“I’ve spent a significant part of my career fixing things,” he said.  He has slashed $400 million in costs over the past year, even eliminating paper cups in the break rooms. Iannuzzi also lowered prices for some key customers and hired 130 salespeople—a 31% increase—to win back business. In January, Monster unveiled a cleaner site that, among other things, reduced the number of steps required to upload a résumé from 20 to 4.

I hope that cost cutting, more sales overhead, and fixing a fundamentally broken website aren’t the extent of what Iannuzzi considers “fixing things”.  Incremental improvement is too little, too late.

Monster’s got advantages – huge name recognition, tons of data, lots of customers to talk to.  Here’s how I’d suggest they use those advantages.

1. Harness your data. Release some interesting trend data, such as “where the highest concentration of Job Title X is being posted” or “most commonly requested job skill requirements by profession.”

2. Ruthlessly test and analyze the competition. Look at Jobvite, Simply Hired, Indeed, LinkedIn to understand what they’re doing that works and doesn’t work.  Survey current users of these services and look for what to steal.  (Remember, “Bad artists copy. Great artists steal.” – Pablo Picasso)

3. Build a better job seeker. Set a skunkworks team loose on interviewing job seekers at various professional levels.  What does their job seeking process look like?  What are they doing right? What should they be doing that they are not?  Prototype what it would look like if you built a site from the ground up to build a better job seeker.  This is a big one, so there are some sub-ideas.

4. Be more social. Make it dead-simple easy for job seekers to add links to their LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook profiles.  Partner with BackType or a similar technology to aggregate blog posts and comments and pull them directly into the candidate’s profile.  This gives job seekers an opportunity to differentiate themselves; gives HR folks a chance to get more background into a candidate.
5. Remind. Offer reminders to help job seekers remember to send follow-up notes, to keep their profile updated, to stay in contact with their network (partner with LinkedIn to access users’ social graphs)
6. Promote offline job networking groups. Identify job seekers with similar skillsets in the same regional area so it’s easy for them to form offline Meetups and resume reviews.   It’s harder to monetize, but the PR and goodwill you’d earn will build loyal users.

7. Build a better job search. Set skunkworks team #2 loose on interviewing job seekers and HR professionals.  How are jobs being posted and advertised?  Where are the greatest mismatches between job and candidate?  What criteria are job seekers/HR looking for that may not be represented in any job search formats today?  Prototype what it would look like if you built a site from the ground up to build a better job search. This is a big one, so there are some sub-ideas.

8. Recommend. Work with a recommendations technology platform (such as Loomia) to show similar jobs (“people who viewed this job description also viewed”).  Behavioral data is a better filter than a simple text-matching filter.
9. Add transparency. Submitting your resume to a job listing is like throwing it into a black hole.  Offer job seekers the ability to see if their resume was scanned, downloaded, or rated.  Give HR folks a one-click option to send a “position is filled” notification to everyone who applied to the position.Even a little illumination into the process would be a huge relief.

10. Real salary data. Other sites, such as indeed.com, offer salary data, but it’s based on the few jobs that list salary ranges in their description.  Monster has millions of email addresses to survey – it would be easy to get anonymous but REAL salary information on what currently-employed folks are making at their job title.  (Whether Monster chose to release this to HR only, or make it public is a different strategic decision.)

And please, if you haven’t already, read up on disruptive innovation.  (The Innovator’s Dilemma: The Revolutionary Book that Will Change the Way You Do Business (Collins Business Essentials), The Innovator’s Solution: Creating and Sustaining Successful Growth
) You’re going to need it.

If your initial business model assumptions were incorrect, you will need to adapt your execution plan. It may be possible to still succeed if you can provide a lesser version of the product/service but with lower costs, faster time-to-market, higher scalability.

If you collect people’s personal data, you will need to clearly communicate what you do with it and what will happen to it if your company doesn’t survive. If you suddenly close up shop with no warning, you’re going to have a lot of angry, alarmed ex-customers.

“If someone’s going to cannibalize your business, better it be one of your other businesses.” – Getty CEO Jonathan Klein (Getty Images acquired iStockphoto, a crowdsourced low-cost stock photo provider).

If your code fails the “random person test”, then the only people who can point out flaws in your assumptions are other engineers. At a previous company, a lot of engineers complained about the effort involved in converting our entire codebase to Model-View-Controller.  They complained a lot less when they realized I and other product managers could see potential pitfalls when 10% of the code was written instead of 100% done.

