Ideation process

  1. Gather qualitative data through user interviews
  2. Gather historical quantitative behavioral and segmentation data if any
  3. define problem statements
  4. define personas
  5. Prioritize personas base on segment size and organization strategy/mission fit
  6. Prioritize problem statements based on problem and product feature fit
  7. generate many design concept variants  as different approaches to tackling problem
  8. curate and prioritize them as agile stories
  9. implement base feature set
  10. roll out to user base
  11. validate outstanding hypothesis to gain visibility
  12. iterate on results
  13. head back to step 1

External references

  • User centric design high level – http://garyteh.com/2018/08/tim-on-user-centric-design/

Quick summary of Facebook early days

Eco-system

  • Palo Alto was the hub where technology innovation happened
  • People forgot to send Mark Zuckerberg the memo that the consumer internet was over
  • The idea of a web about people linked together online was relatively new then. The accepted norm of the day was about pages linked together
  • on the web the values of a few people can have a huge impact on everyone – the web will ultimately go where the collective conscience wants to go

Product Management

  • Getting users to use their real name is very important as it will limit the need to monitor for porn since it is tied directly back to their personal reputation
  • Be very focused and clear what your product is supposed to do – small details are extremely important
    • Facebook is a utility to efficiently communicate with friends
    • MySpace is an online community to share similar interest
    • it was a dead simple product. Just users profiles
  • Uptake of a well crafted feature is pretty organic and retention is high
  • Photo tagging was the largest growth driver
  • your home Page is constantly changing is a new concept – your personalized newspaper
  • user research help elevating understanding from the conversation from “our users are so stupid” to what makes sense for our users –
    • people became scared when they did understand what was going on
    • match user complains to corresponding usage data of the same person
    • give people the control or even an illusion of one on how they are presented publicly on their feed to alleviate fear

Engineering

  • Failure to scale infrastructure properly when required will kill the user experience
  • User needs and behavior drives engineering activities

Culture and HR

  • The team was really focused as a group
  • Ok to pay with stock for services rendered to company
  • The social graph is based on Graph Theory, a mathematical concept that will appeal to someone with math background
  • move fast break things as a concept stopped working at 10 engineers. Some level of discipline became necessary
  • Younger people had simpler lives and didn’t own much. 75% of adults who joined the company in the early days became divorced
  • The culture became very clear and apparent early in
    • Facebook is undergraduate culture,
    • Google is graduate culture
  • Acquisition offers should be considered on the merit of whether the decision to go ahead will further the mission
  • Mark and his whole team just kept repeatedly using the same word “Domination!!!” as a mantra until Mark was told to stop by the general counsel

External reference

Morning reflections on marketing and story telling

The core motivation underlying the whole concept of marketing is to build trust in an entity by a targeted community with the use of this ancient technology called words.

The story that is accompanied with the release and roll out of a solution/feature/product to a community needs to be coherent and consistent to the context members in the community is familiar with. A well crafted story will be easily processed and digested in the limbic brain of the community member, thus truggering off the desired set of hormones/emotions.

Lagging awareness of the underlying context, a mis-crafted message will cause cognitive dissonance in the prefrontal coretex of the community member resulting in a mild level of adrenaline release in the reptilian brain. This effect will serve to erode instead of build trust. It is important to spend time understanding the context/worldview a community holds to identify the “problem” you want to solve within that same community before crafting up the story to communicate how the solution will solve that specific problem the community is facing.

Thus the importance of doing ethnographic research as well as always maintaining a clear understanding that the purpose of any organization (for-profit/non-profit) lies not within its four walls but within the community it intends to serve. It also highlights the importance the need to be awary of employing a one-size fits all marketing story without thorough research into variance across all communities being served.

External references

  • The Essential Drucker, Peter F Drucker
  • Permission marketing, Seth Godin
  • Purple Cow, Seth Godin
  • Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari

Reflections for the afternoon

Betting on technology companies that fall into one of the three categories

  • aggregators of trust
  • aggregators of financial liquidity
  • aggregators of data

On aggregators of data, bet on the storage caching layer as opposed to the presentation layer. The former is harder to displace than the latter

Lateral thinking: To derive as many possible application/implication of the same insight as possible.

Reflection this morning on profiles

A profile is essentially a bio-chemical based system. When gearing for a specific outcome, it is important to examine its configuration at all levels to remove redundant attributes to free up CPU cycles for performance effectiveness. 

The goal of a practitioner is thus to consistently work on the discipline of self-mastery.

Levels of available profile configuration

  • Behavior
  • routines
  • Habit
  • Personality
  • Identity
  • Worldview
  • Beliefs

 

Humor of the day

Reminder to Engineers involved in related projects: When automating and replacing every single conceivable task associated with the preparation of a wonderful dish with AI, please don’t replace the person who is suppose to experience the joy of tasting the dish with a machine

Casey Winter on growth, market places and content loops

  • Your startup probably won’t fail because you ran out of money. It’s premature scaling that actually kills you
  • content loops when done properly are very scalable
  • Growing Market places
    • GrubHub: Try growing it in one city
      • create unique pages based on
        • zipcode
        • neighborhood
        • colleges
        • cuisine combinations
    • Find a replicable way to grow
    • Try it in another city
  • One half of SEO is about being relevant. The other half of SEO is about being an authority
    • on GrubHub
      • restaurant owners gave their menu data
      • visitors gave their reviews
  • Figuring out which unique content to create
    • Pintrest
      • Look for what people were searching for on Pintrest
      • Went to Google Keywords planner to check corresponding search traffic
      • Check how good is the content we are servicing on Pintrest
      • This process ensures quality since users have already indicated which content was cool!

External references

Tim on User centric design

Design thinking is a more elaborate waterfall like model as compared to User centric design

  • It was originally created by the dude from SAP which is the founder of IDEO

User Centric Design

Helps avoid thinking of solution purely in functional terms devoid of human values

Goals

  • Business Goals – numbers you want to hit as a business

Assumptions

  • List of hypothesis revolving around your business goals

User(s)

  • Who
    • the various personas about your user
    • it is centered around the kinds of physical behavior they exhibit
    • it is centered around the emotions and attitude
    • In a market place or social network the following distribution would hold true
      • 1% content creators – the protagonist
      • 9% synthesizers – they transmute the inputs from the creators
      • 90% silent majority – they observe and consume what was generated
  • Problems / Needs
    • centered around the day to day needs they have in their role
    • centered around the day to day problems they experience because of the need they have
    • qualitative and quantitative data to size of each segment of persona as well as the conversion rates in prior experiments
  • Themes
    • The commonly recurring themes identified based on qualitative feedbacks gathered from interviews with users.

 

 

Tim on doing manual sentiment analysis

  1. To read through the comments and reviews users of competitors’ product leave publicly
  2. to extract unique recurring keywords and themes used by the users in their reviews
  3. through these keywords parse out the themes they imply
  4. start thinking of ideas for your own product would contribute towards furthering relevant these thematic experiences