Solution to the heat equation in a pump casing model using the finite elment modelling software Image via Wikipedia

As we gear up to do some college recruiting, I thought this was an interesting thread. I particularly liked one of the comments, starting with the “These days”:

“I agree that the puzzle-solving during interviews is lame.

In fact, I’ve said exactly that same thing to an interviewer once: “Unless you guys spend all your time here re-designing quicksort, why do you want me to implement it on a whiteboard?”

These days, I usually bring a couple tricky differential equations w/ me to interview, and when the time comes when they say: “Do you have any questions for me?”, I respond: “Why yes, in fact I do”.. and I turn over the marker to him, and ask him to solve the following differential equations x, y, z, etc, on the whiteboard. Invariably, they flame out as badly as you might expect.. even for quite simple vanilla differential equations.. “But didn’t you take calculus in college?” I ask… “errr… yeah”… they stumble… “And you can’t solve this?” etc…

Point is, you can turn the tables on them.. or at least, you can do that if you feel the interview isn’t really going all that well anyway.

…”

When candidates come to our office, everyone has a job to do. Some of us ask specific technical questions, some of us do ask various business/consulting hypotheticals and see how the person reacts. I do not think we are too harsh, and I do not think we are unfair, but we can always get better. I hope that asking more and more puzzlers is not going to be the directions for us. A simple rule should apply – if you and your existing colleagues could not do these puzzles every time – do not ask others, it is clearly not an important attribute that has got you this far.

Image via Wikipedia

I’ll come back to this, but let me just say, do not do it for me – do it for the children.

I like books. I really like physical books. I like having them, I like holding them. I do not really like reading them all that much though. They never stay open in the same spot, it is hard to hold them with one hand, and if they are large enough – they take a toll on your back when you carry them on the commute. Let’s not get started on the pain of travel when you have to carry them. In bulk. On a trip. In the overhead space of an economy class carrier… Anyway – many people felt the same and we got these awesome ebook readers now. However, my inner snob is not satisfied – how would people visiting my home know of all these great books I pretend to read?

Ultimately, I want a wall the sort of looks like the picture above, but with my actual books. I have given up on publishers simply giving me the epub/mobi/pdf version with a physical book purchase. I know, I know – it would make too much sense to charge me an extra dollar so I do not have to sacrifice the convenience of electronic copy for the pleasure and security of a physical one. I am sure there are all sorts of complicated reasons why publishing industry chooses to punish its customers.

What I have not given up on is this – could someone make cardboard book covers I could get for the books I really wanted? It would be great if they licensed the original covers. It would be great if they had some new originals – but I could finally have the wall of books I own, to look at happily, as I sit in the armchair reading the amazon kindle.

The above is a bit of a joke, but I do find that having had shelves of books, visible books in the house has been great for the kids. Choosing from a list, or even a cover view on a tablet is not at all the same, as coming up to a bookcase and choose a book – seeing its neighbors, seeing its art. So, do not do it for me – do it for the children.

what is the reason every merchant should not offer email as an option for receipts?

Related articles

• Tired of keeping track of receipts? Lemon.com can help (venturebeat.com)
• E-Receipts Cut Clutter, Boost Marketing Opportunities (npr.org)

UPS, and many others, are even worse, asking for separate fields for Street Address1, Street Address2, etc. Google Maps do it, why would not the CRM which has entering of addresses as a major, and common, use case?

What is merely annoying when entering your own profile, becomes truly distracting in a CRM system. I will settle for correcting the system on the rare occasions it gets the address wrong.

This seemed like such a no-brainer that three years I thought of building a service to do just that, providing an address verification widget to those who needed it. And then I thought, “c’mon, everyone will have this implemented as soon as they realize how annoying entering addresses field-by-field is.” Go figure.

To the survey, Batman! Without being a UX expert (and pretending I have not dealt with them over the years) I can tell right away – Verizon does not care about my feedback, and never did.