If you change your environment, be prepared for your environment to change. “Professional” changes can move you away from the grubby-but-effective roots that got you to launch products and close deals.

If you want something done but there’s an obstacle blocking you, there’s usually a way around it. Funny story about looking beyond the obvious.

1. Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling Technology Products to Mainstream Consumers by Geoffrey Moore

   
   Realization: You can get early customers to love your product, but you can’t use those same methods to convert enough more people into customers to build a business.

   Things to remember: As a startup, you can’t do multiple things well. As a business, you need to focus on the most desperate needs of your customer (which means you must choose your the customers who have desperate needs.)

2. Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make Competition Irrelevant by W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne

   Realization: You don’t need to compete on the same features and benefits that your competitors value.

   Things to remember: Don’t take the vectors you compete on for granted. Map yourself against the competition. Explore what would happen if you changed things.

3. Four Steps to the Epiphany by Stephen G. Blank

   
   Realization: This is your job: First, reduce risk. Next, prove value. Continuously validate. Don’t try to skip any of these steps.

   Things to use: Clear checklists for how to create a market, and a product and get customers. If any of your plans require outlaying tons of money and resources up-front, you’re probably wrong.

4. The Inmates are Running the Asylum: Why High-Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity by Alan Cooper

   Realization: Technology products need someone advocating for the user, and that someone is not going to be the engineers who build them.

   Things to use: If you’re in an organization where user experience design is nonexistent or under-empowered, this book lays out examples to help the product manager to step in as user experience advocate until the permanent resource is in place.(Can be heavy-handed and most of the examples are outdated, but still a great read.)

5. The Innovator’s Dilemma: The Revolutionary Book that Will Change the Way You Do Business by Clayton Christensen

   Realization: Listening to your customers works great for releasing new product versions… until it doesn’t. You can’t predict where markets will emerge.

   Things to remember:The key to your success will, in the short term, be incredibly destructive. In short: stay on your toes and be ready to experiment on barely-formed ideas rather than waiting for them to fully form.

6. Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In by Bruce M. Patton, William L. Ury, and Roger Fisher

   Realization: Negotiating instead of giving in doesn’t make you mean, it makes you effective.

   Things to remember: People want to feel heard and understood more than they need to ‘win’ in most situations.

7. Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything by Stephen J. Dubner OR Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces that Shape our Decisions by Dan Ariely

   
   Realization: People generally don’t understand cause-and-effect, don’t behave rationally, and worry about the wrong things.

   Things to remember: You (and your coworkers fall prey to the same competitive traps that your users do, but knowing this can help you avoid them.(Both books are good, but you probably don’t need to read both unless you’re a psych/socio hobbyist.)

8. Why Decisions Fail by Paul Nutt

   Realization: Really smart companies and people make decisions that seem ridiculous in hindsight.

   Things to remember: Recognizing potential problems can help you avoid them. If it’s too late for that, a more informed postmortem leads to better learning for next time.

9. Super Crunchers: Why Thinking by Numbers is the New Way to Be Smart by Ian Ayres

   Realization: Nothing measures user behavior better than … measuring user behavior. Online, everything is measurable.

   Things to remember: Make sure what you’re measuring is as close as possible to the results you want. As I’ve said before, make sure you I your KP. Remember that your competitors probably have more data than you do and be appropriately concerned about that.

10. The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life by Twyla Tharp

    
    Realization: Creativity doesn’t just happen, it requires hard work and tons of practice.

    Things to remember: Staying out of bad habits and ruts is a constant process.

“A marketing launch establishes your positioning. If you don’t know what the right positioning is for your company, do not launch… When you launch with the wrong positioning, you have to spend extra effort and money later cleaning it up.” (Lessons Learned: Don’t Launch)

“It’s okay to expose these customers to the wrong product, positioning, and funnel as long as you learn from them. In fact, that’s the only way to test your hypotheses.”  (Don’t Launch? But the New York Times is on the Phone!)

Given how cheap online user testing and social media channels are for soliciting feedback, there’s really no justification for the traditional “launch”.  Even if you think you have your positioning nailed, you almost certainly cannot scale to handle that first-day traffic.   Why risk exposing that burst of new users to a negative user experience when your servers slow to a crawl?

“Don’t let your design make promises you can’t keep.” (Streams, Affordances, Facebook, and Rounding Errors)

Most people are non-technical, and as such, they take their cues about “what’s possible” from the technology they’re using.  If that technology gives them a limited sandbox, the product manager can stand back and watch and consider if it helps the business to expand that sandbox.  They may demand more; often they won’t.

