Advice for Product Managers

Not strictly to do with social networking... but following the delivery of the all-new Trutap (now going like hot cakes here), we held a 'retrospective' yesterday, to identify, debate and thrash-out what we got right and what we didn't. From that I've written up a list of 'advice for Product Managers'. It's specifically relevant for building a complex mobile application with a 3rd party developer, but aims to provide wider insights too:

• Weekly Project meetings - Hold these religiously and make sure everyone in key positions attends. In our case: CTO, Head of Product, Product Manager, Head of QA, Account Manager
• Planning - Product scoping is best done with decision-makers heavily involved. It avoids the need to repeatedly explain complex issues to managers. Be sure to schedule a series of meetings with developers during planning, it produces valuable feedback, fosters ownership and irons out misunderstandings.
• Design documentation - Agree (i) style-guide, (ii) components (i.e. pre-defined elements, from which the product is constructed), (iii) rules (e.g. format for dates, character lengths etc.) and (iv) flows, before development starts. If possible, create and review a flash demo before you sign off the flows and UI.
• Wireframes - Wireframes are useful to inform the creation of the design documentation, but should not form it's basis. They are ludicrousy time-consuming and tedious to maintain. Better to create an HTML prototyping tool, or iterate your flash demo.
• Technical plannning - Produce a full list of technical components & design elements. Work with the Devs/designers/QA folks to estimate development, design and QA hours and schedule these into fortnightly Sprints. Ensure the weekly count of 'productive hours' is realistic - i.e. accounts for planning days, bugs, holidays, disruptions, earthquakes etc.
• Agree designs - Ensure it's clear who makes design decisions - e.g. the Product Manager, the Designer or the CTO? Design is so subjective, it's humanly impossible for everyone to agree.
  
• Development - Work in 2-week agile sprints, using 'stories', with a fortnightly 1-day planning day. We found this maximises productivity. Sheltering Devs from the client/product manager (PM) enables them to focus on timely delivery. But, sitting the PM with the Developer for 1 day per sprint is the fastest way to resolve UI issues and inconsistencies.
• Bugs & QA - Ensure that clear Test Plans are created from the design documents. Log bugs against these, but only on 'officially' released features (not features in development). Ensure that high priority bugs (anything that could block going live) are fixed in each subsequent sprint - i.e. within 2 weeks.
• Monitoring progress - Each week, tick items off the list as they are delivered and pass QA. Plot the projected hours/sprint against those being delivered (this is best done on a graph). If extra tasks are added to the projet list, extend the timeline with these hours clearly marked. By plotting a line for 'completed hours' you can forecast when the project will be completed at the current rate of development.
  
• Changes - Don't change agreed specifications unless absolutely necessary, as there will be knock on effects (including re-working completed tasks). But flexibility is essential as you learn more by building the product. Assume 10%-15% of budget for Change Requests. Don't change specs mid-sprint, let the devs complete their tasks, then amend them if needs be.
• Delivery - Once all features have been develivered and QA'd you need to agree when the project is 'done'. Tough product decisions are needed to agree which outstanding bugs or Change Requests are 'blockers'. Time and cost contraints will likely dictate this.

Managing a project with remote development teams and decision-makers who tend to be anywhere but present, you need some good web-based tools. We used these:

• Trac - A good quality free, open-source project management tool with a wiki. Perfect for collaborating on specifications and Project Plans, and for maintaining a shared knowledge-base.
• Google docs - Great for sharing and maintaining a Project Plan and publishing wireframes (including Pdfs) and Task lists, so you don't need expensive Project Management solutions.
• Fogbugz - Excellent bug tracking system that enables rapid client feedback and bug resolution.
• Basecamp - Project management tool that's great for sharing designs & screenshots and getting rapid feedback from a group. Rubbish for sharing documents.
• Pidgin - Free open-source IM and chat rooms, enable remote teams of developers to chat and resolve issues as they arise.

You Can't Fake Local Social Networking

Social networking is already extending down it's long tail. We've got 'youth' SN's such as Bebo and Hi5, and the music-oriented MySpace, and then Flixter for movies. We've got Facebook for the over 25's and LinkedIn and Xing for business people. Then there are FriendsReunited and Classmates.com for old schoolfriends, and Geni.com and Reunion.com for families. Around the world you have Orkut and Friendster for Asia, Skyrock for French speakers, Sonico for the Spanish and Vkontakte.ru for the Russians. Then there's all the mobile social networks, Mocospace, Itsmy etc.

What's missing? To my mind there's one clear and glaring omission: communities of neighbours. People who live near each other. Real communities.

Why is this? Well, I once heard the founder of the pioneering local site UpMyStreet.com explain that it was impossible to monetise local websites, because you could never get the volume of traffic needed to create value for advertisers. I've also heard other industry experts say that Google Local has effectively cornered the market, so what's the point.