Verizon Customer Service Survey

1. Why are you asking me about Live Chat? I did not come to use the Live chat. I came to do something on the website and Live Chat is mitigating a failure of the site. If the site did its job I would not be even using the chat. If Verizon cared about my experience, that’s what they would ask about. Ask me about the experience, not a feature. 

Sidebar: I can see the meeting that drove this decision. “But we are chat division, we cannot be held accountable for the overall experience. This is to make us – live chat customer support – better.” said their manager in an important meeting. Other people in the room, most of whom probably live so far out of the city that FiOS is not available, nod sagely. Everyone in that room has built their careers by defending and growing their turf, not by thinking of their eventual customers’ experience with Verizon.

2. I have no idea. How does this question possibly add a value to me? I already told Verizon the service was poor or excellent. In my case the chat people are always well-meaning but useless. I would not recommend the chat service because to use it is to admit the website has already failed. I would recommend my friends use this service like the would use a fire extinguisher – a painful last resort that will add to the damage but might prevent a bigger loss. Not exactly a ringing endorsement. So why ask this? Because Verizon does not care about your time or getting useful data. They care about TPS reports.

3. I am on a website!!!! That’s clearly my preferred method. It is not any of the choices. And I cannot stand when you require me to answer a question. Are you seriously telling me that my feedback is useless without this answer? An answer to a question you could not even provide adequate choices for? Right… Remind myself again - Verizon does not care about your time or getting useful data. They care about TPS reports.

4. The only useful field on the survey. Maybe it should be the one required field. And the first one. Why not invite the user to tell you how they feel? That would tell me Verizon is willing to read what I write and think about it. But I know they won’t. They will relegate my survey submission to a disgruntled pile, find a way to exclude my ratings from their overall numbers and move on.

To summarize – if you have to give you users a survey, heed the lessons of Verizon. Ask the users in a manner that respects their time and opinion, else your monthly payment from these users will suddenly become $60 less.

If you liked this post, read the first one I wrote on “how not to do surveys“.

Related articles

• Online surveys – how not to do them (www.fridnet.com/slava)

tooth fairy by anne hazelwood

My Dear Daughter (DD) is very serious about collecting money. Right now it is for books, but that is not really important. In one of her musings she wrote, “I hope tooth fairy brings me $5, or may be $8, then I could buy the new books in the [her favorite books] series that are coming out soon.”

At first I was proud, “She is saving money for books!”, but a moment later I realized – that’s her plan – a tooth fairy will bring her the money.

My DD is still pretty small, but I am amazed at constantly seeing businesses and executives who are supposed to be running them having basically the same plan, hoping for a tooth fairy. It is not that they could not use the money in a good way, it is just that it is not a plan to works out after the first few years of your life, or your business.

There is no deeper point I expect to make. Nothing about how to get money from tooth fairy you need to have your teeth loosened and pulled, or that the money you get is not even close to covering the co-pay and deductible. There has to be a good metaphor in this somewhere, that’s all.

Related articles

• American Children Receiving Less Money From Tooth Fairy: Report (huffingtonpost.com)
• There is always a plan B (Steve Blank)

Really really enjoying reading this series. This is the kind of class I think makes the best Universities worth the price.

The Stanford Lean LaunchPad class was an experiment in a new model of teaching startup entrepreneurship.

via The LeanLaunch Pad at Stanford – Class 7: Revenue Model « Steve Blank.

Related articles

• A New Way to Teach Entrepreneurship: Class 1 at Stanford’s Lean Launchpad (xconomy.com)

Klout seems to think that by giving access to product and marketing companies to provide samples or early access to whoever they consider “influencers” in their field, they would occupy a niche that is currently driven by intuition of marketers about the influence of specific people and heuristics – such as professional stature of someone in the field.

Klout Perks (beta)

This approach makes sense if you believe that a lot influencers are not the people you would traditionally think of. Personally, I am not sure there are enough people who are influential but are flying under the radar to make it worth while, but I am happy to be proven wrong.

