Agile process is normally just treated as a “process”. Well it is but more important is that it is a strategy. One cannot just take it in isolation and decide some roles and some steps, purchase a SPRINT planning software and expect it to yield results. Last few years I have applied and developed this strategy from grounds up. So what have I learnt:
How cool is this
Aston Martin & Jaeger LeCoultre release second DBS inspired watch with integrated key – read up http://www.motorauthority.com/cars/aston-martin/aston-martin-jaeger-lecoultre-release-second-dbs-inspired-watch-with-integrated-key/
OlPC V2
more details at http://blog.laptopmag.com/first-look-olpc-xo-generation-20
Metal Art
Apple Customer Care
I had taken the laptop for some repairs to Apple store yesterday. The laptop is still in warranty period which means that unless I spilled orange juice in it, they would not charge for repairs.
One of the problems I mentioned was CD burn process was giving an error. The guy there tried the process but did not get any error. With zero hesitation he told me that he did not get any error but to be sure he’ll ask for the CD drive to be replaced.
This is something that points to two things:
1. Focus on customer satisfaction over short term monetary gains by apple
2. Empowerment of store employees – he didn’t have to call the manager to consult or anything.. was able to take a decision in one snap that Apple will bear the cost for CD drive just because customer mentioned a problem.
Measure customer success to measure yours
Recently Rashmi had written if the page views are dead essentially in a world of rich internet apps the concept of page is diminishing so how does page view mean anything.
I think the intent behind page views was to check how much customers like your site, the question to be asked is how would they like your site. It’ll only be if “their” goals are being met.
Here are my thoughts in context of Slideshare.net, but these apply to other domains as well.
Define user segments, you might already have done personas.. in any case.. one way could be publishers, consumers (might be a separate consumer who is download heavy) , by standards/occasional consumers
The goal of each of these guys is different but connected. The publisher’s goal would be to offer great content and gain visibility.. so how do you measure if content is great or not – one way is star rating, another could be sharing of links by other users (more thinking can draw more ideas), similarly visibility – if you track who is getting how much visibility (in terms of views) and then map these two, you’ll see how successful are in you in helping publisher achieve her goal.
Another matrix you could build on top of this is what I call “Zero to Sixty” – as in acceleration measure (like in cars) is amount of time it takes for someone to visibility, may be that 10% presentations on on slideshare.net reach 10,000 viewership in 30 days
For consumers – they care about quality of content, so you can start taking the above matrix and looking at it at site level and see if the quality of content is improving.
The other part with consumers is presentation completion rates – how many reached to the end. And second aspect is how much time.. a parallel example to this is market research using online surveys, there are mathematical models available to find outliers (by measuring who run through surveys very quickly etc..). You could explore similar models to see what is the amount of time one should spend on online presentations for it to be valid.
These could be interesting stats to include in product blog as well….
Similarly with other user segments.. this really tells you how successful your product is in meeting customer needs which will drive business value..
Lets take an example of facebook – why would one visit facebook – to connect and communicate. I have had a facebook account and I do visit it once in a while – am I a loyal customer .. I don’t think so, am more of curious customer. There is less in the site that pulls me. For facbook, it’s just a repeat visit.. they could look at frequency of this and decide if they made progress or not.
Instead if they see how many friends i have added by inviting others, or if I have posted content, they’ll find I am not as active. That should say that for some reason am not such an ‘involved’ customer, even if I visit every so often..
Steve Jobs had said once that the purpose of the company is not to make money but to build great products. It’s important to measure customer success and company’s success will follow.
Two more gems from apple
A couple of design elements to share apple’s eye for detail:
In the recently access files menu, if there are two files with same name, then it automatically shows the folder name where the files belongs. This one is from “Pages” but I think works across most/all applications on OSx:
The next example is from ichat. I logged into ichat, change my status to not available and went away from machine for a little bit. When I came back and clicked on something (something else other than ichat) I get the following: