Pictures can convey messages much more powerfully than words.  In a recent discussion about writing whitepapers, I suggested combining the idea-creation advice from Made To Stick with the image-creation advice from Back of The Napkin.  Check out this article to see some concrete examples.

Made To Stick

Paul Young, product manager and author of Product Beautiful,  sent out a tweet the other day asking:

Anyone have any “best practices” for whitepaper development? E.g. most whitepapers I read are stilted, I want to make something compelling.

Tweet, on twitter

I suggested combining the ideas from Made to Stick and Back of the Napkin to create a compelling whitepaper.  Stephanie Tilton then replied with a link to a good article she wrote showing how to apply the ideas from Made to Stick to writing whitepapers.

The book, Made To Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, written by Chip Heath and Dan Heath, has some very powerful ideas for communicating ideas.  Stephanie sums them up nicely in her article:

• Simple
• Unexpected
• Concrete
• Credible
• Emotional
• Stories

Stephanie Tilton, How to Craft Whitepapers that Stick in People’s Minds

Check it out, she goes into more detail, with examples and insights about why they work.  What about the Back of the Napkin ideas?  That’s what this article covers.

Back of the Napkin

I remember feeling like I’d been hit in my frontal cortex with a frying pan at Product Camp Austin (Winter 2009), when I first saw a visualization created by Sunni Brown of Brightspot for one of the presentations.  I remembered hearing about Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures, by Dan Roam, and immediately ordered it from Amazon.  This is actually the current book for the Smarter Product Managers book club.

Applying these visualization techniques is extremely compelling for sharing ideas.

There is a ton of science behind why (and how) visual presentation of ideas (pictures) works so well.  Dan Roam does a fantastic job of making this approachable and actionable – an excellent book.

Getting back to the conversation…

How to Put Pictures in your Whitepaper

The rest of this article is showing some example images, in Back of the Napkin style, that support the ideas from Made to Stick, as you would include them in a whitepaper.

Imagine you’re writing a whitepaper about requirements elicitation.  There are a lot of important topics you could cover, but to stay aligned with the simple message from Made to Stick, you will want to focus on one idea (for each whitepaper, as Stephanie explains in her article).

User representatives are often offered to business analysts as a “convenient” source of requirements – the actual users are too busy, too valuable, or too easily distracted/upset/encouraged by conversations about the future.  This idea is both bad and pervasive.  You want your whitepaper to convey emotionally why this is bad.  You need something concrete, and maybe you want to tell a story.  Consider this image:

This is poorly drawn (but that’s ok!), but it establishes the metaphor that inserting user representatives into the elicitation process is like playing the telephone game.  The message (user goals) gets lost between the users and the business analyst.  It also points out that the conversation between users and analysts is what makes good requirements elication, well, good (ref. the smiley faces in the drawing if you’re not sure).

Designing for “Everyone” is a Bad Idea

One challenge for product managers is determining which features to include in their product roadmap.  Industry analysts, and sometimes buyers, have been known to use checklists to pre-screen or select products.  That may be true, but using a checklist to prioritize your product development is a bad idea, because you end up creating a product that doesn’t thrill any particular users, and just makes analysts happy.

The quick mock-up of a Consumer Reports style checklist shows a comparison of your product against the competition’s product.  With six features (A through F), it appears that your product is better.  [Here's an article comparing elicitation techniques, with a real consumer-reports-style checklist and an explanation of how to read it.]  You have six “half-circles” which looks to be “better” than two “full circles.”  Therein lies the danger.

Any individual user cares about two or three of those features (capabilities), not all six of them.  Will that user prefer your product or the competition’s product?

That user is thrilled to use your competition’s product, because it does what that user cares about, really well.  Your product is half-baked. Happy analyst, missing user (for you).

Increasing Distribution Channels Decreases Sales

Another key idea from Made to Stick is the notion of presenting the unexpected.  The authors point out that you need to demonstrate an idea that is at odds with the reader’s concept of reality – breaking it – and then rebuild the reader’s sense of reality around your new idea.  That’s where the unexpected comes in.

Consider that you are selling a product into a crowded market, with many places that customers could buy your product.  You do your inital launch, selling through one sales channel.  Someone proposes adding other channels – hey, more is better, right?