Perhaps this is just the low-hanging fruit they are picking first. I could imagine that if you could more accurately identify not just the influencers, but people generally interested in some topics, that would make marketers a lot more interested. Again, this assumes existing techniques are worse at these predictions than klout would be.

Related articles

• What is your social media influence? An interview with Klout (maloneyonmarketing.com)
• You may have Online Influence, but do you have any Klout? (thelearningzone.co.za)
• In Defense of Klout Measurement (socialmediaobserver.wordpress.com)
• Digital Influence Recalibrated, Part 1: Klout’s measurement spectrum (thebrandbuilder.wordpress.com)

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I am sure it is hard to scale rapidly to 500 million people like facebook, or 5 billion visitors like Google, but PayPal has been stable forever. How hard can it be for an “internet-scale” company to actually scale to perform. It takes so long to login or to go through the three steps of sending money to someone that I constantly switch windows – and eventually time out because I forget I was in a middle of a transaction. Sure I am impatient, but that’s because Google taught me what proper response times are supposed to be – and it is not 15 or 30 seconds per click.

Clean up your act PayPal. You have had an incredible market all to yourself for a long time, and people are gunning for you now – and they will not make users spend a minute trying to send someone money.

Related articles

• How To Use Serve, American Express’ PayPal Clone (AXP) (businessinsider.com)
• PayPal Doubles Fees, Forgets to Tell Customers (blogs.sitepoint.com)
• Google Payment VP/Former PayPal Exec Osama Bedier On eCommerce: Major Change Is Coming (techcrunch.com)

Image via Wikipedia

I was at a meeting with a potential customer once, where we discussed moving forward with a social portal project. Their process – despite having some great people (!!) – compels them to spend months and years discussing how things would be done, if there were to be done, assuming they should be done. Or something like that; what they were unable to do is actually move forward. For 18 months. At the same time, we can read about Groupon‘s enterprise architecture here.

We spoke with Ryan Miller and Chris Bland from Groupon about how the company has managed to scale its business so quickly and with such agility. Rather than relying on its own complex internal systems infrastructure, Groupon uses tools like Salesforce.com and Amazon EC2 and S3 to keep the site powered and deals flowing.

A company barely existed 18 months ago! And then I went back to this letter to Enterprise Architecture I saw yesterday:

Actually, we’re still burned from the last time you did that to us, when you told us that “multichannel integration” would give us all the competitive advantage that we needed. It didn’t give us anything very much, but we suppose you got some “cool” bits or architecture. Anyway, once bitten, twice shy.

But even more surprising than all this was the discovery that even if we agreed to everything you want, we will then have to face an Architectural Council who have the power to overturn everything and send us back to the drawing board. Considering the constitution of this “council” is anyone who has a view on anything, we’ve heard on the grapevine pretty much no decisions get made ever. Apparently you all argue for hours over definitions of things such as TOGAFs and whether your “strategic” statements are correct or not. Its all so very ivory tower. Herds of elephants must have been destroyed in the process.

There is a lot in the post that I do not like, but it is hard to argue with the feeling most enterprise architecture teams inspire in their business users and IT colleagues. This reflection prompted a thought,

what if that is the true meaning of Enterprise Architecture – something that lets the company scale as fast as possible with minimal costs. Period. Everything else is a red herring.

One organization had a series of meetings, and another went from start-up to a multi-billion dollar company with thousands of employees in hundreds of locations – all in a same interval it took Earth do 1.5 orbits around its star.

One immediate realization is that had I thought at 9AM that the headache would persist, I would have taken Advil then. You see, like many people and businesses I do not like to take medicine. Medicine affects things, causes side effects, challenges what feels like “normal” state, and there is always hope that “it will just pass“. And often it will do just that – pass. However, when we do end up taking medicine, it often works, and we regret not taking it earlier. So, when hit with a spade of headaches a few weeks ago I decided – just take the medicine when it starts to hurt. It was amazing how much better I felt, how much more I was able to achieve.

