Pre Code Prototyping

Cort Johnson of Terrible Labs was kind enough to stop by the Harvard I-lab to talk with us about prototyping.  As an engineer at heart my biggest tendency is to build first and ask questions later. I’ve easily wasted years of my life building products to test user demand – when a simple paper (or PowerPoint) prototype would suffice.  So, here are some tips to help you design a great product BEFORE you build it!

 

The Basic Prototyping Process:

1. Plan the tasks you need to test

• Have a clear idea of what you want to learn.

2. Observation

• Watch how users interact with similar or competing products

3. Sketch a user flow

• what tasks needs to be accomplished or what information do we need from the user? Make a simple diagram that links all the tasks together.

4. Beginning with the core, sketch or create simple wireframes of application screens

• Draw simple icons and areas to get a sense for layout. There are great templates for iPhones or websites (or even just paper with a grid of dots) that can help guide this process. A favorite of Cort’s is Pop Prototyping on Paper.
• Cores and Paths – the core is the critical content that people come to the site on. With Flickr it’s photos for a software company it’s the product page. Know that however much navigation you build (from the homepage) know that it’s just one path. Users will mostly likely arrive directly at the critical content – bypassing the rest of your site. Build for that.
• Think about inward paths and outward paths
• What are the user goals and business goals?
• Lastly there are trigger words/content/calls to action

5. Add interactivity and visual polish as needed

• Wireframe – start doing high fidelity wire framing with keynote or PowerPoint. Use conditional links for each button in these presentation systems to mimic the conditional states of your product.
• Fake Doors - Building some new features? Add a button or link that makes it look like the button is there and see how many click on it. Take them to a landing page with maybe a beta user sign up. Don’t build it out until you’ve confirmed interest.

6. Consider audience and intent when selecting the right but make it minimally real

7. Prototype early and often no need to code

And as you’re moving through this whole process here are some tips:

Use realistic content – make it look as close to reality as possible.  Take the time to put real images and real text in there.  People reacting need to focus there.

Test Early Test Often – Make frequent updates and always test first

Consider the Limitations – Keep the impact of the format of the prototype (fidelity/depth) in mind when evaluating the feedback you get.

One Change at at Time – Classic scientific method.  Isolate the variable.  Change it.  See what happens.  If you change many variables at a time its hard to isolate causal vs corollary relationships

Beware of Dead Ends – don’t let a user hit a dead end where they get ‘stuck’ in a state of the app  There should always be a ‘next’.  Users should leave when they feel they are ready – not when they hit a brick wall.

Last (but not least!) here are some really great online resources Court mentioned that will help you get on your way to being a prototyping wiz!

Sketching

• Design pattern library (developer.yahoo.com)
• Templates (interfacesketch.tumblr.com)
• POP for iPhone (http://popapp.in)

Wireframing

• Sketchflow http://microsoft.com/expression
• Axure http://axure.com
• Balsamiq http://balsamiq.com
• Keynote Kung Fu http://keynotekungfu.com
• Keynotopia http://keynotopia.com/themes
• InVision http://invisionapp.com
• http://proto.io

Boston Founders – CustomMade

This week began in the best way possible with a tour of some amazing startups all clustered around Kendall Square (my backyard!). 

First stop was at CustomMade.where we met with their CEO Mike Salguero.  Mike is a Real Estate Professional turned artisan curator.  They had a great story of finding a under-used website that enabled makers (people that create furniture/jewelry etc.) to post their work and attract business.  After some furious fundraising they bought the company, built up the user base, and moved into a transaction mode (where they take a commission on the maker’s transaction).  This transformed the business from an small online bulletin board into the leading marketplace for custom goods worldwide.  Some key takeaways from this conversation:

• Transactions > Fees. While certainly not universally true, the transition from charging a monthly subscription to taking a commission was an infection point.  This makes sense to me since with the former – the makers take on all the risk. In the latter model the risk is aligned to the makers’ success.  If they don’t gain any value from the site it’s free.  And, if they do make some sales I’m sure they are happy to give a small piece to CustomMade.
• Customer is all about the inflection point. You do thousands of little updates every single day, and one of them will hit.  For Linkedin this was the big button to connect address books.  For Hotmail this was the ‘sent from Hotmail’ tag.  It will be trivial and you won’t know before hand what it is, so just keep the ‘innovation flywheel’ spinning!
• TopGrading – test people in situation to find the best employees.  Need to find someone versatile?  Move their interview room 2-3 times and see how they react.  Mike loved getting this insight early on.
• Culture first – Mike liked people with passion and without ego.  He was a proponent of protecting this no matter what. 
• Motivate your team with customer stories – Mike loved telling stories of how much makes loved CustomMade and customer loved the products they received.  Especially hiring folks passionate about the mission this was the core motivator.
• SF>Boston.  Sorry Beantown, but the talent/funding pool in SF is just so much bigger its hard to compare.
• Be super aggressive about asking for help.  Certainly something I took to heart.  There are a ton of amazing folks with experience in Boston who can and want to help. Go find them and get helped!