How do you prevent this Benedict Arnold from killing your company with what looks to be a great idea?  How about getting people’s attention with this “violation of common sense”:

That will get people’s attention.  What the Heath brothers point out is that to establish credibility with this unexpected visual, you have to rebuild people’s perspective.  You could do that with the following:

Since each store (channel) has a best-sellers list, like the Billboard charts for music, you want to make sure you’re at the top of the list.  Most downloaded is a common metric for software available on shareware and freeware sites.  If people can get your product anywhere they happen to be, it will dillute your rankings at every store.  By targeting your marketing and making your product available at one store, you will get more traffic (at that store) than you otherwise would.  Then new potential customers will be more likely to discover your product because it is at the top of the list.

Climate Change

I touched on credibility in the last example.  As Stephanie points out in her article, the Made to Stick authors were talking more about data than visceral understanding.  The first thought that popped into my head was the effectiveness of Al Gore’s data in his An Inconvenient Truth book (and presentation and movie).  He demonstrates that there is a correlation (and implies that there is a causal effect) between the average temperatures on earth and carbon dioxide levels.

Pretty powerful message.

Conclusion

Pictures like the ones above, drawn as Dan Roam suggests in Back of the Napkin can make the ideas you present in your whitepaper really memorable.  Use the Heath brothers’ approach from Made to Stick in crafting your message, and fold it into your whitepaper as Stephanie suggests.

The result is a compelling and memorable white paper, just like Paul always wanted.

Blue Ocean Strategy provides an interesting reactive analysis of companies and markets.  Personas are used to understand your customer’s needs.  Combining the two provides powerful proactive insights when positioning your product for market success.

Blue Ocean Strategy

The book, Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make Competition Irrelevant, by Kim and Mauborgne, was written in 2005.  The book presents a very compelling way to visualize competition in your market by contrasting the emphasis (or effectiveness) of each company at solving particular problems.  The authors argue that red oceans are competitive markets where companies compete to solve the same problems for the same customers.  Their main idea is that by identifying (and solving) unaddressed problems, you can define a new market – a blue ocean with no relevant competitors.  The “red” in their metaphor implies blood in the water, caused by cut-throat competition.  Their position – by defining a new market boundaries with no competition, you eliminate the blood in the water and give yourself a calm, blue ocean in which to navigate your company.

This is a compelling idea, and has a lot of merit.  The Smarter Product Managers book club (started by Cindy Alvarez) reviewed this book last month, and one conclusion we reached during the discussion is that the examples in the book felt “reverse-engineered.”  I feel that the lack of prescriptive advice from the authors created a sense of “that’s fine, but how do I apply these ideas proactively?”   Some of the examples in the book, like Cirque de Solei and Southwest Airlines, felt very compelling (and are often cited), while others felt a bit more contrived.  Almost as if the authors were searching for data to support their arguments – a big no-no for product managers.

Creating a Blue Ocean Strategy Map

The book presents examples of “mapping” markets based upon the strength of the offerings from companies, along different dimensions.  The following example was created by me (and is used throughout this article), but follows the pattern of analysis described in the book.  This is an unresearched, hypothetical example analysis of the market for vaccuum cleaners – or more generically, floor cleaning products.

 [larger image]

The diagram above identifies seven dimensions by which you could characterize the offerings from each company.

