Paradox of the rich company

Here’s a phenomenon: sometimes you look at companies who have inordinate amounts of cash and immense headcount, and as an outsider you see nothing changing at the company: not the product, not the messaging, not the design, not the product offering. You peek inside the company, and everyone is busy. Doing things. Working hard. What are they doing?

Then you look at a startup that has no money and no more headcount than the fingers on your hand. And they drastically reinvent themselves every month, put out press, try new business models, forge new partnerships, and generally feel like they are making progress.

There’s a paradox here, is there not? What’s going on?

When companies mature they shift focus defining who they are to optimizing who they are. On the surface that makes sense. Once you’ve found a model that works, why mess with it? Once you’ve identified internal inefficiencies, why not fix them? Let’s get beter at what we do! To the outsider, the company is doing absolutely nothing. To the insider, everyone is working like mad.

The mistake that’s being made is adopting a culture of improvement over reinvention. They take the same input and produce vastly different quantities of externally observable output.

How I “do” product

I have no formal background or training in product management. But here’s how I do it.

1 – Identify an aspect of the user experience that sucks or just isn’t working.

2 – Think up a few possible solutions. Ignore technical details. Just think about how it would work in an ideal world.

3 – Get into the details of those solutions. Through logic along, eliminate any possible solution that is obviously inferior.

4 – Implement a somewhat crude version of the solution your gut tells you is best.

5 – Over time, improve on the details, monitor user behavior around this new solution, and make changes as necessary.

These steps, on the surface, guide decisions around improving an existing product. But how do you know when to branch off into a new direction? Simply treat the things your product does not do but could do as deficiencies or bugs, and fix those “bugs” if you deem the effort and added complexity to be worth it.

Bang for the buck

The bang for the buck concept is one I find myself applying more and more, and I intend to factor it into decision making further. Broadly, for some desired unit of output, what’s the minimum input required? For some available unit of input, what’s the maximum output possible.

This can generally be solved by considering all options, dividing output by input of each, and selecting the option with the greatest value. Trying to make sales? What are you options? Maybe it’s hire a sales force, send mailers, get media coverage, etc. What do you do? All of them? One of them? Well, why not spend a few minutes and break it down into comparable units of input or output?

The other area I think this is highly relevant is product design. Given your limited engineering resources and unlimited product ideas, which do you choose? Figure out your goal for the product and determine what gets you there cheapest and fastest. This may seem obvious, but I’ve seen endless times product teams (and myself) spending inordinate amounts of time on things that the users just don’t care about. When you focus on the input (we have 100 engineers working on this product) and not the output (conversion, time on site, viral coefficient, or whatever actually matters), you put yourself at risk at being beat by a smaller team who knows how to prioritize.

A little snarkiness over tagline theft

I’d like to point out that Lawpivot is using our tagline “Legal advice at your fingertips” on one of their inner pages. It’s cool. They can do that. This is America, I didn’t bother to trademark anything, and I won’t pretend that I don’t copy ideas too. It’s also totally possible that it was unintentional. Sometimes you see something, and it subconsciously reappears in your mind, lacking the context of the source, you know? This is going to venture into “mean” and “unrelated” territory, but from all my interactions with the LawPivot guys, their sole raison d’etre appears to be raising more venture capital. So, enjoy the tagline, guys. Hope it helps with the raise.

First things first

Sometimes startup founders will say stuff, like, gee, my product will sure make such and such people angry, but I don’t care. To which I say: girlfriend, the most likely outcome is that no one will ever hear of you, so let’s see you get past that first.

Why lawyers hesitate to offer advice online

A question wast posted on Quora about why lawyers seem so hesitant to offer legal advice online. Having spoken with quite a few lawyers about their thoughts on this matter, I wrote this answer:

 I can speak to some of the concerns I’ve heard from lawyers:

– Ambiguity surrounding establishment of an attorney-client relationship.
– Concerns about cross-jurisdictional advice
– Fee splitting (in cases where there’s an intermediary)
– Conflicts checks. It’s harder to determine the identity of someone online, and thus harder to determine if the lawyer has a conflict.
– Confidentiality. If attorney-client communication assumed to be private is made public, it could violate an assumed attorney-client privilege.

We’re doing the best we can to address each of these concerns, and make it possible for lawyers to feel as at ease delivering legal advice online as they do giving it in the confines of their private office.

 

 

Search process

When someone conducts an online search there’s a bit of cognitive load involved in translating what they want to know to how to phrase it as a search. In the context of finding the right professional service provider for a specific need, it gets a litte harder. You have to know what you need, what characteristics of a provider that maps to, and what search term maps to those characteristics. I’ve been thinking these days of how to solve this problem. Reducing the mental effort in the span between recognition of a need and identification of the source of its fulfillment leads to more needs being fulfilled and that makes everyone better off.

What to care about

The attention civil rights gets bothers me. What about the large swath of humanity who die of malnutrition and curable disease? What about animal cruelty? Pollution? Why don’t we stand up for those issues? Why no mention of them political debates? Why? Because we’re the bad guys in that narrative and that’s no fun. There’s a boost to one’s sense of self and no direct cost in believing in women’s right to vote, gays’ right to marry, corporation’s social responsibility to avoid child labor, and so on. But it’s not costless to argue that everyone should put some thought and cash into helping the world’s most poor. It’s not logically coherent to argue that our own consumerism threatens the planet’s longevity. So we divert our own attention by pretending that freedom and liberty and equality are what really matter. Let’s not kid ourselves. They aren’t.

Hiring to make personal life better

The standard model for business hiring is to pay someone a paycheck, get them a desk or a cube and pay them for the time they sit there, during which you presume they are increasing the value of your company more than you are paying them. When people hire other people for their own purposes, the model is flipped. Very few of us have fulltime personal employees. Almost all of us have scores of implicitly contracted employees. Go to a restaurant? You’re briefly contracting the time of a chef and a server. Get a haircut? Hire a lawyer? Same thing. The objective we strive for when we make personal hiring decisions is less clear than when a business does it, but our criteria for evaluating who to hire and how to hire them is largely the same: maximize the benefits less the hassle and cost, subject to time and money contraints.

An aspirational corporate ritual

If I succeed in building a company, I’m going to have a weekly show and tell where employees demonstrate something – anything – they think is exceptionally designed, and something they think has a clearly misguided design. And then we’re going to talk about what and how we can learn from that. And then we’re going to get back to work.

I find that looking at how the best of the best in any industry operate teaches you more about how to improve your business than does studying the best of the best in your industry.