Customer Acquisition Tips from Andy Payne Co-Founder of OpenMarket

Entrepreneurs that come through his office have passion and are thoughtful about product, design and team, but not marketing.  In this day and age, when the online marketing channels are so crowded – reaching the customers is the primary challenge (at least as if not more important than the engineering).

Lifetime Value > Cost Per Acquisition

When the lifetime value starts to really exceed the cost per acquisition you have a real business.  For more Andy recommends you check out http://www.forentrepreneurs.com/(from David Skok at Matrix Partners)

Create a Culture of Experimentation

Treat your marketing like an MVP.  Do the minimal amount necessary to test the ROI for a new channel.  Ghetto testing is a big piece to this – just make a landing page for a product idea – and see if you can get pre-registration.  This will give you a feel for the product need before it’s even launched.

Ways to market

• Paid Search/Banner Ads.  Pretty easy to try, but hard to compete because you’re bidding directly against experts (or at least you should assume they are).  Just like playing poker at a casino – be ware.
• Inbound Marketing/SEO. Make content that people will find on Google.  Use Google analytics/webmaster tools to manage and boost your rankings in the organic search results.  First result for “startup equity” on Google is Andy’s Blog
• Viral Marketing. Hard to plan for, but worth a shot.  Make great content (video/picture/post) that hits that human nature that is simple and sharable.  Then, make sure it connects back to your business (tricky!).  You can also create a project that is inherently viral (dropbox). 
• Email Marketing.  Soothes out acquisition process. If you can get them to buy, great.  If not, what can we do that maintains contact?  You start with a opt in (small customer commitment) and enables you to message to lead up to a sale (big customer commitment).  Opt-in is critical. If you get market as a spammer by too many people email providers (gmail/yahoo/hotmail) will start to ban you.

Book Recommendations:

Inbound Marketing – Get Found Using Google Social Media and Blogs

The New Rules of Marketing and PR – David Scott

All in all the advice boils down to – work smart (use hard data/analysis) and work hard (leverage every personal contact you have and send out a lot of personalized emails to get traction).

F-ing up Feedback

Through some really challenging conversations with advisors I’ve gotten the kick in the pants to re-evaluate my management style. The conclusion I came to was the biggest area for growth was in feedback (irony knows no bounds!).  Giving feedback is hard and temporarily uncomfortable, so it’s something I often postponed to big mile stones.

However, through much reading, adjustment, trial and error I’ve settled on three Fs for feedback:

Fast – Give the feedback in the moment.  Immediately after the action everything is fresh in the recipient’s mind.  This is the best time to trigger reflection and growth.

Frank – Be brutally honest.  Any beating around the bush or ‘cushioning’ to save someone’s feelings only obfuscates your messages and robs the recipient of a valuable learning opportunity.  That is not to say you need to humiliate the person with mean or public feedback.  Just deliver an objective statement in private, answer clarifying questions, and leave to let the recipient reflect.

Frequent – Do this often.  My biggest failing was to wait for big milestones. It’s important the feedback is separated from performance/compensation review.  Frequent feedback builds the trust that the information is simply there to help – nothing else.  This will take the pressure off and enable the person to respond positively.  Also frequent feedback cuts up changes into small chunks – making it easier for the recipient to internalize and adopt.

If you’d like to read some more on this topic from a truly great mind – one of the most pithy descriptions of good feedback comes from Ben Horowitz: http://bhorowitz.com/2012/10/17/making-yourself-a-ceo/

So go forth and F up your feedback so you don’t f**k up your team.

No Business Card Challenge

I have a confession to make: I don’t have business cards.  I used to carry them religiously – 3-4 in my wallet at all times – ready with a card for a serendipitous connection.  I’ve given and received hundreds of cards over the years, but can still count on my fingers the number of valuable connections made. Following up ‘later’ just never happens.

When I meet someone interesting today – I simply send them an email on the spot. It takes just a second - type in the email address, fill in the subject and you both have a cue to connect sitting in your inboxes instantly.  This removes the separate task of follow up after an event, ensures that the message isn’t lost in a jacket pocket for eternity, and provides an immediate cue to connect later. 

In a time before iPhones and 4G business cards had a place as the most efficient means of exchanging information.  However, today, when we all carry our computers in our pockets they  just don’t make sense and should be relegated to being a lost vestige of the meeting ritual:

So I ask of all of you to shelve the archaic cardstock artifacts of last generation’s business world and join the mobile generation. Make connections instant and persistent.

Take the No Business Card Challenge!