“There’s a big advantage to thinking about profitability from Day 1 of the business.  You can still decide to do things that are solving for growth, but you should at least be mindful of profitability.” (Startup Lessons from the Underpants Gnomes)

“Innovation and creativity are value-destroying activities unless they are carefully contained.”  (Why Are So Few Companies the Hotbeds of Innovation that Everyone Thinks They Should Be?)

Think big – within constraints.  A lot of devil’s advocate-ing can help here.

“Design the single, comparable metric to be as close as possible to the problem being solved.”  (One Metric to Measure Them All)

I’ve been commenting on a bunch of Facebook posts this week, most of which are taking the side of “Facebook users are a bunch of whiners”.  None of them seem to be asking “what is the problem Facebook is trying to solve with this redesign?”

And so none of them can really make an intelligent analysis.  First identify the problem, then measure the results.  Maybe Facebook is just trying to get people to Twitter about them, in which case: they are succeeding magnificently.

I said, “I don’t know. And if I tell you what I think we’ll just have one more uninformed opinion. But what we need right now is some facts. (SuperMac War Story 2: Facts Exist Outside the Building, Opinions Reside Within – So Get the Hell Outside the Building)

“Remember that an engaged customer is a highly valuable one.”  10 Ways to Measure Social Media Success
“Rushing into social-computing initiatives without clearly defined benefits for both the company and customer will be the biggest cause of failure…” Gartner Says Companies Need to Pursue Four Steps to Harness Social Computing in CRM

I’m hearing a lot of two extremes right now: social media is useless fluff, and social media is the magic bullet.  The truth is somewhere in the middle, and depends on your business, your industry, and your customers.

Put it into action today: Think about one thing you’d like for your audience to know about your company/product, and put it into a blog post, a tweet, or even one phone call to one person.

“What’s” are the specific things a business needs to accomplish, as opposed to the process they typically use to accomplish it. Some are high value; some are not. Understanding the difference can give you great insights into where you can safely pare away and where you should leave well enough alone.  A Better Way to Cut Costs

Put it into action today: Brainstorm the “what’s”.  Work with your team to figure where you’re creating value for your customers.  (Then go validate it through a quick and dirty survey)

“Stop looking at your member count to determine whether your community is successful, and don’t expect (or even ask for) rapid growth. Real relationships take time to develop, and if you want a real community based on real relationships, you need to be in it for the long haul.”  Member Count Not a Measure of Community Success

Put it into action today: Think of a question that you’re afraid to know the answer to, and ask it.  On your forum or blog would be great, but if you’re not ready for that, ask via private mail.  But take the first step towards ceding control.

” to a larger extent than you probably realize, your environment dictates your actions… So don’t fight yourself to change your behavior in the midst of the wrong environment; just change the environment.”  The Easiest Way to Change People’s Behavior

Put it into action today: Think about a result you want (a co-worker to stop doing something, a customer to start doing something, etc.) and brainstorm “How can I make it as easy as possible for this person to do this thing that I want?”

It could be asking a multiple-choice question instead of an open-ended one to your users (reduce their thinking time).  It could be proposing 6 meeting times instead of 2 to a customer (increases the odds that their calendar will be open for one).  It could be walking through a whiteboard exercise with someone instead of waiting for them to do it on their own (reduces their chance for procrastination, interactivity increases the odds of you getting exactly what you need.)

“Why are we doing this project? What are the assumptions that made it seem like a good idea before and are they still valid?”  Too Many Projects Chasing Too Few People

Put it into action today: Look at the list of projects on your to-do list.  There’s probably at least one that doesn’t make sense.

Make a proposal to your boss explaining briefly the reasons this became a priority, what has changed, and the opportunity cost if you continued.  You might get overruled, but it’s good practice and repeated attempts can drive cultural change.

“The trick is that unlike traditional marketing you don’t talk TO your potential customers, instead you try to get them INVOLVED in a discussion with you.”  How to Use Web 2.0 to be a Better Product Manager

Put it into action today: Search for your product, or competitor’s product, or your industry (whichever is most relevant) on Twitter.  Read what people are saying and respond.  Ask a question.

What happens: “You are constantly questioning your vendor’s motivation, and they are pushing back on every little change because it effects their bottom line.”  How to Guarantee Software Project Failure

Put it into action today: Walk through the deployment process for your software or service.  Identify the points where you are dependent on your customer.  Maybe it’s waiting for them to give you information, install some code, make a decision.  Ask yourself if there is any way to move that responsibility from them to you (even a hacky way may be an improvement.)