The thing is – businesses can do the same. Facing up to the problem early, realizing that what you are doing is causing pain – and that taking “medicine” is not a sign of weakness, it is a sign of being focused on moving forward. Surprisingly often, headaches are not a sign of a brain tumor requiring major surgery, they are like Advil – cheap, easy to take, and provide relief to focus on things businesses need to thrive and move forward. But it only works if you take the medicine. What have you got to lose except a headache?

What’s the rush for an ipo for a well-capitalized company? Fear that the market isn’t going to be there…

Anyway, what really hit me was that message of product introspection applies to established companies as much as it does to start-ups. Existing companies spend as much, perhaps more, time dreaming up products and solutions, offers and packages, as any start-up. IBM alone has thousands and thousands software “products” (part #s you can buy) and each one of these was debated, researched, fought over – and in the end decided to solve some problem for a non-trivially sized market.

So next time we have a solution definition meeting, I will be the guy standing up and asking, “How are they doing it now?”

Update: It took me a couple of days to get to write this post. I actually *did* bring this up in a strategy meeting. The result was to change one of the marketing approaches to our international business. Great return on investment of reading a blog :)

A lot of highfaluting and important-sounding stuff gets written about office culture, team building, and other human resources buzzwords. I like to think that as much – or more – can be found in small clues left around by the people themselves. A desk with a pile of printouts covering 3 old laptops and 5 coffee cups on it tells you as much about the person as his resume would. At least as much.

But I digress. A similar clue struck me as I walked around offices a little  while ago, late in the evening. It was quiet – everyone had gone home and I had a thorny problem to solve. As I walked the office perimeter, trying to think, I realized that new carpet and paint brought out the wear-and-tear of the doors – specifically door handles.

When I looked at these handles, I actually knew immediately which offices they belonged to – and thought the amount of wear and tear on them made perfect sense given the occupants.

What’s my point? As people decorate and redecorate their offices, fight for team improvement and cohesion, alignment, productivity – they should not forget that in the end there are human beings sitting inside these offices. And so if they find a worn out handle on someone’s door – do not replace it, just quietly give the guy (or gal) a raise.

- from a Colleague’s conference abstract

With all the talk about customer/user experience, businesses sometimes forget that ALL interactions matter, and that friction built in any phase of the transaction will slow down the momentum. Having 1-click shopping experience is great, but not when there is no way to reset a password and complete a sale in the time already mentally allotted for it.

Recently, for example, I was about to buy shoes from Zappoes.com, since I figured it would be easiest for me for to just reorder the last pair of shoes I bought there. With as many account we have nowadays, and different security requirements, I could not remember the password and had to request a reset. A common enough occurrence, I suppose. I find it strange that Zappoes can get shoes to me, if I could order them, faster than they got the password reset email to my Inbox. Like many consumers, I am willing to wait 5 or 10 minutes for such an email, but when it does not arrive – I am forced (forced, I tell you!) to go to Plan B. In this case Amazon won the day. It took me a few extra clicks to locate my desired pair of shoes – but at least I could get in and buy.

So a kind reminder to online merchants – I suspect you lose a sale for every 10 minutes password reset is not done. And every such lost sale is totally unnecessary. If you are not sure how long your site takes to reset a password – go and test it now, do not put it off till tomorrow when more of your sales are going to Amazon, which is one site users do remember their passwords.

It sounds great, sort of. First, push the customer to adopt the latest and greatest, and figure out exactly how to operate that sharp, spinning, cut-to-the-bone blade of innovation without gloves and safety glasses during implementation. Second, learn your lessons on their dollars, deliver a half-broken system that sparked a thousand promises, and work hard to get a second contract to fix the problems from the first round. [If this situation sounds familiar - maybe you need to find a different partner for services]

Of course, there are other ways. Like doing good and fun things to learn and become better at something (it helps if you are passionate about your work). This is where the ‘Poster’ comes in.

A couple of good friends run a pretty awesome [IMHO] design studio in Brooklyn called Hyperakt. One of the things I really like about them is that in addition to their paid work they also do pro-bono work for various causes, and some just plain fun stuff. A radial bracket World Cup Poster is one such project.

