That title, ‘morphing the lean startup’, may be technical jargon. But it is literal. And brief. I have a few thoughts to share about them both. Morphing There’s a very small sliver of research in the Marketing Science on morphing. Two papers, ‘website morphing‘, and its adtech successor, ‘morphing banner advertising‘, stand out as giants. This technology makes snap changes to a digital user experience. The ultimate reason why you’re not hearing more about morphing in adtech is because paid agencies can’t figure out how to scale the creative necessary to drive it. I’m convinced that morphing is the ultimate promise I bought into back in the mid-nineties – the perfect intersection of recsys and experience. It requires an extreme[…]
Reddit had a bruising week. If you’re out of the loop, you can read about it here. It highlights the untapped opportunities in how our collective experiences are managed and lists of recommended reading/viewing are assembled. Large areas of opportunity include regression shaving, state-management, and dog-whistle cancelling headphones. Regression Shaving In general, the bigger the audience, the smaller the media. In Regression to the Meme, I argued that a lot of redditors want high jolts per minute with easy to consume content. Why read a three paragraph joke when you can get the same amount of dopamine almost immediately with a six word image macro? Larger audiences congregate around easy-to-consume content. Go wide. Go LCD. Accept that younger people have[…]
Somebody, get this, created a fitbit…but for dogs. This is a real design pattern. Take any service that is starting to gain traction and just add “for dogs!” at the end of it. Tinder…for dogs. Airbnb…for dogs. It’s a laugh line. Facebook…for dogs. Those are all real things. Dogs do love to chase tail lights. That’s just taking the taillight/fast-follow strategy a little bit too far. Entrepreneurs are trying to reinvent things by making them smarter. This is well beyond the you know, “the data!”, style pitches you may have been subjected to. I’m really optimistic, and excited, for the 2.5% of companies that will thrive, not by slapping a dashboard on an product or attacking a niche market, but by[…]
Nash died this week, sadly, in a traffic collision. That’s isn’t how I’m going to remember him. My first introduction to Nash was from a book I found in a used book store titled “Game Theory and Canadian Politics”. There was a whole chapter on the Nash Equilibrium and the prisoner’s dilemma in there. This was the diving board for further exploration into game theory and, it was the gateway drug into the Garbage Can, Arrow, and the Genetic Algorithm. He offered up a thread of thought: this idea that collectively, as people, we are capable of creating such sub-optimal outcomes. I didn’t like that one bit. I spent time trying to disprove it. It was Arrow that would end[…]
Previously, I wrote about communication overhead in tech and the two cultures around it. Broadly, I perceive two broad camps: there are the shippers and there are the talkers. Shippers ship. Talkers talk, then ship. In this post I’ll describe three forms of written communication and how they link up with current cultural megatrends. There are those that can write instructions that a human can reliably compile and execute (management). There are those that can write instructions that an organization can reliably compile and execute (governance/policy). There are those that can write instructions that a computer can reliably compile and execute (development). There are instructions that can be typed that cause performance in people. Such parameters include the outcome, the instruction,[…]
Ask some what’s the key factor for success and they’ll say team. Ask others what’s the key factor for success and they’ll say code. In many circumstances, many problems can be solved by shipping code. Revenue down? Ship! Morale down? Ship. Customer sat down? Ship. Ship. An orientation to ship and Get Shhhhhhhet Done (TM) is valued in many cultures. An orientation towards team is valued in many others. It’s not pretty when the two cultures clash. To those that want to ship, meetings with others, talk, policy, and process is viewed as communication overhead that adds little value at best, and is catastrophic at worst. They have a deadline to hit. Stop talking about your feelings and your preferred[…]
There’s a tension between two modes of communication – comms by storytelling and comms by bullet point. They each have pros and cons. In this post, I’ll summarize the differences. There is no verdict. The bullet point Some speak in bullet points. They’re being the golden threes be’s: Be Brief. Be Brilliant. Be Gone. Their talks might as well be written in nouveau-valley font, with Serif. Brevity is valued; where hard problems command easy heuristics, and where ‘don’t make me think’ is the l’ordre du jour. If I had more time, I would have written less. That’s especially true in the Valley. It’s true of politicians in certain settings. It’s true on Adelaide and on King. Elevator pitches are a[…]
In this post, I will unpack the concept of Convenient Reasoning and link it to managerial judgement and the spirited defense of Gut. I really haven’t challenged these assumptions in a few months, so, if you dislike what you read, give me a shout. I’ll spend too much time over the next 45 days repeating the orthodox line of scientific management and continuous learning in digital. It’ll be a great opportunity to unpack some language and really tone down the information density. Gut Just as I translate the word ‘leverage’ into ‘use’, I translate the word ‘gut’ into ‘my feelings about expectations’. Or, put more derisively, ‘muh feelz’. I’m indebted to James G. March for highlighting the difference between expectations,[…]
A tier one MSI topic focuses on how should quantitative methods and qualitative methods be combined to understand the total consumer experience. It’s an excellent topic. The two worlds aren’t natural complements. They have radically different systems of activities, tools, and methods, which in turn affects their own experiences, and how they see the world. However, if the stance is unified, in the form of understanding the total consumer experience, the sum of the two approaches produces such more. That focus creates the cohesion. Facts, Experience, and Anecdata Have you ever been asked how many people need to be in a focus group before their statements become statistically significant? It’s a pretty neat question. What are they really asking when they ask[…]
Analytics in 2014. What a year. We hit peak Data Science hype in October. We hit peak Data Science sometime over the summer. This has a few important impacts for 2015. The end of that hype will make it harder for the majors to sell binders of plans. It’ll be tougher to find optimistic customers. It’ll be rough going for some of the weaker offers on the market to fake it long enough to make it. It’ll sort out the ‘transformational change’ shops from the technical shops far more slowly. Markets aren’t nearly as efficient as they should be. It usually takes 180 days for the peak to bite and 270 days for the money to run out. It’s really[…]