• Breathe Easier / Anti-Allergen – sometimes, people vaccuum their rugs in order to reduce allergens (by sucking up dust), making it easier for them to breathe in their homes.  Vaccuum cleaners work by sucking up air through the carpet, collecting the dirt (that is sucked up along with the air), and filtering the exhaust air (that is expelled into the room).  Different vaccuum cleaners pay different levels of attention to removing allergens during this cleaning process, by (1) getting the allergens out of the carpet and (2) filtering the allergens out of the exhaust air.
• Remove Stains – one motivation to clean your floor is to remove stains.  This is not generally a focus of vaccuum cleaners, but products like the Green Machine do focus on removing stains, while also “picking up dirt.”
• Physically Easy to Use – after back surgery, one of the key pieces of advice my mother received from her doctor was “no vaccuuming.”  When you are young and healthy, you don’t expect vaccuuming to be something that is forbidden by your doctor.  Shoveling snow, climbing a mountain, running a marathon, yes – but vaccuuming?
• Reducing Hassle – Why don’t we vaccuum every day?  Because it can be a hassle to get out the vaccuum, set up the equipment, and actually use it.  When you reduce the hassle involved in vaccuuming, you are likely to vaccuum more often, thereby realizing more benefits from vaccuuming.
• Saving Time – Hassle is not the only barrier to vaccuuming.  If you could vaccuum your house in 5 minutes instead of 105 minutes, you would do it more often.  As a teenager, I used to jog behind the lawn mower, just to get the yard done so I could move on to other things.
• Reliability – While reliability is not a major factor when vaccuuming your house (once), it is a key component of making purchasing decisions – because you don’t vaccuum just once.  The more you vaccuum, the more you care about reliability.  This is also an indirect cost factor – a vaccuum cleaner that has to be frequently repaired or replaced will cost more per year than one that has the same purchase price and is more reliable.  This is also an indirect hassle factor – you may delay vaccuuming your home until you can make time to get a broken vaccuum cleaner repaired.
• Avoiding Cost – A direct focus on cost is primarily driven by purchase price.  Other factors (like reliability, and the cost of replacement bags or filters), but people place greater emphasis on purchase price when thinking about cost.  Consumer Reports and other “product review” companies will often “do the math” for you, taking into account all of the post-purchase costs to calculate total-cost-of-ownership.

The above diagram, with fictitous values for “Strength of Competitive Offering”, shows the competitive landscape for the vaccuum cleaner market.  One of the very powerful features of this visualization is that the Roomba faces “no competition” from the other companies in three of the seven categories – Ease of Use, Hassle, and Time.  A Blue Ocean Strategy analysis would say that the Roomba has created their own market, with an absense of competition.

This gets back to our insight that the examples felt “reverse engineered.”  The Roomba does have a dramatically different value-proposition, and focused on dimensions that are not addressed by their competition.  So why isn’t the Roomba in the book?  Because they still compete in the red ocean.  Unlike Southwest Airlines, they did not differentiate their offering in a relevant way.  And that’s the problem we found in trying to apply the principles from the book.  

It is not enough to be innovative and differentiated, which the Roomba certainly is, you have to be valuably differentiated.

So how do you differentiate valuably and proactively?  Identify the problems that your customers value, but don’t yet have solutions for.  How do you do that?  With personas.

Personas

Personas represent customers in your target markets.  Markets are not homogenous – different people in your markets value different things for different reasons.  You develop personas as archetypes to represent subsets of the customers in a given market who share common problems.  More concretely, personas share common valuations of shared problems.

To combine persona development with the market-mapping concept from Blue Ocean Strategy, create the same map, but for personas.  Instead of identifying the strength of each company/product along each dimension, identify how much each persona cares about each particular dimension.

 [larger image]

In the chart above, I’ve created 6 hypothetical personas who populate our market:

• Single Parent – the classic superman / superwoman who does everything, including keeping the house clean.
• Housekeeper – someone employed to keep someone else’s house clean.
• Office Cleaner – the person who vaccuums your office at 2am every night and picks up all the empty Diet Coke cans and Twinkee wrappers.
• Kid (Doing Chores) – most kids won’t ask for a vaccuum cleaner for their birthday, but when you child is responsible for vaccuuming, do you want a battle every week because they hate it?
• Homeowner – like the single parent, but maybe without kids, and definitely with fewer responsibilities (and more time).
• Retiree – like the homeowner, but with a lot more time, and a less robust physical condition.

[Note - the above examples are really stereotypes and not personas (there is no research to back them up - they are entirely fictional) - don't fall into the trap of thinking persona development is this easy.]

OK, now we have an understanding of how much importance each persona places on each dimension.  It looks like a mess, for this example, when you try and absorb the big picture.  If you focus on a single persona, you get great clarity about what that type of customer cares about.  Look at each curve individually, then look at them all together.  If you’re thinking ahead, you’ll suspect that the Roomba is perfect for the kid doing chores.  But wait, we’ll come back to that.

One insight we can gain from this messy view of the market is that you can’t create a product that is “perfect” for all of these personas.  You have to target a specific persona, and tailor your product for that persona.