I have my doubts about both arguments. The fact is, "local" can and will only ever work at a local level. We all know that you only get reliable, local information by speaking to people on the ground. Yet all the serious attempts to crack local search, listings and social networking to date have been centralised, either at a national or a global level. The resultant websites are invariably standardised, impersonal, boring, out-of-date and frustrating. How can we possibly be surprised when they fail?

The only local websites with half a chance of success are those run by local newspapers, because they are managed by local people and, ususally, include user-generated-content from the community. Yet with their revenues tied to hard-copy media and little or no understanding of how to develop sustainable local social networks, local media is failing to fill this growing gap in the market.

The problem, I believe, is that Web 2.0 business models require huge economies of scale to produce results. They simply don't work at a local level. The guy from UpMyStreet was right in this respect, but he was wrong to assume that other business models couldn't succeed in their place. As the long tail of social networking reaches our towns and cities, I think we'll see a revival of local social networking from the bottom-up. Local has to be genuine, you can't fake it.

How Social Networks Work: Object-Centred Sociality

A few days back I gave my views on why social networks work. I've since found a couple of fascinating posts on the subject that are definitely worth reading.

Jyri Zengestrom's 2005 post "Why some social network services work and others don't — Or: the case for object-centered sociality" discusses the need for social networks to have "social objects" at their core. This, he explains, is why LinkedIn feels hollow at times. It's just a bunch of business people. Interaction requires more than people - it feeds off a common purpose and interest.

My favourite post is a more recent one by Hugh MacLeod. His "Why the Social Object is the future of marketing" hones in on what Jyri was saying in 2005, and sounds the death knell for mass marketing as we know it (or have known it). He puts it to the marketeer of Brand X in no uncertain terms:

"From now on you won’t have the TV Commercials to rely on to start your conversations. People are ignoring you. Mass media has simply gotten too expensive. The only way your product is going to spread is by word of mouth. The only way it’s going to get word of mouth is if there is something in it for the person talking about it.

The person you want talking about is not doing it for the money. She'll only talk about it if it serves as a Social Object. A "hook" to move the conversation along. A hook she can use it as a way to relate to her fellow human beings."

Following on from this, Jay Deragon highlighted the lack of understanding of this shift in marketing towards object-centred social commerce among Fortune 500 companies in "Will 2008 be the year of social commerce". Are these guys equipped to deal with such disruptive influences on the markets they control? Erm, you decide:

"When asked how many of the executives were active participants in social networks 100% answered they were not and 40% didn’t even have a profile on Linkedin. When asked how many of their employees (in excess of 20,000 employees) were active in social networks their answers were “We don’t know”."

Add one connection - double the value of your network

Just when I thought I was getting on top of these 'Mass Media' movements, David Cushman goes and discovers another one! I'm yet to hear what the 8th Mass Media is all about, but the point he makes about Reed's law - that every extra person added to a network doubles it's value, reminded me of something Jonathan MacDonald said at FOM on Monday.

Apparently one of the large national pizza chains will give anyone who complains £100 in cash. How can they afford to do that? Well, the arguament is, obviously, how can they afford not to? They've worked out that the value to them of each customers' network is more than £100. Therefore by buying that person's goodwill, they should come out on top.

This still doesn't help with people trying to grow their networks, though David's proposal of inviting recommendations to his blog (therefore 'our') network as a way of testing Reed's Law is a novel one. To grow your network you should probably start by reading 'The Power of the Network'.

Future of Mobile Conference - 17th Dec. London

Another engaging event from the Carsonified team. The overwhelming highlight of the Future of Mobile conference was author and strategy consultant, Tomi Ahonen, evangelising his theory of the 7th mass media channel. Essentially, it goes like this: over time, new mass media channels emerge and each usurp the former, building on it's strengths and preying on it's weakesses. In this way TV adopted the programming formulae that had succeeded on radio, but then cannibalised it by providing 'the cinema experience' at home.

Tomi believes that mobile will cannibalise the Web in this way. The future of mobile is not 'the Web on a phone' (he was virulent in his denial of such a proposition!). Mobile will take the best bits of the Web, then use it's own special advantages, such as location enabled features, in-built billing, ubiquitous connectivity (in the broad sense, i.e. you are always contactable) and personalisation, to provide services that are more compelling for users and more profitable for suppliers.

Always ready with a trusty fact, he pointed out that the mobile content market is already larger, financially, than the whole of Web content and advertising put together. He might, actually have gone much further. You could add the Hollywood box office income and global music industry revenues to the Internet and mobile content would STILL dwarf the total.