“The only way to actually get things done is to mitigate the urgent to work on the important.”   How to Mitigate The Urgent to Work on the Important

Put it into action today: Stop reading this blog and go do something important.  (No, really, please don’t. I like you, audience.)

Go through the requests people have made of you.  If you can delegate it, do so.   Reply to the rest asking: specifically what do you need? what problem/answer are you trying to solve? what timeframe do you need this by?   (Most people make the mistake of replying to requests “right away” when the requester might’ve needed it “sometime before Q3″).  Once you’ve cleared the stack, you’re ready to use the tricks in this article.

“The suggestion is that you implement one single company-wide rule. The rule is simple: every employee is 100% responsible for how they spend their time.”   Employees should be Masters of Their Time

Put it into action today: If you find yourself telling someone how to do their job, stop.  Tell them the problem that needs solving and let them propose a way to solve it.  If someone tells you how to do your job, tell them “Am I correct that you’re trying to solve problem X? If so, let me propose a solution.”

“Negative feedback is valuable feedback; better to have it articulated in your own community where you can respond to it then have it only appear elsewhere on the Web.”  The 7 Deadly Sins of Online Community Management

Put it into action today: Suck it up and read your product reviews.  Be honest about things you know aren’t optimal and requests that you realistically are not going to provide anytime soon.

OK, not quite.  But not all customers are created equal, and not all have the same impact on your bottom line.   So start by figuring out where the value lies and how to measure it.

A couple years ago, I was talking with a customer, a bank business analyst, and she told me that they had solid data on three clusters of customers – the top tier, who through very high net worth and using multiple bank services brought in 80% of revenues, the broad mainstream tier that collectively brought in 40% of revenues, and — wait, isn’t that 120%?  … That’s right, the bottom tier of customers actually lost the bank money.

Remember that the next time someone blithely reminds you that “the customer is always right”.

What can the Pareto Principle do for you? (Laserlike)

…Find out what separates the top segment from the other segments.  If you have multiple products, do they buy certain products more than others?  Use certain features more than others?  Where do they come from and can you tune your marketing to find more customers like your best customers?  Does your analytics effort measure overall metrics as well as the health of your business by segment?

Understanding your customer segments can reveal hidden pockets of revenues.  Some customers (like the ones with the $10MM of assets in your bank) are obviously valuable.  But the smaller yet stable customer may require less hand-holding and do more positive word of mouth for you.

Make Every Customer More Profitable (CIO Insight)

The program certainly helps boost business from high-rollers…but it has also helped Harrah’s identify a profitable segment of customers that it had been under-valuing: the low-rollers, the so-called “retail” or small gamblers who spend no more than $50 per visit, but who represent about 40 percent of Harrah’s business.

Once you know your good customers, how far do you go to make them happy?  It’s important to know what you should — and should not — negotiate on.

The Art of Saying No to a Customer Paints a More Profitable Picture (Brews News)

We have found that negotiating with potential buyers, especially on price, never works out well for us.  Never…  So, engaging in a conversation about price is a waste of our time and even if we successfully negotiated a cheaper price and got the sale, we would not be making a profit which is the point of being in business.   And, most importantly, the negotiation process … takes away precious little time that we could be serving customers who are ready and willing to pay our stated price.

For one of my products several years ago, we had a big-name customer lined up to buy it… as long as we removed a feature (forcing consumers to use a more profitable but less user-friendly option).  That was a hard lesson that you can’t negotiate on usability.  If no one uses your service, it doesn’t matter how much you make per user.

Some more good related reading:

• Making Existing Customers More Profitable
• Five Steps to Understanding Customer Retention
• Customer Profitability

There have been a cluster of studies lately about the types of praise that children receive and the impact it has on how much they challenge themselves and how diligently they apply themselves. I’m not sure if adults have been studied in the same way, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the same lessons apply.

Smart Strategy: Think of the Brain as a Muscle (LiveScience)

Those who think intelligence is something you can cultivate are much more interested in being challenged than in just looking smart. They are much more resilient and persistent, and not as worried about making mistakes…

“When you have a fixed view, you kind of run away from mistakes and setbacks, since you think they mean you’re not smart,” Dweck said. “The fixed view doesn’t give students a good way to repair their deficiencies. If you believe your ability is permanently fixed, and you don’t do well, there’s no good route to come back from that.”