And now that you have a bunch of business cards you won’t be handing out anymore – Hugh MacLeod has found that they make the perfect cartoon canvases:

Breaking the Silence

In the first of many Harvard Alumni Entrepreneurs events I plan to attend Michael Beer discussed on The Silent Killers to Strategy Execution.  The foundation of the talk was that there are insidious issues that pervade organizations of any type and prevent sustained success.  In order to create an enduring business executives need to continually bring these issues to the surface and face them head on.

• Create trust based relationships.  Start by creating the culture with your employees and it will flow through to your customers and investors. 
• This makes me wonder if quarterly volatility is an indication of a stock’s quality (are people trusting in the people or trading on quarterly results).
• Expose misalignments and make them discussable.  Learning and governance is the structure that should be designed to surface performance and psychological alignment issues.  “Trust can speak to power about leadership and organizational effectiveness”.  This is why many companies hire consultants.  But do you really want to outsource something that should be your core competency?
• People at the top are the biggest champions of the status quo. If you’re currently in change any change is all downside risk.
• Silent Killers
• Unclear strategy values, and conflicting priorities
• Extreme leadership style – top down or laissez faire
• Poor coordination
• Often seen as the hub and spoke systems – relying on one point of management and communications
• Inadequate leadership skills/development
• Closed vertical communication resulting in low trust and problem solving

So, how do we get a productive conversation going?  Honest collective and public conversations.  Have this conversation on a regular basis and explicitly call out discussions for any historically known silent killers in your organizations.  Have an intermediary fitness task force that connects senior leadership team to the broader organization.

Helpful rules for great feedback and bring out the unvarnished truth

• Perception is fact.  Don’t argue about veracity.  If employees are saying it you need to deal with it.
• You can’t ask for sources.
• Management can choose the taskforce – they need to choose people they trust.
• Task force members need to follow up with the organizational members they spoke with to let them know that the message was delivered.
• Feedback session layout – this physical layout offers a sense of communal security (together in the center) with management as observers on the outside. 

The taskforce provides the dialog and open feedback. Surveys don’t surface issues – they measure them.  And, as an added benefit – this will help you to develop talent.

While much of this is from the perspective of larger organizations, however, it is all applicable to startups.  Startups are intensely political and personality driven organizations powered by faith in the mission.  This often clouds management’s ability to collected feedback (despite having a flat organizations).  Consistently having honest collective and public conversations will ensure that you keep learning and continue to grow a healthy organization at any stage.

Learning to Talk

Remember doing that a few decades ago?  Well, as it turns out the fun never ends!  In person communication is the most powerful form of persuasion.  As an entrepreneur – especially as a founder – your voice is the most important asset you bring to a company.  We can always hire for skills.  However, that person who’s passion can power a team or persuade an investor becomes the irreplaceable piece of a company’s DNA. That’s a key difference between a founder and an employee.

Since speaking comes naturally we often will gloss over the practice of this art with a good enough subsistence level of skill.  What an opportunity to miss.  Like any other skill, through deliberate practice the level of competency will grow.  In this vein HBS brought in KNP Consulting to study some videos of past presentations.  Here’s the one I chose:

I was lucky enough to sit down with Matt Kohut who has some pretty incredibly experience training speakers – especially in the engineering space (NASA no less).  Here’s the core lessons he had for me based on the clip:

• Slow Down! Not news to anyone that knows me – but I talk FAST.  This makes the message hard to digest and understand. 
• Cadence is a roadmap.  Modulating the pace and tone of speech provides an audience with subtle cues for the importance attached to each part of the speech.  When you get to the most important point – lower your voice, slow down your delivery, and then stop.  A pause is the most powerful form of punctuation.
• Move deliberately.  When walking around a stage – it’s important to pick a point or a person and walk towards them.  Deliver a message as you walk.  Finish the point and walk away.
• Play with balls.  Most motions on stage should mimic holding a sphere ranging in size from a basketball to a bb.  The deliberate movements conforming to a round shape creates a strong movement with an organic (warm) pattern.
• Reading recommendations:
• The Man Who Lied to a Laptop.  What we can learn about building relationships from Human Computer Interaction
• Honest Signals. How to project authenticity.
• Strong vs. Warm.  The core analytical tool they use to think about a speaker’s effectiveness is how strong or warm you are perceived as.  It’s important to note that people prefer warmth to strength (just in case you’re picking one).  Figure out what your baseline place on the spectrum is and then carefully pick the appropriate place on the spectrum for each situation (talking with your team vs. talking with a VC). 

 

I love the framework and deliberately choosing the mix of strength and warmth that you need to project in any given situation.  The real challenge to continually developing this skill is collecting feedback.  Self-monitoring is extremely difficult since it distracts you from the conversation and will inherently make you less effective. 

The best way I’ve found (both personally and with my clients) is to designate a spotter – an ally in important presentations and meetings who can focus on watching you to provide feedback afterwards.  Any ‘bad behaviors’ go on a list for the spotter to flag in conversation for me (think of it as an early warning system).  The notes from KNP will definitely go on mine!