Mapping Personas to Products

Now we have two views of the market, along 7 dimensions.  We have assessments of the relative strength of each competitor’s offering, and we have estimates of the relative importance to each persona – for each dimension.  What we need to do is combine the two.

All of this analysis runs the risk of introducing a notion of false precision - we have a lot of data, therefore it must be accurate.  So our inclination may be to try and do some mathematically refined, scientific analysis.  I suspect that would be wasted effort, providing no additional insights, and risking leaps to the wrong conclusions.  I propose a simpler approach.

The analysis we really care about – which product offering is best aligned with the needs of each persona?  A simple mathematical equivalent of “which curves match the best” is an easy analysis.  By comparing the values from each competitor curve with those of each persona curve, we can create a series of “how good a fit is it?” values.

 [larger image]

Imagine a persona saying “how well does each company’s product align with my goals?”  This “simple math mashup” takes into account both “they succeed at what I care about” and “they haven’t invested in something I don’t care about (at the expense of something I do care about).”

You can see that the Roomba clearly wins with kids doing chores.  The rest of offerings stand out less, but do provide insight.  Now you can easily drive strategic decisions – “we want to be the vaccuum of choice for housekeepers” now drives some obvious emphasis on ease of use and a reduced emphasis on reducing costs.

Improving The Model

My two main problems with the blue ocean strategy were lack of relevance (who cares about dimension X) and magnitude (which dimension is most important?).  The model above addresses only relevance – a focus on target personas.  We can overlay some “relative importance of each persona” data, or just manually focus our efforts on each persona in series.  

The other magnitude challenge is in understanding not just which problems are important in absolute terms (kids care a lot about saving time, but not cost), but in relative terms (kids would trade an hour of time for a modicum of ease-of-use).  Essentially, defining the utility-curves for each persona.  For any but the largest, most saturated markets, I would hesitate to do the utility curve analysis in detail – it feels too heavyweight and un-agile.

Conclusion

The Blue Ocean Strategy book provides us with a visceral tool for visualizing relative offerings from competitors in a given market.  Combine it with the same visualization approach for personas that participate in that market, and you gain insights into which problems to solve next to achieve product success.

My friend Rich Mironov, chief marketing officer at Enthiosys, recently published The Art of Product Management, and was kind enough to send me a free copy.  The essays he shares in the book make great conversation starters for product managers.  Tyner Blain is giving away a free copy to someone who participates in the product management conversations.  Read on to see how you can win.

Conversation

Rich really has a great conversational style in his writing, it reads well and flows easily. Rich knows his audience well, and provides keen insights into different elements of product management.  Often, he uses analogies – like running a grocery store versus running a restaurant, to put SaaS versus licensing of software into perspective.  Even with essays so well aligned with the interests of product managers, it can be challenging to create a conversation through writing a book.  Rich can’t get real time feedback while writing his book, like he can from the readers of his blog.

Cindy Alvarez started the smarter product managers book club on booksprouts, and we’re on our second book – The Art of Product Management.  We meet tomorrow night (Wed, 11 Mar 2009) – details in the book-club area, sign up and join for free.  This will help get more conversation going around Rich’s book.  

Also, if you’re on Twitter [I'm @sehlhorst if you want to follow my tweets], you can search for “#pmbc” and find tweets that are related (usually) to the current book.  You can also search twitter for “#prodmgmt” to see tweets from/about product management.  If you aren’t on Twitter, you can still follow those links and watch the conversations, and find people to follow.

One of the most rewarding things about writing the Tyner Blain blog is the conversations it starts for me.

Contest

This contest is meant to serve two goals.  First, to give away a copy of Rich’s book, balancing out the free copy he so graciously sent to me.  Thanks again, Rich!  Second, to trigger even more conversations on Tyner Blain.  Since Rich’s book is written for product managers, the contest is structured to inspire conversations about product management.

The Rules of the Contest

There are three ways to “enter” the contest to win a free copy of The Art of Product Management.

