Talk About Know Priorities

Mike Oeth is the CEO of OnSIP Business VoIP and winner of the Telecommunications Executive of the Year in the 2013 American Business Awards. Mike graduated from Harvard College in 1991 with a degree in Economics and has since worked for technology companies, cofounding OnSIP in 2004. Mike is an active community member and father, balancing his roles as board member of the local YMCA, member of the father-daughter Y-group Adventure Princesses, and basketball coach for his three daughters’ basketball teams. Mike also enjoys rock climbing with his teenage son.

Find & Follow: @VoipCEO

Extra links:

• OnSip Business VoIP
• Lighthouse
• Good to Great - Jim Collins

Notes:

• Sales/support > engineering estimates & provides 2 cents > executive team (mkt potential vs time to mkt)
• It’s rare to get a completely 1-off request
• Sync up with very active resellers (to help harmonize with the consumer base)
• Biggest thing to worry about, customer who is yelling the loudest or the most recent thing you heard
• Loudest or recent is not the best way to figure out what your product should be
• Have, follow, and stick with a process
• We are not going to get this deal without X feature, okay pass on the deal
• Interrupting engineering for 1-off features is like a commercial break, you have to go back and recap
• Best thing you can do is have a very clear idea of where the product is going and end result is and stick with it
• Do all of your research ahead of time before they write that first line of code
• A good engineering team will go pick the best tools, database, interface, etc
• Have a process, stick to it, and have some consistency once it gets going
• Emails are best because it's in the customer's own words
• Tough/flawed: not being thorough enough and not thinking through all the way to how the customer is going to interact
• Like a director shooting a movie, get down to the little story boards before you even start
• Get down to the detail before starting otherwise there is too much ambiguity or the result is not what's expected
• Hedgehog concept (book: good to great), nucleus of the company...what is the core idea
• If they don't fit into your hedgehog concept, you pass on those features
• Have to figure out how these products mesh where you want them to be in 5-10 years
• Internal back office projects are tougher to get priority compared to revenue generating projects
• Pitching a product, easier to talk about revenue versus cost savings with execs
• Interesting to have a voting system to get the wisdom of the crowd
• Nice to have a crystal ball to see what the market impact would be

Good Job:

• Apple
• Google
• Dell
• Juniper

Allan is the co-founder of LessEverything which is the coolest company you've never heard of. They make amazing products like LessAccounting and LessFilms. He loves his family more than breathing. He also build cool lamps as a hobby MassalanaDrive.com

Find & Follow: @AllanBranch

Episode has some explicit language

Extra links:

• LessAccounting
• AutoPilot - Bookkeeping Service
• LessFilms
• Massalina Drive
• Calendly
• Ramen.is

Notes:

• (prioritization) the answer changes every day
• how we pick the feature to work on depends on resources
• where are we trying to take the app balanced against what the customer is saying
• realize they don't know our long term vision
• they don't see the full picture
• ideas are not the problem, knowing what to work on next is
• sometimes features are Pandora's box of other features
• especially with a small team you have to be conservative about what you build
• change something small, you'll get 50 praise and 50 hate emails
• take user feedback and put it in a place that doesn't hurt you
• we try to interact like human beings,...more than likely they are human too
• gathering feedback, it's all hard
• you give advice based on your situation,...don't know the full story
• advice is easy to get, not right a lot of the time...just got to go with your gut
• get the psychology behind what are they trying to accomplish
• ...only takes 15 minutes to read all the daily tickets
• everyone has baggage, perspective, shortsightedness...your job is to look above that
• listen to everybody a little bit, and then ignore everyone
• that state of chaos is what I need
• wish we had more resources, but then we would be building a lot more crap
• what the internet doesn't do for us is make you think you are the smartest person in the world

Good Job:

• Ben Chestnut, MailChimp.com
• Basecamp.com, Jason Fried, DHH
• Brennan Dunn, Double Your Freelancing
• Nathan Barry, ConvertKit.com
• Rob Walling, GetDrip.com
• Rdio
• Ira Glass
• Josh Pigford, Baremetrics.com
• Harvest
• Mike McDermin, Freshbooks

Joe is the regional sales manager at Identity Finder. He has worked in the sales channel for over 15 years covering information management and cloud computing markets. His experience covers an array of companies like Syncplicity, EMC, Accellion, nGenX, and Iron Mountain.

Find & Follow: @jalbanese74, LinkedIn

Episode has some explicit language

Extra links:

• Identity Finder
• UserVoice
• Priority Calculator - Excel, Api, Open Source

Notes:

• The channels are there, but it's a lot of noise
• Focusing on the delivery of what we are going to do
• Missed their mark, so we are going to refocus on what we do
• CEO wacked, CMO wacked, a lot of people, I'm like oh no
• Hardest thing in smaller companies: a 1-off large deal size over ruling pre-set priorities
• Asked what you wanted, then trumped by a company trying to be nimble
• It all sucked. I understand it, but we lost all around.
• If prioritize something, stick to it.
• Dollars trumping process is bad
• Never know how much voice you have
• People will always try to game the system
• You and your customers get on the same page; and how many times does that happen...
• A transparent % of say, would spark communication
• What do you want,... just tell me
• Sometimes you don't get a chance to cultivate relationships with customers
• Depreciation is huge, and what if someone leaves the company, why should their voice matter
• What works, flat out asking
• What doesn't work, multiple emails or huddled conference calls
• Direct 1-1 communications work best
• Direct line of communication with the right people
• Direct communication and alignment with the product team
• When people have different projects in different silos, they don't exactly want each other's input

Good Job:

• Salesforce
• GoPro

VP of Product for CenturyLink, a Microsoft MVP, an instructor for developer-centric training company Pluralsight, the lead InfoQ.com editor for cloud computing, and author of multiple books on application integration strategies. As VP of Product for CenturyLink, he is responsible for product strategy, sprint planning, community contribution, and leading an expert team of product owners and analysts.

