Are PM's in the Services or Experience business?

I recently read The Experience Economy after hearing Tom Peters refer to it in an old speech of his I try to listen to annually. The book talks about progressing from selling commodities, to products, to services, to experiences, and ultimately to transformations. One of the things that struck me was the notion of what you leave behind or what does the customer/client get to keep or come away with after the transaction. With goods they obviously get to take home the item they purchased. With services it can be s a bit tricky. Maybe they get a new haircut or a fixed car. When you buy an experience you take with you a memory (say of your Disney vacation) or a new skill (like a certification). After a transformation you walk away with a new outlook or a new organization.

It got me thinking. As a consultant coming in to manage a portfolio of projects for a client, what business am I really in? Frankly I think I've framed what I do as being in the services business. My client gets projects done well, on time, and within budget. My firm bills for the hours I work. I get paid. Services rendered.

Hmmm. What if I wanted to be in the experience business instead?

So now I still manage a portfolio of IT projects on time and within budget. But with my new paradigm I've started to also spend focused time with the business analysts, project leads, vendors, and the executives I work with slowing down a bit and training them on various aspects of what I do for them. I'm leaving behind useful skills in the organization and in their partners that will allow my client to analyze situations, manage projects, lead changes, and do a number of other related things they may not have been able to do before. I want my clients to have the memory of being part of a well-oiled team working toward something that matters. In short, I want them to think back on this time as me having orchestrated a great experience they were fortunate to be a part of--not just as someone who managed a bunch of projects.

This is something I continue to work on. The next step is to create transformations through my consulting.

What business are you in?

Thinking with your hands

I was listening to a TED podcast this morning from a gentleman from IDEO. He described a design session where an IDEO team was meeting with surgeon's to discuss a new surgical instrument they would like developed. Someone from the design team left the room and in a few minutes returned with a dry erase marker taped to an empty film canister that was taped to a clothes pin in the rough shape of a gun. The designer gave it to the surgeon's who passed it around and begin offering very constructive feedback on how the device should sit in the hand, how it should be shaped, what it should do, etc. IDEO calls this behavior "thinking with your hands" (and this eventually turned into a real device).

It typically involves making many low-resolution prototypes very quickly. Often by bringing many found elements together in order to get to a solution...And so this behavior is all about quickly getting something into the real world and having your thinking advanced as a result.

This dovetails precisely with the Getting Real approach advocated by 37Signals. Tom Peters has been an advocate of this for years. And it explains why the Back of the Napkin approach of visual thinking works so well.

IDEO takes this idea seriously and has "protyping carts" around filled with Play-doh, tape, Legos, colored paper, markers, etc. ("the stuff we all had in pre-school") so desingers can begin prototyping objects whenever they want. They also apply this approach to designing a service experience through rapidly jumping into role-playing various scenarios.

Seth Godin and Cosmetics

My wife is legally blind and often comes to me with a handful of frosted glass cosmetics jars of every shape, size, and color as she's getting ready in the morning asking what each of them are. I'm continually amazed at how specific (and frankly creative) many of these products can be.

At the same time, I'm reading Tribes--Seth Godin's new book. Seth is one of my favorite authors and a common theme of his (and Tom Peters for that matter) has been to find and dominate micro niches (or some small territory along the long tail) rather than taking on Ma Bell. Basecamp or Highrise from 37Signals (one of my favorite companies) is a much better bet today than trying to take on Word or Excel.

So that got me thinking: if Revlon can sell a cream for women of a certain age to place just around their eyes--only at night--how many possible creams/lotions/potions are there? And if they can do that with their market, why can't I do something similar with mine? How many ways can you slice and dice your target market? And after you've done that, you're sure to find at least one of those micro market niches is underserved at the moment. And Seth would say there's a "tribe" waiting for you to be their leader.

Agile and Spaghetti Sauce

I recently discovered TED. I have no idea how it's not hit my radar until now, but I can't listen to and watch the talks fast enough. I was watching Malcolm Gladwell talk about a personal hero of his, Howard Moskowitz, and the role he had in discovering the value of providing calculated varieties of a product versus trying to find the one, "perfect" product that will meet the needs of the majority of the market. With Seth Godin's work and The Long Tail we tend to take this idea for granted today, but Malcolm does a wonderful job of taking us back in time to a point where this paradigm was uncommon and even revolutionary.