1. Add a non-trivial comment to this article, about one or more of the essays in The Art of Product Management.  You can either start a conversation or join an existing one.  ”Non-trivial” is solely up to my judgement.  If you’re contributing to the conversation, then I’m happy.  ”Me too” won’t cut it.
2. Add a non-trivial comment to any of the 200 Tyner Blain articles in the “product management” category.  You can either join a conversation or start a new one related to the article.  Feel free, of course to be critical of any of those articles – just make sure you’re conversational, and I’m happy.  ”You stink, Scott” isn’t good enough.
3. Write a blog post on your own blog and either use a trackback or link it to this article or one of the product management articles on Tyner Blain.  The same conversational rules apply.

You’ll get 1 point for each comment or blog post you make as you participate in the conversations.  You can write multiple comments / posts, you’ll get credit for all of them.  Your comment needs to include the email address you want me to contact you at when you win, or I need to be able to find a way to contact you if your blog post is the winner.  You can select to be notified by email whenever a new comment is added to any article you’ve commented on – just check the box before submitting your comment.  I’ve found that to be a fantastic way to participate in conversations!

The contest starts immediately after the first comment I post to this article, and ends either when we get to 100 qualifying comments/posts, or one month from today (April 10th, 2009).  I will randomly select a winner from all of the entries, and contact you after the contest is over. [Note: Comments by Scott Sehlhorst are not counted in this contest.]

But I Already Own The Art of Product Management!

OK, if you already own a copy, you can accept the cash equivalent (the current Amazon price on April 10th, 2009), and choose to buy something else, or get another copy of the book and give it to someone (or run your own contest).  Your choice.

Thanks

Thanks to Rich for writing this really enjoyable book for product managers, and thanks to everyone who contributes to the product management conversations here and on the other great product management blogs that I read.

We’ve all heard the saying, the customer is always right.  For most product managers, however, the non-customer is the person you should be listening to.  When you hear the phrase understand your market, the goal isn’t to understand those people who’ve already purchased your product.  The goal is to understand the people who haven’t purchased your product yet.

Retail Customers

Gordon Selfridge is credited with coining the phrase, the customer is always right, about 100 years ago.  [Note: Wikipedia notes that it may not have originated with him.]  Mr. Selfridge made his fame first at Macy’s and then with his own department store.

There are two good reasons that he was successful, and that his catch phrase has become part of our mass conciousness.  First, the phrase serves as a reminder of the importance of great customer service as an element of customer delight.  Great customer service can be a distinctive competence of your organization – it can be what makes you dominate a market.   Second, and more importantly, in retail, your (previous) customers are not certain to be your (future) customers.  This is especially true with commodity products or markets, like retail and white goods.  The person who bought from you yesterday can just as easily buy from the guy across the street next week.  With an eye to the future, you really should be thinking of him as a non-customer, and should be trying to win his business.

In gambling, there’s a phrase – dice have no memory.  The fact that you threw a seven (a winning throw in craps) 10 seconds ago has no bearing on the possibility that you will throw snake-eyes (a losing throw) 10 seconds from now.  Retail customers are the same, unless you give them a reason to want to make their next purchase from you.

And that’s why the customer is always right works for retailers.  Because the focus on customer service will magically convert “non-customers” into repeat-customers.

Non-Customers

If you’re a product manager who champions a product that relies on repeat customers, then you may not get any value from this article.  If you’re a product manager who wants to grow his market – to sell to new customers, then listen up – this one is for you.

New customers are not really customers, yet.  You can call them prospects, leads, or opportunities.  You hope they will become customers.  But right now, they are non-customers.

Non-customers are your market.  And understanding your market means understanding your non-customers.  Find out what their problems are.  And create solutions for your non-customers.  If you do a good enough job, you can call them not-yet-your-customers.  But that’s too many hyphens for me to type.  Non-customers.

How many email servers, data centers, or disaster recovery solutions are you going to sell to one customer?

Sure, your business model may rely on residuals, maintenance contracts, or license fees, or you may sell a service that involves recurring billing.  Part of your business model, then, is about having sustained customers.  sustained customers are not the same as repeat customers.  You want them to keep using what you already sold them (and keep paying more for it – so it better become more valuable over time!).  But if growth is part of your business model, what you’re really looking for is new-to-you customers.

Non-customers.

Tuned In To Your Non-Customers

Maybe I always had this understanding, locked away in my head, just waiting to be set free.  Or maybe the idea jumped out of the pages of Tuned In and rang so true that I can’t remember not hearing the reverberations of the idea.  It is not a new idea – and the authors (Craig Stull, Phil Meyers, and David Meerman Scott) say as much – but it is a refreshingly crisp presentation of the idea.