Do I agree with Tomi that mobile is not only bigger but also better - and therefore implicitly different? Well, I think the misconception that the future of mobile is 'the Web on a phone' has grown in recent years for specific reasons:

1) The iphone came along and dramatically bridged the mobile/Internet divide.
2) People are so fed up with fragmentation (which Android has only added to) that it's tempting to seek comfort in the universal standards of the Web.
3) Because it's taken so long for some of the most appealing mobile differentiators to bear fruit (think location-based services, or global billing mechanisms), lots of people have given up on them - just as consumers are waking up to them!

As Daniel Appelquist from Vodafone pointed out, Apple are advertising their Apps Store on US TV. That's the first time any Western company has promoted the concept of mobile aplications using mass media. To me it marks a watershed in mobile communications that will have profound knock-on effects for applications on any platform, including Java applications (like Trutap) that, to date, have been seen as the domain of geeks or kids. If iphone applications and widgets can go mainstream, why not Java apps?

In short, I wholeheartedly agree with Tomi that the future of mobile is much more than the Web. In my view many mobile companies have become so sick of false dawns and prophets that they've stopped believing in the 'magic of mobile' (another Tomi phrase). Ironically, now is precisely the time they should be dusting down that pointy old hat and polishing their wand. Thankfully, there was one wizard in the house today.

Understanding Social Networking by Predicting the Past

The most radical change so far in how we use the Internet occurred between 2003 and 2005: the emergence of Web 2.0. Of course, it’s easy to understand the result - the shift from consumption to interaction, from browsing and buying to creating and recommending – but exactly how it happened seems to have been lost in the hype. Somehow I think we’ve missed the biggest lessons of this shift – and this is important: how will we spot the next trend unless we take time to understand the current one? After all, as they say, nothing is harder to predict than the future.

Let’s go back in time... In 2003 I was advising UK charities on how they could best use the Internet to benefit their members. My belief was that they should be using it to facilitate peer-support and information exchange, to bring people in need, who were often spread out across the country (or world), closer together. We were ‘building online communities’. It was all very exciting. It was damnable hard work.

To start off with I had huge difficulties convincing them that the Internet was the perfect medium for this. This was exacerbated by their instinctive desire to maintain strict control over their communities. They wanted to create a centralised, organised, hub, in which any user-generated content had to be approved by some shadowy figure in their marketing department. They were, I thought, unnaturally terrified of ‘trolls’ and other cyber-miscreants, who might post libellous nonsense on their site.

Gradually, through a process of coaxing and repetition, some of my clients loosened their grip. A couple allowed me to let their users complete detailed personal profiles and write un-moderated blogs. It was a radical departure. We even let users post up photos! This had the lawyers writhing in paroxysms of fear and apprehension, but it felt right.

Around this time MySpace hit the headlines for having 25 million users. Truly they had done something special – but I was curious that the by-line to every story was almost always “and yet, their website looks so shit”. Compared to our carefully sculpted sites, MySpace seemed (and, as it happens, was) a horrible a morass of tangled HTML, garish design and boob-shots. What had they done so right?

Soon, we began to notice that the sites we had ‘decentralised’ and allowed users to inhabit more freely, were gaining traction much faster than the tightly managed ‘online communities’ maintained by other clients. These users were finding each other, reading about each other, starting conversations, and even having relationships… They were becoming networks of people, rather than faceless users of a hosted community site.

Naturally, being an entrepreneurial kind of fellow, I quit being a consultant and set up my own ‘social network’. This post is now starting to overlap with one below, but needless to say, we didn’t go on to be the, erm, first Facebook. Looking back, I realise that, while we had understood what was happening, we hadn't thought about why it was happening. We hadn’t yet learnt the fundamental premise of social networking: that social networks develop from the enthusiasm with which people are prepared to share aspects of their life with each other. In other words, that the hub is not the community, it’s the individual, and that ‘social networking’ only occurs when these personal hubs are connected.

What MySpace did so effectively in 2005, and what Facebook has superlatively outclassed them at ever since, was to effectively connect personal hubs. It’s what we failed to do in our small business and what so many big businesses continue to misunderstand today.

So what counts as a hub? Well, that depends on the purpose of the social network - and it would take some anyalysing, but certainly it requires an identity (e.g. profile), plus a range of content/activities that can be updated and shared. Beyond that it's all about implementing clever forms of (increasingly passive) interaction - such as the Facebook newsfeed, gifts and pokes.

To my mind, this is how social networking became what it is today. So what does it tell us for the future? Well, the funny thing is, the personal hub has been used in marketing for a long time - it's where we got pyramid selling and tupperware parties - yet this time it can reach even our most extended circle of acquaintances at virtually no per-head cost. It's pyramid selling on steroids! I see both the fragmentation of major social networks, as they widgetise themselves into sub-networks, and the proliferation of niche networks, as we move along the 'long tail' of social networking, happening over the next 5-10 years. Within that time I guarantee there will be a social network about social networking. Hmmmm, can't wait.