I don’t think this is limited to intelligence, either. I’ve definitely seen this fixed effect in designers – having been told that they’re great designers, they tend to lean very heavily on previously successful concepts and published style guide examples.

It’s understandable. Visual design in particular is both highly subjective and likely to incur vehement responses (either positive or negative). It’s tempting to bringing out the (highly polished) solution first rather than waiting to fully grok the problem that needs solving and, of necessity, make mistakes along the way.

The Power (and Peril) of Praising Your Kids (NY Magazine)

According to Meyer’s findings, by the age of 12, children believe that earning praise from a teacher is not a sign you did well—it’s actually a sign you lack ability and the teacher thinks you need extra encouragement. And teens, Meyer found, discounted praise to such an extent that they believed it’s a teacher’s criticism—not praise at all—that really conveys a positive belief in a student’s aptitude.

The takeaways from these studies is not to stop praising your kids, and I certainly wouldn’t advocate not praising your team or coworkers. The guidelines seem to be:

• Be very specific about what earned your praise
• Praise effort more than innate skills
• Be sincere

It may be that adults have already formed their sense of fixed versus flexible brains and this won’t retrain anyone. But there’s no harm in trying – at the very least, these guidelines will force you to pay closer attention to your team.

It takes a fair amount of perception to be able to say “You did a great job proactively figuring out and addressing the customer’s questions” versus just “Great presentation today”, but the compliment is much more meaningful when you do. (I had a boss once who was always supremely complimentary of me, but I swear, could not distinguish between relatively trivial projects and absolute miracle-that-I-pulled-this-off projects. I cannot tell you how batty it drove me to have the former drowned in compliments and the latter barely acknowledged.)

The blunter way of putting it is, no one cares about your great ideas. Because as long as they just sit there, good ideas aren’t any better than bad ideas or silly ideas or ridiculous ideas or insulting ideas.

Free Ideas. Just Add Execution. (Laserlike)

Share your ideas. Doing so will make you feel like you need to go do them, because of the small risk that someone will take your idea now that it’s “out there” and beat you to it. Sharing your idea will expose you to diverse feedback on it. Your idea will get pressure tested.

I’d add to this: if you don’t have any already, find some friends who will hold you responsible for following up on your idea. If you really believe an idea is great, you owe it to yourself to make an investment in it. That may be money, but more often than not it’s just time, research, and a commitment to keep questioning. Figure out what kind of experiment you’d need to run to get a better sense of the idea’s future success or failure. Then do it.

Be that friend: hold other people responsible for their ideas. At dinner a couple weeks ago, a friend of mine mentioned a potential new concept for his business. We discussed it for a while and asked some questions and encouraged him to think more about it – “at least grab the domain name,” I said. He promised he would.

A week later, I went to Discount Domain Registry to check up on him and make sure he’d followed through. (He did.) And guess what? Now I will totally feel like a hypocrite if I don’t follow up on my own projects. It’s a win-win situation.

Your Idea Alone Has No Value (Will Shroter)

It’s not uncommon for a startup company to go toe-to-toe with a much larger company offering a very similar product. On its face, it looks like the startup is at a severe disadvantage…If you were to try to compete against the behemoth on their own terms you’d get crushed. That’s why startups tend to look for the weak spots in larger companies and exploit them.

Look for the unfair advantage. It’s not just for making a business case, but for any situation. What do you uniquely know or what are you uniquely skilled at?

When I started working for a financial software company, I was at a distinct disadvantage in domain expertise. Aside from reading Motley Fool and watching CNBC, I didn’t have a lot of knowledge about the various banking industry players or their customers. But I am good at at-libbing. So I’d open up a product demo with “I’m going to walk through our product from the perspective of a customer – help me out as I go by telling me about your customer.” I’d adapt the story as I got feedback instead of pretending to be an expert.

(I remember vividly presenting to a group of wealth management executives, who pointed out that my sample data had far too few zeroes to represent their audience. “Your customers?” I asked, “Uh-oh, this must be the version of the demo based on my net worth. But the beauty of the product is, it works for me, and it’ll still work for me in a couple decades when I’ve made it to being one of your customers.” They laughed – I breathed a sigh of relief.)

Entrepreneurial Proverbs (O’Reilly Radar)

Sometimes an idea catches hold of you and you find you can’t put it down. Pay attention to that! Just start working on it. Can’t get yourself to do anything on it? Move on.

…Entrepreneurs too often worry about keeping their brilliant secrets locked away; we should all worry much more about springing a surprise on a disinterested market (anyone remember the Segway?)