Tuned In just became the Amazon #1best seller (and more accolades).  You can watch the abc news interview with Phil on the Tuned In blog.  It may be the Da Vinci Code for product managers.  Check out the video for a quick overview from Phil about the ideas in their book.

The Right Time For An Idea

I don’t know if it is serendipity, but the focus on the problems of non-customers is getting a lot of attention in the product management world right now.  It’s the hot new epiphany.

Nick Coster pointed us, last week on brainmates, to a blog post by John Nack, senior product manager at Adobe.  One idea among several from John:

“My job is to talk to people from across the insanely diverse range of those who use Photoshop–and some who don’t, but who we think should–and to figure out the “next next” thing.”

It’s his attention to his non-customers that gets our attention.

Ivan Chalif was digging through back-issues of Fast Company when he came across an article from Nov 2007 about Trek bicycles.  From Ivan’s article:

“They were accustomed to collecting feedback from biking professionals, but when they solicited requirements from people who weren’t bikers, they ended up designing a bike which appealed to a completely different rider.”

Again with the non-customers.

And there are a bunch of examples in Tuned In too – from Zip Car to iPods and more.  I really think the guys are onto something here…

Michael Port’s new book just came out. If you’re trying to redefine or improve how you focus professionally, it would be a good read. If you run your own company, or want to, it is a great read. Michael has good advice, good reasoning for his advice, and he writes well – a very easy to read style. Not dumbed down, not full of jargon. As someone who exactly matches his target audience, I highly recommend Beyond Booked Solid.

Getting Beyond Booked Solid

Out of the blue, one day, I get a pre-release copy of Michael’s book. I sometimes get books in advance of publication, so that I may review them and spread the word. It’s a good word-of-mouth marketing investment for the publisher. In full-disclosure, I feel a mild sense of obligation to review the book. But I feel no obligation to write a good review if it isn’t deserved. And as someone who’s now written about half a million words at Tyner Blain, I personally have no interest in panning a book that I don’t enjoy. If I don’t like it, I don’t write about it.

Usually, the books I get are related to product management or business analysis – or occasionally development and architecture. The publishers send me books that Tyner Blain readers are likely to benefit from – the books fit our niche. I was a little surprised that I got Beyond Booked Solid – it doesn’t fit that mold. I started reading it anyway. I just assumed it was from one of the publishers that sends me books.

A little while later, I got an email from Michael’s assistant, and we started a good conversation.

It turns out, I like the book. As the founder of Tyner Blain, and as someone who sells consulting services, the notion of getting booked solid is definitely something that resonates. And I’ve been really fortunate over the past three years, and I find myself getting more requests for help than I can fulfill.

Michael’s book is about exactly that – what do you do when you’re successful enough that your business model is working perfectly? So well, that you’re booked solid? How do you move beyond that stage?

Anyone who listens to audio books will tell you that sometimes the reader is more important than the work. The best novel, poorly read, is excruciating. But a good reader makes anything enjoyable. George Carlin actually made people laugh by reading the phone book years ago. Seriously. Belly Laughs.

Michael’s writing is so conversational that (1) you feel like you’re listening to an audio book with a good reader, and (2) I feel a connection with the guy. It would feel awkward to call him Mr. Port at this point.

The best part – the content is great too!

Taking your business beyond what already works great couldn’t be a more compelling topic for me. There are things that Tyner Blain will do that go beyond today’s business model. After reading Michael’s book, not only are they likely to happen sooner rather than later, I believe they are now more likely to succeed.

Breaking Out of the Box

Innovative solutions usually require thinking “outside of the box.” Whatever your box may be. Michael provides some occasionally inspiring, often analogous examples. He’s not writing about software consulting, or enterprise product management. But the challenges are the same. The small business owner that reaches “capacity” with his store, and decides to open a franchise. His writing is fluid enough that I can’t remember if he suggests that we (as readers) imagine parallels in our own worlds, or if I just did it.

Thinking outside the box. That’s what it boils down to. And Michael’s writing style is such that he encourages you to break out of the box. He isn’t a pitch man, there’s no “hard sell.” You just read what he’s writing and think to yourself – “Yeah. That’s what I need to do.”

