International Digital Business Traveller

Prior to 2012 I worked with a fair number of international stakeholders and occasionally paid visits to Boston or Milan, but was primarily based in London.

Since the start of 2012, I've spent significant stretches of time away from home consulting with clients in person. It's been an amazing experience to move beyond tourism and learn about different cultures through developing content, products and services.

All this travel led me to develop  techniques to optimise my efficiency whilst on the road. My most effective tool was the purchase of a 3G-equipped iPad and keyboard case, though recently I've had to work more with with colleagues who can't quite shake the habit of using MS Office documents so I've added a MacBook Air to my armoury. The Air also affords me more file storage and functionality when I'm away from home for weeks at a time.

When I look at where I've spent my time, I came up with the following (excluding travel time and overseas holidays) :

2012

2 months in Paris consulting with clients (spread across 2 and 3 day visits)

2013

2 months in Paris consulting with clients (spread across 2 and 3 days visits)

1 month in Doha consulting with clients

1 week Slovakia with my development team

Several days in Slovenia on an "employee of the year" mini-break 

2014

7 weeks (and counting) in Doha consulting with clients

As I contemplate another several weeks in the Middle East, I found this piece by Michael Lopp articulates very well how to make travel as frictionless as possible : Practical Advice for the Obsessive Compulsive Traveler.

See you somewhere between London, Paris and Doha soon!

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Focusing on making a partnership work is more profitable than focusing on making money. Love your employees more than you love your clients. The best new business is your current business. Price projects by asking yourself what the client's lawyer would charge. It's better to be hired for your work than for your price. When it comes to getting paid, the first of the month is better than the thirtieth. Making money off mechanicals, printing and computers turns your business into a commodity. The books in your library are more important than the numbers on your balance sheet. In order to love your work, take vacations. Power, in business, comes from sharing money and valuing love.

Insights about business by late William Drenttel from a 1991 talk he gave at the AIGA National Design Conference in Chicago.

Something for me to remember as I return to work I love from a week's holiday mooching about London, taking pictures, catching up on cinema and relaxing.

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You know we’re constantly taking. We don’t make most of the food we eat, we don’t grow it, anyway. We wear clothes other people make, we speak a language other people developed, we use a mathematics other people evolved and spent their lives building. I mean we’re constantly taking things. It’s a wonderful ecstatic feeling to create something and put it into the pool of human experience and knowledge.

Steve Jobs in an interview from 1983

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Teaching and training - making products that enhance a client's business and workflow

At the end of November 2013, I spent a month on site with a client in the Middle East. I was there as part of a project relaunch kickoff and part of my agenda included setting up a CMS training session with the client’s journalists and content managers and my company’s CMS product manager.

From my years working in publishing, I very much understand the needs of content authors and their editors who publish to various endpoints (e.g., web sites, apps, a client intranet, feeds syndicated to 3rd party partners, social media, other connected platforms). My love of technology springs from the way it enables and augments by ability to create.

At the last minute, the CMS product manager wasn’t available and no one else could make the journey. The client pointed out that connectivity on site was unreliable for Skype videochat and insisted the training be delivered in person - by me.

After an evening of preparation, I delivered two 2.5 hour seminars to groups of 20 or so journalists and content editors. By the evening I felt exhausted, but exhilarated.

I absolutely love opportunities like this to connect directly with users. There’s nothing more satisfying than speaking with the people who depend on what one makes every day and hearing the good (and the bad) and the amazing tricks employed by users to extend the usefulness of a given system. Teaching journalists to use a CMS to deliver their own brilliant content reminds one that the most valuable products we make facilitate publication and distribution of our clients’ ideas and messages.

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So how do you know if you’re doing a good job? After all, when you really look at what’s being decided on one end and produced on the other, it might look like a PM is doing nothing at all. In most cases, this invisibility is a good sign. There are a few other tells. "A big one is that the founders ping you directly without CC’ing other people. They just trust you to follow through and they know your team trusts you to be a good channel of information back and forth," Jackson says. Communication skills are paramount. 'One sign of a great PM is that other people get quiet when they start talking. A lot of PMs talk too much and spend time on things that aren’t important until people start tuning them out. If you see a PM talking and everyone else stops talking and listens, you know they are pretty good.' You're also a good PM if your absence is noticed by the best engineers on your team. "You want them to ask 'What would that PM do or say if she was here?' You want the best people to value your opinion that much and know you have the technical prowess to meaningfully contribute."

Top Hacks from a PM Behind Two of Tech's Hottest Products - It's exactly what I've always looked for in a project manager and what I bring to the projects and teams I've led directly.

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1. Real artists ship. 2. It's better to be a pirate than join the navy.

Coming late to a project and at the start of a very hectic two months for me, I'm reminded of these first "Sayings from Chairman Jobs" as told by Folklore.org.

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Even a day after Halloween these stories summon up a shudder of recognition.

Every company experiences operational issues and growing pains, but what really matters is the speed and transparency with which one responds to a crisis.

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When a business rots from within - a lesson from academia

In my experience, this is how many ostensibly successful businesses rot from within -

"In this way, faculty are like columnists for major newspapers. Columnists for, say, the New York Times are perfectly free to write whatever they like (within appropriate professional guidelines, of course). But the range of opinion expressed in those columns is terribly narrow. The problem is not that the Times is exerting pressure on its columnists. The problem is that in order to be a columnist for the New York Times to begin with, you have to be the kind of person whose opinions already fall within a specific range. The same goes for faculty. Universities are generally pretty good about not exerting overt pressure on faculty and their research. Intellectual freedom is generally respected. But the university doesn't need to exert any pressure, because it's already filtered out the people who would need to be pressured. Those who survive are, for the most part, narrow specialists who care little about what's happening outside their own area of specialisation." - from Why Your Professors Suck

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Facebook ad profit a staggering 1,790% more on iPhone than Android

A study of more than 200 billion ads on Facebook says that mobile ads on iPhone generate 1,790 percent more return on investment than ads on Android.

Nice to quantify the appeal of iOS development for those of us interested in generating revenue from both direct to consumer app sales/in-app purchases and advertising.

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The idea is that you need a ton of website visitors, then some of them become become leads, and then after you do something (the usual recommendation is to bombard the leads with marketing automation) they relent and pay you money, thus becoming a 'customer.' 

I hate this, because it's shortsighted.

- by Ben Chestnut of MailChimp & TinyLetter

I see this sort of scattershot, cynical approach from marketers all the time. It's irritating, illogical and counterproductive.

Love your customers.

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What every great project manager should know

In the course of giving advice to a recent graduate, he asked me to describe exactly what a great project manager does. My response: a project manager always knows what is happening at a given moment, understands where that moment exists on the overall project timeline and, most importantly of all, explains all of this regularly to any and every person connected to the project.

We make apps, sites and services that communicate messages on behalf of our clients and a great project manager must be exceptionally skilled at briefing stakeholders appropriate to the stakeholders' level of knowledge and interest.

As I've written before, tell me the story of what's going on, where we are and where we need to be in order to succeed.