Full moon over old TV antennas - Ramat Gan, Israel I recently got a new customer who needs to raise money. When I first started with him it was described as research and write a business plan, target investors, make presentations, and negotiate the terms. A year ago I had another customer that wanted to redesign his business to make more money. He had an open source product which was used to sell services and customization. Both companies are small and both somewhat profitable. Both understood that they didn't manage their products well enough to become really profitable. Like most small technology company managers, both CEOS knew that they needed help and they had lots of ideas. One actually started writing a document with observations, ideas, plans, and alike. But with his erratic schedule he could not take the time to really organize a plan. The other had lots of little notes on everything from Post-It Notes to back of utility bill envelopes (no kidding here!). The big difference was the actual product. The first was an industrial-commercial service CRM system. It was small in comparison to the large scale enterprise systems, runs on PCS, written in Microsoft Visual Basic, and is very reliable (this application requires reliability). The open source application was medium size and was written by a loose group of dedicated programmers. The company selling the service had done some development and debug work but overall was mostly a support organization (installation and configuration, training, maintenance, etc.)
The difference between open source and proprietary product is what I want to talk about. I do not mean the business model or technology methodology (shared open development vs. close back room secrecy), but the way companies behave because of their products. Most people seem to think that if you have a certain product you also have to run your company in the way other do. Or worst, they think that once a methodology has been established you can't change it. This is a recipe for disaster in the business of technology product management. We can't get stuck just in one mode. Open source companies tend to rely on the technological capability. They also tend to think in terms of how to use technology for features and capabilities. The proprietary side of software development seem to think more in terms of a complete solution. Maybe there is a shift in thinking once in a while but I think that looking at the way the two sides work can help most managers make better decisions. Actually, open source companies are starting to see how stitching together complete solutions with support, training, and even hosted operation can make good business sense. (I need to write about this next, this is something that very few people take into account and they are leaving lots of money on the table).
One of the advantages a consultant (they call us coaches now - the sports analogies never stop) is an fresh outside perspective. We come in and do not have the mindset of someone on the inside. This is one of the most powerful tool a CEO can have. While going about "regular business" fundamental changes are not going to be made. Sometimes this is what can bring a product and a company down. One very noticeable difference between these two organizations was the speed vs. quality. In everything that small proprietary company was doing -- QUALITY is JOB 1 (remember the Ford tag line?). The open source company was speed -- fix it and get it out. Figure out what is wrong and get the customer the solution -- e-Mail a response before he even needs it. But life unfortunately can not be run in a single mode. Actually, every product manager needs to modulate and decide what needs time and polish and what needs fast response. This is certainly true in software development and hardware design. This is even more true in product planning and marketing. There are way too many confusing strategies, missing features, and minor revision releases.
The point is: don't make your work totally uniform in methodology. If you need help deciding how to do things, get help from the outside. Otherwise you will end up somewhere between a "rut" and "unchanging" modus operandi. The "rut" is doing things but the same way as if you were on a train going only where the tracks take you. While trains are nice way to travel, there is much more to life than train stations and big cities. The "train" (your way of working) will get you just close but not where you need to go. People who do not appreciate American country music hear every song as a mini soap opera with a cheating wife (or husband), a dog, and a pickup truck.
Is your strategic planning system a 3M product in 3" X 3" format? The "unchanging" is not doing anything. Analyzing, researching, prototyping, testing... you do all the work to try to get as "good results" as you have now. Companies which are very successful tend to do this all the time. Microsoft is now being called a "has been". In the grand scheme of things, they still want to do Windows and Office as they have done for almost 20 years. The problem with this is worst than the "rut". Here you don't even "write more cheating wife, sad dog, and pickup truck" songs any more. Microsoft has not put out a decent big product in so long, nobody even expect it! Their last thing is probably the X-BOX. Compare this to Apple who was almost dead just a few years ago. Apple has taken a lesson from the old Microsoft. They get out a product and get it redesigned over and over again. Essentially the "cannibalize" their own products. But this is what Microsoft was doing all through the 1980's and 1990's. But don't just look at the big companies. Sometimes their business situation is too complex, so be careful here. I think that Microsoft is trying to do things in certain directions, essentially using their existing successful products as launching points for "bigger and better". In the windows world they are trying to integrate new ideas like the SharePoint server (essentially a combination of Web2.0 + Apache + Office + more). That was a great strategy in the days where Windows was a fairly new and dynamic product. Remember that Microsoft was sued by Netscape for putting Internet Explorer into a windows release? That was controversial!
The good thing about looking at others, like Microsoft and Apple, is learning to look, analyze, think, come to conclusions. So what if you can't do anything about it. BUT you can use the same techniques on your own work. Even if you have a bunch of Post-It notes for observation this is a good start. Take the time to look at what your competitors are doing (and NOT doing). Take the time to observe if you are a "quality" organization and if this is useful for different type of tasks. Look at how "quickly" things are done. Do you have to hold on to customer issues and analyze them? Can you just fire off an answer and get them going even 70% of the time? Well, I hope this has given you some ideas on how to look at your work and organizations.
Tim O'Reilly with Richard Stallman the founder of "open source" (it was first called "free software".
Rattling the technolgy "geeks" all the way from the Harvard Business School