March 20 Best of Twitter – Innovate, Learn, and Don’t Launch
“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)