One of the many anecdotes that impressed me was when Mr. Moskowitz concocted nearly endless varieties of spaghetti sauce using variations on sauce thickness, amounts of various spices, introducing bits of vegetable chunks, etc. and then fed 10 bowls of various varieties to a number of subjects. When he worked through the data of people's preferences he found they fell into three groups: plain, spicy, and chunky. He concluded this latter category represented the preferences of about a third of the population--and there was no sauce on the shelves with chunks of juicy vegetables at that time. Prego went on to release such a product and make a fortune, but the lesson I want to focus on is one observation Malcolm makes in his narrative: no one had mentioned they would like a chunky spaghetti sauce in any prior focus groups. The lesson Malcolm draws from this is that people don't really know what they want until you give it to them.

This conclusion is reinforced in protracted software development projects that follow a rigid waterfall approach. The requirements analyst asks the business users what they want and their answers are often within an implicit and many times unconscious context or menu of what they've already got in an existing system or think would be possible based upon a limited understanding of possible system features. In other words, they say they want a good tasting sauce.

In Agile or more iterative, prototype-rich methodologies, the user would be presented with rough drawings of user interfaces, story boards, and HTML and/or PowerPoint mock-ups, over and over again throughout the very initial stages of the process. In other words, the developers spend a fair amount of time up front cooking up a ton of varieties and keeping the business users taste-testing. Now the possibilities are open and we're getting several quick cycles of real-time, visceral feedback. Now we can get from the 40-50% approval ratings Malcolm mentioned are the usual result of a homogenized solution to the 75%+ delight ratings of people who get what they didn't know they really wanted.

Tom Peters mentions how Ritz Carlton aims to "fulfill the unexpressed wishes of its guests" in a few of his books. The Japanese have a common practice of insisting on finding seven viable solutions to a problem or challenge before they select their approach.

It is incumbent upon those of us in the IT solutions field to translate what is really a collection of abstract ideas in the beginning of a project into tangible value and options in the minds and senses of end users as quickly as we can.

Quick test to compare brands

Two quick thoughts as I'm reading through the book Built to Last by James C. Collins and Jerry I. Porras:

First, the authors ask the reader what comes to mind when you hear "Disney." For me it was Walt Disney, Mickey Mouse, Walt Disney World, and for some reason Michael Eisner. Then the authors ask the reader to do the same thing for Columbia.

Hmm...I've got nothing.

I don't think I've run across a better, quick test to determine the power of one's brand. This should give us all pause as we think about what image or associations our past and present supervisors, colleagues, vendors, etc. have when they hear our name. What brand image do we have? Is it, "Oh he's probably the most organized guy I've ever worked with..." or more like, "ummm...is he the one that was in purchasing a while back?"

If you follow Tom Peters (and I think we all should), we should be just as concerned about building a brand in our own little world as Disney was and is about there's.

Another test the authors propose is how woven into the fabric of your culture are you? In other words, it's hard to imagine popular culture without a Disney. It's pretty easy for me to imagine life without Columbia. How hard is it to imagine your field, your industry without you?

Three Days: Product Overhaul or Just a Meeting?

I've been posting about the new CRM solution from 37Signals called Highrise and complained how the "Cases" feature was only available to premium accounts. Apparently a lot of others didn't like it either. So today, three days after launch, Signals sends out an email informing everyone they're giving cases to everyone, dramatically increased storage limits, even created a new user category and corresponding pricing structure. Their ability to take the pulse of the community and respond quickly and iterate is impressive. Imagine a "big" company doing that...naw, I can't conjure that up either. I'm willing to bet in most companies it would take three days just to find an open slot on everyone's calendar to have a meeting about if we should consider modifying the product.

It reminds me of Tom Peters' example of Paul Paliska's Professional Parking Service, Inc. in The Tom Peters Seminar (page 139). Essentially, Tom showed up to speak at a luncheon at a very busy Orange County Marriott and despite all the traffic and people he noticed everyone was parked in very short order. He complimented Marriott on it during his speech only to learn afterwards that Marriott hadn't parked the cars--Paul's subcontracted parking service had. Tom mused that since Paul and his crew were so focused on and good at event parking they probably got better insurance rates than "giant" Marriott. So he posed the question, "Who's really the big fish in this picture?"

Seth's saying about the same things these days. And I expect we'll get more of that with his new book The Dip coming out in May. Excellence comes from focus. The question is how big can one get before you're no longer nimble? Maybe when you can't pass the rework and relaunch your whole product in 36 hours test?