“Here is Edward Bear, coming downstairs now, bump, bump, bump, on the back of his head, behind Christopher Robin. It is, as far as he knows, the only way of coming downstairs, but sometimes he feels that there really is another way, if only he could stop bumping for a moment and think of it.”
— A. A. Milne
Over the years since I finished high school I’ve had the immense good fortune to work with a handful of remarkable people who have inspired me deeply; who have mentored me and taught me an incredible amount about myself.
The first of these was not a CEO or a VP; he had, in fact, nothing to do with the technical career I was then aspiring to pursue. He was a barkeeper.
A cocktail maker in fact; “Chief Cocktail Maker”, if such a title existed. His name was Ted; he was in his mid fifties then and had worked in the same piano bar in Sydney’s inner southern suburbs for something like 20 years.
The cocktail bar was part of a large lounge and bar complex, filled to overflowing with glittering poker machines and rowdy teenagers. In the midst of this sea of lights, noise and excitement, Ted’s little cocktail bar was an island of quiet and still.
There were many bartenders working at the club; maybe 40 or 50 at any one time. Ted was feared by some, awed by many; and respected by everyone. Something of a legend in the cocktail business, his skill with a boston shaker and hawthorne strainer was renowned.
Ted had worked in that dimly lit bar behind that lotus-green marble countertop for as long as he could remember, and as far as I know he’s still there now, mixing up his classic appleseed martini. And yet I learnt from Ted a few fundamental things that have stayed with me through my career as a Product Manager and helped define who I am and how I work.
How?
Firstly, Ted taught me the value of understanding the customer experience. When you come into his bar, you are not there just for the drinks. What you pay for is the end-to-end experience. This is something any good restaurateur understands: the quality of the meal itself is only as good as the quality of the experience surrounding it.
The same is true of software products. When you pay for a piece of software (either with cash, or with your attention), it’s not just the source code that you obtain – it’s an experience. And the experience doesn’t end with the user interface of the product. The sales process itself is part of the product, as is the customer support line, the warranty process, the packaging, and so on. And the user’s perception of every part of this experience influences their perception of everything else.
Ted taught me about this experience. The guest’s experience starts when they enter the bar and see how the room is lit, how the chairs are organised, what music is playing. It continues when they order their drink: the menu, the options. How a cocktail is prepared and presented to the customer is almost more important than how it tastes; in fact, mixing the ingredients in the right way is the easy part – the true artistry comes with the flair with which it’s prepared and the quality of the presentation in the glass. (The artistry involved in creating new drinks is quite something else, but that’s another story).
This brings me to the next critical skill I learned under Ted’s tutorage: attention to detail.
Ted was obsessed with orderliness, and every stool and every table needed to be perfectly positioned and perfectly aligned. He was known for walking through various parts of the club with a ruler, measuring the distance between the chairs and tables, as well as rigorously enforcing other standards of excellence, such as ensuring coasters laid out on the table were positioned so the text would be the correct way up for the seated guests, or that every bottled product served to a customer should be served with the label facing the guest (something actually every bartender knows and continues to do intuitively when placing bottles on the table, long after their bartender career has ended).
Details come in all forms great and small, and the ability to keep your eye on the details while maintaining the end-to-end view is, I believe, one of the chief virtues of incredibly successful people.
To understand the impact of these two things, consider the packaging of an Apple product, whether an iPod, MacBook or an iPad. Every aspect of the package has been considered; the colour, the use of images and type. Bold in its modesty, an Apple product stands out among the clutter through its thoughtful minimalism and stark beauty.
Attention has been paid to every aspect of the end-to-end experience, from what the product looks like on the shelf to the experience of taking the product out of the box and using it for the first time.
In every product I work on I come back to that which I learned during those long evenings in the Skyline cocktail bar. But Ted taught me more than that.
Ted’s obsession with orderliness didn’t end at the alignment of the chairs and tables. If he saw a dirty table, he’d be the first to grab a rag and a spray bottle and he’d be off to clean it. If an ashtray had ash in it, he’d empty it, or if there as litter on the floor, he’d pick it up.
It didn’t bother Ted that he was actually the bar manager. He could have called the cleaners; he could have delegated to a more junior bar staff member. It didn’t matter that it wasn’t his job: if something needed doing, then he’d do it.
Ted, of course, expected nothing less of the people who worked for him, and the result was a culture where “not-my-job” thinking just didn’t exist.
Every team has issues that don’t get resolved as quickly as they probably should – old, un-refactored code, unanswered customer support queries, lingering bugs. But when these things start to stack up into ever-increasing piles, I’ve found that it’s often due to an established “not-my-job” attitude, and changing this attitude once it’s ingrained in a team is very difficult.