Find & Follow: @rseroter, http://seroter.wordpress.com/

Extra Links:

• Courses on Pluralsight
• Books on Amazon
• Articles on InfoQ
• Microsoft MVP
• CenturyLink Cloud

Notes:

• "they don't even need the service, they need what the service can give them"
• Cost of delay factor
• Strategic alignment to prevent blocking a team in the future
• Also focusing on deprioritization
• Just go through everything in the list comparing one vs another, rinse and repeat
• You should be able to build your products with few to no dependencies. Although sometimes it's impossible.
• don't loose your shared awareness
• the product owner is the voice of the customer in, and the voice of the technology out.
• one of the hardest parts is explaining priorities that span teams
• the entire job of the product owner is prioritization and that involves hard choices
• Instead of putting teams in a holding pattern or assign to help another team, make them work within the constraints to deliver whatever they can.
• Balance between transparency and making people understand the priorities
• An 18 month road-map is useless
• Execution matters. it gives you a free pass a bit to be flexible because you are continually shipping value.
• shipping value on a regular basis earns trust and leeway to alter the priorities a bit
• Ensure as much 1-1 feedback
• Having a back-office product owner can help cover internal voices that can be excluded from
• Use a brain trust, but push decisions to the edges
• The biggest place you get into trouble is when you think there is a single channel to collect requirements.
• Some will be vocal, some will be quite, some need face to face, some will fill out a survey, some will attend a conference
• The more options you can give your products owners and get feedback, the more rounded feedback you'll get.
• Don't let yourself get bogged down by so many sources of input that you are paralyzed
• Sometimes seeing behavior is the best feedback. Some people will just tell you what you want to hear.
• 90% of what you hear is what next. The constant drive of what is next.
• Best companies that execute well, explain well. They don't just announce a feature, they put in context.

Others doing a good job:

• Slack
• Trello

Marc is the CEO and creator of Frontend Masters, dedicated to teaching advanced web development skills. Before that he was heavily involved in open source and created one of the most popular UI elements on the web, the jQuery UI Datepicker. He also spoke at over sixty conferences around the world, created conferences and wrote on his blog to hundreds of thousands of readers monthly.

Find & Follow: @1Marc, http://marcgrabanski.com/

Extra links:

• Frontend Masters
• Intercom.io
• GumRoad
• LeadPages

Notes

• what experiment can i try next, and validate that they need the thing
• hater driven development: hate on you because they have a need but something is off (aka fighting apathy)
• intercom is a great feedback medium
• live feedback as much (1-1) as possible
• Being heavily harmonized with and in the industry and networked with the people allow simple priority decisions
• NPS (net promoter score) surveys are very helpful (1-10 scale surveys)
• determining what people what: huge difference between people who get it for free and those paying
• Careful because "free" can sometimes take your product away from it's core
• One of the big reason surveys fail is because they are blasted to everyone instead of contextual groups
• In software you can make a car a submarine, and then lets add freaking wings
• Biggest flaw is not validating the need
• Unless it's growing in ways that people care about, it's going to die. No matter how amazing, it will die, and no one will care.
• While still small enough, and agile enough, you can benefit from as close to a 1-1 conversation with a human on the other end
• Hard part or frustration is the pull/desire to jump on a new prototype product vs on the product at hand

Good Job:

• Aaron Skonnard
• Tim Ferriss
• Gary Vaynerchuk
• Scott Harrison
• Justin Kaufenberg
• Matthew Dornquast

He likes to make stuff. In addition to building several products, such as Marketing for Developers, and the Product People Club, he hosts two podcasts and writes extensively. When he's not working, he's chasing his 4 kids and spending time with his wife.

Find & Follow: @mijustin, http://justinjackson.ca/

Extra Links:

• Marketing for Developers
• Product People - Club
• Build & Launch - Podcast
• Product People - Podcast
• List of Other Products
• Sprintly

Notes:

• “wired for relationships” “lens of people”
• “what’s going to get them to reach into their pocket and pull out the mastercard, punch in some numbers, to buy that thing…”
• “the gap is that they don’t understand the people part”
• “I’m a neck beard disguised as a marketer”
• 60-70% of my list is software developers (who are product people)
• Dirty secret: “much easier for devs to learn marketing, than for a marketer to learn dev”
• Prioritization is variable and elastic depending on what the commitment is.
• Long lead times are daunting.
• 6-9 months away, chances of that “thing” happening go down drastically
• Favorite way to decide to prioritize it is whether people are will to pay for it.
• In many groups, the people who pay for the product are not the people using the product. So the person receiving the communication is the person paying.
• Customer service often don’t get a direct line to the product management or the dev team and thus a lot of information is getting lost.
• Customer service or other “excluded” party could benefit from learning the language of the business to get their voice heard.
• Including vendors is much more of a partnership when they are included.
• Sometimes the inclusion from vendors, due to a lack of execution on their behalf from that inclusion, sours the partnership.
• “The data is much more dirty and much more general than we wish it was”
• Basing voice on LTV might be an interesting
• Something many applications miss the question of what is the risk in terms of churn
• In most organizations, what ends up winning in terms of what gets prioritized, is whatever is presented by the best sales person

Good job with prioritization:

• Josh Pigford @ Baremetrics
• Nathan Barry @ ConvertKit