The poster is nifty. I like how it is dynamic – taking its final shape over the weeks of the World Cup tournament. I also like that this is a project hosted on KickStarter , gets socialized on twitter, and helps Hyperakt to better understand how to do such things for their customers, without experimenting using other people’s time and money.

What can I say? Let’s watch some futbol!

Sent to a [SYNTHETIC-WORLDS] mailing list:

A main goal of the synthetic worlds initiative at Indiana University is to develop large games as research environments. To test some ideas, we have prepared a browser-based game of kingdoms, trade, diplomacy, and warfare in the stone age. The world is called Greenland and it enters open beta today. We invite those interested in such things to help us by testing the environment and contributing reactions and criticism to the forums.

To enter Greenland, go to http://greenlandgame.com/ and choose the Mercator server (the other two servers are closed for internal testing).You will need a code to register for the server; it is GLOPENACCESS.

If you have questions or problems, please contact our community manager Matt Falk at mfalk@umail.iu.edu.

Thank you.

--
Edward Castronova
Associate Professor of Telecommunications
Indiana University

I am trying to figure out how best to use the “deals” feature, and it would be really great if I could surface emails/notes from people involved in the deal without having to make 10 clicks. It was not even obvious to me that I could assign these to deals until I tried to change the email… At the very least, I should be able to drag an email/note to the “deal” that is already shown on the right side of the screen. Ideally, I would like to be able to add notes/emails from inside the deals – also with drag-n-drop…

Offtopic: Interestingly (for me) – I have immediately begun to expect that companies follow twitter and therefore will just pick up the resultant twit and comment on the blog. It’s all the fault of the GetSatisfaction.com team.

At first I thought it was different, especially between different socio-economic circles, but now I think it might be the same problem. Perhaps there is not a difference between knowing “someone by name” and “someone by skill”, at least in terms of the length of the chain. The difference may occur on the level of semantics – “good lawyer” or, in today’s headlines, “good bank” are different from “John Smith”. I’d be curious to know if people have done reaearch into this question, and what their findings were.

How does this relate to anything useful?

As I constantly think of how best to work with my teams, this is an important, but largely unmeasured consideration. When forming the teams we formally look at the person’s skills, some relevant experience with a similar type of project or industry is helpful – but rarely measured. However, I do not think I have ever heard anyone say, “we must have 40 points of X experience and 60 points of Y exposure for every project we undertake in order to have 90% confidence of success.” We do a similar calculation with technical skills, but not much else. At the same time, it is pretty obvious that the MVPs on all teams are always the multi-faceted guys who not only know how to manage java heap sizes, but also where to get a projector on short notice and can talk sports/stocks/beer with colleagues and customers.

“In addition, over time the sales team will get frustrated if the product is not ready for primetime and they will be out looking for a new job in a couple of quarters making all of this effort a very expensive experiment.”

That is absolutely true, and I think only comes with experience (or reading Ed’s blog). It is hard to underestimate how quickly sales people become frustrated if they feel the product is not saleable, especially if the market for the product is new in general or unfamiliar to the sales person.
Another aspect of sales hiring, very important to understand before multiple sales people are brought on, is the length of the sales cycle. It is pointless to expect a sales person to produce even after two quarters when the average sales cycle for your industry segment is nine months. So one has to remember that a sales person will use up most of their year getting that first sale, and that despite being “theirs”, the senior technical or business personnel will actually do most of the work in getting that first, or even second and third, sales for every sales person hired. It is annoying for a bootstrapping company to babysit someone who is supposed to be brining in sales and income – but there is often no other way to get the sales people to understand the new technology they are selling to new customers they are engaging.

“…rather than hire a VP of Sales first, I would encourage you to focus on generating leads and hiring a sales rep or two to follow up on them. This way you can take a smaller step to refine your sales model and product before going big.”

Absolutely. This is sage advice (don’t I sound fawning?)