On top of all that, my time in Ted’s cocktail bar taught me that hard work is rewarding work. It might sound like a socialist slogan, but when I fell into bed at 4am after making cocktails all evening, I fell asleep exhausted, but fulfilled. I’d had fun at work, I’d learned something (which I did nearly every day), I’d met interesting people and helped serve an experience to our guests that they appreciated and told their friends about.
You might not believe it, but it’s truly amazing what you can learn in a bar.
Cheers!
Everybody’s saying it…
“Let’s make it go viral!”
“We need to build in some virality.”
“It should be more viral!”
The problem I have encountered often recently is that many people seem to have various misconceptions about what ‘viral’ really is, what it really means – but mostly how easy (read: difficult) it is.
I hit the web and spoke to some friends and colleagues in the industry and uncovered quite a few myths and legends concerning viral products and viral marketing. Here are a few virality mythbusters for the next time someone turns up at your door asking you to “just make your product go viral”.
The ability to share content to social networks from within applications is just expected functionality these days. True and proper “virality” for social apps is not just letting your users share objects out of your product (although it helps).
Apps that successfully use a viral engine of growth build the core interactions around the need or desire to involve your friends in the product experience. In other words, it’s not about broadcasting your status to your friends: it’s about using the product together with your friends. Some classic examples of apps that have gotten this nailed are Words with Friends or Farmville.
No, this is just annoying. If the Facebook news feed logic doesn’t start blocking your updates, your user’s friends certainly will. Sure, some early products made it big by spamming their user’s facebook feeds, but this just doesn’t work anymore.
The reality is that most attempts to create something witty with the specific intention of making it “go viral” will fall flat. People are smarter than that, and they know when someone’s trying to play them.
A notable example is when Ashanti thought it would be a neat idea to support her new album by creating a viral campaign that let people send their friends death threats. No further comment necessary!
“Making it go viral” should not be the goal. Viral is the outcome of a great piece of content that successfully engages users.
Nope. Viral messages need to be seeded properly. It’s all about momentum. If it takes too long to get started, it will die out before it reaches its peak. Properly seeded viral messages start by getting spread by people with many thousands of followers… not the 250 people on your personal twitter post.
Serious marketers also pay big dollars to seed messages. In fact, social media agencies measure return on investment (ROI) on social campaigns by how many views a message gets relative to how much cash they spend to seed it.
Now, don’t get me wrong: clearly when you an everyone in your team tweet and post and blog about your product or message, it can only help. In fact, I view it as a very important activity for the whole team to be a part of… but the point is, it’s (probably) not going to result in a million views overnight.
Over 72 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute. Yes, every minute. However, some research has indicated that less than 1% of videos get more than 5,000 views in a year. YouTube is a crowded, cluttered space, and not every video is going to stand out, and you’re going to need to do a little more than just upload it to YouTube and hope for the best.
Here’s an example: the official Nokia YouTube channel has, at the time of writing, 635 videos uploaded. Of that, only 22 videos (3.5%) have more than 1 million views, and only two videos have more than 5 million. And of those 22 with more than a million views, only five videos are less than 12 months old.
Compare that with some classic examples of viral successes, such as this Evian commercial, which has over 58 million views.
Clearly, a lot of varied content helps raise the overall number of views (109 million aggregated views for the whole Nokia channel), this total is not the result of one silver bullet-style viral video, and it wasn’t achieved overnight.
Social media is a powerful set of tools to allow you to reach unprecedented numbers of people. But if your message is not compelling and engaging, then people won’t engage with your message. Just like the fascination (and the birth and massive growth of an entire industry) surrounding Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), you can try to play the system, but at the end of the day if your content is not compelling, the tricks won’t help you… at least not long-term.
People share content that they care about and that is meaningful for them. Something “going viral” is the result; it should not be the goal.
It’s a simple thing to get someone’s name right.
Yousendit had an opportunity. They had my email address from whenever I had signed up to their service in order to download some file or another. I knew the service and trusted it enough to sign up, and if I had left my email address, I had surely left my name as well.
Since then I obviously haven’t been back, but they had the opportunity to send me a single, polite, targeted email message to remind me of the service, let me know what’s been happening, and maybe convinve me to come back, check it out and perhaps even start using it again.
And yet the first line of the email: “Dear NULL”.
As someone whose name people often get confused (I get called “Gil” a lot. Evidently it’s quite a popular French name here in Europe), I know how not-nice it is to be addressed with a name that’s not your own; especially by people who are supposed to know you.
Each opportunity to have to have a meaningful conversation with a user is a gift. It’s a unique chance to build a valuable relationship with someone who will use your products or services and tell others about their great experience.
Attention is more and more expensive and more and more rare, so when you manage to get the attention of your users, even for a moment, use it wisely – don’t squander it.
And you can start by getting their name right.