He provides sound advice – almost a layman’s SWOT analysis approach to managing your business or career. What are the strengths you can leverage, the weaknesses you need to avoid? What do you love to do or hate to do? What are your goals? Good stuff in general. Fantastic advice when you’re already doing everything you thought you wanted, and you have that niggling thought in the back of your head asking – “Yeah, but what’s next?”

Payback and Pay Forward

While not “obviously on-topic” here, everyone who reads here is trying to improve themselves – either getting better at what they do, learning to do something else, or just learning how to accomplish the same things in less time.

And that means Beyond Booked Solid may be right up your alley.

A first look at Outside-in Software Development, available tomorrow (or pre-order tonight on Amazon.com). At the time of this writing, the book is #29 on the Hot New Releases list – and you can get it for just over a third off the price if you pre-order now. Take a look at an overview of the book and our first impressions – then give the book a bump and let the wisdom of crowds take over.

Anticipation and Excitement

You usually aren’t excited about a business book, or a software book, when you open it for the first time. Something is different about Outside-In Software Development, because I got very excited as soon as I saw what the book is about. It’s about the hard part of goal driven development – understanding the goals. Once you know your goals, it is pretty straightforward to go about building a solution that meets the goals. Maybe not straightforward, but at least well understood. OK, understood.

Unless you’re already great at delivering software product success, regardless of how you feel about what it takes to get from goals to delivered results, I’m sure that you find the process of defining the goals in the first place to be much harder.

We wrote about the importance of being goal driven about a year ago, if you need a quick refresher. In short, feature-driven designs are inside-out while goal-driven designs are outside-in.

Defining those goals is what this book is about. Focusing on the intent of your software, from the perspective of stakeholders, in order to create software that meets the intent. This couldn’t have come at a better time for me (a week earlier would have been better, but I’m not complaining). We are working on a project that is in the early stages of definition, where a key element is understanding the goals of the project.

Here’s a quick list of the chapter titles for the book.

1. Introducing Outside-In Development
2. Understanding Your Stakeholders
3. Understanding Organizational Context
4. Making Products Consumable
5. Aligning With Stakeholder Goals
6. Defining Success in Your Stakeholder’s Terms
7. Becoming an Outside-In Developer

First Impressions

After reading and skimming the first 50 pages, I’m positively surprised by the ease of reading this book. The concepts are insightful, but the language is very straightforward and practical. As an example, the authors recognize that there are many stakeholders in a project, and break them down into some different groups – who have different needs, and who must be engaged differently.

• Principals - the business sponsors for a product or project. These folks have business goals they are trying to achieve. Your mission is to understand those goals. You also need to recognize that they may be moving targets, and be prepared to adapt to those changes.  And we need to understand why they want what they want.
• End Users – the people who ultimately interact with the software. The best software development processes are focused on satisfying the end users. And a lot of authors are out there teaching us how to do that, although none perhaps as visibly as Alan Cooper.
• Partners - people who are neither principals nor end users. These are the folks who don’t directly benefit from your product, don’t use it directly, and didn’t help create it. But they are responsible for helping your product live, thrive, and interact with other products. Think IT people, keeping your system running, and keeping other systems talking to it.
• Insiders - the people who define the product. Your (internal) team. Not only product managers and developers, but business folks, marketers, testers, support staff, finance, etc. The people creating a product influence what ends up being created. And they are stakeholders in a narrow scope – they are affected by the creation and ongoing support of your product.

Carl and John focus on these stakeholders, in this order of priority. Good stuff. There are elements that pop up repeatedly that make the text also read practically, realistically, and credibly. Things like an aside about how principals often don’t want to, or can’t articulate crisp goals. How project sponsors are often unavailable (and how to find proxies for the sponsors, and why to take those inputs with a grain of salt).

More To Come

We’ll write more about the book as we get a chance to read through it, and conveniently apply some of the ideas that the authors present us – and provide feedback. I’ve got a bookmark in the section on organizational context right now, and an idea of how to draw and understand something for my current project, based on one of the concepts. I can’t wait to start it in the morning.

So, go buy the book, and bump it up to number 1. [Handy link below in the Recommended Reading box]